 |
 |
 |
|
Measuring up under pressure
Last year, 430 "low-performing" schools entered a new state program with a unique mandate: Shape up or ship out. This year, another 430 low-performing schools will receive the same ultimatum.
The "shaping up" refers to test scores. The "shipping out" refers to staff - both administrators and teachers - as a consequence of test scores failing to meet growth targets within a few years.
 Calling on all their resources in the effort to boost test scores are Desjanee Threat at Webster Elementary in Fresno.
California's high-stakes "shape up or ship out" experiment is called the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program (II/USP). Set up by Senate Bill 1X, the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, the program is intended to hold public schools accountable for the academic progress and achievement of pupils. As far as quick fixes go, this may be the most ambitious one in history.
Gov. Gray Davis requested that schools volunteer for the dubious distinction of being II/USP schools. The state threatened to draft schools if there was a lack of willing participants. Not surprisingly, the prospect of monetary rewards motivated 1,400 administrators to volunteer their school sites for the 430 slots. Schools accepted into the program receive up to $50,000 for the planning process alone.
The good news is that most II/USP schools have boosted test scores without even implementing their plans. Some attribute this to the fact that many schools began improvements before entering the program, or that class size reduction has been in effect for a few years. (Research indicates that test scores can be expected to improve for the next few years as a result of recent reforms. Then, unless significant infrastructure changes are made, they will reach a plateau.)
 Rosa Solorzano at Costano Elementary in East Palo Alto.
Others attribute this year's higher scores without implementation of action plans to a phenomenon known as the "Hawthorne Effect." This was coined in the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, and is defined in the Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems as "Production increased not as a consequence of actual changes in working conditions introduced by the plant's management, but because management demonstrated interest in such improvements (see self-fulfilling hypothesis)."
Even with improvements in test scores, however, there is still pressure. Schools that have surpassed their "growth targets" dramatically - some by over 100 points - will still have to show another 5 percent growth toward the state-adopted goal of 800 on SAT-9 scores next year to receive reward money. They must also show growth for minority and low socioeconomic subgroups.
How the program works
During the first year, II/USP schools must do the following:
For the first batch of schools, last year was the "planning year." If these schools fail to improve test scores this year, they will be subject to local sanctions at a public hearing, with school boards choosing "interventions" that could include reassignment of staff.
Next year, if growth targets are not met but significant growth is evident, the school may opt to participate in the program an additional year. If the growth target is not met by the end of the additional year and there is no evidence of significant growth, the school is subject to state takeover.
Growth is measured by a school's performance on the Academic Performance Index (API). This means that a school is judged entirely on how students perform on one test in a given week. The stakes in high-stakes testing have never been higher.
In the public eye
Those teaching in II/USP schools achieved notoriety overnight. They were constantly in the media and the subject of conversation in their communities as a result of their schools' underperforming status. Some have described the media attention as painful.
 Reid Brockett at Webster Elementary School in Fresno asks Kou Moua and Fong Xiong questions about the book they're reading. He says English learners can decode the words, but don't necessarily comprehend the material.
"When we came back to school last year, we were told by our principal that we had been accepted into the program," reports Melanie Driver, who teaches at Cleo Gordon Elementary School in Fairfield. "We had no idea of what we were getting into. Suddenly we were labeled 'underperforming' and always in the newspaper, even though we were working so hard in a very low socioeonomic area. We came up with a T-shirt, 'We Are The Chosen - II/USP,' to make ourselves feel better."
"All I could think of was, 'Why us? Why pick on us?'" recalls Sandy Nelson, president of the Perris Elementary Teachers Association and a teacher at Nan Sanders School in Perris. "We were not the lowest-scoring school in the district by a long shot. No one wants that spotlight on them, being examined all the time for everything they do. It's a tremendous amount of pressure, more than we ever dreamed of. We were worried and upset about what the parents might say."
 Third-graders Chris Ahokava and Crystal Falepouono know the answer to their teacher's question
Indeed, many schools selected for the program were not the lowest-performing schools in their districts. While schools needed to be in the bottom deciles for II/USP acceptance, the state sought a wide range of low-performing schools. Some teachers believe that administrators volunteered "high-end" low-performing schools for II/USP because it would be much easier to show improvement at those sites than it would be to show dramatic improvement at the "lowest of the low."
For some teachers, being in the program was an exciting opportunity to bring about meaningful change. For others, it was traumatizing, degrading and a waste of time.
Not surprisingly, teachers who were highly involved with the program tended to feel more positive about their experiences than teachers who were not as involved. Teachers who felt as if they were partners in the II/USP process were more positive than teachers who said the plan was imposed upon them.
Some teachers were encouraged to assume leadership roles in the II/USP process from the very beginning. Some fought for the right to do so and took charge of the program. Others felt railroaded by the process and were too overwhelmed with the day-to-day job of teaching to become involved. Many teachers reported feeling powerless.
Individual interviews, observations by CTA field staff involved with II/USP sites, and the findings of CTA focus groups drew many of the same conclusions about the program:
The action plans submitted by II/USP schools have drawn criticism from state education officials and others. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Leaders in Sacramento complain that too many of the plans fail to clearly diagnose why schools are failing and offer only vague solutions, such as teacher collaboration, rather than precise steps to raise math and reading test scores. State officials are considering tightening the requirements."
Hundreds of II/USP action plans were studied by CTA Board members Angela Marese Boyle and Dayton Crummey, who serve on CTA's Staff Workgroup on Accountability and Testing (SWAT) as well as the Public School Accountability Workgroup. Despite the fact that the action plans they studied were a stratified sample from urban, rural and suburban schools, the plans offered the exact same approach to school reform in many instances. Frequently, the same external evaluator outlined the exact same action plan for widely dissimilar school sites.
"It was sometimes a one-size-fits-all, fill-in-the-blanks approach," says Boyle, who noted that some external evaluators had accidentally left the name of the wrong school on action plans.
Boyle and Crummey, who sat with teachers in focus groups, found that teachers had wildly differing views of the II/USP experience. "Some felt good about it," says Crummey. "Some felt blasČ. Some felt very negative."
Good II/USP experiences
From the very beginning, teachers at Webster Elementary School in Fresno were on board with the idea of being an II/USP school and included in the process at all levels. Teachers were even asked whether they thought the school should join the II/USP.
"No one objected," recalls Rachel Banuelos, a Fresno Teachers Association (FTA) member who teaches third grade. "We felt it was something that the school needed. At first it was intimidating, but it was something we were willing to do."
"Being an II/USP school helped us to pull together as a staff," says Banuelos, who was on her school's II/USP planning committee. "Our external evaluator was really helpful. It was like she put pieces of a puzzle together for us, and showed us where we needed to go. She was very positive. She told us change won't come overnight, but we are capable of doing it. Teachers had a lot of input and there was a lot of collaboration. Teachers were involved in the final plan and there was a lot of happiness with the plan." Last year, Webster's scores shot up 105 points. (For more on the Webster plan, click here).
"It was a good experience for Colton Middle School," says Richard Morrall, president of the Association of Colton Educators. "The external evaluator talked a lot and had ideas, but basically it was our plan. We took it over. Teachers wrote the plan with a little bit of help. We said, 'We don't care about bringing in experts to tell us what to do. Give us time and money and stay out of our way. Let us do it.'"
Before the school year started, teachers met to begin working on the action plan, which calls for aligning curriculum with standards, increasing collaboration time for teachers, and emphasizing parent involvement, among other ideas.
The school had a growth target of 17 points and scores went up 16 points last year. "We're not eligible for money this year, but we are showing year-to-year growth," says Morrall. "Nobody is really concerned about sanctions. We know what we're doing."
Buena Park Teachers Association members Mike McDonald and Andrew Hopkins similarly took over the II/USP action plan at Beatty Elementary School and are pleased with the results. With an association representative at all meetings, teachers were not taken advantage of.
"Before we took over, we felt the plan was cheerleading," says Hopkins. "We wanted more than motivational speeches. We wanted hard data."
The two looked at past SAT-9 scores and played with the data, seeing specific areas where students needed to improve. They broke down the scores by student population to see which groups of students needed help in certain areas. They then wrote the plan, which calls for computer technology and tutorials, Saturday school and other improvements. The school had a growth target of 10 points, but went up 50 points.
 At Costano, Mae Williams helps eighth-graders Peter Holland and Filise Maafu with their math assignment.
"After saying, 'Why us?' I muttered a bit," recalls Sandy Nelson of the Perris Elementary Teachers Association. "In spite of being furious with the governor for what he did, I said from the beginning that it might be a good thing in the end. We've never really taken a long, hard look at what we're teaching. We're always saying, 'We're doing the best we can,' and we probably are, but there were never any guidelines. It's given us some structure, even though there was a tremendous amount of pressure."
Her school found a relatively cheap external evaluator from the local county office of education, and was able to use the remainder of the funds for a planning retreat that included the external evaluator, administrators and teachers.
"The only way it was going to succeed was if teachers had buy-in to the plan," says Nelson. "Administrators don't like to ask teachers for a lot and tend to impose plans. I pushed to have input from staff in all areas. That's why the plan succeeded."
The plan called for a new reading series, more small-group instruction, more testing preparation and more attention to student deficits. Curriculum was aligned to standards. Test scores went up 124 points.
"For us, it was a learning experience with some good and some bad," muses Marie Singh, a teacher at Del Rey Woods Elementary School in Monterey. "It was important for us to do this as a way to evaluate our school. We needed to figure out what we were doing well, and what we needed to improve on. It gave people something to focus on."
The Monterey Teachers Association member liked the "no-excuses" policy of the external evaluator, who stressed that teachers need to believe in children rather than make excuses for them. The evaluator didn't spend as much time with teachers and staff as he initially promised, and he gave teachers horrendous amounts of paperwork to fill out under tight deadlines. But, overall, things worked out.
"When he gave us the final plan, we found some errors and sent it back. He corrected them. I think we're okay with it. We have a strong leadership team at our school with pretty bright people. Overall, I'd say we devised a pretty good plan."
The plan lengthened the school day except for a shortened day on Wednesday, which allows for grade-level meetings, inservice and collaboration. Test preparation was emphasized and student weaknesses were addressed. An after-school enrichment program was opened with an emphasis on reading and writing; the product was a newspaper produced by students. Test scores shot up 65 points.
Bad and ugly experiences
In Fairfield, where II/USP teachers achieved notoriety overnight, Melanie Driver says things got worse for teachers as the program progressed. Teachers had no input in choosing the external evaluator. Administrators - not the association - selected the three teachers on the site team.
"The external evaluator came in and stayed from 4 to 8 p.m. for three days," recalls the Fairfield Suisun Unified Teachers Association member. "We were initially told that he came to get information from us, but it ended up with a touchy-feely type workshop that was supposed to make us feel better. He put a candle on the table and told us to pretend we were somewhere else, and asked us to see our school five years from now and visualize success-type activities. We felt insulted by the whole situation. We felt angry because the external evaluator didn't know what was happening in our classrooms or our school - period."
Driver, who did not serve on the site team, says that most teachers were kept in the dark about the II/USP process. "Then, on Feb. 1, the external evaluator gives us a paper that asks us about what we think about choosing a CSR (comprehensive school reform) model. We had no idea what a CSR was." Under pressure, a program called America's Choice was selected as the CSR for the school. Ironically, scores went up 30 points, says Driver, even without implementing the plan.
"That scares me, because we're spending much less time teaching and more time doing everything else," she says. "Morale is very, very low. Four teachers left last year. We are very stressed out and teachers are starting to look for jobs in other places. We have less money for supplies, paper and pencils, since money is going to the CSR. They took away arts and crafts, even in the primary classes. Scores may have gone up, but the fun has gone out of teaching."
The joy is also gone for Bill Gray, a teacher at Franklin Middle School in Vallejo. "We got rid of all hands-on electives, like woodshop, drama, art and ceramics," says Gray, who once taught ceramics and now teaches reading.
"We didn't just make some concessions and evaluate, then test and see if it was working. We just dropped everything. Some guru told us we should do that."
Students don't like it, says Gray, a Vallejo Education Association member. "They come up and ask why they can't have ceramics or woodshop. They are mad at me and I tell them it's not my choice. I think it's a shame. Kids need some kind of carrot instead of just being told to read another book."
The II/USP process was "a joke," according to Gray. "We had meetings where butcher paper was put up and teachers were asked to brainstorm about how to improve reading scores. They (the external evaluator and administrators) circled the ideas they had planned on putting in place anyway and told us they were our ideas. But lots of our other ideas weren't circled. They had made up their minds beforehand. The external evaluator's report was poorly written and filled with errors."
Teachers were misled into thinking they were being included in the process at Mary Buren Elementary School, says Rose-Marie Battaglia, a second-grade teacher and member of the Guadalupe Teachers Association.
"Initially, we felt included," says Battaglia. "We were interviewed and we all felt good about that. Then came the action plan. Things were included in the plan that teachers said they didn't want and didn't see the value of. Things that teachers unanimously wanted were left out of the plan. Up until we got the plan, we thought we were being included. But it was a cookie-cutter plan that the external evaluator had. It felt to us like a one-size-fits-all plan."
Scores went up 94 points in the Santa Barbara County school without the plan being implemented, says Battaglia, who credits pre-II/USP improvements, such as class size reduction for upper grades and tutoring programs, with making the real difference.
"But some teachers are struggling with this whole thing and asking, 'At what expense are we raising test scores? What are we giving up?' I think there is a concern that we are sacrificing a love of learning to increase test scores. We are more concerned with children as test-takers than children as lifelong learners."
Tremendous staff turnover was part of the II/USP process at West Street School in Corning, says Linda LePeilbet, president of the Corning Elementary Faculty Association and a teacher at the school.
"We've had four principals in a year, and our superintendent also left. There is such pressure to perform that it causes high turnover. There is no one to go to for help, and no one knows what's going on. The pool for principals is limited now, and no one wants to come to a school with this kind of program."
LePeilbet says the external evaluator ended up giving her school a plan "so generic, it came with another school's name on it. It made everyone so furious that the external evaluator received $35,000 for a cookie-cutter job. The external evaluator told us nothing we didn't already know. We are not happy with this."
After the school raised scores by almost 100 points, LePeilbet asked the superintendent about social development, PE and music. "These things fell by the wayside. He said, 'It's not on the test.'
"You can count on one hand how many times kids have PE in one year. They have one recess a day and the rest of the time is all academic."
LePeilbet had to cut her interview with the California Educator short. "I'm going to another going-away party for our principal now," she says. "I guess we're in limbo again."
Instead of test scores going up, they went down 22 points at Indio Middle School in Riverside County, says Darlene Watson, a member of the Desert Sands Teachers Association. As a result, teachers are under tremendous pressure.
"It was real depressing," says Watson, who teaches high school preparation classes. "The teachers here are really conscientious. We put in lots of hours and time. We run after-school programs on our own time and have lots of supplemental programs that were supposed to boost scores. When I saw our scores go down, I was sick to my stomach. I thought, 'What more can we do? What more can go wrong?'"
Watson believes the external evaluator did little to help the school. "It was like the blind leading the blind. I felt we needed more direction. They asked us to voice opinions, yet when we did, they heard only what they wanted to hear. They didn't include the things that we felt were important. They came in with a preconceived notion of how our school should work. They didn't look at us as a school with unique problems. They said, 'Your school fits these demographics, so you need to do such and such.'"
There has been little discussion on the very real possibility of sanctions, says Watson. "The principal talked about who would go first, and pointed to herself, since administrators go first."
Watson wishes school reform could be handled differently.
"The public pressure is driving me crazy. I wish we could do this without all the public pressure that makes us railroad everything through. We need to spend time articulating, planning, making long-range goals and having a vision. We are so focused on raising test scores we have tunnel vision."
Don't become an II/USP victim
To avoid winding up in the bad or ugly category, there are strategies teachers can employ:
Following is some advice from II/USP survivors for teachers entering the program:
"Get on the planning team. Have a voice and speak up. Be very vocal about what you know that works in the classroom," says Melanie Driver of Fairfield.
"Go talk to schools that have a plan in place," suggests Richard Morrall of Colton. "To heck with the external evaluator. Find a plan that's working and read it, please. I wish we had done this before we submitted our plan.
"Also, go to meetings. I know meetings are cumbersome and wearisome, but please go. The stakes are very high. If you want conditions that make teaching easier and better for all concerned, you have to give input. At the end, we were down to just two teachers at meetings. One of them was me."
"Make sure you pick an effective external evaluator," says Marie Singh of Monterey. "Find someone who will keep their word and produce what they say they will produce. Get someone who will really work with staff - not just talk.
"Also, talk to teachers who have been through this, so you don't feel like you are re-inventing the wheel."
"Get the facts, but try to have a positive outlook," says Cindy Casey, a first grade teacher at Webster School in Fresno. "The whole purpose of this program is that you succeed. Look at it as everyone working together to succeed."
"Have someone representing your association at all II/USP meetings," adds Andrew Hopkins of Buena Park. "Make sure that if teachers have to come in on Saturdays, or do any work on top of their regular workload, that they will be compensated."
"Also, don't rely on data from the external evaluator," adds Hopkins. "Instead of depending on so-called 'experts,' become the expert. Ask questions. If push comes to shove, don't just nod your head. Find out what is being said and what it really means to you."
 |