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Adequate Time to Learn New Roles. The transition to a schoolwide project involves introducing new and expanded roles, academic expectations, and management structures. Even new resources require that long-standing practices be adjusted. These changes can be disconcerting or overwhelming to some members of the school community; even with broad support, new initiatives can be tricky to coordinate smoothly.
Careful planning increases the likelihood that the schoolwide project plan will be sufficiently clear and comprehensive and that all members of the school community--including parents--will accept and support the plan's intent, design, and desired outcomes. Although reaching consensus is a slow process, planners of successful schoolwide projects acknowledge that "ownership" by all parties is essential. The process is facilitated when principals and teachers participate in workshops on effective planning and collaboration techniques to learn about the roles and responsibilities that must be shared and about changes in teaching that promote achievement. Some districts enable school principals and selected teachers to attend workshops on schoolwide project planning and technical support; others provide minimal guidance, often contributing to later implementation roadblocks. The experience of the Accelerated Learning Laboratory (ALL) School in Worcester, Massachusetts, illustrates how poor initial planning offers a lesson for better planning in the future, eventually leading to success.
The ALL School in Worcester, Massachusetts began its first cycle of a Chapter 1 schoolwide project with less than six months of planning time. According to one of the planners, the lack of planning time resulted in a project that allocated resources primarily for technology, used a less-focused curriculum, and redirected pullouts to primary grades. Teacher morale was low, and students fought openly in the classrooms. But the school spent a year planning its second cycle and revamped the curriculum, reorganized into grade "clusters," and established project-oriented learning and alternative assessments--leading to significant improvements in instruction, learning, and school atmosphere. "Everyone thought...we needed to change attitudes," said principal Carol Shilinsky, who joined the ALL School during planning for the second cycle. Working with an experienced educator of gifted and talented students, teachers rewrote the curriculum to include a stronger social studies program; administrators reduced class size and eliminated pullout classes. Shilinsky met weekly with key program participants, building broad support; soliciting advice; and encouraging teachers, parents, representatives of local businesses and universities, and the city school committee to become involved.
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Communication and Involvement. Without exception, schoolwide project planners said that project success is directly related to the quality of communication among planners and the degree to which teachers are partners in planning and implementation. "The biggest pitfall is lack of communication," remarked a principal whose school is in its second project cycle. "It was hard for some people to see why things should be done differently."
Moving Beyond Reduced Class Size. Reduced class size is crucial to schoolwide project success because of the relationships between class size, classroom discipline, individualized instruction, and student achievement and self-esteem. Students in smaller classes receive more individualized instruction from the regular classroom teacher and assistants, and thus are more likely to be productively engaged. Ultimately, the attention they receive heightens self-esteem and connects them to the academic program. As one teacher in a schoolwide project said, "Children come to this school needing concentrated attention, both in instruction and in building relationships. Because we have the lower ratio, we can do it."
But reducing class size alone cannot ensure a successful schoolwide project without a focus on a sound, developmentally appropriate academic program. Detailed planning, staff development, teacher involvement, and district support enable schools to use reduced class size as a starting point for improving instruction schoolwide.
Adequate Preparation for New Resources. Successful schoolwide projects require extensive training of all teachers in uses of technology, new content and methods, and different teaching styles. Often, teachers need preparation in programs such as Reading Recovery or Funds of Knowledge for Teaching or the use of science and mathematics manipulatives. Practitioners emphasize that everyone needs to receive information and some training--administrators and parents as well as the teachers who will conduct the program.
Including Parents and the Community. Organizers of schoolwide projects find that it is not enough to improve instruction, curricula, or materials. Success for the project depends on support from parents, businesses, special interest groups, and fraternal organizations. "You must network with the community you serve," explains McNair principal Patricia Rabon. "We turn to our community council of 32 contributing businesses and service agencies to help us support our students. We just cannot do it ourselves."
Achievement Variability. Despite the strong academic programs and comprehensive assistance that schoolwide projects offer children, student performance on standardized tests can fluctuate from year to year. There are many reasons for this, even where standards are high and the academic emphasis is consistent: (1) populations in schoolwides shift frequently, (2) students most at risk perform in the extreme ranges of the achievement scale where the tests are least reliable, (3) English is a second or developing language for many students in schoolwide projects, (4) standardized tests do not always reveal performance competence, and (5) programs vary. It is up to schoolwide project managers to closely monitor program fluctuations and the effects on achievement.
Dips in achievement in schoolwide projects that are working well are rarely unexpected. Teachers know when a group of students have confronted difficulties, and the teachers anticipate performance below their goals. However, it is significant that these schools have structures that allow staff to adjust the program as needed. With the backing of planning councils and diagnostic teams, coordinating resources for success becomes a challenge for everyone, rather than the problem of a few.
Stabilizing Change. The most consistent threat to schoolwide project success is the change in leadership that occurs all too often and too early in the life of many projects. It is not uncommon for enthusiastic district managers, seeing the success of a creative leader, to move an administrator who initiates a schoolwide project into a new administrative slot well before the new initiatives stabilize, sometimes as soon as only one or two years after a project gets under way. After the departure of a strong leader, even with shared decision making it takes time for a school to establish new relationships and to develop a shared vision with its leaders. Some sources say that as much as a year's progress can be delayed or lost. Even without such a change, achieving stable evaluation results after only three years can be difficult--especially when students are highly mobile, because the neediest students may not have been exposed to the program long enough for it to take effect. "I think real change takes five to ten years.... Three years is just not enough," commented one district Chapter 1 coordinator.
Furthermore, despite the availability of Chapter 1 funds, state and local budget cuts may be so severe that they threaten the resource base of schoolwide projects and endanger continuity--as in the case of Fairview Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska.
Fairview Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska began a successful schoolwide project in 1989 that reduced the student-teacher ratio to 17:1, emphasized individualized attention to students, established a computer lab and Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) lab, eliminated pullout services, and provided new opportunities for field trips and extracurricular activities. Students' test scores improved on average from the 34th percentile to the 48th percentile in reading, and from the 46th percentile to the 61st percentile in math. The school's district ranking rose from 54th--the lowest--to 27th; a local realtor reported a "dramatic" increase in the number of families seeking to move into the district so that their children could attend Fairview. Despite its success, especially for students at risk, by 1993 Fairview faced a crisis. State budget cuts, coupled with rapid population growth, meant that the school had to provide more services with fewer resources. The 23- room school, originally designed for 272 students, faced an enrollment of 425. The student-teacher ratio jumped to 26-28:1 in some classrooms, despite the addition of nine portable classrooms--so the computer and HOTS labs disappeared to make space for classrooms. With larger classes, instruction became less individualized; with a tighter budget, field trips and extracurricular classes were cut. And when the principal who had implemented the project accepted a district position, Fairview faced a change in leadership. The new principal has solicited grants from a local business to reinstate some of the special activities, but she says that without more funds--and especially more portable classrooms--it will be a struggle for Fairview to reduce class size again or bring back the special labs that were integral to the schoolwide project. |
There is great enthusiasm among the faculty, school, district, and state leadership teams that conduct these programs. While promising educational practice for disadvantaged youth does not come easily, success is possible when project participants find ways to work together under a unified mission to encourage every child to succeed. In multicultural settings, this often means that teachers learn to speak a second language and become educated in the many dimensions of tradition that help foster children's learning. It means cultivating the roots of history, or developing an appreciation for dialect, languages, or cultures that were previously unfamiliar. And often it means re-learning about cultures once thought familiar, such as African American or Native American.
Schoolwide projects adapt the practices that researchers and practitioners have proven successful in the past: Instruction and curricula respond to students' previous achievements and involve a range of resources. The most promising practices establish strong ties to parents, include children as active learners, and are facilitated by state and local institutional arrangements. Teachers, principals, school administrators, and community members become partners and collaborators--members of teams that serve children more comprehensively. Every child becomes every educator's responsibility.
There are no packaged solutions, and no schoolwide projects remain static. The best projects are designed creatively to meet the needs of the children they serve; when the plans falter, educators redirect their energies to discover new and more appropriate designs. In time, the students change, too. Through hard work, time, collaboration, and mutual respect, schoolwide projects can accomplish long-held goals of academic excellence for every child.
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[Chapter 5 - Profiles of Effective Schoolwide Projects]