A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Harriet A. Baldwin Elementary School
Boston Public Schools
Boston, Mass.

1997-98 School Year

Key Programs: Chinese Bilingual Program, grades K-5; whole-school change effort, supported by the Boston Plan for Excellence; focus on schoolwide literacy; in-school and after-school tutoring provided by Boston College students

Background

A stately two-story brick building, with large windows, wooden double doors framed in white stone, and large bay windows filled with flowers at each end of the building, Baldwin Elementary looks like the classic picture of a New England school. At 8 a.m., children are running around the paved schoolyard, playing tag, chasing each other, moving in and out of a pick-up game of dodge ball, and yelling exuberantly. Children carrying books and bag lunches are dropped off by school buses or by parents. The students pass through the black iron gates as principals and several teachers circulate and talk with parents, grandparents, and students.

At 8:30 a.m., a teacher rings an old-fashioned hand bell and the noise and exuberance turn into order. Children line up by grade and class, with the younger grades closer to the door. In unison, the whole school says the Pledge of Allegiance and sings America the Beautiful. Then, in one voice, the school community greets the principal, "Good morning, Ms. Lee." Each grade, in an orderly fashion, files into the school. Each morning without snow, this ritual begins the school day.

Five years ago, Baldwin Elementary did not feel like this. Parents, teachers, and district administrators described Baldwin at that time as chaotic and disorganized. For example, because supplies were limited, teachers hoarded them in their rooms. There was little communication within the school, with other schools, or with the district office. In a setting with a lack of clear messages and no established means of communication, rumors and suspicion arose easily. In describing Baldwin in the fall of 1994 when she was named acting principal, Suzanne Lee, now principal, explained, "Literally, there was fighting in the hall. There was constant turmoil among both kids and adults."

Teachers, parents, administrators, and visitors to Baldwin today describe it as a safe, welcoming, and academically focused school. A principal from another school who had visited on a professional "walk-through" described Baldwin as "a school that feels intimate, where everyone knows everyone. The staff seemed organized around teaching and learning. When you go into classrooms they?re happy to see visitors, and students are active and asking questions."

One parent told of a time when she was recovering from surgery. The principal and teachers took turns picking up her children to take them to school and bring them home. Another parent who lived across town had an older son who graduated from Baldwin, but she started her younger daughter in an elementary school closer to home. An incident happened at the other school and a teacher acted unconcerned. The mother immediately enrolled her daughter in Baldwin, even though it meant arranging transport every day, because, she said, "Here teachers will notice if something is happening, and they will let you know."

Teachers feel that they are able to pay attention to all their students, and this is a source of satisfaction and pride. As one teacher explained:

These kids don?t get lost in the shuffle. We follow the kids who are struggling. We know them. We know their families. No one can hide. I hear about children that I have taught previously and I?ll go in and say, ?I heard you wrote a really beautiful essay.? I check in on them. There is a sense of continuity.

Population Served

In academic year 1996-97, Baldwin served a total student population of 283 students, 72 percent of whom were Asian American; 17 percent, African American; seven percent, white; and four percent, Hispanic. More than 80 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Seventy-eight percent of the students come from families speaking a language other than English at home. Baldwin is one of the Boston schools that offers a Chinese bilingual program. At each grade level from kindergarten to fifth grade, there is a class in which students are taught in English and a class in which they are taught in both English and Chinese.

Academic Improvement

Baldwin?s academic achievement is noteworthy. From 1996 to 1998, their Stanford 9 mathematics and reading scores have improved substantially. Their scores are currently well above the national median and are substantially higher than the district scores. There is a trend in the Baldwin Stanford 9 data that shows achievement shifting from Levels 1&2 (little or no mastery of basic knowledge and skills and partial mastery) to Levels 3&4 (solid academic performance and superior performance beyond grade-level mastery). For example, in 1996, 66 percent of the third-grade students scored in math Levels 1&2; in 1998, 100 percent of the students scored at Levels 3&4. In 1997, 75 percent of fourth-grade students were at Level 1&2 in reading, and only 25 percent at higher levels of proficiency. In 1998, no fourth-grade students were at Level 1 in reading, 44 percent of the students were at Level 2, and 56 percent were at Levels 3&4.

Similar improvement has been shown by increases in median percentile scores on the Stanford 9 mathematics and reading tests. As Table 4 illustrates, students at Baldwin are performing substantially above the 50^th percentile. Furthermore, the trend shows improvement beyond the overall improvement in the Boston Public School District.

Table 4: Stanford 9 Achievement at Baldwin Elementary Versus Scores for Boston Public Schools, Percentile Scores

Starting Points

In describing the changes at Baldwin, it is important to note that the school-level changes have been made in the context of changes in the district, in the city, and in the state that have all encouraged, supported, and reinforced the concept of whole-school change. In the year after Principal Lee came to Baldwin, a number of major district-level changes were put in place. The Boston Foundation, a local foundation supporting public education, shifted its funding priorities from mini-grants to whole-school reform. The foundation established a competitive process for becoming one of the Boston Plan for Excellence?s Schools for the 21^st Century. This grant included resources to support professional development.

That same year, 1995, Thomas Payzant, who had been assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education at the U. S. Department of Education, was hired as superintendent of the Boston Public Schools. His efforts focused on reorganization within the district. Boston Public Schools did not have feeder patterns. Part of the superintendent?s program was to reorganize schools into regional clusters that met regularly. This new structure provided principals with professional development and a professional group for support. In addition, city-wide learning standards were developed and adopted by the school committee in math, science, English language arts, and social studies in the summer of 1996 and the arts, health, physical education and world languages in the summer of 1997.

In academic years 1993-94 and 1994-95, the district office began to examine schools that were not performing well. They created intervention teams of teachers, administrators, and central office staff that visited the under-performing schools. Baldwin was targeted for intervention. The former principal, who had been at the school for 15 years, had at one time been well respected, but he had experienced health problems, and the school had gone downhill. In 1994, Suzanne Lee, who had taught bilingual classes, and was the district coordinator for bilingual education, was named acting principal, and two years later, officially hired as principal. She was chosen for this position because of her background in curriculum and instruction and her ability to relate to the community.

Changing the School Climate

When Lee came to Baldwin, her first order of business was to create order and safety in the school and to let students and teachers know that there was someone in charge. Lee described arriving at Baldwin:

I actually came on Halloween. The second-grade teacher puts on a Halloween play every year. So the first day I was here I went to see the play. The very next day I started this tradition of a daily memo to staff. I wrote in it how nice it was to have that kind of play for kids, for them to have a safe place to enjoy Halloween. [Later,] I overheard teachers as they were signing in say, ?This is a breath of fresh air that somebody even recognizes the work that we do.? I tried to start looking at the positive things people were doing in a very difficult situation.

That first year, Lee, who has 20 years? experience in community organizing, said "I wanted to establish more of a culture in the school, also to give the message to teachers that I?m here for the long haul, with them, to support them." She intentionally set about creating a safe, comfortable, predictable environment for the children. The school was small, but it was crowded, and that added to the tension. Because there was an extra classroom in the basement, the student assignment office had added an extra class, without regard for how that would affect the next year?s distribution of students. One of Lee?s first moves was to wrangle with the central office to reduce enrollment to a manageable number and maintain a grade-level pattern that allowed her to plan effectively, even though decreasing the student population meant the loss of one full-time teaching position. Lee reported:

I said, ?This building is too small for the number of kids that they stuffed in here.? We had 350 that first year. The cafeteria is very small. So if you have 120 kids down there, it?s ridiculous. Of course they get into fights. You don?t even have any elbow room. I said, ?You can?t just stuff every single room.?

As part of building a safe environment, Lee made herself visible, moving around in the schoolyard when students arrived, in and out of classrooms during the day, and in the halls. She knew every one of nearly 300 students by name, and in many cases, she knew their families. Especially during the first two years, when she was getting to know the community, Lee made a concerted effort to meet and talk with parents. If there were difficulties reaching a parent, she would take the child home after school. She made these home visits on an average of once or twice a week. In addition, a small and diverse group of parents became and remain active in the site council and in school governance.

Lee?s presence and her authority helped shape the feeling of stability and predictability at Baldwin. She encouraged children to allow her to help solve problems that they might be tempted to resolve through fighting. As she explained:

The turning point was about a year or so after being here, [some fifth-grade] kids got off their bus, rushed into my office, and said, ?Ms. Lee you better take care of what happened!? They described what had happened at the bus stop. I said, ?Well, I?m glad you guys came to me. Let?s see what we can do.? I?m trying to instill in them, that the rule of the school has to be the rule at the bus stop. You cannot take things into your own hands and start beating on everybody on the school bus. They believed, ?If adults won?t take care of it, we will.? It was important that they would come to me and say, ?We?ll let you take care of it and see what happens.? So I took care of it. That constant open door policy and that one-on-one [working] with kids took a whole year.

Changing Academic Instruction

Even in the first year, while building the safe environment in the school, Lee focused upon improving academic instruction. The changes in instruction were influenced by a common focus on instructional strategies that would better serve the large population of students who were learning English as a second language. Also, the manner in which teachers collaborated with each other around instructional issues helped improve instruction.

Focusing on a Common Academic Need

The district had small professional development grants for which schools could apply. Lee saw this as an opportunity to acquire resources to address an issue that was important to teachers and students. Teachers clearly identified English as a Second Language (ESL) as a common major need. The bilingual classes might have students speaking two or three dialects of Chinese, whereas the regular classes could have immigrant children speaking six or seven different languages. Teachers reported, "We have so many kids in the classroom that are second language learners that we don?t necessarily know what to do. Are we doing the right thing?" The school applied for and received a $5,000 grant that provided materials and workshops on ESL strategies.

The principal explained that not every teacher participated in the Saturday and after-school workshops, but many did. More than 70 percent of the teachers came on their own time to work on instructional strategies to help students who were learning English. In explaining why teachers were willing to participate, Lee underscored both the dedication of the staff and her strategy of supporting the positive as a resource for change:

I think underneath, people really wanted to do a good job. I recognized that and tapped into it. The message I constantly give out is not to work harder; instead, it?s about being more effective. How can we be more effective? They had to form a team and share a lot more. Intellectually people can hear that, but it takes a lot longer to go into action like that.

Consolidating Staff

The Baldwin teaching staff was experienced and dedicated, but in the disrupted school environment, teachers had, in the classic description of teacher isolation, shut themselves in their classrooms and taught what they wanted. Breaking the pattern of isolation was not easy. For some of the teachers, the changing environment and expectations at Baldwin were welcome. Other teachers, however, were resistant. A central office administrator described Principal Lee:

?[She is] a principal who, when she encountered a number of veteran teachers, some of whom were set in their ways, didn?t back off and say ?I can?t do anything because there are some folks that have been doing their own thing for a number of years and they don?t want to be players.? She?s made some staffing changes and she?s brought some folks around and as a result, she has been pretty focused around teacher improvement, which has gotten some good results.

Five or six staff positions had to be removed or redefined. In some cases people left through retirement, though others had to be removed more aggressively. For example, one teacher who had been at the school a long time did not want to give up "pull-out" remedial reading instruction, which did not fit with a whole-school literacy orientation. That teacher is no longer there.

On the other hand, some new positions were created, and new staff added. Changes in Title I funding allowed the school to purchase computers and stock a computer lab as well as put a networked computer in every third, fourth, and fifth-grade classroom. In the second year, Lee hired a computer teacher who worked with all students and teachers. And because the computer teacher did not have previous history with the school, she was in a position to build new connections. When the principal recruited for this position, she looked for someone who had not only technical skills, but also a capacity to draw people together.

Some teachers liked the way the school was before. One teacher described it as "relaxed," another as a place where "everybody did whatever they did." But even some staff members who were initially hesitant or resistant to collaboration could see the writing on the wall. Major changes were happening in the district and in the state. Thomas Payzant, the superintendent who came to Boston Public Schools in 1995, established new policies. He brought to the district more focus on student achievement, on accountability, and on using data for decisions. Thus a few teachers recognized that change was inevitable, and leaving Baldwin to go to another school would not be a way to avoid it.

Yet others in the school found the changes and challenges exciting. The special education resource room teacher described how this move towards teams and collaboration had benefited her work, benefited other teachers, and most of all, benefited the students:

Five years ago I was down here in my little room [in the basement], pulling the students away from class, working on different materials for their IEPs [individual education plans]. Now I?m working with them on their class materials. And teachers are coming and asking me, "What do I do about this student?" I can see that in the future I could be working with them in the classrooms.

The same teacher explained further by saying, "The principal paved the way, saying ?it?s alright to ask for help. I?m going to give you time to meet together. The first-grade teacher may have skills that you can use.? It?s a sharing of ideas. We?re all valuable."

In a move that was both symbolic and substantive, supplies, which were scarce in the past, have been made available. Teachers were aware of this, and expressed their appreciation for the principal?s support.

She's gone to the n^th degree to get more than enough supplies. Not just basal readers, but extras. In a community where kids don't necessarily get to go to the library this enrichment is very important. Before we wouldn't even have had supplies, even regular supplies. The supplies door was locked. Ms. Lee has made it so that I can go to her and ask her to buy things we need. And she has encouraged us to do that.

In the emerging environment that fostered collaboration, two teachers worked together so that both of their classes benefited from cross-age tutoring. Four years ago, the fifth-grade teacher and the kindergarten bilingual teacher proposed and implemented a cross-grade program. Once a week fifth graders come and work with the bilingual kindergarten students. The younger children get extra attention and the older children gain a sense of responsibility.

One teacher commented on the overall differences in the school from five years before. Teaching staff now is more informed about expectations based on standards and curriculum. She explained:

We are getting more information about what they want us to teach—a whole curriculum. And we've been taking more courses. I've got my master's degree. Communication is greatly improved. We get notices. We know what is going on. Lee has a notice she writes every morning. There's a sense we are connected. Before we were disconnected. Now we are a unified body.

Changing Relationships with Parents and the Community

Boston Public Schools has controlled-choice student assignment—parents submit an application with a list of their top three schools for their children. School assignments are made on a combination of space available and student diversity in the school. Several of the parents interviewed chose Baldwin for their children because of the atmosphere. Many parents have chosen Baldwin for the bilingual program, others chose it because it is a school that will look after their children and give them a good academic base. One parent said that the former principal had referred to them as "just parents." But this has shifted, "Now we are people, we are equals." Parents say that they love to come to the school; "It?s like a community." Parents know there is an open-door policy and that they are welcome in the classroom anytime.

Parents were on the site council and played an active role in the interviewing and hiring process for the principal. Parents were also instrumental in 1997 in identifying the need for and—with the YWCA—starting up an after school enrichment program that goes until 6 p.m.

The concept of whole school does not stop at the boundaries of the campus. Lee looks for opportunities to bring community resources to Baldwin. These partnerships afford more students one-on-one attention and help give all members of the school community a sense of connection to the school. Lee initiated a partnership with Boston College. The first activity was a Junior Olympics Day on the college campus, organized by the Asian Student Association.

The relationship with Boston College has grown. Now more than 40 college students tutor and mentor Baldwin students during the school day and after school. Some of the college students are volunteer tutors. Others are paid through the America Reads Challenge. The tutoring is specifically targeted for Baldwin students who are identified as needing more academic support. Tutoring during the extended academic time, until 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon, was first made available to children who walk to school. Then Title I money was used to provide transportation so that students who live farther away could also take part in the after-school tutoring.

One of the teachers commented on the value of Boston College tutors:

The college students help open up our students? vision so that they know what they should do in the future. Especially [it is helpful] for our students, given their background. They?re still below middle class, if not poor. For the immigrants, for the parents, they don?t know that much about local society or the future. This has definitely helped our students enlarge their vision.

Changing the Organization of Schooling

Before coming to Baldwin, Lee had been enrolled in a Harvard University leadership program and then worked in the central office. She came to the campus with a view of the system as a whole. Her strategic moves in her first year at Baldwin were all aimed toward whole-school change. In her second year as principal, a new superintendent was hired for Boston Public Schools, and the Boston Plan for Excellence (a local public education fund) put out applications for schools to be part of a whole-school change process called Schools for the 21^st Century.

These district and community initiatives supported Lee?s vision of a whole-school effort and she took advantage of the opportunity. As she explained:

When Payzant came, he really pushed hard for whole-school change and using Title I money differently to look at what your whole school needs. That was also the first year that Ellen Guiney came back from Washington. She was hired as the director for the Boston Plan for Excellence, part of the Boston Foundation, which is the largest private foundation to give money to Boston schools. She had known Payzant in Washington. At the end of the 1995-96 year, the Boston Plan for Excellence put out this call for whole-school change projects. They were looking for the school to make a commitment to four or five years to change their whole school—to re-look at everything they do, and to involve everybody. So when that call came out for Schools for the 21^st Century, that was my chance to jump at it.

Baldwin was part of the first cohort of the Schools for the 21^st Century program, which began in academic year 1996-97. The program has mandated components that all participating schools must implement. Under the aegis of the 21^st Century program, many of the significant structural changes—a coordinated curriculum, primary and elementary instructional leadership teams, and regularly scheduled meetings—have been established at Baldwin.

The first step in the program was to identify an instructional focus to meet students? needs. The program provided resources for teachers? professional development and external coaches for technical support. The faculty at Baldwin, as a group, identified literacy as their focus.

Interestingly, the majority of schools in their cluster have also chosen literacy as a focus. Schools that joined later cohorts of the Boston Plan for Excellence have been told that literacy will be the curricular focus, so Baldwin has identified a need that was widely shared in the district.

The literacy program is one of the areas for critical use of data. This focus on data coincided with a district priority to have more instructional decisions based on data analysis. The district central office made student achievement data (e.g., the Stanford 9 test scores, student attendance rates) available to campuses, disaggregated in various ways. At Baldwin, the principal and teachers formally and informally reviewed the data to identify students who were struggling or were in danger of falling through the cracks. The principal explained the challenge that necessitated a focus on data:

How far do we have to go to catch up? In Boston, we are trying to have every kid read on grade level by grade three. But if kids are at level one, if they are already three years behind, how do we do this? Those are the challenges. We try to work with them in smaller groups and hook them into supportive services to help academically and socially.

When students were identified at Level 1 (little or no mastery of basic knowledge and skills) they were specifically linked to extra resources such as foster grandparents and one-on-one tutoring during and after school.

With the help of the external coach assigned by the 21^st Century project, the Baldwin faculty researched a wide range of literacy programs and chose First Steps for their school. They have been implementing this literacy program for more than two years. One of the practices that Baldwin has established is that all students have a 90-minute period of literacy every day. The first and second-grade teachers first instituted it, and now it is a school-wide practice. In addition, all teaching staff, the art teacher, the resource room teacher, and the coach, work with students during the literacy period. Moreover, the new Boston curricular guidelines stress writing in all content areas.

Several teachers described their responses to the coordinated literacy effort, and their sense of the effect on students:

We decided literacy was our focus around the middle of 1997, second semester. We started bringing in the training for it and getting ready. We already had some excellent reading teachers here anyway, but with this as a focus, it really helped them flourish, too. They [the teachers] have become more involved now.

The terms and the strategies used for literacy, reading, and writing are consistent from kindergarten through fifth grade. The students hear the same language, the same approaches. The school has really unified. Instead of every teacher just doing their own curriculum, even though they did it well, there is now a school-wide focus and consistency which tends to have the students do a better job of things.

However, there are costs. Other teachers have found this focus on literacy to be stressful and frustrating. As one teacher stated:

Now the bottom line for us is to prepare the students to pass the test. Just work them hard. There?s a test; you?ve got to pass. The literacy focus, especially when there are students who are slower learners, is very demanding. It?s also demanding on teachers. Then, that might be the reason for these changes ? to force teachers to work harder. I don?t know how much harder we can go.

Another major difference in the last few years is that teachers meet together regularly. There is a primary team (kindergarten through second grade) and an elementary team (third through fifth grades) and they meet twice a month. Among the teachers, there is a strong sense that these meetings are valuable. As one teacher reported:

I think the biggest change is that the staff meets regularly. It is mandatory. Before this, there were few teacher meetings where the entire staff met. But now, there are regularly scheduled meetings. So just by being there and listening, you get to know somebody and know their ideas and how they approach things. So people know each other better and therefore can be more comfortable with each other.

Another teacher noted more subtle change in the meetings:

We have come a long way. People are now more comfortable talking at meetings. Before there was silence and then after the meetings they would talk. Discussion is more positive, not putting each other down. The coaches gave us mini-trainings. They set up ground rules for the meetings. That helped.

One teacher noted that the meetings were a move in the right direction. "The meetings are helpful, but the agendas are totally scheduled, there is no informal time for teachers to get together and talk about issues of the moment." The same teacher also mused that it is difficult to make whole-school changes when the whole school does not have the opportunity to meet together.

As a part of Schools for the 21^st Century, one mandated activity is reviewing student work and data in relation to the city-wide learning standards. The external coach leads this activity and uses the protocol and rubrics developed by the Education Trust. This activity has been both useful and stressful for teachers. As teachers explained:

There was a lot of negative feeling about it. Teachers are their own worst critics and many teachers feel inadequate. But most are doing really good work. At first, I thought it was a huge waste of time. But with this focus I've learned to ask, "Did I get them ready for it? Did I give them enough direction?" It makes you look at the way you prepare them for the assignment and the actual instrumentation. I see it now as an asset.

Moreover, another major district initiative, the establishment of school clusters, supported the whole-school change process at Baldwin. The school cluster of which Baldwin is a part consists of two high schools, two middle schools, seven elementary schools, the school for the deaf, and an early learning center. The principals meet monthly and have other activities, including visits to each other?s schools. In the first year, each principal conducted a local needs assessment and wrote a comprehensive school plan. Other cluster principals reviewed the plan, using a protocol similar to the one teachers used to examine student work. The cohort of cluster principals has grown into a strong network of professional support and advice. For Lee at Baldwin, this structure has provided a valued source of support.

Conclusions

The story of whole-school change at Baldwin Elementary School is evolving. In the last four years, the school has grappled with multiple changes: a new district curriculum, a new principal, computers, and a commitment to whole-school change. And a state assessment system is looming on the horizon. With dynamic leadership, vision, prodding, external encouragement, and increased resources, Baldwin Elementary School has shifted from a place where individual teachers worked in their classrooms with their students to a school with a common curricular focus, organized faculty teams, and pathways for communication. This process is not complete, nor has it always been easy up to this point.

Many of the successes to date are evident. Most strikingly, the school is a safe and welcoming place and the students are achieving academically. Structures are in place for professional development and teacher collaboration. However, even with these structures, a quiet struggle continues. There is, for example, some tension between the bilingual and regular programs within the school. Both programs are grappling with different pressures that can obstruct perception of their common needs and goals.

Not surprisingly, there has been resistance to change at Baldwin. For some of the teachers, the mandate to change challenged their view of themselves as teachers, and as good teachers. In one teacher's words, "People feel comfortable with what they know, what they used in the past, rather than trying something new. People felt that what they did in the past wasn't valued; that if something new was going to be tried, then what they had done was not valued."

One of the teachers, who was someone others came and talked with, explained how she responds to teachers' reluctance. "You have to have a willingness to let them go through their resistance. Then you focus on the fact that this is for the good of the kids."

A quote from the evaluation of the Boston Plan for Excellence's 21^st Century School Program captures a dilemma surrounding whole-school change. "Progress seems to be too slow for those in leadership positions, and too fast and intense for those at the schools." The cluster leader echoes this from conversations with the cluster principals, "It's a concern, how hard and how time consuming this work is, how many years it takes for a school to move forward."

Principal Lee thoughtfully reflects on the challenges inherent in her position as principal of a small elementary school in the midst of whole-school change. As principal she is responsible for both instructional leadership and management. She questioned if this is sustainable:

How long can anyone do this? Are there that many people that are skilled to do all these things, all rolled into one? In a small elementary school where you don't have other administrators, you are it. [There is] no assistant principal. I do discipline, planning, the instructional support, the budget, supplies, everything.

Lee can see the changes and successes that have occurred so far, but she can also see challenges still to come. Teachers at the school are working hard and are tired. One teacher, for example, mentioned that for two years she had not slept well because she was so anxious about meeting the increased performance expectations. The teachers are still conscious of the school's history. They sometimes retreat into familiar ways. But there is progress: where before teachers did not talk together, they are now talking, and building relationships and building trust. The reality, hope, and optimism are wrapped into one teacher's comment; "I can see where we are going as a school. Are we there yet? No. Are we moving in the right direction? Yes."

[Bibliography]

[Baskin Elementary School]