Schools raising goals for grads

By KEN HARVEY

Ten years ago, school districts were mostly concerned with getting students graduated. Then the statewide WASL test forced districts to focus on meeting specific standards. But experts say passing the WASL is too low a goal for students.

Speaking at OSPI’s High School Summit, keynote speaker Tom Vander Ark, executive director of the Gates Foundation’s education initiatives, said many students who pass WASL still can’t pass college placement exams. Rather, they are required to pay for remedial courses that don’t count toward college graduation.

“There’s a good chance these students will drop out of college,” he told about 1,800 educators gathered at the Seattle Convention Center in January. “We need students to be college-ready, work-ready and citizenship-read.”

When students fail to become properly prepared by the end of high school, it can have a devastating effect.

“The way students leave high school often defines the rest of their lives,” Vander Ark says.

The cumulative impact of how students do in school then shapes all society.

“What you are doing is really important,” Vander Ark tells educators. “You are on the front lines  of social justice and economic development.”

The Gates Foundation executive says Washington has done some good things, including leading the way among the states in awarding college credit to high school students – about 24,000 through AP (Advanced Placement) classes within the high school and about 15,000 through the Running Start program, where high school students attend a community college tuition-free and achieve credits counted toward both high school and college graduation.

“But we can do better,” Vander Ark says.

Besides their efforts to prepare students to pass the WASL, students should be taking more challenging courses than typically required. Most districts only require two years of math and two years of science, and that’s not enough, he says.

“There is no question that taking more years of math would prepare students better,” Vander Ark says. “We need to get kids to take more math and science.”

He recommends four years of each, but that’s not all.

“We need to get kids to read more and write more, and English teachers cannot do this alone,” Vander Ark says. More reading and writing need to be integrated into other subjects.

The Gates Foundation has provided schools around the country millions of dollars in grants to help schools “reinvent education.”

Kennewick School District (KSD), a Gates grant recipient striving to employ best practices, presented a workshop at the High School Summit.

Former KSD Supt. Paul Rosier, recently named executive director of the Washington Association of School Administrators, told participants, “We realize WASL isn’t the end game. Now we realize we must aim well beyond that.”

Rosier says, similar to students throughout the state, 50-60 percent of KSD’s graduates who go to Columbia Basin College have to take a remedial math course not counted toward college graduation, he says. Others have to take remedial English.

To pass the entrance exam, Rosier says, students must have mastered a pre-calculus level of math. “Our kids need to be aware of that,” he says.

Students show similar weaknesses in their preparation to enter the workforce and to participate in the democratic process after graduation. Part of the challenge is to get students and parents to understand the challenges of today’s world, where America’s economic supremacy is threatened by the superior education of literally hundreds of millions of students around the world.

China, the superintendent notes, only graduates about 25 percent of its students from high school, but they come out with an International Baccalaureate-level education superior to what most American students achieve. And with China’s population of 1.3 billion, it still graduates more students than the United States. India and many other nations are also better preparing their students to succeed in the world economy, the superintendent says.

“We are sure of one thing,” says Rosier. “Every kid will have to work harder in school than we did, and we have to help parents understand that.”

Rosier says the level that needs the most improvement currently is middle school. The district needs to help those students continue to work as hard as they did in elementary school. Socio-cultural influences are encouraging many middle school students to slack off and not take their academics very seriously, he says.

“We’ve been really working at this, and we believe there are still about 40 percent of our middle school students who are not ready for high school,” Rosier says.

Kennewick educators have worked with both the Gates Foundation and Harvard University in developing what they are calling the PERR strategy for instructional excellence. Effective instruction should include Purpose, Engagement, Rigor and Results, Rosier says.

Teachers need to have a clear purpose for each day’s lesson, says Assist Supt. Greg Fancher, noting that a survey of students at Southridge High School showed that to be a top concern of students. “We want to know what the teacher wants us to learn. We want a syllabus,” the students said, essentially.

An extensive study by the Gates Foundation found that only 20 percent of all high school classes are both engaging and rigorous, Fancher says. Some classes have students very involved, but in content that is not academically challenging. Other classes may cover very challenging content, but students are bored and inattentive.

And, ultimately, the district wants to see results, and many of the schools’ and teachers’ efforts should be driven by data, Fancher says.

The district is focusing staff training on the PERR concepts and developing a set of videotaped demonstrations of effective classroom instruction by some of the district’s top teachers.

Meanwhile, among the three Kennewick high schools, Kamiakin is leading the way in using test data to develop new strategies to achieve the district’s 90 percent goal.

Principal Dave Bond has developed a nickname of “Data Dave” because of his extensive analysis of student test scores to drive the educational process at the school. Improving WASL results indicate the strategies are succeeding.

Bond and many other educational leaders are convinced that students should be taking four years of math and four years of English, and his statistical analysis of who is passing the WASL and who is failing helps illustrate that need to students and their parents.

Consequently, even though state and district policy only requires two years of math, for example, the school pushes all students to take four years.

For ninth-graders whose test scores show they are below grade level in math or reading, Kamiakin requires them to take a Math Help Class or Reading Help Class, in addition to their regular math or reading class. The help classes count as electives toward graduation, which means the students, in essence, have to sacrifice some other elective they might prefer to take.

The only way students who are below grade level can get out of a help class is if their parents sign an opt-out form. But the form is very blunt about the potential consequences.

“You pretty much have to say your kid is going to be a failure in order to sign the form,” Bond says.

Test data also helps the school be more diagnostic and prescriptive in its educational approach. Teachers in the help classes are given individualized data charts showing what the students’ specific weaknesses are – what concepts they don’t understand. The teachers can then provide individual assistance, small group instruction and computer-based instruction to help students plug the holes in their understanding.

Teachers, administrators and counselors also have the data available in order to counsel students better in what they need to be doing and in helping them better understand the ramifications of not getting up to grade level.

Even science and social studies teachers are provided data about their students’ reading skills so they can give additional help to those students who do not read well. The teachers can emphasize more vocabulary development and strategies for how to better understand complex concepts covered in the textbook.

The school is also reorganizing its staff into teams that work with the same students, Bond explains. For example, a teacher of a Reading Help Class now has most if not all those same students in one of her regular English classes, as well. And most of the students also attend a class of one specific science teacher and one specific social studies teacher. That allows the help teacher to more easily check on reading assignments the students have in the other classes.

In order to fit the additional math and English classes into their schedules, Bond is waiving P.E. for many students. One of the legal justifications for waiving the requirement is “other good cause,” and the Kamiakin principal believes achieving grade-level skills in math, reading and writing definitely qualifies as a good cause.

Analyzing data also helps in teacher development. Every teacher knows how his students are doing on the WASL and on other tests, in comparison with other teachers teaching the same course. If their students are doing consistently worse on tests, they know they need to make some changes, Bond says. Administrators and fellow teachers can help identify differences in skills and strategies used by teachers whose students are not doing as well.

The WASL results suggest Kamiakin has been effective in making these educational reforms.

Over the past five years, the percentage of students passing WASL math has risen from 51 percent to 73 percent, WASL writing from 51 percent to 89 percent, and WASL reading from 64 percent to 89 percent.