How to Fix Our City Schools
“Practical” turn-around strategies
An old friend often evaluates the “practicality” of my newsletters. Of course, I always think they are all extremely practical but his questions and comments have made me wonder. The point of my newsletters is to offer simple, do-able changes that will have maximum positive impacts for children. So, here, I will outline four strategies I believe will do just that. (The first two I have written about in prior newsletters but they cannot be repeated often enough.)
1. What do you do if half of your kindergarten students arrive on day one with 10 or 20 or 30 million word gaps compared to the students from more affluent communities?
I have written about this many times before so here I will only repeat that district turn-around is not possible without ensuring that the large majority of your students can read at or near grade level by the end of 3rd grade. Solving this huge problem is the first critical example of the importance of differentiation. Your children cannot participate in the curriculum when their language skills are years behind.
2. Almost every district has one or two schools that are “beating the odds” but, often, district leaders do not know why they are being successful (or take advantage of their successes).
In order to understand what successful schools are doing differently, many (most) district leaders will have to learn to look at them with new, open eyes and minds – and look beyond their own experience, interests, specialties, theories, and philosophies. District leaders have many important works and interests – curriculum design, fine arts, STEM/STEAM, after-school and summer school programs, social justice, SEL, language immersion, teacher recruitment and retention, instructional technology, credit recovery, higher order thinking, and on and on. Yet, over the last forty years, all the great works (combined) of our district leaders have not transformed our struggling urban schools into great schools. District leaders today must come to grips with this fact and seriously reexamine what they are missing. (Hint: It is not complicated or mysterious.) As I have argued before, the first place they must look is at the fundamental issue of what happens when students fall behind. How do successful schools respond so that all the students receive the “opportunity to learn?” And, as Marzano has argued, the “opportunity to learn” begins with “time.”[1]
3. There is no substitute for (correct) practice – whether a child is learning to hit a baseball or learning to read fluently. In this regard, it is critical that teachers don’t waste valuable classroom time on “reading” activities that are not only ineffective but actually harmful to weaker readers. For example, why are many teachers still wasting time on activities like round-robin reading and popcorn reading? How do those activities possibly help students who are poor readers? Yet, as a number of experts have pointed out, “while we knew these activities didn’t work decades ago, they persist in more than 50% of the nation’s classrooms.”[2]
Similarly, I have always thought practices like “silent reading” and “drop everything and read” were great for those kids who like to read and are already successful readers. But, how does “silent reading” help a kid who is struggling and avoids reading whenever possible? Of course, reading experts will argue that there are ways to make those practices effective and I am sure that is true (see footnote links.)2 But, more often than not, silent reading activities are employed because they are “easy,” require little planning, and provide teachers with time to take a break or prepare for other activities – not because they are effective or efficient.
Why do I mention these practices? Because (again) teaching children to read is the most critical responsibility of our elementary schools and the school day is short… and, yet, many teachers waste much of the “reading block” time with activities that model poor fluency and pronunciation, embarrass weak readers, and make poor readers less confident and enjoy reading less.
Like many of the practices in our urban (and rural and suburban) schools, these practices are not complicated to improve – and practice is essential to helping all children become more proficient and fluent readers.
4. There are many educational practices and debates I have always thought were odd (to say the least). These include the arguments about the importance of phonics, disagreements about the value of homework, the limited and weak use of technology, and the failure of school districts to share curriculum. But, perhaps, the most bizarre idea I have heard is the notion that somehow sharing lesson plans is an insult to teachers’ professionalism.
Recently, I read about teachers who are buying and selling lessons on the internet and a discussion of whether such practices are appropriate and professional. Personally, I have always seen the job of the teacher as amazingly difficult – preparing for and teaching four or five subjects or five different classes every day for 180+ days. So, it seems to me that teachers can use all the help they can get, particularly if their districts are not providing the necessary resources.
Equally odd is that in some districts teachers are not required to write lesson plans at all, and it is apparently not uncommon for teachers to “teach” classes without planning their lessons. I don’t see how that is possible. Even when I only taught one graduate class a week (in addition to my regular district job), I worked on each lesson for hours and, even then, only felt moderately prepared.
I don’t know if this is a common practice, but I recently read about a charter school district that requires first year teachers to use district developed lessons. However, after their first year, they are free to develop their own lessons or use the district provided ones. While many teachers may find such a requirement insulting, it certainly makes great sense to me when you consider how difficult it is to be a first year teacher.
I am not suggesting that districts require teachers to use district-developed lessons. But, teachers should have help. How could such a bank of optional lessons be created? Easily! Pay your best teachers to share their best lessons. For example, if a district paid a small number of their best teachers only $200 for each lesson, each teacher could earn $10,000 for just 50 lessons. (In many cases, these would be lessons the teachers have used for years and are classroom-tested.) If you do the math, the cost to the district would be extremely small and it would be a one-time cost that would result in all teachers having access to hundreds of model lessons developed by the district’s strongest teachers.
This seems like a no-brainer to me and a great help to teachers – particularly to novice teachers and those teachers working two or three jobs, raising families, taking care of elderly parents, and so on.
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Dear Subscribers,
I hope you find the information and ideas in my newsletters compelling and useful. They are informed by over 40 years of experience working with twenty superintendents, dozens of future superintendents, hundreds of senior administrators, and thousands of principals. (A short BIO is provided below.) On almost a daily basis, I listened to their hopes, doubts, complaints, excuses, and promises… and discussed and debated priorities, philosophies, theories, programs, and plans. If you find the newsletters valuable, please share them with friends and colleagues. Only by informing school board members, educators, parents, and community leaders can we finally create the great schools every child and family deserves. If you have questions or comments, those are also very welcome.
Best Regards!
Bill Caritj
President and CEO
Capital Schools Consulting Group
925 S. Prospect Street
Burlington, VT 05401
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Links to recent newsletters:
The Most Important Things I learned in 2022
(January 26, 2023)
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize!
(December 27, 2022)
The Answer is… In Your Own Backyard!
(December 8, 2022)
Where is the Outrage?
(November 8, 2022)
Great Principals, Superintendents, and Board Members
(October 19, 2022)
Six First Steps (Starting with Early Literacy)
(September 16, 2022)
"Game Changers"
(September 3, 2022)
The Solutions are Simple, Change is Not!
(August 8, 2022)
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Bio/Introduction
For forty years, I was fortunate to lead the assessment, evaluation, and accountability departments of nine public school districts, including six of the largest in the nation – Washington, DC, Baltimore, St. Louis, Austin, Atlanta, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). In almost every instance, my position was relatively independent of the internal and external “politics.” As a result, I am not biased toward or against any particular specialty, theory, philosophy, or program. My only bias is to results.
Over the years, I have had a wide range of responsibilities including state and local test development, accountability, research and evaluation, standards alignment, school improvement, information technology, and instructional technology. From 2014-2021, I supervised the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) Information Technology, Instructional Technology, Assessment, Research, Evaluation, and Data and Information divisions. Over that period, our teams were credited with restoring the integrity and public trust in the district’s assessment, accountability, and data and information systems after the cheating scandal of 2008. During the COVID pandemic, these outstanding teams also did amazing work to enable and support (and, in many cases, develop) the high-quality virtual programs provided each day to over 50,000 students who were forced to receive their daily instruction at home.
Since “retiring” from the Atlanta Public Schools, I’ve been very busy – working on a book, How to Fix Our City Schools, publishing a monthly newsletter (of the same name), and launching the Capital Schools Consulting Group (CSCG). CSCG services include executive coaching, training, evaluation, and data analytic services to district leaders and school boards. How to Fix Our City Schools is part memoir and part handbook and while I am very excited about finally completing a final draft, the process has made me even more acutely aware of the disappointment I feel about the missed opportunities and failures of the last forty years and my fear that they will continue indefinitely for future generations of poor and disadvantaged children.
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CSCG Services
· Data analysis and reporting
· Board training – data analytics, planning, and goal setting
· Executive coaching for new school board members
· Executive coaching and support for new superintendents’ transition teams
· Planning and monitoring district reforms
· Logic model and strategy map development
· Major program implementation audits
[1] Marzano, R. J. (2000a). A new era of school reform: Going where the research takes us. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 454255)
[2] Is Round Robin Reading Really That Bad?
https://www.carnegielearning.com/blog/alternatives-to-round-robin-reading/;
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/alternatives-to-round-robin-reading-todd-finley;
https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/round-robin-reading-really-bad.