“The San Francisco Unified School District sees the achievement gap as the greatest social justice/civil right issue facing our country today: there cannot be justice for all without closing this gap.” – Carlos Garcia, superintendent of San Francisco USD.
Carol Abbott from the Middle/High School Improvement Office at the California Department of Education wrote the following article for EdCal. It is the third in a follow-up series on the one-year anniversary of the launch of the reform project “Taking Center Stage-Act II: Ensuring Success and Closing the Achievement Gap for California’s Middle Grades Students.”
In the spring of 2008, under the leadership of Superintendent Carlos Garcia and Deputy Superintendent Tony Smith, San Francisco Unified School District began undertaking the development of a new strategic plan through a process called the Balanced Scorecard.
The purpose of the district’s strategic plan is for all students to receive an equitable education that will ensure their highest academic success. School sites and central office departments have been developing their Balanced Scorecards with a focus on high academic achievement for African American, Latino and English learners, and all students who have not reached academic proficiency.
Even before the California Department of Education launched Taking Center Stage-Act II in March of 2008, San Francisco USD Assistant Superintendent Joan Hepperly saw how TCSII could be a powerful resource and tool to support the principals and staffs at middle schools in developing their Balanced Scorecards.
“When I saw that ACSA was featuring a new Web site for middle grades educators at the 2007 Leadership Summit, I knew right away that TCSII was a tool we could use in our middle grades department,” Hepperly said.
Not one to let an opportunity pass, Hepperly brought nearly all of her middle grades principals to the Leadership Summit, where they met with TCSII staff and offered to be a pilot district for implementing the 12 recommendations.
“I liked the focus on 12 recommendations for middle grades success that were related to each other.” Hepperly said. “The principals really appreciated the connection to the existing Schools to Watch-Taking Center Stage focus areas of academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, social equity and organizational structures and processes. However, I think the biggest draw for us was that it was about young adolescents. It was grounded in what we know about kids at this age.”
Like Hepperly, San Francisco middle grades principals moved quickly to implement TCSII by weaving the TCSII recommendations into school plans and strategic actions required under the district’s Balanced Scorecard and its three goals: access and equity, achievement, and accountability. All school plans must be focused on diminishing the power of demographics and providing an equitable education for all students.
Some of the key strategic actions identified by SFUSD school teams include developing stronger leadership teams; looking at student work; peer visits; AVID – a college-going culture; project-based learning; increased use of common planning time; differentiation, TRIBES – a program to support personalization and community; culturally linguistic and relevant pedagogy; specially designed academic instruction in English; equity walk-throughs; courageous conversations around race, class and culture; ensuring equitable access to algebra; focal students – identified students who are not proficient are provided strategies and resources to support their academic achievement; and using a variety of assessments.
“It was great that the three district goals so easily matched the four focus areas for TCSII,” Hepperly said. “Even so, we had some important groundwork to do in making sure everyone had the same definition for common terms.”
To ensure that the principals meant the same things when they used terms like “equity,” Hepperly led the leadership team in an exercise to define terms that were common to both TCSII and the district plan. They defined the differences between “equity” and “equal,” and came to a common understanding of the term “achievement gap.”
One principal spoke for the group when he said, “Equity is like triage in the medical field. If one person has a broken arm and another is experiencing a heart attack, you don’t give them equal treatment. You provide triage to save the life of the one most at risk. The same is true in middle school: Some students will drop out before the ninth grade; they need triage, not equal treatment.”
The group agreed that the achievement gap is essentially a “capacity deficit.” They noted that children are not given the tools, skills and support necessary to reach success, and that all children can achieve if adults strengthen their skills by focusing on the child’s assets.
As the principals understood more about the similarities between TCSII and the district scorecard, they began planning to share the two initiatives with their teachers. First, they organized teams to attend the statewide TCSII Road Show Webcast in April 2008. Following that regional event, the principals agreed that their teachers would complete a “straw poll” exercise to ascertain how well each team was implementing the TCSII recommendations.
In a leadership planning meeting at the end of the 2007-08 school year, principals shared results of the straw poll discussions.
“We were really shocked at the outcome of the straw polls at all our middle schools,” Hepperly said. “We thought the top priority for improvement would be TCSII recommendation number two on instruction. Instead, recommendation number three — time — consistently ranked as a top recommendation for change.
“Even though we were surprised, we realized we needed to honor the work the teachers had done, so we agreed to pursue district support so that each site would be able to have at least one to five common planning periods per week,” Hepperly said.
Hepperly reported that with support from Superintendent Garcia, Dennis Garden, who heads transportation and the after-school programs, allowed 11 of the 13 middle schools to institute weekly common planning times. The other two schools are looking at implementation in the fall of 2009.
While the schedule-change negotiations continued, the middle school principals initiated – with support from Hepperly – a district-wide pre-service training in August 2008 for all middle grades staff to learn about the connection between the district goals and the TCSII recommendations. Garcia, Deputy Supt. Smith and Board Member Jane Kim presented an overview of the strategic plan.
Following the TCSII presentation, staff broke into school teams to begin dialogues about implementing TCSII recommendations and the Balanced Scorecard goals at their school site. The principals and assistant principals led activities with their individual sites that they had developed together prior to the training.
The sites recently completed the first draft of their Balanced Scorecards. At a recent middle school principals’ professional development, the principals worked collaboratively to identify key strategic actions in one another’s scorecards and cross-walked the initiatives with the four core areas of TCSII. This enabled the principals to see how organization and structure can play a role in the implementation of social equity, developmental awareness and academic excellence.
The next step will be for principals to form smaller learning communities where they will work together and support one another in the implementation of a key strategic action. Through this process they will use TCSII as one of the powerful resources to support the work with their sites.
Schools will complete their site-based Balanced Scorecard by the end of the 2008-09 school year. To help in that process, principals have the opportunity to pilot-test a new TCSII rubric that guides school team members in taking a deeper look at the effectiveness of their strategies in light of the 12 TCSII recommendations and district goals.
Never too late to get into the act
How is your school or district implementing the TCSII recommendations and using the resources on the middle grades Web portal? ACSA members are always invited and encouraged to contribute to TCSII. Tell us how you and your school are using TCSII to make a difference. Your story could become a featured “In the Spotlight” on TCSII or in later issues of EdCal. Contact the TCSII team at TCSII@cde.ca.gov and get into the act.
Click here to access the Taking Center Stage- Act II Web portal.