By Jack O’Connell

In visits to hundreds of California districts and schools, one consistent attribute I see in all successful schools is a commitment to a continuous learning system. I have yet to meet a principal in a high-performing school or a superintendent in a high-performing district who is satisfied. He or she is constantly searching for what additional things can be done to improve the system in order to benefit students.

As a state education system, we also need this spirit of dedicated entrepreneurialism, this willingness to take the next step to improve our service to schools and to students.

Over the past decade, the move to high standards and accountability in our public school system has led to significant gains in student achievement. Those gains can be translated into hundreds of thousands more California students reading, communicating and performing in math at levels that will enable them to compete in a demanding global economy. We have set higher standards for all students and focused new resources where the need is greatest. We can be  proud that “all boats are rising” when it comes to student performance.

Disaggregating student achievement data has allowed instructional leaders to design educational programs more effectively. The practice has also put into clear focus a problem educators have struggled with for decades: racial, ethnic and economic achievement gaps.

Gaps can’t be explained by poverty alone

Although over the past five years all student groups have made significant achievement gains, the Academic Performance Index reveals achievement gaps in California that are stark and pernicious. When looking at performance by “all grades” in 2006, there is a jarring 166-point gap between California’s African American and white students and a 145-point gap between Hispanic/Latino and white students. These gaps are simply unacceptable if California hopes to have a thriving workforce in our increasingly competitive global economy. Our state has both a moral and an economic obligation to solve this problem.

For many years, educators have both lamented achievement gaps and believed them to be the immutable result of economic disparities in our society. Now, with several years of data disaggregated by race as well as income, it is impossible to explain the gaps by poverty alone. The fact is, academic achievement by African American students and Hispanic/Latino students who are not socio-economically disadvantaged lags behind or hovers near the achievement levels of white students who are socio-economically disadvantaged.

It is time that we willingly and openly discuss, examine and change this disconcerting fact. We know that all groups of students can learn to high levels, so we must address those things that are holding groups of students back.

Recognizing that much has been said and written about the national educational phenomenon of achievement gaps, our state has yet to have a public, comprehensive and collaborative discussion about why such gaps exist. My foremost goal as state superintendent is to lead this discussion, and to develop a specific roadmap to help educators in the field narrow and eventually eliminate achievement gaps. I believe that until we work together with this specific aim, we will fall far short of ensuring that all California students graduate from high school ready for college, career and life.

I’m asking all district and school administrators to be a part of this effort, to share their expertise, to let us know the most effective role the state can play, and to be willing to learn and adopt new strategies for closing achievement gaps. We want to know how the state can do better at helping you in your efforts to respond to student needs.

Early this year, I charged my P-16 Council — a statewide assembly of educators from pre-school, K-12 and higher education and leaders from business, philanthropy and the community — to take the lead on this task. I reorganized the California Department of Education and established a unit dedicated to assisting the P-16 Council in extensive information-gathering through examining existing research; surveying educators, students, families and other stakeholders; identifying current exemplary successful practices in California; and holding town hall meetings and community forums.

Statewide Achievement Gap Summit

On Nov. 13 and 14 in Sacramento, we will host a statewide Achievement Gap Summit where thousands of educators will come together to discuss ways to close the gap and share effective strategies. The summit will also highlight recommendations to be presented at that time by the P-16 Council. Based on the information gathered, I will outline my initial recommendations for closing the gap early next year.

This effort is based on the premise that major factors inhibiting the learning of all students can be grouped into four themes represented by the acronym, ACES. These themes are defined in the following ways:

• Access: How do all students gain access to what they need? This could include rigorous curriculum and instruction, highly effective teachers, counselors, extra learning options that supplement the education provided in a typical school day, health and social services, and more.

• Culture/climate: How can schools offer the best learning environment for all students? Is the school a safe place for students to learn? Does it have an environment that promotes learning and a sense of belonging for students and school staff? Does it offer culturally relevant and responsive instruction? Do effective school-family-community partnerships exist?

• Expectations: Are high expectations for all students and teachers truly held? Is it evident in the curriculum, instructional practices, student assignments, and the school’s communication to students, parents and school staff? Is student progress measured using data and effective instructional strategies?

• Strategies: What practices have proven effective (or are promising) for closing the achievement gap? Strategies should address improving the quality of instruction, differentiated instruction, increasing instructional time, teacher collaboration time, reconsidering how to differentiate schools by grade span, and more.

Guided by these themes, my staff and I will be holding town hall meetings and focus groups, visiting schools and gathering information throughout the state. By February, I will lay out specific benchmarks and a plan for meeting them in our collaborative effort at closing the achievement gaps. This plan will be based on the work of educators leading up to and during the working November summit.

We will be asking how we can do a better job in collecting and reporting data that will be useful to schools and districts as they focus on the achievement gap. How can we align interventions more effectively? What additional professional development opportunities might the state provide? 

Schools need flexibility to tailor solutions

Focusing on this issue is in no way an effort to find new ways in which the state can impose solutions on local educational agencies. If anything has become clear, it is that there is no single silver bullet solution to closing the achievement gap, and that schools need the flexibility to tailor individual solutions to individual students.

Nor is this effort in any way an attempt to backtrack from our system of high standards and accountability for educating students to those standards. On the contrary, it is an attempt to work together to create the kind of continuous learning system we see in California’s most successful schools.

Doing this work is recognition that there are steps to be taken beyond where we’ve been, and a willingness to take those steps even though doing so may at times make us uncomfortable. In the process, I hope state policymakers will gain a clearer direction from schools and districts on how we can be better partners in helping you tackle this most difficult issue.

Jack O’Connell is California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction.