Northwest Education

Winter 2007 / Volume 12, Number 2.

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Leaps and Bounds

The largest school district in Idaho continues to find success by staying focused on annual academic growth for every student.

Story by Bracken Reed
Photos by Darin Oswald

MERIDIAN, Idaho—Things are booming in Meridian. According to the Idaho Commerce and Labor Department’s most recent statistics, this one-time farming town located 10 miles west of Boise is the fastest growing community in the state. In 2004 Meridian had a 14.5 percent population increase, gaining more than 7,000 new residents. Unofficial estimates put the 2005 figure at close to 10,000 newcomers. While those numbers are higher than normal, the Boise area’s rare combination of high-paying jobs, world-class recreational opportunities, and a major university has fueled a population explosion for more than a decade.

Perhaps no institution has felt the shock of that explosion more than the public school system. Officially called Joint School District #2, the district—which includes Meridian, parts of Boise, and the nearby communities of Eagle and Star—surpassed Boise as the largest in the state five years ago and has continued to grow at unprecedented rates, averaging 1,000 new students every year for the past decade. In the 2005–2006 school year it absorbed almost twice that number. In fall 2006, the district added another 1,764 youngsters.

“Any district that’s having that kind of growth is always, in some ways, playing catch-up,” says Superintendent Linda Clark, “and we are, too.”

For JSD#2, playing catch-up means trying to pass multimillion dollar school bonds as frequently as every two years. It means building two or three new schools at any given time. It means hiring dozens of new staff members each school year, often up to the beginning of the second semester. It means constant adjustments to food service and transportation, finding portable classrooms on short notice, and dealing with a steady trickle of new students—some years as many as 800—who arrive after the state has already allocated the district budget.

Despite these circumstances, the district has managed to stay focused on meeting its primary goal: annual academic achievement growth for every student. “When a district has that as its clear, articulated focus,” Clark says, “it changes virtually every decision you make: how you organize your school; how classrooms are organized; how teachers deliver instruction; the role of your assessments; and the role of the materials that support your instruction. Everything is changed.”

The district chose that focus and made those changes more than a decade ago. To understand how the district stays firmly grounded and continues to succeed, despite constant upheaval, you need to go back to the mid-1990s—a time when the population had yet to boom; a time when no one was telling the district it needed to improve, except the district itself.

Building a Foundation

Traditionally, JSD#2’s student achievement scores have always been among the best in the state, and the mid-1990s were no different. Clark, the district’s director of student achievement at the time, says success was threatening to become a source of complacency. “There were gaps,” she says, “but basically we were a very high-achieving district. And yet, when we sat down and looked at our achievement scores we realized we were the same as we’d always been, as if we’d just been patting ourselves on the back and saying, ‘Look at us, we’re good.’”

Thankfully, Clark says, the district administration and the school board weren’t comfortable with stagnation, even at a high level. Instead, they began to ask the question: How do we get better?

With a J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation grant in hand, the district was able to take up that question in earnest. The answers they found, says Clark, “completely changed the way we did business.”

The district leadership set three major goals. First, they would train all district staff members—including bus drivers and custodians—in the continuous improvement process, a management model based on the work of W. Edwards Deming. Second, they would revise the entire curriculum—all subject areas, all grade levels—in one big project. And third, they would implement a comprehensive assessment program.

Amazingly, the district was able to meet all three goals within the next two years. Accomplishing the first goal, Clark says, was the key. “Making that systemic commitment to continuous improvement became the context for everything else we did,” she says, “and it still is. It drives everything we do.”

The continuous improvement process is heavily based on the use of data, Clark points out, and as a result the district became data-driven like never before. The first thing everyone noticed was that it was the top half of students, ironically, who weren’t showing academic growth. “If students aren’t being introduced to new information, then they don’t show growth,” says Clark. “That upper half of kids was kind of coasting; they weren’t being challenged. That’s when we realized that in order to continually improve we were going to have to change our focus. We needed to make sure that all students were going to show growth no matter what their starting point.”

That shift led to the decision not only to revise the entire curriculum, but also to find an assessment that could accurately measure academic growth. With the help of the Northwest Evaluation Association, the district implemented an “adaptive” test, or one that selects each question based on the answer to the previous question, effectively customizing the test for each student. The result is a more accurate picture of a student’s academic level, which in turn allows a school to provide a more appropriate and individualized level of instruction. The district now had the ability to track academic growth by individual students, by classrooms, by schools, and even by the district—a system that perfectly matched its stated goal.

The district’s assessment program gained national attention as one of the first of its kind, especially after a computerized version called Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) was introduced in the 2000–2001 school year. With MAP, teachers got immediate data to drive their instruction. The district began using the test twice a year—once in the fall to determine the appropriate instructional level for each student and once in the spring to assess academic growth.

“It’s an assessment system that has meaning at the classroom level,” Clark says, “and it’s our belief that the classroom level has to be the focus—that’s where the changes for individual students are made.”

The Exception

By the end of the 1990s—and the beginning of the area’s full-fledged population boom—the district had all the major pieces of its reform in place: a districtwide curriculum; appropriate and consistent instructional materials at each building; a comprehensive assessment system; and a well-developed instructional model that provided guidance to teachers by identifying research-based, proven strategies. The foundation was there. “A district has to build the underpinnings,” says Clark. “You have to have a common understanding of what is to be taught, what the expectations are, what materials can be used, and the data system that supports it. We really believe we have those things in place, and have had for quite a while.”

The data bore the proof. Most students—typically close to 90 percent districtwide—were high achieving on the Idaho Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), the proficiency-based test implemented to determine adequate yearly progress. More important for the district, the majority of students showed annual academic growth on the MAP tests that was well beyond the national average. But there was one glaring exception.

Meridian Elementary is, as Principal Byron Yankey puts it, “very, very unlike the majority of the other 28 elementary schools in the district.” While most of those schools are predominantly white and middle- to upper-middle class, Meridian Elementary typically has a 70 percent poverty rate. Located near the old center of town, the school serves a neighborhood that looks much different than the sprawl of town houses, condominiums, and planned communities with names like Autumn Faire and Canna Lily Estates that dominate much of Meridian. “We have high crime, high mobility, high density of apartments, a lot of single-parent homes, some homeless students,” says Yankey. “Basically, we have the kinds of problems you would typically see in an inner city.”

Despite strong district support, the school consistently had low academic achievement levels. Yankey, a veteran principal, was hired for the school before the 1999–2000 school year in an attempt to turn things around. “The message from the district was—do whatever it takes, let us know what you need, make the changes you think need to be made,” says Yankey. “They gave us a lot of support, but they were also very hands-off.”

Yankey spent his first year at the school trying to learn everything he could about what wasn’t working, what was working, and why. Ironically, he got the clearest picture from what he calls an “informal, anecdotal” study he conducted during that first spring.

Yankey decided to focus on four fourth-graders and four fifth-graders, each of whom had been at the school since kindergarten. All eight students were extremely low achieving and were being tested for learning disabilities. Yankey then tracked every intervention the students had been offered, every teacher they had had, and the data from every assessment they had been given. Several things were immediately apparent.

First, it had been clear early on that the students needed help. “It wasn’t that we didn’t know,” Yankey says. “We could determine that, literally, at the end of the first full week of kindergarten. It was that clear.” Second, each student had been given significant extra help every year he or she was at the school. That help included everything from formal interventions to tutoring by a teacher who had, on her own initiative, given five of the students an entire year of after-school, one-on-one reading instruction for 30 minutes each week. “So that made it clear that we had recognized they needed help and we had tried to give them that help,” says Yankey.

The third factor, although harder to track, was Yankey’s personal perspective that bad teaching was not the problem. “That became especially clear in retrospect,” Yankey says, “but I could also see it at the time. I had observed those teachers and I knew them to be highly qualified, experienced, and dedicated.”

The real problem, Yankey discovered, was bigger than all of these. “We weren’t making decisions systemically,” he says. “We weren’t looking at the type of data or the information that would help us to determine what the kids knew and what they needed to know. And as a result we were providing services to kids in an extremely happenstance way.”

In short, all the pieces the district had put in place were still just that at Meridian Elementary—separate pieces, without the necessary focus. The following year, Yankey set out to change that.

Finding a Focus

The first decision the school leaders made was to divide the day into 45-minute blocks. Second, they identified reading as the primary area of concern and decided that every student should have two full blocks of reading—one at their appropriate instructional level and one at their normal grade level. “That was one of the problems,” says Yankey “we were helping kids but we weren’t exposing them to their grade-level curriculum. As a result, they were falling farther and farther behind.”

To make this work, Yankey took his entire certified staff—Title I, special education, and classroom teachers—and designed a “focused” reading block for each grade level. The result is similar to the walk-to-read model used in many schools: Each grade level has a 45-minute block that matches one staff member with a small group of students—typically as few as five—who are at the same reading level. Frequent assessments ensure that these groups are flexible—students move to the next level as soon as they’re ready, rather than at arbitrary times throughout the year. In addition, all students still get a 45-minute at-grade-level reading block in the regular classroom.

The results were dramatic. “Within the first year, the first semester, we saw massive movement in student reading levels,” says Yankey. “It benefited the kids below-grade level, on-grade level, and above-grade level. Everyone improved dramatically.”

District support was critical to the effort. The district reading specialists helped the school choose interventions and reading programs that were horizontally aligned from one reading level and one grade level to the next. The district also provided support on conducting classroom assessments, the use of data, and instructional techniques for small groups.

The biggest challenge, says Yankey, was the loss of independence and control for classroom teachers. “Teachers definitely had to change their instruction,” he says. “And we had to fight some old belief systems. People would say things like, ‘I don’t think you can teach reading after two o’clock in the afternoon.’ Or, ‘this isn’t going to work—we have too much student mobility.’ Well, the reality is you can make it work. And we did. And we have the data to show it.”

What those data showed was double-digit improvement in the first year. Five years later, the school’s reading proficiency scores are consistently above 75 percent at all K–5 grade levels, and often in the high 80s. Math scores have also shown huge increases during the same time period.

For Clark, the school’s most impressive result is the percent of student academic growth each year, at each grade level. “They take those students, who are some of the most economically disadvantaged students we have, and consistently raise their academic levels in the course of a year. They went from being the lowest achieving school around to the highest per capita growth school in the state. What it shows is that the key ingredient that turns a school around is when the staff comes to realize that the growth of every student is the responsibility of every adult in the building.”

Pushing Ahead

At Meridian, population growth and academic growth continue to go hand in hand. The district has built nine schools in the past five years, and is currently building three more that will open in 2007–2008. Some predictions, based on land development proposals already underway, suggest that the district could see an influx of 40,000 more students in the coming decades. With more than 30,000 students already served in the district and a 70 percent increase during the past decade, dealing with growth has become a way of life. For Clark, keeping the focus on both continuous improvement and academic growth for all students is the key to weathering the storm.

Clark has been an outspoken critic of the emphasis on testing for proficiency, insisting that academic growth is the only measure that is fair, accurate, and useful in the actual classroom. In fact, despite the district’s sterling academic record, there are a dozen schools currently in improvement status based on the scores of students with learning disabilities.

“Those students are showing 20 to 25 points of growth a year,” says Clark, “which is phenomenal. We’ve moved over 200 students out of special education classes and into the mainstream over the past five years. We’re having tremendous success at educating those students, but that isn’t acknowledged.”

Despite the current trend, the district continues to hold its ground, conducting the MAP tests alongside the statewide proficiency assessments. “We’re absolutely committed to accountability,” says Clark, “but it’s our belief that if every student is showing significant academic growth, then proficiency is going to come along. We choose to focus on what we can control.”

With no end in sight to Meridian’s population boom, that steadfast commitment keeps JSD#2 among the highest achieving districts in the state, by any measure.

By the numbers: Joint School District #2

Total students:	31,779
Racial/Ethnic Makeup:
White	45%
African American	2%
Hispanic	3%
American Indian/Alaska Native	1%
Asian	1%
Free and reduced-price lunch:	19%
Programs:
Special education	10%
Staff:
Teachers	1,763
Support staff	1,629
Administrators	127
Spending per student:	$5,000

For more information: www.meridianschools.org