Volume 7 Number 1
High Standards for All
Tucked away in the trees near the windswept mouth of the Columbia River, southwest Washington's Naselle-Grays River Valley School District fits into a single building. The district offices and 300-plus students in grades K-12 share space not far from the spot where Lewis and Clark made camp after they reached the blue Pacific. Employing about 20 teachers, a part-time superintendent, a business manager, a principal, and four office staff members, the district is the area's second-largest employer (behind the state-run Naselle Youth Camp for juvenile offenders).
A hundred miles upriver on the eastern edge of the Vancouver metro area, Camas School District serves more than 10 times as many students. Kids who live in the fast-growing area, where high-tech R&D firms operate next door to pulp mills, fill four elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school.
These districts — one isolated, the other closely linked to city life-share the struggles that all districts large and small face in implementing standards. In particular, their experiences point up one of the often overlooked but critical components of successful standards-based reform: the role of the district office.
The spotlight in the standards drama tends to fall on individual schools. But research suggests that district leadership plays a crucial role in determining whether standards infuse teaching. Districts expect schools to improve, support them as they do, and check periodically to assure improvement.
Researcher Lizanne DeStefano, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, is heading a national study of the role districts play in implementing state standards. DeStefano believes districts hold the key because they set personnel, instructional, and resource policies. And they hold the ultimate power — the purse strings. The importance of district-level involvement in standards implementation, she says, cannot be overestimated.
"When you actually look at the processes," DeStefano writes, "many are district-controlled. And when you get down to the building level, it is very rare to find a building implementing standards that doesn't have district support to do that."
Bob Blum, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory program director of school improvement, agrees. A district's central office, he says, bears the burden of helping staff, teachers, parents, and students to not only understand but also embrace the state standards. Rather than viewing standards as another pile of red tape imposed by the state, these key players must view standards as vital for improving student learning in their community.
"Getting kids to meet the same standards, but in ways appropriate to the kids and the adults in the school, is important," says Blum. "But we can get to the same end via many methods."
The Naselle and Grays rivers wind through the woods toward Willapa Bay just around the bend from where the mighty Columbia flows into the ocean. Mingled with the rustle of alder leaves and evergreen needles, you can almost hear the constant rumble of the log trucks and loading equipment that once signaled the area's economic mainstay. As the timber industry has waned in recent years, the decline has been felt in the district, says Superintendent Gerald Schmidtke. A quarter of the students qualify for federal lunch programs.
When the prospect of state standards began blipping on Washington state's radar screens in the early 1990s, Naselle-Grays River Valley immediately volunteered to be a guinea pig for the state's fourth-grade benchmark test. "It gave our teachers the chance to see what the students would have to know and the formats and types of questions," says Schmidtke.
The pilot served as a launching pad for the district's efforts to align its math and reading curricula with the Washington standards, or Essential Academic Learning Requirements. "The pilot test in a sense forced teachers to talk with each other about this," says Principal Steve Quick, who was a math and Spanish teacher back then.
Prior to the pilot, Naselle-Grays teachers worked in relative isolation, covering the material they'd always covered, giving the tests they'd always given, officials report. How well that material meshed with earlier and later grade levels was not formally discussed. "I don't think any (curricular communication) was going on,"admits Schmidtke, who notes that such a communication void undermines any chance for cross-grade consistency.
After teams of teachers reviewed both state and national math and reading standards, they began wrestling with how the district would meet them. The district put teachers in the driver's seat in the development of a standards-based curriculum. As the work unfolded, teachers began to take ownership of and accountability for the impending changes. "The teachers developed the sequence," says Schmidtke. "They felt very strongly that when 'their' kids leave their classroom, they must have completed their sequence." It's not easy to dodge accountability in a district where each grade has only one class — and one teacher.
The principal's leadership and commitment were critical to the effort's success. "Having a principal who supports the goal is critical," says Schmidtke. "If the principal buys in, that goes a long ways toward getting real teacher buy-in."
The close-knit community was another big factor in getting teachers on board, says Quick. The teams spent many unpaid hours after school and on weekends hammering away at the process. It's pretty tough to refuse a colleague's request to meet on a Saturday morning when you know you'll run into her over at Okie's Select Market on Saturday afternoon.
Once the teamwork was finished, the principal made sure the teachers' ideas were implemented. "If you don't do that," Schmidtke says, "you lose your credibility." Quick agrees. "You have to give up the power or control and let teachers do it, then implement what they did," he stresses.
Earmarking money for standards is one of the most powerful ways administrators can demonstrate their commitment to making standards work. To ensure alignment with standards, Naselle-Grays budgeted $30,000 to $45,000 for textbooks each year for several years, versus the $10,000 to $15,000 it would typically spend. The district had the flexibility to allocate extra dollars for textbooks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Naselle-Grays is able to hire part-time or temporary teachers from the youth camp to meet short-term needs, thus saving money on faculty salaries. For another, the school receives extra funds from the state (they call it the "small-school factor") in lieu of a straight FTE formula to compensate for its size. Besides being aligned with standards, the new books are also closely sequenced through the grades to foster continuity from level to level.
Naselle-Grays tests students at every grade level except kindergarten. That, officials say, helps put kids at ease by giving them practice with test-taking and familiarity with the test format. And it helps the district find weak spots in the curriculum. This year, the district teacher teams will review the entire math curriculum, K-12, and make adjustments where needed.
Overall, says Quick, there has been very little resistance to the new expectations in the district. "Not too many people balk at high standards," says Quick. "The state just got us all on the same page."
The process is paying off in terms of student achievement, especially in the area of reading. For example, 89 percent of Naselle-Grays fourth-graders and 87 percent of 10th-graders met the standard in reading in 1999-2000. Statewide, the percentages were 66 and 60, respectively (see Figure 1).
"Our biggest problem is children who come in from out of the district," says Schmidtke. "How do we get them ready for the test?"
A bedroom community to the rapidly swelling Vancouver metropolitan area, Camas has seen its population almost double since 1991, reaching nearly 13,000 residents today. School enrollment has ballooned as well, from 2,400 in 1991 to 3,800 in 2001. Employers in the area range from Information Age companies such as Wafer Tech Industries and Sharp Microelectronics to the Georgia-Pacific paper mill, employing nearly 1,500 workers.
Like Naselle-Grays, the Camas School District also had a head start on state standards. A few years before standards implementation, the district received a federal 21st Century Schools grant, which it used to implement exit requirements for grades six and up. Camas wanted to know with certainty what a graduate with a Camas High School diploma knows and what he or she can do, says Tanis Knight, assistant superintendent of curriculum.
Using the grant to pay for 10 planning days a year over several years, the district began developing standards subject by subject, setting expectations, and garnering community buy-in. "We held 'coffees' all around the district," says Knight, to help inform parents of the new expectations. "And once we set the expectation that this was what students would have to do, they did."
For students who did not meet the exit requirements for their grade, summer school was mandatory. When the state developed its own set of standards, Camas was in a good position to capitalize on the work already done. A committee of teachers undertook a "gap analysis" of the curriculum — that is, they looked for the missing pieces between the desired goal and the status quo. The committee tacked up a big blank piece of paper on which they created a "map" of the curriculum, showing the places where the benchmarks and current realities failed to connect.
"We went benchmark by benchmark and we plugged the holes," Knight reports.
Committees for each grade and subject put together a two-page "target" document for each curriculum area and each grade — for instance, the first-grade writing target or the seventh-grade math target.
To keep expectations clear and the approach standardized, district officials recommend compressing the information into bare essentials. "You don't need a huge document," says Knight. "Strip out everything except the core expectations. Ours is one page, front and back."
The target sheets formed the basis for the central office's efforts on behalf of standards. Knight went over the target sheets with every school. For parents, the district sent home a brochure of expectations for each grade level. The standards have been embedded in the students' report cards, too, to help parents keep track of and monitor their children's skill development relative to standards. "This," says Knight, "helps align it all."
This is not to say that the process was simple. "These things don't happen overnight, " Knight says. For instance, the state standards require punctuating dialogue at an earlier age than the district had done. And algebra and geometry are introduced in fourth grade now to meet state benchmarks — an expectation that made Knight initially skeptical.
"I would have said, 'I don't know if children can do that at that age'," she says. "But we dove in, and, surprisingly enough, our fourth-graders are doing well."
On the other hand, the district conducts math, reading, and writing assessments at grades not required by the state. These tests are tied to the standards and give students and teachers the opportunity to experience a format similar to the state tests. This also helps teachers at all grade levels see where students are — or are not — on track for state tests. "You can't just say it's a fourth-grade 'problem,'" says Knight. "Every grade must 'own' their role."
Accountability is further enhanced by the district's scoring approach. At each grade level, teachers for that grade come together to score the tests. "This allows a healthy discussion of what students must show to earn a three or four," says Knight. "It helps teachers internalize what the standards are."
If expectations are more clearly defined, it does everybody a service, Knight says. Ultimately, it will make the teacher's job easier. "Once you internalize the standards," she says, "you can put back in stuff you've set aside" — that is, reintroduce projects and strategies you've used successfully in the past. Most teachers, she points out, are conscientious. They want to do a good job, so there is typically a lot of professional pride at stake. "When you know you're going to sit down with colleagues at your grade level (to score the tests), it ups the ante," says Knight. "You want your kids to look good. You want to look good."
Knight says that teacher buy-in started with the attitude conveyed by the central office. The message that came through was that the standards offer an opportunity to help students rather than being a "burden" imposed by the state. "Just having the right attitude makes a difference," Knight says. "This is an open, friendly district. We approached this as 'We're all in this together. This is the hand we were dealt.'"
The district stayed focused on the benefits for students, and incorporated teacher ideas in the final curriculum. Once the curriculum was set, Knight took on the role of coach. "My job as the central office person is to help them keep their eye on the ball," she says. "It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. I'm like their obnoxious conscience."
Part of her role was ensuring that professional development was in place to help teachers build knowledge and skills. Teachers don't get a degree in teaching state standards, she notes.
Camas used several innovative strategies to provide support to schools, such as pooling elementary and middle school professional development dollars to focus on state standards. Districtwide meetings allowed teachers from different buildings to zero in together on a particular standard. And individual buildings could choose to specialize in one subject.
Camas also tapped the unique power of e-mail in professional development. After identifying skills that could help children in any subject area — for example, how to identify a main idea, how to summarize, how to compare and contrast, how to support an opinion — Knight's office summarized them and e-mailed them to teachers one at a time, every two weeks. Posters placed around the schools reinforced these overarching concepts for teachers and students. It was a simple but effective technique, Knight reports.
Despite Camas' strong central office approach to implementing standards, Knight says it is a mistake to try to do everything from the district level. Better, she says, to closely involve teachers in areas such as staff development. Knight used building-level teachers to teach some workshops in each school. This, she believes, was much more effective than bringing teachers to a districtwide training. An added benefit was establishing an onsite expert at each building as a resource.
In the end, she notes, the standards are important, but even more vital is helping students, teachers, and schools reach the new standards in ways that are appropriate for both students and staff in each individual school.
In the latest report of state results, Camas' approach appears to be working. The district's 1999- 2000 WASL results are higher than state averages on every standard at the fourth and seventh grades, and are close to state averages at 10th grade (see Figure 2).
"It's hard work — politically sensitive," says Knight. "Everybody gets pretty weary. But when I see how much students have improved, I know it's worth it."
In the dance of the standards, districts approach curriculum alignment in sometimes radically different ways — from, say, the precise choreography of a traditional ballet to the more free-form flow of jazz. Some districts tightly and centrally engineer the elements of curriculum and instruction. Others take a looser, more developmental approach. More often than not, though, curriculum guidance is a blend of loose and tight control from the center, and this can vary by subject matter.
Districts using a more engineered approach tend to opt for closely entwined, explicitly detailed curriculum documents that are reinforced by district workshops, instructional oversight, and assessments. Lengthy and highly specific curriculum guides provide standards, frameworks, and pacing sequences. These guides can contain a hierarchy of desired outcomes, from state to county to grade-level and, finally, to unit outcomes. Other components may include resource guides for each grade level and planning guides for each unit outcome. A guide might show teachers in detail how to allocate their time, supplying an example of a year-long planning matrix covering all outcomes.
At the other end, districts may pursue alignment to common goals through fluid, more open-ended means. One East Coast district, for example, created abbreviated rather than full-blown outcomes linked to state standards so that schools would have flexibility in determining how to meet the outcomes.
Whatever the approach, the district has three key responsibilities, according to NWREL's Blum. It must:
"The biggest and most important piece is in the middle — the district supporting schools and teachers as they learn to teach the standards and improve student performance," says Blum.
Throughout the process, a delicate balance must be achieved between local control and state mandates. How, in other words, does a district meld local needs and priorities with the overriding state mandate?
Another balance must be struck between district control and school autonomy. Site-based decisionmaking — giving schools significant control over budget and staff and the flexibility to make the changes they need to improve learning — is standard procedure in many districts these days. Does the central role of districts in standards implementation portend a shift away from site-based management? Blum says no. Schools can maintain their autonomy despite the need for a strong central office role, he asserts. To be sure, the central office holds schools accountable for results. But the school gets to decide how to meet the targets determined at the state and district levels. In the nuts-and-bolts process of prying standards from the pages of a ponderous document and bringing them to life in the classroom, the school retains a lot of leeway. For one school, the key mechanism might be more math workshops for teachers. Another school might decide to use more direct instruction in reading or to hire more teacher assistants.
A national study of standards-based reforms in 22 districts across eight states has identified some strategies that successful districts use. Conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the study is detailed in a September 2000 policy brief, The District Role in Building Capacity: Four Strategies by Diane Massell. The brief is part of a large-scale, multiyear study by the consortium examining the design, implementation, and effectiveness of school improvement efforts.
Strategies for implementing state standards vary nationwide, the consortium has found. Some districts make extra staff and resources available to low-performing schools. Some create specific offices, teams, or units to provide assistance. In one unspecified district, schools in need of support receive coaches or special consultants, additional staff, and professional development for administrators. In another district, support teams of principals, teachers, and other staff from high-performing schools are paired with a low-performing school to help raise performance. Other districts require or encourage low-performing schools to network with the more successful ones to stimulate fresh thinking about how to improve performance. In one district, an intervention team spends about a half-day at each school visiting every classroom and focusing on four areas: school organization and management; culture and climate; curriculum and instruction; and parental involvement.
In synthesizing all these approaches, the study identifies key elements of successful districts:
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