Office of Planning and Service Coordination
Regional Needs Assessment 2002
The complete text of the 2002 Regional Needs Assessment in Adobe Acrobat format (42 pages, 298K)
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While educators across the Northwest share a number of priorities for improving student learning in their schools, there are three issues that rise to the top specifically for low-performing schools, according to the 2002 NWREL Educator Survey. These include fostering parental involvement, agreeing on shared responsibility for ensuring student success, and meeting diverse learner needs. In fact, fostering parent involvement was the top priority for teachers and principals in low-performing schools, no matter how you cut the data.
The survey indicates that low-performing schools are struggling on a lot more fronts than their high-performing counterparts. Just below the top three, a number of other survey issues ranked high in importance among respondents from low-performing schools and districts. They include creating a culture of success, empowering students, addressing the learning needs of ELL students, creating learning opportunities outside the classroom, developing supports beyond the classroom, and increasing teacher diversity. All of these issues reflect needs characterized by schools with high diversity, high poverty, and low performance. For a sense of the scale of the problem, of the lowest performing third of elementary schools in Alaska, Montana, Oregon, and Washington in 2001, more than half enroll upwards of 40 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and 25 percent minority students. These schools represent one in five elementary schools in these four states, or more than 400 elementary schools in the five-state region.
In addition to these concerns, several issues rated high priority, regardless of school performance. These include increasing collaboration, supporting professional development, using data for decisionmaking, and integrating technology.
These findings, coupled with school demographic data and findings from a survey of 500 Northwest households produced some important insights into the nature of needs for research and development, technical assistance, and training for low-performing schools in the Northwest. The implications for NWREL's work follow:
Addressing complex challenges in low-performing schools. Low-performing schools have assistance needs that are more numerous and more complex than average, and therefore require support that is more frequent and of longer duration than average.
Meeting the requirements of the NCLB Act. Low-performing schools in the Northwest will be struggling to meet the "adequate yearly progress" provision of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. These schools will need assistance in planning, prioritizing, and implementing improvements to ensure that they achieve adequate yearly progress, and they will need help interpreting and complying with all aspects of the NCLB. More than 400 high-poverty, high-minority, low-performing elementary schools will face serious near-term challenges in meeting the provision of the federal NCLB Act. NWREL must determine what role it will fill in helping schools interpret and plan compliance with the law and meet adequate yearly progress requirements.
Agreeing on responsibility for youth success. Administrators in low-performing schools— middle and high schools, in particular —said their schools need to put more effort into coming to agreement among the school, families, and community members about the responsibilities each holds for ensuring that students achieve to high standards. Using NWREL facilitation processes such as Planning for Youth Success could help communities find agreement and develop an action plan for follow-through.
Developing a shared vision of student success. In order for schools to monitor student progress and use this information to make decisions about the instructional program, administrative and instructional staff must first have a common understanding of what they consider "student success". This vision must be aligned to state goals for student performance and fit within the NCLB definition of adequate progress. It must also deal with the thorny question of how success is defined for students with learning disabilities. The development of products or training to facilitate this task could help schools develop a common vision of success, and grapple with the question of whether their instructional programs ensure success for all students.
Using data to improve teaching and learning. Survey results suggest that administrators in low-performing schools are substantially more concerned about this issue than are teachers. Given the low student performance in most Title I schools, it appears that this is an area needing considerable attention. Providing products and training to help teachers turn their focus from high-stakes testing, which is used primarily to judge "adequacy," to using classroom data for continuous improvement can help schools improve overall teaching and learning.
Engaging families in student learning. Engaging families in student learning is a high-priority issue for teachers and administrators across school levels and role groups in low-performing schools. Engaging parents as partners in their children's learning is also an important goal of the NCLB Act. Because there is agreement among school staff and administrators that this is a priority issue and the payoff in terms of improvement in student performance is likely to be substantial, this may be a good issue to tackle as a first step in building a productive working relationship with low-performing schools and districts.
Communicating performance in a way that leads to improvement. An important goal of the NCLB Act is to help parents become informed and empowered decisionmakers. Survey results indicate that a priority need for principals in low-performing schools is to be able to communicate to parents what students should learn and be able to do at each grade level, and to communicate student academic progress in a way that can help parents understand how to enhance their child's learning. Likewise, a priority for superintendents is to communicate school and district performance data in a way that is meaningful and helpful for improving student learning.
The manner in which performance data are presented, especially when the news is not particularly good, can result in either behavior that is divisive or unifying for the stakeholders receiving the news. Helping low-performing schools develop strategies for clearly and concisely communicating student and school performance data in a way that facilitates productive discussions and decisionmaking is critical to helping low- performing schools move forward.
Collaborating to improve teaching and learning. A high percentage of teachers and administrators (70 to 80 percent) agree that their schools need to put more effort into collaboration within and across grade levels. Two out of three principals said that their schools needed to put more effort into collaboration in evaluating the effectiveness of current school and classroom practices. One of the biggest obstacles to collaboration, respondents said, is finding time. Schools could benefit from help with developing strategies for restructuring their schedules to create opportunities for collaborative work.
Supporting continuing learning for practitioners. Two out of three respondents from low-performing schools said schools need to provide more time and resources for professional development. Creating time for collaboration is, in effect, creating time for professional development. Collaboration can serve as a powerful professional development experience for those involved, as they learn from one another while engaged in activities such as curriculum development, program evaluation, data analysis, planning, and problem solving. Effective collaborative work becomes part of the continuous learning process that enables schools to become high- performing learning communities. Developing products and training that can support collaborative work can fill an important niche in efforts to support continuing learning for teachers and administrators, for example producing process guides for teacher development using the lesson study method.
Creating a culture that supports success. Survey results suggest that the majority of respondents feel their schools need to work on empowering students by: (1) creating a school(district)wide culture built on the conviction that each student can achieve to high standards in core subjects, (2) helping students become self-directed learners who take responsibility for their own learning, and (3) helping students monitor their own progress and participate in decisions about how they will reach their learning goals. Designing products, training, and technical assistance to address these needs will help schools enhance the success of their students.
Providing support outside the classroom. Unless parents are especially resourceful, low-income children have fewer learning opportunities outside the classroom. Schools, especially those that are effective at partnering with families and the community, can help fill the learning opportunity gap by developing opportunities outside the classroom to supplement classroom learning. These schools can also develop community resources to help provide the family supports that lead to stable homes and ensure that basic family needs are met. Products, training, and technical assistance that help schools develop productive, long-term partnerships with the community will enable low-performing schools to enhance the potential for all students to succeed.
Addressing diverse learning needs. More than two out of three educators in low-performing schools indicated that their schools need to put more effort into incorporating a variety of classroom practices to address the diverse learning needs of students.
Addressing the needs of diverse student populations. Low-performing schools, compared to others, have a disproportionate share of low-income, racially and ethnically diverse students, and a relatively high concentration of English Language Learners. These student populations are growing in numbers, as well as a percentage of the total enrollment.
With the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, which require that schools ensure adequate yearly progress for student subgroups by race/ethnicity, language, disability, and poverty, these schools will be under closer scrutiny and possible sanctions if they are not successful in helping in these subgroups of students achieve to standards. Research and development, technical assistance and training must be tailored to address the unique learning needs of each subgroup found in client schools.
Integrating technology into the curriculum. Assistance with integrating technology into the curriculum continues to be a high need regardless of school performance or respondent role group. It is of special interest to teachers in low-performing elementary schools, where four out of five said they need help with this issue.
The complete text of the 2002 Regional Needs Assessment in Adobe Acrobat format (42 pages, 298K)
.If the Adobe Acrobat Reader does not launch when you click on the link above, you can obtain an installation file from Adobe's website: