News
From Low Performing to High Priority

NEA has launched an unprecedented, long-term initiative to assist struggling public schools and close this nation's student achievement gap.

Kansas teacher pam Taverner belongs to the first team ever organized by an NEA affiliate to assist low-performing schools. "Any school could be as good as my school, given the right amount of money, time, and people resources," Taverner maintains.

You might not expect Pam Taverner, a language arts teacher and part-time curriculum coordinator in a suburban Kansas high school, to know a whole lot about urban or rural "low-performing" schools--aside from the usual tales of impoverished "at-risk" students, ancient facilities, and poor parent involvement.

And you might not expect Taverner, who works at Clearwater High School southwest of Wichita, to focus a lot of attention on those unfortunate schools, since their intractable problems don't spread to middle-class districts like her own.

But, in fact, Taverner is one of a number of dedicated Association members fueling NEA's Priority Schools Initiative, an unprecedented effort to address the needs of students and teachers in America's lowest-performing schools.

This comprehensive, long-term campaign will involve everything from assistance to NEA affiliates and districts in the school rescue process to community and political outreach to build broad consensus for closing this nation's student achievement gap.

At the heart of this initiative: accomplished educators like Pam Taverner.

As a veteran peer trainer for Kansas NEA, Taverner has visited both successful and struggling schools, places where you're either greeted as a colleague or glared at like an "alien."

Trained as a drama teacher to read body language and tone of voice, Taverner can often spot the kind of campus that will land on the state's list of "conditionally" accredited schools.

Besides being underfunded, it's a "cold" place, she observes, where the principal communicates through memos, the staff is "scared to death," and teachers labor in isolation, "with no time or mechanism for collaborating with the guy down the hall," she says.

Despite such odds, Taverner--a 30-year education veteran--thinks that even the "coldest" public school "could be just as good as my school, given the right amount of money, time, and people resources."

And, so long as some politicians judge all public schools by the problems of some, Taverner knows she has a stake in making this turnaround happen.

"I hate hearing about 'failing' public schools," this Kansan fumes, "because I see so many things going well in public education. And I'm tired of teachers just accepting this myth of failure, and not hitting back."

Pam Taverner is hitting back in her own way. She and ten other skilled teachers have joined Kansas NEA's new Quality Performance Accreditation Assistance Cadre, the first team ever organized by an NEA state affiliate to directly assist struggling public schools.

Cadre members are specially screened and trained to assist any school that is conditionally accredited by the Kansas state Department of Education. When invited to a campus, they'll be able to help staff to collaborate better, to gather and analyze school performance data, to design an "intervention" plan with a focus and target areas, and to obtain needed professional development and other resources.

"Among other things, cadre members--who are now readying to enter their first schools--will be helping grown-ups to get along better with one another," notes KNEA Instructional Advocacy Director Peg Dunlap. "Making group decisions and running effective meetings is not something you learn in college preparation programs."

"Cadre members all have great people skills and a sense of humor," says Taverner. "We can communicate with teachers, administrators, and every other kind of person encountered in the school improvement process. Moreover, we've all been involved in Kansas's progressive school accreditation process from the very beginning, and we all want to make it even better."

What's happening in Kansas is just one piece of NEA's Priority Schools Initiative. NEA is also beefing up support for its existing school change efforts--including NEA Family-School-Community-Partnership training and the KEYS diagnosis program for school strengths and weaknesses--and making tracks in these new directions:

• Releasing a step-by-step guide for "Making Low-Performing Schools a Priority."
  Chock full of checklists, anecdotes of school site successes, and Internet resources, this user-friendly manual walks the average teacher and ESP through the nuts and bolts of school change. Those basics include collaboration-building among stakeholders, development of a school improvement plan, and procurement of resources to meet improvement targets.

  To supplement this guide, "NEA is planning technical assistance, including training and staff development, for state affiliates that need help to plan for school change initiatives," reports Sheila Simmons, a member of NEA's Priority Schools Core Team.

• Focusing maximum attention on ways to close the achievement gap.
  Belinda Williams, a research psychologist who has studied urban students for the past 25 years, helped NEA write the priority schools guide and is now working with the Association to develop other school change training tools.

  But Williams's strongest contribution to the Priority Schools Initiative is research showing that educators can help urban students reach their full potential by learning more about these children and their culture, working their daily experiences into lessons that connect curriculum content with students' existing knowledge and interests, and exploiting hidden "assets" like the problem-solving skills urban youngsters often develop as survival mechanisms (see Williams interview).

  "There is a huge difference between improving achievement and closing the achievement gap," says Williams. "Improving achievement might involve introduction of a new program, a specific professional development experience, parental involvement strategies, or class size reduction. But if all these important activities are introduced in a fragmented way, you typically find only a slight achievement gain."

  Williams concludes: "The current research and theory on human development suggests that to close the achievement gap you have to integrate and focus federal, state, district, and school strategies and staff development to reflect a shared understanding of how all people learn."

• Focusing lawmakers on the need to help--not hurt--struggling schools.
  The political fix for low-performing schools is too often punitive, like tuition vouchers that divert per-pupil funding to private institutions (see list of voucher advocates).

  In response, NEA has developed model federal and state legislation to ensure that struggling schools have the resources to begin the steps toward a successful turnaround--everything from lowered class size to recruitment and retention of qualified staff.

  Congress is starting to listen. At NEA Today press time, the Senate was debating an NEA-backed provision--in legislation reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act--to progressively target low-performing schools for federal aid, from 0.5 percent to 5 percent of Title I funding over two years.

  This measure, introduced by North Carolina Senator John Edwards, would also strongly encourage each state to replicate North Carolina's practice of assigning state assistance teams to low-performing schools.

  The Tarheel State teams, rigorously trained with the help of the North Carolina Association of Educators/NEA, have used the talents of veteran teachers and retired administrators to boost student achievement in no fewer than 29 struggling schools since 1997.

  "Team members should go into these schools to support and not 'fix' them," stresses Angela Farthing, manager of NCAE's Center for Teaching and Learning. "They can mediate conflicts, show staff how to analyze performance data, offer different teaching strategies, and model lessons. People skills are tantamount in this job.

  "NCAE helps the work of these teams by providing mini-grants to low-performing schools to purchase supplies and/or offer stress relief," Farthing adds, "and we've created a special newsletter that goes to all current and past low-performing schools."

• 

  Integrating efforts and reaching out for allies.
  "Everything we do to close this nation's student achievement gap has to be integrated into a total effort. There can't be stand-alone projects," emphasizes Warlene Gary, NEA's manager for urban initiatives.

  "All children can learn," she adds. "We need to make a commitment to reach all children and to raise their achievement to the highest level.

  "We can't do this alone," Gary concludes. "We need allies, we need to extend NEA's external partnerships, and we need to use the best and brightest in our profession to work with the hardest-hit schools."

  For more on Kansas NEA's QPA Assistance Cadre, contact Peg Dunlap at pdunlap@nea.org. NEA's high-priority schools guide is at www.nea.org/issues/lowperf/priorityschools.