Diversity Makes Us Stronger

Last week, my school had our Winter Concert. The music was wonderful and seeing all of our students performing with confidence in a variety of musical genres and singing in parts made me incredibly proud. So much to be proud of - but there was something that really inspired me in addition to the music. So many of the students on the stage spoke little or no English when they came to my school, and yet they were on the stage with every other child - grinning, proud, singing, doing the motions, and being included. Their parents, who speak Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Kinyarwandan, Karen, or Chinese, beamed as they saw their children on stage performing - fully a part of the school community.

Why does this story matter today? Today is the day to share this story so that it can impact someone who has never been fortunate enough to experience the power of diversity.

According to the National Park Service, The Statue of Liberty has been referred to as "The Immigrant's Statue" since the late 1800's. Emma Lazarus' famous poem, which is engraved onto the pedestal of Lady Liberty, rings out with the words

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

For me, these words have always underscored a commitment. They are an invitation. They are the theme of our country. At least, that is what I have been taught and I have believed. 

A newly arrived immigrant family on Ellis Island, gazing across the bay at the Statue of Liberty from National Park Service

The current administration's decisions regarding immigrants and sanctuary cities is reactionary and panders to the uninformed, the privileged, and the afraid. Diversity in our schools, and in our country, makes us stronger. Learning from the stories of others strengthens our own story and shows us how we can be a better version of ourselves. As educators, we see the power of learning each and every day in our classrooms and in our schools. We know that a community must have diverse ideas in order to thrive. The time is now to use that power to make sure that children from Syria, from the Congo, from Burma, from Afghanistan, have the same opportunities that young Irish or Italian children had 100 years ago.

A Case for Personalized Learning

Personalized Learning. It's quite a topic in education right now. But, personalized learning is not new - it has taken on a new life as our need for differentiation has grown. A colleague asked me to consider the challenges of the one-room school house and consider it as a model of personalized learning.

 Today's classrooms look very different than the one-room schoolhouse, but the challenge is similar - full classrooms of students at varying levels with one teacher trying to figure out how to push students toward mastery. Our teachers today have the additional challenge of standards, state testing, and school improvement measures. We also have an amazing opportunity to use digital tools in our classrooms and to use those tools as a way to reach the goal of truly personalized learning.

Personalized learning isn't just about digital tools. It is about knowing your students, knowing their data and the strengths or gaps in their learning, knowing effective standards-based instruction, and knowing how to build student ownership of their own learning. Education Elements, who are some of the foremost thinkers about personalized learning, define the core four elements of personalized learning as Targeted Instruction, Data Driven Decisions, Student Reflection and Ownership, and Integrated Digital Content. 

From Education Elements - Core Four Elements of Personalized Learning

With all of the work we have invested in using data to drive our instruction, it seems like everything points to the Core Four Elements of Personalized Learning as a logical step. Using data to drive your instruction ultimately leads to personalized learning - and the right digital content can ensure that students are engaged in effective, standards-based learning. 

Digital tools do not replace teacher actions - they should enhance the effective, standards-based instruction that is happening in classrooms. Classrooms might feel like the old one-room schoolhouse with the levels of necessary differentiation, but today's classroom should look much different. Today's personalized classroom reflects the availability of technology and information and is rooted in individualized goal setting and personalized growth. If we are truly committed to providing our students with a high-quality education that prepares our students for college and career, this level of personalized learning is the next step in our journey. Digital tools, in combination with data driven instruction, effective standards-based instruction, and students involved in setting their own goals and monitoring their own progress are changing the way our classrooms look and the way our children achieve. 

What Our Kids Need

When you think about the students in your class, how do you know them? Do you know them for the behaviors they show in your room or throughout the school? Do you know them for the gaps in their learning and what their data reflects? Do you know them for their lives and what they bring to school with them each and every day? Do you know them for who you think they are or do you really know each and every child in your class?

Really knowing your students means knowing their lives - their real lives - and bringing that understanding into your support and guidance for your students. It doesn't mean that you lower your expectations for them based on what you know about their lives. If anything, it means that you have consistently high expectations, but you also have to have compassion and understanding. 

This article, published on CNN, talks about children in Chicago learning to dodge bullets before they are five years old. According to the National Center for Child Poverty, 47% of American children are from low-income families and 66% of those children are African-American. The American Psychological Association  indicates that poverty has significant impacts on children in many ways, not the least of which is academic performance. 

From American Psychological Association

Educators must know and understand how they can best support children living in poverty without judgement or condemnation. Our children didn't ask to be born into poverty. Parents want what is best for their children. That leaves educators to ensure that our children have whatever they need to help them break the cycle of poverty - social emotional strategies and practice, high academic expectations, and a vision of themselves in the future where they are of value and valued. 

from Children's Defense Fund

Our kids need educators who are committed to giving them the skills they will need to break the cycle of poverty - reading, writing, and math skills that will help them be competitive, social emotional skills that will help them solve problems and cope with the challenges they face, and supports for parents and families struggling with addiction, insecure housing, unemployment or underemployment, and/or mental health issues. The field of education needs people with vision and a relentless commitment to doing whatever it takes to making the future better for our children. We need people with creativity, with compassion, with a commitment to high expectations and doing whatever it takes to help change our communities so that children do not have to grow up learning to dodge bullets before they learn how to read.

Goals for the New Year

It's time to go back to school and the calendar has turned to another year. As we return to school, it's time to take stock of what is working and what needs to be adjusted in order to move our students closer to proficiency.

How do you know where all of your students have made growth and where you measure up? It is time to review all of that data and develop an action plan for moving forward.

Having a system to track, review, and compare data is essential for any school. We use a system developed in Microsoft 365 to share our data, but any system of tracking and sharing data works, as long as it is consistently used and everyone agrees on the data points. 

Having data doesn't do any good if it isn't being used to design targeted instruction. Today's teachers must be able to must be data experts who use data to plan instruction that meets students where they are and moves them to the next level. 

Moving students to the next level can be extremely overwhelming when you have large numbers of students who are below level, so it is important to set short-term, as well as long-term, goals. Many new teachers get stuck here - wasting valuable time on lessons that don't move students closer to the goal. Your long-term, or year end, goals are similar to the concept of planning for college as soon as your child is born. You know that you have to begin the savings account, you have the conversation with you spouse, and you set a goal of how much you would like to have saved by the time your child is eighteen or ready to go to college (and trust me, it won't be enough). Short-term goals are similar to your plan to actually put the money in the account - whether you use a 529 or a savings account, you have a system to put away the money each month and then you progress monitor to see how close you are getting to your goal. It's actually the short-term goals that you can adjust and make changes to in order to get you closer to your long-term goal. So as important as the end of the year goal is, if you are not setting short-term goals that will get your students closer to the mark, and then reviewing each and every day to see how much progress they have made, you will find yourself short when it really comes time. 

So, it's time to measure up. How much progress have your students made to date? Where are your students in terms of the year-end goals? What teacher actions will you implement in order to move your students over the next 6-8 weeks? Here is an example of a tool for planning your mid-year data discussions and instructional planning. 

Public Education is Worth Fighting For

Public Education is about to venture back into the debate of charters and vouchers as options for turning around our struggling schools. With the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, Public Education is again being threatened by another "transformation" that is meant to raise standards and provide for excellence in American classrooms. However, with a focus on repealing the Common Core State Standards, providing vouchers and funding charter schools, there is little hope that this refurbished approach to transforming American education will do much more than frustrate high quality educators and leaders who have invested their lives into educating future generations of American children.

As a leader of a struggling school that is a completely different place than it was three years ago, I have a few pieces of advice for the incoming Education Secretary - not that I think they will be heard, but I have decided that if I do not use my voice to advocate for what I believe in (aka Public Education), then I am not being true to myself as a leader and I am not showing my community what I believe in and am willing to invest my time and effort into.

Common Core - Why does the Education Secretary want to repeal the Common Core? Her tweet, "Many of you are asking about Common Core. To clarify, I am not a support - period," (read more here) has been retweeted and quoted throughout the news cycles. The Common Core State Standards has put the need for more rigorous, student-centered educational practices that build on conceptual understanding the center of classroom planning and practice. How is that hurting anyone? The whole idea behind transforming our education system is that American students lag significantly behind students from around the world (see chart below) and in a global economy, we simply cannot afford for American innovation and business to continue to lag behind. 

While the roll-out of Common Core and the connection to APPR were highly (and rightly) criticized, the need for rigorous discourse, high quality instruction that builds on conceptual understanding, reading complex text, and writing across the content areas continue to be the best parts of Common Core and should not be "watered down" in the name of "transformation." The Common Core is not the problem in America's schools - if our students cannot meet the standards, we must look at effective leadership practices and effective classroom practices that will make sure that our students (that's ALL students) get the high quality instruction that they deserve. 

Vouchers and Charters - I can hear it now..."What's the big deal? If there is more choice, that will force schools to be better if they want to keep students!"Here is the real deal...it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to turn around a school. I am on year three and we are really starting to see gains across all areas. However, we have not yet reached a tipping point where the majority of our students are performing at or above their grade level. Public school dollars support charter and voucher programs that allow for students to leave public schools and attend a school of choice, which has a devastating impact on the resources available to students and in classrooms. Public schools have an obligation to provide the highest quality education to all of our students in order to have an educated citizenry and that requires having adequate resources. We cannot educate the future of our communities and our country if only some students are given the opportunity to experience excellence. 

Teacher Preparation Programs - In the past twenty-five years that I have been in education, there has been very little public debate about the quality and expectations of Teacher Preparation Programs. There is a significant amount of debate from within education, but no one else has really seemed to take on the challenge. I would encourage Betsy DeVos to take this on as one of her important first challenges - more important than Common Core revision, ESSA, or even the Voucher debate. Without having top notch teachers in our classrooms, very little matters about what the laws and regulations state about what we need in American classrooms. What we need, more than absolutely anything, is the best teachers ever. That will definitely require that colleges make changes to their programs. It will require that teacher preparation programs look much more like doctor preparation programs. And it should require changes to the salary scales for teachers as well - if we are expected to train like doctors, we should be compensated like doctors. After all, we are saving lives, too. 

So, my challenge to incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is more of an invitation. Come and visit. See first hand who American children are, what American children are learning, and American teachers are teaching. Talk with high quality school leaders who are training the teachers who are coming out of our Teacher Preparation programs over the course of three years or more in order to make young teachers who have just stepped into the classroom into effective practitioners. And lastly, I would ask you to remember that educators are making investments in our future each and every day. We wouldn't ask Wall Street Investors to make a promising future without the appropriate resources - likewise, our public schools need the resources to ensure a bright future for ALL of our children. 

Developing Leadership Opportunities

One of the key components of leadership is developing the next generation of leaders, whether that is classroom leaders, model classrooms, or school or district level leaders. We have an obligation to ensure that the leaders who come after us have a mindset and beliefs that will serve the students of tomorrow and provide them with the absolute best education. In some ways, that means that leaders are always developing teachers out of the classrooms in their own building, which can have a significant impact on the instructional program in a school. So, it is necessary to have a leadership development plan.

Developing a leadership development plan starts with your own leadership as the school building leader. You must have an idea of where you need to learn and grow if you are going to model and create opportunities for leadership development in your school. As a leader, you must learn and grow alongside your staff - simply providing them with opportunities to learn is not enough, and expecting them to learn for you is poor leadership. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Deborah Rowland cites that many employees do not trust their boss and that most in-house leadership development is less about "doing leadership" and more about "how to do" leadership. As school leaders, we must start with ourselves if we want to develop highly effective leaders.

Having a leadership plan requires a common language around the competencies of leadership. There are certainly many to choose from - I have used the Turnaround Leadership Competencies by Public Impact for myself, my leadership teams, and my classroom leaders. Hearing my teacher leaders talk about recognizing the early wins or requiring all staff to make changes is exciting and it underscores the importance of having that common language throughout an organization in order to make substantive change. Here is an example of a self-assessment tool that leaders can use when beginning to make a leadership development plan.

The next levels of leadership vary based on the size of your system. Identifying these levels of leadership is essential for any strong leadership development plan. In my system, I have a leadership team (their primary role is leadership within the building), teacher leaders (they have additional leadership responsibilities that they have taken on outside of their classroom role), team leaders (they are the key person on their grade level team or department), and classroom leaders. There is some crossover between the layers of leadership, as some people are involved in multiple levels of the work.

My responsibility as the building leader is to distribute the leadership of our school vision through internal leadership and also provide opportunities for them to learn and grow their own skill set. Within this system, I have several leaders who aspire to be building leaders, several who wish to become model classrooms or instructional coaches, and some who are working on developing stronger communication skills within their grade level team. Differentiating leadership development and opportunities for growth requires that school leaders know the skill sets and leadership capacities of their staff as well as creative opportunities for leadership to live in your school. Leadership development also requires clear visioning, strong communication regarding the vision, and regular feedback and check-ins. Two-way communication and checking-in on progress have to be a priority in order for budding leadership to grow and yield the expected results.

How Can You Tell If Your School Has "Turned Around?

There are many components of school turnaround - suspension and referral rates, student achievement measures, attendance, parent involvement, staff turnover, and school climate to name a few. With so many moving targets, how can anyone ever know if their school has really "turned around?"

Even the idea of "turnaround" is somewhat of a misnomer. Moving a school from significantly underperforming to achieving takes time. It's not as if there is a magic wand that can take a school from one end of the spectrum to the other overnight. When we talk about school turnaround, we are really talking about significant school improvement and being able to see improvement in the terms of any of the indicators previously listed is an amazing thing to see.

There are many voices in the school turnaround debate. Advocates range from strategies that involve closing schools and re-opening them with new leadership, new staff, and new curriculum to strategies that involve supporting the whole child through addressing the issues of high poverty. No matter what the approach to school turnaround, the research supports the need for strong, visionary leadership in implementing a school turnaround plan that yields results.

This is my third year as a turnaround principal. My school has made significant gains in reducing suspensions and referrals, in improving student achievement, in improving attendance rates, in engaging parents and families, in reducing staff turnover, and in creating a school culture that is a productive learning environment and values achievement. This week, New York State released the Demonstrable Improvement Index for schools in receivership. This score indicates an overall improvement rating based on metrics that were selected for that school. Schools were given points based on meeting the targets set for each metric. The school I lead scored a 92 out of 100. Maybe I should say that in a little different way - how's this?

92 out of 100!!! That's amazing!!!

This acknowledges and underscores our hard work and improvement efforts. We are working tirelessly to make greater gains in student achievement and to continue toward being a model school in school turnaround. To read more about our demonstrable improvement index, our metrics, out turnaround efforts, and our school community, click here.