9/15/08

Columbus Dispatch

Jennifer Smith Richards

Deshler Elementary has orderly classrooms with happy colors, busy teachers and students who appear to be focused. It does not look like a bad school — except on paper.

By the numbers, the South Side school has been a chronic failure. Test scores are low, and progress has come in small increments. A new principal known for her turnaround ability and a mostly new staff were brought in before last school year, but test scores indicated that the kids at Deshler still didn’t accomplish as much as they should have in a year.

Head east to Liberty Elementary, which has a similar student body of mostly poor black children. Like Deshler, it has struggled to improve for several years and hasn’t met federal goals for math and reading or state standards for academic success.

But Liberty can show that its students are catching up. Test scores show that they accomplished more than expected last school year.

Turnarounds take time

The answer to why schools achieve different results with similar students is more complex than the question, said Deshler Principal Deborah Copeland.

“We’re talking about children, not numbers,” she said. “I’m a 56-year-old woman. What could you assume about me as a 56-year-old woman? I’m larger than a number. There’s more to us.”

The majority of Deshler children live in single-parent households and the school’s expectations haven’t always been high.

“That’s not an excuse for anything,” Copeland said. “We’re a ‘Yes, I can’ school. I feel confident that we will meet our goals.”

True turnarounds take years, Columbus officials say.

“There are no silver bullets to school improvement,” said Marvenia Bosley, the district’s deputy superintendent. “Especially in a school that’s redesigned, it may take three, four, five years to actually begin to see progress.”

In the meantime, a generation of students can pass through an ineffective school.

“It does take years to turn a school around,” said Janine Bempechat, an associate professor at Wheelock College in Boston who has written books about at-risk students.

But “when it’s your child, how long are you going to wait?”

Focus on teachers

Deshler received its third straight F grade last school year, making it one of 17 Columbus schools with a D or F in the past three years.

Liberty’s grade climbed to a C because teachers gave students more than a year’s worth of growth, based on a calculation that compares individual students’ performance on state tests from one year to the next. Liberty’s three previous grades were D’s.

Experts say there’s no magic answer for how to fix schools that struggle, but they say teacher quality matters. A lot.

Both schools focused on making sure their teachers were teaching their strongest subjects, rather than using the jack-of-all-trade classroom model where each teacher is responsible for every subject. Both schools’ principals say that their teachers are engaged, energetic and ready to learn new methods.

But Liberty’s teachers, on average, had 17 years of experience last school year, compared with 12 years for Deshler’s. More of the Liberty teachers had master’s degrees, too.

Copeland said more of her staff at Deshler has advanced degrees this year, and some teachers are working on them.

At Liberty, Principal Cheryl Jones relies on everybody, not just the teachers, to help in the classrooms. Instead of having teachers’ aides run copies or patrol the cafeteria, she has them help teach.

The new “value-added” measure that shows a year’s progress gives the teachers and staff credit for the difference they’ve made, even if they’re not achieving high test scores.

” ‘Value-added’ couldn’t have come out soon enough. We felt like we finally had a system that was a true measure,” Jones said.

Subtle signs of progress

Deshler’s successes have been more subtle.

The performance index score that shows whether more students are getting better scores on state tests is up about four points, to 64.6 out of a possible 120.

And although Deshler students didn’t make a year’s worth of gains last year, the school did make enough progress in some areas to prevent it from slipping into an eighth consecutive year of “school improvement,” the failing status established by federal law. If students improve again next year in math and reading, the school could be removed from that list.

“I was brought here to make a difference, and we’re making a difference,” said Copeland, who had been assigned to Brentnell Elementary before the district closed the school.

Learning from progress

About 27 percent of the district’s schools that received value-added ratings showed they had done more than a year’s worth of work in 2007-08. About 41 percent showed less than a year’s progress.

District officials say they don’t know yet what’s working for Columbus’ successful schools. They plan to find out.

“Our teachers are doing some wonderful things out there and it is our responsibility to capture that so our children can benefit,” said Bosley, the deputy superintendent.

There hasn’t been a call to simply shut down the district’s longest-struggling schools, officials say.

As long as there’s progress, children aren’t really in a failing school, Copeland said.

“We are dealing with children’s lives, and we take it very seriously,” she said. “The kids deserve a staff that’s committed to their personal growth. That is what they deserve. That’s what No Child Left Behind is about.”