"Awareness, Understanding, Support"

The dismantling of public education continues. The dismantling is not surprising. In fact, given the preoccupation with testing as the single measure of “effect” of teaching and learning is the result of several years, possibly decades of reducing the complexity of teaching and learning to a linear formula that if dedicated, caring, compassionate, and committed educators would simply follow, students would excel.

The only problem with such thinking is that teaching and learning is complex, dynamic, fluid, and full of uncertainties, attributes or factors that vary in the degree of influence or cause. The absence by policy makers to acknowledge that teaching and learning is all of the above is telling of a different agenda.

The agenda of ensuring all learners meet or exceed standards of literacy, numeracy, writing, and citizenship require a different mindset – arguably missing.

Required is a clear aim of and for education – one that includes reality and vision, more dreams than memories, solutions over excuses, and results rather than promises.

We have a plan.

Our plan is working.

What we have learned in working our plan is that three (3) requirements simultaneously interact and integrate. These are 1) awareness, 2) understanding, and 3) support. When these three are present, practiced ubiquitously the plan (a.k.a. Strategic Commitments) comes to life and is implemented yielding results.

We have results but they’re not consistent!

Our results are powerful but we are not there yet!

We did not become low performing – persistently or consistently low performing overnight. We also did not become low performing intentionally or with malice.

We will not, therefore, become high performing overnight.

The steps toward high performance requires a plan but the plan as we have learned has not fully or completely been implemented for one very powerful reason – culture.

The root cause of persistently or consistently low performing schools is not the students or the parents or the teachers or the administration or the community. Rather, it is culture.

What is it about our culture?

We have attempted for almost four years to bring to life seven correlates of high performing, effective schools. These correlates are the operating system producing high performing teachers and learners. These correlates will cause fidelity of implementation of our Strategic Commitments.

Looking at just one ...

A Climate of High Expectations for Success- Dr. Lezotte wrote:

“The First Generation: In the effective school there is a climate of expectation in which the staff believe and demonstrate that all students can attain mastery of the essential school skills, and the staff also believe that they have the capability to help all students achieve that mastery.

The Second Generation: In the second generation, the emphasis placed on high expectations for success will be broadened significantly. In the first generation, expectations were described in terms of attitudes and beliefs that suggested how the teacher should behave in the teaching-learning situation. Those descriptions sought to tell teachers how they should initially deliver the lesson. High expectations meant, for example, that the teacher should evenly distribute questions asked among all students and should provide each student with an equal opportunity to participate in the learning process. Unfortunately, this "equalization of opportunity," though beneficial, proved to be insufficient to assure mastery for many learners. Teachers found themselves in the difficult position of having had high expectations and having acted upon them—yet some students still did not learn.

In the second generation, the teachers will anticipate this and they will develop a broader array of responses. For example, teachers will implement additional strategies, such as reteaching and regrouping, to assure that all students do achieve mastery. Implementing this expanded concept of high expectations will require the school as an organization to reflect high expectations. Most of the useful strategies will require the cooperation of the school as a whole; teachers cannot implement most of these strategies working alone in isolated classrooms.

High expectations for success will be judged, not only by the initial staff beliefs and behaviors, but also by the organization’s response when some students do not learn. For example, if the teacher plans a lesson, delivers that lesson, assesses learning and finds that some students did not learn, and still goes on to the next lesson, then that teacher didn’t expect the students to learn in the first place. If the school condones through silence that teacher’s behavior, it apparently does not expect the students to learn, or the teacher to teach these students.

Several changes are called for in order to implement this expanded concept of high expectations successfully. First, teachers will have to come to recognize that high expectations for student success must be "launched" from a platform of teachers having high expectations for self. Then the school organization will have to be restructured to assure that teachers have access to more "tools" to help them achieve successful Learning for All. Third, schools, as cultural organizations, must recognize that schools must be transformed from institutions designed for "instruction" to institutions designed to assure "learning."

We would be well served – moreover, our community, parents, staff, students, and all that are interested in all students being successful now and in the future would be best served by creating and sustaining first, a climate of high expectations – for all!