A Principal Describes How More Resources Can Make A Difference(2)

In the past several posts, we've been pursuing a Strib opinion piece by former Minneapolis superintendent Peter Hutchinson, in which he argues that the we must fix our urban public schools by going big financially.  (See "Minneapolis schools must go big or go home") His thesis is that we keep providing school districts with mere inflationary increases, which merely make it possible to keep doing pretty much what has been done in the past, maintaining the status quo, which leaves tens of thousands of students permanently behind.  A common response is that since past inflationary increases don't seem to make a difference, surely that proves that "more money doesn't make a difference."   In dialog, it has become clear that too many of us simply can't imagine what money could do, if if schools received enough money to "go big," and if that money was provided only on condition that it bought big change.

So, in the last post, we began to provide some actual testimony from experienced educators on what they could do, if the state gave them enough money to go big.  This post is part (2) of that series.  Our principal is a highly experienced urban school educational leader.  Her views on this topic are more worthy of note, than say, a paid political pundit for an advocacy group. 

We pick up where we left off in part 1.  The principal tells us that with a significant influx of resources, her elementary school was able over several years time to nearly double the reading proficiency rate of black (non ELL) students in her school, students who were almost exclusively free and reduced lunch eligible.  During that time period, proficiency rates rose from lower than Minneapolis and St. Paul to more than ten points higher.  She continues:

Using the added resources, we implemented a model of co-teaching that provides a second teacher to provide reading in the classroom and provide additional support and intervention for the students who were behind. We implemented a number of other changes involving more planning time, more professional development to increase teachers tool- box in meeting the needs of their diverse student population. Over the next several years, the reading proficiency rates for those students increased to nearly 50%.

The co-teaching model is one strategy that intervenes immediately to make sure that kids who are behind get the help that they need it, right when they need it.  There are other approaches to this problem, but all of them recognize that learning is a pyramid of knowledge and skills, and when there are missing blocks in the foundation of that pyramid, it becomes increasingly difficult for students to construct on that shaky and incomplete base.  Every sound strategy must address this problem: if we allow kids to fall behind, they fall further and further behind, until they begin to believe that school is a failure zone.  

In that same classroom, our principal explains, students are falling behind in math, but the district lacked the funding to apply the same successful strategy for math.

We could not replicate these improvements for math, because the district lacked the resources to provide us with co-teaching and other similar supports for mathematics. And while we increased scores for English Language Learners as well, the District lacked the resources to provide the robust English Language learning support that we needed to move our English Language Learners to the point where they would meet state standards.

As a result of the reading success, her district moved her to a second school to implement the same reading strategy:  

At my current school, we are making an effort to use similar strategies with our students who are behind. The District is providing us with extra support for co-teachers in reading, but there is no money for co-teaching support in mathematics.  If we are going to meet state standards for the children who are persistently behind we need significantly more resources, and we need to use those resources significantly to add to what we are doing.

What would she do, with significantly more resources, we asked? She answered.  "Resources are needed to provide:

• More co-teaching and other intervention support staff, and provide significantly more intervention resources based on the needs of these students instead of providing those resources based on what we can spare out of the current budget. 
• Significantly more onboarding training for our new teachers before they start to work. Newly certified teachers are not coming out of schools of education with the training, experience and skills that they need. Currently the district is unable to afford the amount of onboarding training that these new teachers need to be effective. 
• More EL support from EL specialists who can help us implement EL best practices.
• More professional development time for our new and experienced teachers. That must be accomplished either by providing substitute teachers when teachers are out of the classroom for development, or preferably, providing in the collective bargaining agreement for more time after the instructional day is over.
  • Time for observation and use of that observation for instructional improvement.
  • More instructional coaches and time for instructional coaches to translate coaching into better practice.
  • More support, including additional qualified staff, for student who have social and emotional challenges.
  • Develop and implement specialized curriculum that targets these students particular challenges, so that individual teachers don’t have to develop their own curriculum on the fly.
  • High quality early childhood education that closes some of the gaps so that when students arrive in our school, their educational deficit is smaller and they are more likely to be ready for a classroom environment.
  • Resources to build links to parents and other caregivers to leverage our educational work in the home"
  

These strategies are being used successfully here and there in some schools, many of them extraordinary charter schools with extra foundation funding.  But in Minnesota, we lack the imagination to fund and implement these important changes, because our funding system is not based on funding the cost of what works, but rather it is based on funding just enough to keep on doing what we've been doing.   In the next post, we'll hear a bit more from this witness, and then we'll hear from other experienced educators who would like to have the state's support to assure the success of their students.