WestEd’s Inside High School Reform looks at formerly low-performing schools that got better. Here are the author’s top 10 tips for improving high schools:
Treat teachers as the trained education professionals they are.
Hold students to high expectations.
Continually use school, teacher, and student data to decide what changes to make next.
Start with what you want students to know and achieve, then work backwards to create tests and lesson plans.
Coordinate lesson plans and tests within departments and across grades and schools.
Don’t take the “easy way out” when deciding how to help underachieving kids.
Create an optimistic, college-going culture and help students understand how high school work affects their future college and career choices.
Develop flexible school systems to maintain reforms that work.
Find partners such as local colleges, businesses, other schools, and parent groups to provide help.
Stay alert for new partners, activities, and funding streams while maintaining a focus on reform.
Author Jordan Horowitz says something that relates to the “Out of the underclass” post: Students must believe that only they can ensure their own success. I like the focus on an optimistic school culture as well.
Treat teachers as the trained education professionals they are.
First of all that assumes that public school teachers, as a group, actually are trained educated education professionals. I have my doubts.
As a message to administrators and educrats, however, it does have its merits. Let the teachers, even the ignorant ones, teach, and don’t micro-manage them, because chances are you’re an even more ignorant specimen who bullied your way to the top. And give the smart and competent teachers even more room.
I’d agree with most of those suggestions, but I was disheartened that again, it pointed at and towards ‘college bound’. There are a great number of students who have no interest in college and the school should serve them as well. I’m not talking about the druggies and drop-outs, I’m talking about the kids who know (either instinctively or through summer work) that they’d rather learn a trade. Be that construction, auto mechanic, welding, etc. they too need an education but the emphasis for them should be a bit different than that for a college bound child. If anyone thinks it’s not a viable and valuable occupation - compare the yearly earnings of an auto mechanic (or plumber) to that of the typical student who graduated with an english degree or a liberal arts degree. Again, we need to serve the needs of our children; the schools have failed at that job for decades.
How about an optimism coordinator?
First, thanks for your comments on the book.
I agree that not all high school teachers are not the highest quality teachers. The schools involved in the project found that by treating all teachers as education professionals, teachers were far more likely to be open to suggestions to improve their instructional practices. This also is grounded in developing a community of professionals in the schools.
Regarding students who are not college-bound. Remember, these were extremely low-performing schools (as measured by California’s annual performance index–I don’t want to get into the problems with the index, here, but they do exist). Also, the focus of the CAPP project is to increase the college-going population among schools under-represented in CA colleges. So, that puts a bit of a slant on the goals (and the book). The schools in these projects found that by treating all students as though they are college-bound benefitted all students. There is no intent to devalue students or occupations that are not necessarily college-bound.
I hope that folks who are commenting have the opportunity to read the book. This will give you a better understanding of the top ten tips we created for the press release.
Thanks for your interest in the book and also in improving high schools.
Jordan
Not so fast, author-boy. Taking your tips for improving high schools in turn,
Treat teachers as the trained education professionals they are.
Why? They’re almost at the bottom of the hierarchy, only students being lower, so why treat them any better then you can get away with?
Hold students to high expectations.
Easy to say if you don’t have sit across a desk from an irate parent who’s less interested in their kid learning then getting their kid’s passport stamped.
Continually use school, teacher, and student data to decide what changes to make next.
If education were important then teacher’s salaries would be a function of their competence not their time on the job. Since that isn’t the case, why go to the effort of closing the feedback loop?
Start with what you want students to know and achieve, then work backwards to create tests and lesson plans.
See above.
Coordinate lesson plans and tests within departments and across grades and schools.
Ditto.
Don’t take the “easy way out” when deciding how to help underachieving kids.
Yes, and remember to floss as well.
Create an optimistic, college-going culture and help students understand how high school work affects their future college and career choices.
Just create it, hey? What with? Pixie dust?
Develop flexible school systems to maintain reforms that work.
You’re getting ahead of yourself. First you have to have reforms. Then you can worry about maintaining them.
Find partners such as local colleges, businesses, other schools, and parent groups to provide help.
Yeah sure, why not?
Stay alert for new partners, activities, and funding streams while maintaining a focus on reform.
What reform? The type of reform which is driven by those all-too-uncommon individuals who have the intelligence, drive, courage and self-confidence with which to temporarily hold back the tides of mediocrity and faddishness that are an integral part of the public education scene? If that’s the type of reform you’re talking about then it’ll always be local, a function of one individual and temporary. Maintaining a focus on reform becomes a function of finding a replacement with the requisite qualities to replace the reformer. Good luck on that.