Vision
Support/Training
Accountability

It looks like this school has all three - bravo and encouraging news!Often, however, teachers (and then, by extension, students) are hit over the head with just one leg - accountability. Accountability is crucial, but without vision (state and federal mandates, by the way, are not vision) and support and training of teachers (who responds well to criticism from an administrator via email or a once-in-a-three-to-four-month “visit”?) are equally crucial. With only two, you have a wobbly stool at best.

Accountability is the darling of most teacher critics - and by itself, it becomes a club rather than one of three legs. It\’s a great tool for hitting - over the head, below the belt, and in the gut - but not so impressive for enacting meaningful change. Personally, I strive to establish these three legs on a stool for myself - but obviously it would work better if administration worked to establish and maintain all three.

Any guesses?

Perhaps because it demands too much? Too hard to do? Most aren’t going to do what requires too much; most do what is easiest.

wmartin46 wrote:

Certainly giving this straightforward ten-point program a chance would seem to be the first step in a get-well program for failing schools.

This “ten-point program” has been around forever. Remember, in your own post, just two paragraphs up, you wrote that it was common sense. If it’s common sense then there’s got to be some widely applicable reason why it isn’t used.

Any guesses?

To produce anything -

1) Determine what you have as an input.
2) Determine what you product want to make.
3) Determine what changes you will make on the input to create the product.
4) List those changes in order.
5) Execute those changes in order, testing to see whether the items have been changed correctly at each step.

You have to choose the measurement interval based upon the kind of changes you are making and the point at which those changes have to be made to keep from scrapping the work. (IE you have to fix the shape of the clay before you bake it).

In the case of students, weekly is probably a fair first approximation. If a particular student needs help more often, I’m sure they will get it under a system that actually cares about weekly performance.

Principal Mikara Solomon Davis could be interviewed (on video) and that video made available over the NET, so that others could get a sense of who this person is, and how she responded to problems implementing this program.

Certainly giving this straightforward ten-point program a chance would seem to be the first step in a get-well program for failing schools.