[Kentucky] Success Within Reach

from The Northern Kentucky Challenger

By Michael Jennings
The Sunday Challenger

Parents, Mentors Help High-Poverty Schools

There's broad agreement among educators on the right strategies for improving school performance in schools where that's hardest to do - high-poverty schools with a history of low academic expectations within families and the faculty.

In large part, that agreement boils down to a belief that learning levels previously thought unreachable for some children are in fact reachable for all. Like many matters of faith, that belief can seem maddeningly difficult to put into practice.

And as in many matters of faith, it requires people to turn standard assumptions on their head. For example, high-poverty schools, where remedial instruction was once the rule, should instead present their children with stiff challenges, such as eighth-grade algebra, says Gene Bottoms, vice president of the Southern Regional Education Board.

"If you've got a lot of poor and minority students, you accelerate, you don't remediate," said Bottoms, whose agency, a 16-state compact based in Atlanta, aids member states with research, planning and policies.

"You cannot remediate yourself into excellence," Bottoms said. "But you can hold kids to grade-level standards until they eventually get there."

Sometimes, he said, that may mean teachers must confront students with aggressive faith in their potential. Students often say teachers who practice such tough love "are in your face like your mama," Bottoms said.

"Schools With a Full-Court Press"

He said high-poverty schools that succeed stay in close touch with parents, and many of them assign students to adult mentors who can get them the help they need if they fall behind. (See related stories, page 1A and 3A.)

"I describe these schools as schools with a full-court press," Bottoms said.
In Kentucky, the Lexington-based Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence set out to determine how schools with the most formidable obstacles to learning have overcome them. Aided by a Ford Foundation grant, the Prichard Committee sponsored research on educational practices common at high-poverty, high-performing schools.

The researchers looked for factors that distinguish two sets of schools: high-poverty schools where poor and minority children share in an overall pattern of high achievement; and other high-poverty schools where overall achievement is low and there are sizable gaps in achievement along lines of family income and race.

The study focused on eight high-achieving elementary schools (none of them in Northern Kentucky) where at least half the students received subsidized school meals. Based in part on academic audits conducted in the spring of 2004, researchers found the successful schools shared high expectations for students, strong relationships among adults and children and a high faculty work ethic and morale. All eight did a careful job of teacher recruitment and assignment.

Comparing the eight strong schools to eight other schools with high poverty levels and poor academic performance, the researchers turned up some unexpected findings. There was little difference between the two groups of schools in the quality of school leadership, and the high-performing schools did a less than outstanding job of following state planning guidelines, implementing school-based decision making or using technology.

Everyone Treated the Same

Faculty members at the high-performing schools regularly assessed each student and used the findings to plan instruction. Disadvantaged students were treated the same as other students.

In their project report, the researchers wrote that faculties "appeared to be on the same page with regard to what was being taught, what performance expectations were, and where each teachers' focus fit into the broader curriculum of the school."

Cindy Heine, the Prichard Committee's associate executive director, said other research confirms that high-performing Kentucky schools ensure that instruction conforms to state expectations and that it forms a seamless progression from grade to grade. They also pay close attention to test data and change their teaching strategies based on what they learn from it, she said.

Michael Brandt, the Newport schools superintendent, said his district is equipped to do on-the-spot assessments of children's learning and quickly make any needed adjustments in teaching. Using online practice tests, Newport teachers will be able to determine "which five out of 30 kids didn't get it," he said.

The state could help make state-mandated tests more useful in adjusting the curriculum if it would provide schools with assessment data before the school year ends, rather than early the following school year, Brandt said.

Essential to School Success

Many educators say strong early-childhood and kindergarten programs are essential to school success, particularly for children from deprived backgrounds. In Kentucky, schools must offer preschool to disabled children and children from low-income eligible families, as well as half-day kindergarten open to all children.

Gov. Ernie Fletcher wants to put more money into early-childhood education, and a bill sponsored by House Speaker Jody Richards would allow families at up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level to enroll their children in public preschool. Richards' bill would also require all school districts to offer full-day kindergarten.

Like most Kentucky school districts, the Covington schools devote enough local money to kindergarten to offer a full-day program. Jack Moreland, the Covington superintendent, calls early-childhood programs "absolutely critical" for poor children.

But Bottoms said that for such children, intervention in early childhood and primary school isn't enough. If educators don't keep up their full-court press, "whatever gains you make through grade four, you wipe out" as the children progress through middle and high school, he said.

He said preventing that may require extraordinary steps, such as intensive six-week summer sessions, and it definitely requires "a core group of dedicated teachers" who have leadership skills and a "burn" to help poor children succeed.

Turning it Around

In Kentucky, teachers and principals who demonstrate those qualities may be tapped as "highly skilled educators" and assigned to help schools that fall perilously far behind in their progress toward proficiency. From 2000 to 2003, Dewey Hensley was assigned to help Covington's Ninth District Elementary School, which had been declared in crisis because of persistent low scores.

Last year, Ninth District's Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) score was well ahead of its goal for the current two-year testing cycle. Hensley, now the principal of Bates Elementary School in Jefferson County, said keys to the school's turnaround included a "vibrant principal," Rick Ross, and teachers who understood they had to stop expecting less from children who live in poverty.

In high-poverty schools, it's crucial that children "have everybody from board members on down to custodians who believe that the kids can do it," Hensley said. "And it comes down to not losing the fact that people's brains are not their circumstances."

Teaching Quality is Key

Hensley said it's clear that the main factor affecting student achievement is the "efficacy and quality of the teaching the kid receives." Yet some faculty members at the school, he said, persisted in placing "the blame for the low achievement solely at the feet of kids from poverty."

The school's leaders, he said, "pulled together a guiding coalition of people who didn't feel that way," convinced the skeptics they were "on the fringe" and persuaded them to leave.

Bottoms, of the Southern Regional Education Board, offers this description of the change of mind and heart that must take place to make high-poverty schools like Ninth District high-performing:

"It's kind of like a Southern Baptist conversion," he said. "Fundamentally, you have to decide that these students are worth it, and that you can teach them."