Giving schools freedom to change

FREE DESIGN: Asa Messer Elementary School has been integrating technology with traditional classroom elements. Above, Leslie Tirocchi, a teacher at Asa Messer Elementary, works with Joel Valdez, age 6. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
FREE DESIGN: Asa Messer Elementary School has been integrating technology with traditional classroom elements. Above, Leslie Tirocchi, a teacher at Asa Messer Elementary, works with Joel Valdez, age 6. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

By next fall, 39 Providence school principals will be developing programming based on a new policy called autonomy, an approach that could flip the traditional top-down administrative control in the central office on its head.
While that might seem like a dramatic interpretation, it is not far off the mark, according to district leaders spearheading the change. In fact, one principal is already seeing the benefits of decentralized decision-making and empowerment – the result of a “cross-pollination” of successful ideas such as blended learning modeled by another district elementary school.
“Autonomy means there is greater flexibility in decision-making at the building level,” said District Superintendent Susan F. Lusi, “so that over time, rather than the central office dictating to all schools, ‘This is how you’re going to do things,’ instead, school leaders are saying: ‘This is how we believe we can best support our students, and this is the support we need.’ ”
School-based autonomy will include 37 traditional public schools and two innovative high schools opening next year, she said. Principals, in particular, will have more direct control over budgets, the school day, and scheduling and structuring of the school classroom, she said.
“We are a low-performing district,” added Lusi. “We need to dramatically improve student learning. I believe and the board believes providing additional autonomy, with mechanisms for holding [school-based educators] accountable, is a vehicle for improving further, faster.”
The Providence Board of Education has been discussing the potential change for a year and a half, said Chairman Keith Oliveira, and in late November approved the new policy with the backing of the Providence Teachers Union, which will be involved in implementing it, he said.
Oliveira was the director of charter schools for the R.I. Department of Education, developing and authorizing many of them between 1999 and 2010, he said. The charter schools are a model of autonomous, decentralized education, he added. “What makes charter schools effective is, they are nimble and flexible, [and can] design programming around what [students’] needs are,” Oliveira said. “When you’re working around actual student need, you can put systems and programs in place and design for the outcomes you want. This is about creating learning environments that are truly student-centered.”
Lusi noted that educators are more invested, whatever their level of competency, if they have “some professional discretion and decision-making authority on behalf of their kids. When you go to charter schools, you see that. I want invested, capable professionals in our schools. We do [have that], but I think the investment can increase.”
Massachusetts Education Partnership reform initiatives are helping Providence pursue autonomy.
Providence is joining five Massachusetts districts, including Boston, to participate in the District Capacity Project, which has been underway for the past three years in five districts, including Brockton and Fall River, said Chad d’Entremont, executive director of the nonprofit, Boston-based Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy.
The center, whose mission is to improve public education through policy and practice, is a partner in the project, which matches trained facilitators to district teams comprised of administrators and labor leaders to improve student achievement through educational reform, d’Entremont said.
The Rhode Island school district is the first and only district to date beyond Massachusetts borders to embrace reform through the MEP, d’Entremont said. Other states like California and Illinois are similarly engaged, he said.
“There is an emerging national appetite to find a constructive way to do business that understands diverse perspectives within the education space and works collaboratively to achieve the shared goals of improved educational outcomes,” d’Entremont said. “Providence’s willingness to participate in this type of constructive approach to reform puts it on the cutting edge [in] finding a more effective and sustainable way to support change in our educational system.” In general, the MEP districts are not focused on autonomy, he said, but through collaboration with school administrators, community leaders, labor leaders and researchers are driving educational improvements based on collaborative practice.
Fall River is one district that has experimented with a form of autonomy, he added, trying to improve decision-making at the school level by introducing professional-learning communities within the schools.
The Brockton, Mass., school district has seen a rise in English-language learners who are Spanish and Portuguese, so that district is building a new school. Not all projects are of that scale, but most of the work in Massachusetts has focused on policy change, d’Entremont said.
Once a district takes on a unique project, it will have access to “content” experts at the Rennie Center who know best practices and how to design a program that will work, he added.
Rennie Center consultant Peter McWalters, a former education commissioner in Rhode Island, will facilitate the local collaboration, working with: two people from the Providence central office; a principal; teachers union President Mary Beth Calabro; two union members, one of whom is a classroom teacher; and two school board members.
“You want common expectations, but the issue of how you get that into the hands of teachers so they can design curriculum around it – that’s an individual, one-teacher-at-a-time problem,” McWalters explained.
Proposals being put together in Providence will involve the so-called Trailblazer Cluster of schools: Roger Williams and Esek Hopkins middle schools and Bailey Elementary School. “They went through an evaluation last year and were chosen to be in this cluster,” Lusi said. A small number of other schools will be involved in the autonomy approach next fall, she added.
Although these proposals are only beginning to enter the concept stage, Lusi and Denise Missry, principal of Asa Messer Elementary School, said Asa Messer’s recent approach to imitating, on a smaller scale, Pleasant View Elementary School’s blended-learning initiative – integrating technology with traditional classroom teaching – is an example of the kind of student-centered programming that one school can model for another.
In 2012, Pleasant Valley Principal Gara B. Field obtained $470,000 in federal and private grants to improve student-centered learning by integrating electronic whiteboards and iPads in every classroom.
Pleasant View has seen an increase in reading test scores and significant improvement in math, Lusi said.
Based on that success, Asa Messer began to replicate the blended-learning initiative “on a shoestring budget,” putting students in groups of eight and using the technology to teach them at their own pace, Missry said. The school had been closed, and when it reopened in the 2010-11 school year, increasing from 420 to 660 students, test scores, especially in math, had plummeted, she said.
“It was some ridiculously low percentage, under 35 percent in NECAP testing in math,” she said. “That provided us with a mandate: We needed to find something research-proven to work.”
The principal identified federal and local funding to purchase iPads for kindergarten and laptops for grades 1 and 2. Test scores from STAR math testing show strong increases in grade 1 and improvements for grades 2 through 5, she added.
“It’s very difficult to say these blended-learning classrooms are doing better than other classrooms,” she noted. “However, it seems to be [the case], because we have more students proficient … than we had at the beginning of last year.” •

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  1. To improve school performance, the “School-Within-a-School-Concept” should be employed in each school with more than 350 students. If a school has 600 students, it would be divided up into two separate schools with 300 students each. In each school, administrators, faculty members, parents, non-instructional staff and students would have an opportunity get to know and trust one another. In a short period of time, almost everyone would begin acting like a family where most members care about and want to help each other. A social commitment would develop where most members would begin working together to make the school a successful community. Because these schools would be small, curriculums designed to meet the cultural diverse needs of at risk student populations could be developed. Administrators, teachers and students, in these small schools, could use the team approach to implement curriculum goals and create group portfolios to represent their achievements. These small schools would be the equivalent of well run charter schools.