Recently I had the privilege of listening to practitioners from Ohio’s high-performing districts who shared how they’re achieving success. These districts are earning A grades on their state report cards in notoriously difficult areas such as closing achievement gaps, effectively serving gifted students and students with disabilities, and increasing student achievement across the board.
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The series of events was hosted by Battelle for Kids in conjunction with the Ohio Department of Education, and I was able to hear from five of the exemplary districts: Marysville, Orange City, Oak Hills Local, Solon City, and Mechanicsburg. Here are the important commonalities I found among the strategies discussed.
1. Plus time
This strategy goes by a different name depending on which district you visit: “no-new-instruction time,” “flex time,” “plus time,” and “support classes” were all terms I heard, but the basic idea was the same. Each of these high flyers altered their daily schedule so that students received around forty minutes a day of either enrichment or remediation. To be clear, this isn’t an additional class in which students learn new information; instead, this is a time for students to either solidify or improve on what they know. How this looks on the ground depends on the district culture. In Solon, students with IEPs, students who failed their previous state assessment, and students struggling in a particular class receive additional support. The type of support, lesson topics, and the students in attendance are determined by student-specific data that teachers analyze and then use to plan instruction. In Marysville, every student in the district takes part in flex time, which is a daily forty-five-minute period organized into a nine-week class. These classes are designed and planned by teachers with a focus on remediation or extension. For example, a Marysville intervention specialist explained that while one student may receive intensive small-group instruction on pre-algebra concepts, other students may take part in a robotics course or band.
2. Data analysis and internal accountability
If there was one clear mantra throughout each presentation, it was the importance of creating, tracking, and acting on data. For example, Orange City talked about how their teachers leveraged common planning time to hold data meetings where teachers could not only analyze their own data, but share ideas for how to use the data to improve the practice of their colleagues. Oak Hills explained how their teachers complete walkthroughs of colleagues’ classrooms, share their observations, and create a system of data for monitoring effective teaching outside of the state’s teacher evaluation system. Perhaps the best use of data was in Solon, where district representatives emphasized that systems don’t matter unless the data is actually used to drive instruction. By using real-time data from common assessments that are created by teachers, educators in Solon are able to pinpoint (down to the level of individual test questions) areas for growth, brainstorm with other teachers and their principal (in a non-evaluative environment) ways to improve, and purposefully determine where students should be placed during flex time.
Several districts also mentioned quarterly data meetings in which principals share with and are accountable to superintendents about building-level data. This internal accountability is equally as important as tracking and acting on data. One district representative explained it this way: “Data isn’t about judgment; it’s about trying to uncover ways to do it better.” However, once those ways are pinpointed, “decisions are made and justified with data…and we hold ourselves accountable to the people we’re serving.” These accountability sentiments were echoed by several districts, making one thing clear: highly effective schools hold themselves accountable for being highly effective every day, all year—not just when school report cards are published.
3. Leveraging teacher talent and leadership
Professional development for teachers is incredibly important but notoriously bad. So how do high-performing districts make professional development better? By using what they have. A common thread among the high flyers is a desire to pinpoint their talented people and then, instead of patting them on the back and moving on to the next emergency, leveraging them into making the district better. For example, Marysville (which recently earned an A on their report card for serving students with disabilities) utilizes a nearly universal co-teaching model. In order to make the co-teaching model more effective, administrators identified a general education teacher and intervention specialist who had mastered the model (again using student achievement data to prove this) and then allowed them to lead professional development sessions on co-teaching. District representatives shared that co-teaching effectiveness skyrocketed after this session and subsequent collaboration—and their report card grade backs that up. But Marysville isn’t the only example. Representatives from each district explained how their administration works to give the best teachers influence over building and district decisions and opportunities to collaborate with other teachers, particularly during common planning times. Most importantly, these districts allow their highly effective teachers to share best practices as experts. After all, why spend money for outside experts when there are highly effective, proven experts in your midst?
4. High expectations and rigor for all students
This strategy was best explained by Oak Hills's assistant superintendent, who described precisely what high expectations for all students means: “All means all, and that’s all that all means.” In other words, although time and resources for students may need to vary depending on their needs, every student should be receiving rigorous instruction—every student, not just those expected to pass state tests. Orange City echoed these sentiments when they talked about the power of de-tracking students. Instead of placing students in contained or low-level class sequences, Orange City utilized inclusion for all but their most severely disabled students and required every student to be on a rigorous class track regardless of their performance history. By ensuring that the lowest-performing students were exposed to the same curriculum and expectations as other students—and by incorporating plus time—the district was able to earn an A on their report card grade for the lowest 20 percent of achievers.
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Although each of these high-performing districts undoubtedly has dozens of practices and policies that contribute to their state report card success--all of which could use deeper analysis than is possible here—the four listed above are a starting point for any district wishing to emulate that success. Time and time again, representatives from these districts emphasized that the achievement of their schools wasn’t because of some silver bullet or secret recipe, but a simple combination of identifying a strategy that works and acting on it—consistently and faithfully.
