Here’s why some schools receiving state intervention improve and others don’t

About a year ago, the Office of School Improvement at the Georgia Department of Education analyzed the more than 240 struggling schools it serves out of the state’s 2,292 public schools to answer this confounding question:

Why do some of the schools that receive state intervention improve their academic achievement, and why do others that receive the same state intervention not improve?

The office examined the 10 percent of schools that improved the most and the bottom 10 percent that improved the least. And the study revealed a clean conclusion to this messy problem: “What works is the inverse of what doesn’t work,” Will Rumbaugh, the GaDOE’s director of school and district effectiveness, said during the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education symposium Jan. 6 at the Georgia Public Broadcasting headquarters in Atlanta.

What works and what doesn’t work can be summarized by three major reasons, Rumbaugh said:

▪  Coherence

▪  Ownership

▪  Staff

Coherence

Schools that continue to struggle show they are struggling as soon as folks enter the facility, Rumbaugh said.

“The school building doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You walk in, and it’s incoherent. Nothing makes sense. Things don’t fit together. The curriculum doesn’t fit together. It’s just almost chaotic in a sense, as far as procedures.”

Meanwhile, schools that improve make a good first impression, Rumbaugh said.

“If you go into a good school,” he said, “everything makes sense. You know where to go. You know what to do. … It’s coherent. It’s clear.”

Ownership

Schools that continue to struggle don’t have enough staff, students or supporters trying to improve their school, Rumbaugh said.

“There’s a pervasive sense of ‘We don’t own this problem,’” he said. “There’s not a collective sense of ‘Hey, we’re all in this. We believe we’re a part of the solution.’ There isn’t that kind of culture.”

Meanwhile, schools that improve have a united effort, Rumbaugh said.

“You can feel a culture, and you can hear a culture, where everyone – everyone – in the building owns the building,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘That’s not my job’ or ‘That’s not my student.’”

Staff

Schools that continue to struggle don’t have enough lifelong learners on staff, Rumbaugh said.

“The problems kind of persist because the staff is not getting better and better,” he said. “They’re not experiencing development. They’re not using each other to understand what’s going on with the students. They’re not sharpening their saws.”

Although the staff might know what’s supposed to happen, he added, “nobody’s making sure it does happen.”

Meanwhile, schools that improve ensure what’s supposed to happen indeed happens, Rumbaugh said.

“Professionals come together,” he said. “They look at what’s going on in the classrooms. They look at the data, and they help each other improve.”

Leadership

All of which points to leadership as the key to school improvement, Rumbaugh emphasized.

Avis King, the GaDOE’s deputy superintendent for school improvement, said during the symposium, “The most important thing we’re doing is working with leadership. You’ve got to have leadership in that school building. I don’t just mean leadership in the principal. You’ve got to build that leadership team and the capacity of those teachers. If you don’t have that, you cannot be effective.

“If that principal leaves, then you have to start over. But if you build the capacity in that building with those teacher leaders, you can keep it going, not only there but from the school to the district level, where those leaders are all in sync and they’re all going in the same direction.”

Approach

That’s why the GaDOE is changing its approach to serving its struggling schools. Experts from the state’s Office of School Improvement used to bypass the district administration and communicate only with the school’s leadership.

“We found out that was a problem,” King said. “You could be doing really, really well in that school, but if your district had barriers and things were going on at the district level that was impeding the progress of that school, the school couldn’t remain doing well for very long. So now, we have the district effectiveness specialist team go in and work with the district, and they align the work from that school to the district.”

A supervisor from the district’s office also visits the struggling schools along with the state-level expert to “listen to everything, so everybody knows what’s going on and everybody has a common language of the work that is happening,” King said.

“We’ve been learning from our schools,” Rumbaugh said. “… We’re kind of resetting our direction as an agency.”

Rumbaugh added, “This may sound strange, but we’ve decided who our customer is. Before, you could ask anybody who the customer is, and it could be different people. … We’re really serving the leadership of the schools and the districts, because it’s their responsibility to make sure these schools improve.”

Just like coherence, ownership and staff are essential components for school improvement, they also seem to be crucial for the GaDOE to help those schools improve. Rumbaugh called it a “coherent instructional system.”

“If you’re a school leader, what’s coming at you is a lot of different things,” he said. “It’s very confusing. It’s not a lack of talent or will. We just need to make a simple adjustment.”

That means one assessment to determine a school’s needs, one improvement plan tailored to that school’s needs, and one state-level expert for that school to communicate with for access to all of the resources available, instead of multiple assessments, multiple improvement plans and multiple experts intervening, Rumbaugh said.

“This is the thing we’re really working hard on,” he said, “and I think it’s going to have a powerful effect.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2017 at 12:10 AM with the headline "Here’s why some schools receiving state intervention improve and others don’t."