A Feb. 5 News Tribune article described the Tacoma School District’s efforts to be designated as Washington state’s first “district-wide Innovative School Zone.”
Among the benefits would be the ability for Tacoma to seek a six-year waiver from a range of state regulations, including the requirement to offer 180 days of school to students.
As reported, the state appears to be rushing to embrace and reward “innovation” as an end in itself, without requiring any clear evidence or research base to support specific proposed innovations.
Many leading educational researchers, including John Hattie, author of “Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement,” have asserted that the lack of progress to significantly improve outcomes for all students and to close achievement gaps is not for lack of innovation. Harvard professor Richard Elmore characterizes most school reform efforts as “promiscuous and pathological” in their readiness to embrace the next fad.
Rather the failure to improve learning outcomes for all students is a result of school districts not meaningfully implementing the known essential, research-based factors influencing student achievement.
Although terminology varies, the consensus of most researchers is that student achievement is most dependent on:
• A system-wide implementation of a rigorous, content-rich curriculum provided to all students.
• Effective instruction in every classroom, grounded in the basics of quality lesson design.
• Significant attention to building students’ background knowledge through wide reading, particularly of nonfiction, and direct vocabulary instruction – particularly important in districts with large numbers of low-income students.
Further, it is essential that teachers who teach the same students or content collaborate regularly in teams (Professional Learning Communities, or PLCs) to plan lessons, design and administer common assessments, and intervene when students do not learn.
My school district, University Place, and others that have focused on these elements have realized measurable and in some cases dramatic increases in student achievement.
For example, teachers working together at our intermediate schools have turned around a sizeable achievement gap in mathematics; our low-income students now score on par with the state average for non-low income students.
Our district was recently identified by the independent Washington School Research Center as among the “top 5 percent of high-performing districts in the state” based on five years of student achievement data that take into account district demographics (e.g., poverty rate). SAT scores improved dramatically over the same time period that the district’s free/reduced meals rate doubled.
Despite the use of research-based school-improvement strategies and significant gains in student achievement, none of the schools in our district would qualify as an “innovative school” according to the state.
The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s scoring rubric for the first round of Innovation Grants (which was released only after the grants were awarded) gave points to project-based, multidisciplinary and small learning community programs, and – most oddly – awarded points if the school needed a waiver to accomplish its proposal.
Apparently, being able to advance student learning within existing regulations is evidence of a lack of innovation. The strategies most supported by educational research – straightforward but not easy – likewise do not qualify as innovative.
All of us – teachers, administrators and community members – must diligently work together to improve learning for all students. But the expenditure of time, money and emotional energy to pursue multiple school improvement agendas that value innovation over achievement is not acceptable.
Tacoma School Board member Karen Vialle is quoted as saying, “if it doesn’t work, we can learn from it.” But if it doesn’t work, the students will not learn from it, and it will be too late for them.
I wish the best for Tacoma School District; I wish that it becomes a “district-wide Student Achievement Zone.”
Kathie Zurfluh, a health and fitness teacher at Evergreen Primary School, is president of the University Place Education Association, the union that represents that district’s schoolteachers.
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