Aldine Independent School District

At 7:15 a.m., shortly after students at Aldine Ninth Grade School recite their twin pledges—to the United States and to Texas—they hear this message from Principal Walter Stewart:

"Students, you are here for one reason and one reason only, and that is to learn. If you are not here for that reason there will be consequences for your actions...Failure is not an option."

No student knows that better than 16-year-old Daniela Vela, who later that day will take a 60-question test on world geography (her third attempt to pass) that will determine whether she becomes a sophomore next year. If she fails, she falls one credit short and faces the embarrassing prospect of moving to the high school as a "repeat" ninth-grader.

"I'll do my best to get the credits," says Daniela. "Some of the words are really hard...If they put the questions into big words, I don't get that."

The push by teachers and school leaders here to encourage students like Daniela to keep trying illustrates why Houston's Aldine Independent School District is a four-time Broad Prize finalist (also in 2004, 2005 and 2008). What makes Aldine distinctive is its steady academic progress and ability to close gaps—despite the fact that 84 percent of area families are low-income, compared to 55 percent across Texas.

"The thing that makes what we do so special is the fact that we have so many economically disadvantaged students," says Superintendent Wanda Bamberg.

Between 2005 and 2008, reading achievement gaps between white students across Texas and Aldine's Hispanic and African-American students narrowed in all grades. In math, the gap for those students narrowed in elementary and middle schools. For Aldine's Hispanic middle school students, that gap narrowed by 10 percentage points. Further, in 2008, Aldine's Hispanic and low-income students achieved higher average proficiency rates than their counterparts statewide in elementary, middle and high school reading and math. Aldine's African-American students also achieved higher proficiency rates than their counterparts statewide in math at all school levels and in reading at the middle and high school levels.

Behind that success lie many strategic district-wide efforts put in place over the last decade, including a sophisticated online curriculum and assessment database allowing teachers to access proven model lessons designed by other teachers, frequent assessments providing teachers and instructional leaders with current data on each student, and an aggressive teacher recruiting program enabling the district to attract high-quality teachers who are likely to stay in the district.

Those drivers are apparent here at Aldine Ninth Grade School, a school designed to support ninth-graders during their transition year, where highly motivated teachers have taken to heart the district's mandate not to let low-performing students slip between the cracks. Teachers here encourage—no, demand—that students make up lost credits. The school offers after-school classes and Saturday school. Here, and in all the ninth-grade schools in Aldine, students who fall behind in algebra can take dual-track algebra, which combines refresher algebra and regular course algebra, so they can get back on par with their peers.

Daniela is an example of this intense effort. She needed to earn at least a 70 percent on her final exam to secure the last credit required to become a sophomore. Her world geography teacher, Adelle Pratt, has been overseeing her "recovery:" twice-a-week after school sessions and four hours on Saturdays for the last month. With only days left in the school year, she has whittled the number of failing students from 69 to 26 and hasn't given up on the remaining.

After Daniela took the test later that day, Pratt sent this email: "I am absolutely thrilled to let you know that not only did Daniela pass—she earned an 82 percent...These kids will be successful past a point that they can even envision right now and I refuse to believe otherwise."

Read more about Aldine at www.broadprize.org/past_winners/2009.html.

Contact:
Mike Keeney
281.985.6213
mkeeney@aldine.k12.tx.us

Broward County Public Schools

Eighth-grader Alleeyah Wade-Lester didn't raise her hand to volunteer to read her expository writing lesson aloud, but when tapped by writing coach Linda Foster, she proved more than ready. With a confident voice complemented by oversized earrings and trendy black glasses, Alleeyah gave a performance that left the other students in her class hungry for more.

The writing task that day at Broward County, Florida's William Dandy Middle School: Where would you want to take your family on vacation and why? Alleeyah's answer: Jamaica, with its "beautiful watermelons...famous curry chicken falling off the bone and you can smell the spices a mile away...Jamaican beef patties made from scratch...and last but not least the rice and beans."

Her class that day was part of the school's "Success Days" initiative where electives are set aside and core subjects, including writing, get double time with spare teachers acting as coaches. While Success Days are a tool invented at Dandy, they arose because the district tapped schools like Dandy to implement a district-wide effort—part of Broward County's seven-goal strategic plan—to push research-based instructional strategies into the classroom.

Empowering schools to come up with creative strategies to meet specific district-level student performance targets is one reason Broward County Public Schools shows up at or near the top of rankings for Florida's big school districts.

For the second year in a row, Broward County is a Broad Prize finalist, once again demonstrating not just overall academic progress but gap-closing success. Between 2005 and 2008, Broward narrowed achievement gaps between African-American and white students in math at all levels and in middle school reading. The gap closures achieved by African-American students are among the top half of fastest closing gaps in the state. The district accomplished the same for its low-income students as compared to the state averages for non-low-income students.

The threads behind the strategy that accomplished these gains date back roughly five years to when district leaders realized their sprawling school district—the sixth largest in the nation—wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Students coming in the door were high-tech; the district wasn't. With more than 36,000 employees, the district should have been run like a Fortune 500 company, only it wasn't. And while select urban districts in other parts of the state and country were making gains with diverse, low-income student populations, Broward wasn't as successful.

Within a few years, the district had put in place a two-pronged turnaround strategy—using technology to engage students and employing sophisticated data analysis to drive teaching and learning—and it began paying dividends. Says Superintendent James Notter: "Our kids live in a tetherless world; we have to meet them there."

In the sprawling Broward district, neighborhoods are referred to by their ZIP codes. The ZIP known as the poorest and toughest is 33311, home to Dillard High School, the type of school rewarded first by the district with the best technology. In order to meet Notter's goal of reaching students in that "tetherless world," Broward turned Dillard into a high-tech, performing arts magnet school that draws a mix of students, both from around the district and from the local neighborhood.

During the years of its recent academic growth, Broward's strategy to boost technology worked hand-in-hand with the district's simultaneous effort to ramp up reliance on sophisticated student data when making key decisions on teaching and learning.

At the beginning of the year, at the click of a mouse, teachers at Dandy and elsewhere in Broward accessed achievement data on every student through the district's "virtual counselor" interface, learning exactly where each student stands on individual skills. Teachers then set year-long student achievement goals—by class and by student—based on their incoming students' prior achievement data. The district similarly targeted teacher professional development to help teachers meet those goals, with all professional development courses designed and approved based on proven data and teaching strategies.

Then during the year, teachers continued tracking student data with mini-assessments, which were analyzed for ways to tinker with the academic calendar to quickly adjust teaching as needed before the more important benchmark tests. Broward teachers carry around bar-graph charts telling them where their class (and individual students) stands.

All that analysis led Dandy leaders to a solution for the school's failing status: offer students Success Days to focus on a handful of key skills in which they need work. Classes combine for team teaching (if a child didn't adjust to one teacher's style, perhaps the lessons will stick when taught by another teacher). The Success Days become more intense—as many as three or four days a week—as the FCATs (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) approach in March.

District leaders credit that one move with turning Dandy from a "D" school to an "A" school in just a few years.

The new approach appears to be working for Alleeyah. She scored high on the writing FCAT, more than enough to bolster her dreams of becoming a University of Florida "Gator."

Read more about Broward at www.broadprize.org/past_winners/2009.html.

Contact:
Charles Webster
754-321-2300
charles.webster@browardschools.com

Gwinnett County Public Schools

Meet "stretch" student Tyshane Shannon, an 18-year-old high school senior with a quick smile and an honest sense of his pluses and minuses. Tyshane is a self-described so-so student who rarely studies. Often, his time is taken up working a landscaping job.

Tyshane, however, knows something else about himself. When he hears or reads something just once, he remembers it. Thinking that meant he could tackle challenging coursework in high school despite his lackluster grades, he inquired about taking an Advanced Placement class—and was welcomed.

At Berkmar High School in Georgia's Gwinnett County Public Schools, Tyshane is considered an ideal candidate for a district-wide initiative that persuades students to stretch themselves academically. While many American high schools talk about encouraging students to challenge themselves with AP courses, Berkmar and other Gwinnett high schools use velvet hammers to aggressively steer students into advanced classes.

The approach also calls for turning teachers into recruiters.

AP physics teacher Walt Snow describes his recruitment efforts as "redefining what failure means." He looks for students with academic profiles that predict they would score no higher than 1 on an AP test, the lowest score on a five-point scale, and encourages them to give AP physics a try.

Although it may sound counter-intuitive, the strategy works. A substantial number of non-traditional AP students end up scoring a 3 or higher on the AP exams, earning advanced credit. Those who fall short still develop confidence and prove they can learn rigorous college preparatory material.

Fast-rising participation rates among African-American and Hispanic students taking the SAT, ACT and AP exams illustrates one reason why Gwinnett County Public Schools, where 29 percent of the students are African-American and 22 percent Hispanic, is a first- time finalist for The Broad Prize.

Gwinnett's strategy of pushing low-performing students to stretch academically started with top district leadership. "I don't know why schools ever got so far into remediation," says Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks. "Unless we get students that are behind into higher level classes, such as AP, you're never going to close the gaps. Forget remediation; talk acceleration."

Anyone trying to understand how Gwinnett County Public Schools manages to post impressive academic results despite steadily rising numbers of poor and minority students needs to look back into history a bit to study the collision of two forces.

In the 1980s, this suburban Atlanta district was one of the fastest growing counties in the country, well on its way to becoming the nation's 14th largest school district it is today. But by the early 1990s, it became clear that the Gwinnett district was going to be more than just big; it was going to be very diverse, which is exactly what happened.

At about that time, Georgia adopted statewide "outcome-based" learning standards—defining skills required at each grade level—for all Georgia students. In Gwinnett County and elsewhere, many parents viewed the changes with suspicion. Given the rapid demographic changes, with more low-income and minority students moving into the district, would these be "minimum" standards, dragging down expectations for all students?

School Board Chairman Daniel Seckinger and the rest of the board teamed up with Wilbanks to launch Gwinnett in a different direction. Hundreds of hours of efforts by teachers, parents and school officials led eventually to Gwinnett adopting its own academic standards, far tougher than anything offered by the state. The new standards nailed down rigorous learning objectives for every grade and every subject.

The final standards were codified in a living document dubbed "AKS," for Academic Knowledge and Skills. Unlike most school improvement master plans, this one never drew dust on the shelf. The district annually revisits the AKS to ensure they are continually aligned to state and local standards, and every five years or so the district conducts a deeper review by subject area. Today, in part because of the AKS, Gwinnett County schools are on a far different trajectory than neighboring districts.

Now, the percentage of African-American and Hispanic students taking and passing AP and college exams exceeds that of their peers statewide. For example, 12 percent of the African-American high school students in Gwinnett took at least one AP course in the spring of 2008. Among those, 47 percent scored a passing 3 or above on the exam. In contrast, in Georgia only 8 percent of African-American students take AP courses, and only 23 percent of those pass the test

Teachers at Berkmar High School are baffled by the national debate about whether admitting all takers into Advanced Placement courses dumbs down the curriculum. Look at our success record, they say—this 90 percent minority urban high school will administer 1,400 AP exams to more than 700 students this year.

Tyshane, a most unlikely AP student, appreciates the stretch. In his junior year at Berkmar he took AP U.S. history and scored a 3. In his senior year, he's taking two AP economic classes as well as AP world history.

"Here at Berkmar, they have a doctrine that if you put kids into advanced classes they will rise to the occasion. We proved that," says Tyshane. "Look at me. Academically, I had been written off. Nobody expected me to succeed."

Read more about Gwinnett at www.broadprize.org/past_winners/2009.html.

Contact:
Sloan Roach
678-301-6021
sloan_roach@gwinnett.k12.ga.us

Long Beach Unified School District

Here in Long Beach, Calif., Redondo Avenue runs directly to the beach, neatly splitting the city into east and west. The east side has long enjoyed cool California bungalows, trendy restaurants and great schools. In contrast, the west side has housed an oil refinery, low-income apartments, and until recently, largely unsuccessful schools.

While the economic dividing line in Long Beach remains as steady as ever, school reputations have not remained the same. Today, schools such as Webster and Roosevelt elementary schools on the poorer west side are the academic superstars, surpassing many of the schools on the more affluent east side.

Not many cities in America have seen as dramatic a turnaround in their schools, which explains why Long Beach is once again a Broad Prize finalist, its fifth year as a finalist for an honor it won in 2003. Just the latest example of its ongoing success: Between 2005 and 2008, both participation rates and passing rates for African-American and Hispanic students taking Advanced Placement exams in core subjects increased in Long Beach—typically, these two rates move in opposite directions. Hispanic students now also make up the largest subgroup of Long Beach students taking the AP.

To grasp the turnaround requires understanding what people at all levels of the district commonly refer to as the "Long Beach Way," a unique bottom-up, top-down relationship where the district office never tries radical reforms, never pushes beyond what local school staff can realistically absorb. Instead, reforms are deliberately selected based on proven results in the field and always paired with intensive professional development.

Although many school districts often rapidly introduce new programs without the necessary wraparound support—simultaneous teacher training, allowing sufficient time for teachers to fulfill new expectations or seeking teacher buy-in or on-the-ground feedback—in Long Beach it's all about methodical, data-driven, supported improvement.

Take Long Beach's Signal Hill Elementary as an example of how this all works.

Perched high above the city on the grounds where oil was first discovered in California, the school is surrounded by rusting oil derricks and wrapped in a tall metal security fence.

The odds are against these students—nearly every child comes from a high-poverty family. Among the parents of the more than 700 students there, maybe a dozen graduated from a four-year college. However, measured by the state's Academic Performance Index, Signal Hill is the 11th best-ranked school within this 93-school district. On a list of the most-alike schools in California—schools with the same profile of poverty and ethnic mix—Signal Hill ranks first...by a comfortable margin.

During a school walk-through, the Long Beach Way starts to become visible as you see the implementation of academic initiatives that grew organically in one or more Long Beach schools years ago and then were harnessed by the district and gradually introduced in low-performing schools like Signal Hill.

For example, in Nicole Kelly's fifth-grade class, students are engaged in MAP2D (Math Achievement Program Professional Development), the district's signature math instruction sequence. Developed by a Long Beach elementary school teacher, MAP2D was first tried in five low-performing elementary schools in 2004-05 and has since been expanded throughout the district.

Kelly's lesson today is a review of multiplication and division of fractions. She models the instruction using an overhead projector, and then weaves her way into small group instruction, where students reach a consensus on the correct way to solve a problem. Finally, Kelly randomly selects one student to present that group's solution in front of the entire class.

What Kelly does sounds deceptively simple. But when properly implemented, MAP2D draws on nationally acclaimed best practices of collaborative learning, heterogeneous grouping and public presentation (valuable for English-learner students)—and propels math scores upward.

The secret to success is proper implementation. In Long Beach, that's not left to chance. Long Beach invests heavily in establishing data-driven instruction. But unique in Long Beach is the use of data to drive refinements to professional development. Kelly's teaching method—everything from the problem chosen, to the time spent teaching it, to the exact questions she asks of the class—has been informed by data, starting with isolating missed math questions on tests.

One of Long Beach's long-time educators, who both witnessed and then helped engineer the district's significant transformation (including coining "The Long Beach Way") is Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser. He attended Long Beach schools as a child, student-taught here and then made his first mark as leader after turning around Signal Hill back in the year when it was a struggling school, the first of many low-income schools here that underwent transformations.

As recently as seven years ago, Redondo Avenue still served as the dividing line between good and bad schools. No more. Says Steinhauser, "Today, that distinction is totally lost...You can go to every quadrant of this district and find a distinguished school."

Read more about Long Beach at www.broadprize.org/past_winners/2009.html.

Contact:
Chris Eftychiou
562-997-8250
ceftychiou@lbschools.net

Socorro Independent School District

Excited about the prospect of helping other students, third-grader Lorene Pinales squirms in her seat as literacy coach Matthew Gorges spins through lessons for struggling second-graders. Lorene is the big kid, the role model in this catch-up tutoring class held during the school day.

Only a year ago, Lorene herself was a struggling reader, but thanks to boosts from school tutors and other district-level reforms, she now serves as a role model at Escontrias Elementary, a high-poverty school located only a mile from the Mexican border in the hard-pressed lower valley region outside El Paso, Texas.

In previous years, Escontrias and other schools in the Socorro Independent School District scraped the test score bottom. No longer is this the case. In 2008, Socorro schools outperformed other Texas schools serving students with similar income levels in reading and math at all grade levels. Between 2005 and 2008, Socorro schools were more successful than the state at increasing the percentage of students overall—and low-income and Hispanic students taken separately—who achieved proficiency in reading and math at all levels.

But what changes in this border district's history explain such gains?

What happened at Escontrias is a window into a district-wide reform. Before the 2007-08 school year, this elementary school offered little support for teaching and learning. There was no pullout class for poor readers, little help for struggling teachers and no effective accountability system. When the bell rang, teachers simply closed their doors: visitors of any kind were not expected.

Today, by contrast, Escontrias teachers embrace the district's relatively new approach to accountability. Not only have they become accustomed to a new open-door policy, but they also expect visitors with feedback and welcome the extra help. Escontrias Principal Magdalena Aguilar, who in 2007 was strategically placed in her school by district leadership looking for a strong new leader who could infuse fresh ideas and strategies, quickly pulled together a team of seasoned administrators and tasked them with providing teachers with specific support. Similarly, she surrounded struggling students with literacy coaches who would provide them with adequate help.

The results show: In just one year after she took over the school, science scores at Escontrias rose dramatically by 29 percent, math scores by 27 percent and reading scores by 16 percent, all part of a district-led effort to help faltering students recover and thrive.

Turning Socorro from a just-getting-by district to an academically ambitious district required promoting principals such as Aguilar, but those promotions wouldn't have worked absent district insistence that all Socorro staff abide by open-door collaboration.

In a district where the typical student comes from a low-income family and English is their second language, switching to a collaborative teaching and learning culture was a bumpy ride. Along the way, some principals—and even the superintendent who sparked many of the reforms —departed, along with many teachers who preferred the old way of teaching.

As the data reveal, however, efforts to encourage collaboration among teachers and administrators transformed the culture of Socorro schools for the better.

In addition to the creation of collaborative teaching environments, Socorro's academic gains between 2005 and 2008 also resulted from district leaders' call for all schools to use highly detailed pacing guides for nearly every subject in every grade. The district also made sure schools built in common planning time when teachers could work together to use assessment data. And, Socorro leaders made a district-wide push to reach struggling students through widespread re-teaching and tutoring. In all schools, as soon as students show signs of being at risk of drifting away, teachers and administrators reach out to re-engage them academically.

"It's not about getting kids to pass (the state test) any more. That's not even up for discussion," says Laura Valera, a middle school science teacher, of the new Socorro culture. "It's about how much more you can do for them. We don't allow them to not do well."

Read more about Socorro at www.broadprize.org/past_winners/2009.html.

Contact:
Daniel R. Escobar
915-937-0282
descob02@sisd.net