Double Time: Running behind, Winchester Elementary employs extra determination and drive
A Memphis teacher reports: Winchester has actually been "fresh started" twice now. So to say that they've avoided firing the school staff by avoiding state takeover when they've thrown the entire school out twice and started over in the last 3-4 years seems a bit like creative terminology to me.
Here is the note on the school's website: "Fresh Start" meant everybody had to reapply for a job. As a result, "two teachers, one clerical, four educational assistants, and the entire custodial and cafeteria staff returned. The remainder on the staff was newly hired through a special " Fresh Start" program in cooperation with the Division of Human Resources."
The site lists 32 faculty.
Note the way they're increasing scores: extra work with the bubble kids. That said, the emphasis on books is good.
By Ruma Banerji Kumar
There was a time day cares refused to pull their vans too close to Winchester Elementary School's front door. Kids were rowdy and fought in front of teachers and administrators on the front lawn.
These days, the school's green lawn is undisturbed and students politely remind principal Flora Childres to walk on the sidewalks when she unintentionally treads on the grass. The halls are quiet and orderly. This year, 30 teachers and staff feel safe and proud enough of Winchester Elementary to bring their own children to school here.
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If No Child Left Behind counted "adequate yearly progress" for making school staff and parents feel safer at the school, Winchester would have surely made the grade, teachers say.
But it's reading, math and attendance that get measured by the federal
government's accountability system. And despite gains in reading and attendance at the school, recurrently poor math performance kept this Whitehaven school on the state's list of troubled schools.
For being on that list more than three years in a row, Winchester Elementary is one of five Memphis schools that faced a state takeover under No Child Left Behind. However, Tennessee Department of Education officials are working with the Memphis district to avoid a takeover that could have led to the firing of school staff. The district has been working with state officials to draft reform plans for Winchester, Cypress Middle, Vance Middle, Geeter Middle and Westwood High.
Nationally, though, there's growing concern that states are too reluctant to take over persistently low-performing schools.
"The structure of NCLB allows for a high level of state autonomy in making these decisions. This freedom allows for innovation and smart local solutions, but also leaves space for mediocre reform," school leadership expert Rebecca Wolf DiBiase wrote in a September 2005 report for the Education Commission of the States.
In the five Memphis schools, principals are moving forward with their own strategies to improve reading and math scores -- even as the state prepares to spend more than half a million dollars bringing professional reform models and teacher trainers to the five schools over the next couple of months.
At Winchester, principal Flora Childres is grateful for the state department's cooperative approach.
Winchester was one of five "fresh start" schools two years ago. Childres was brought in after a more experienced principal wasn't successful at improving test scores or attendance. Nearly half the student population turns over each year.
Change was not easy. In her first six weeks at the school, Childres lost eight teachers. What she was asking of them was too hard, too different, they told her. She asked them to study test data, overhaul their teaching strategies, hammer reading in every aspect, fill classroom shelves with books. Books had been kept in a handful of crates before. Now every classroom has shelves with books. There are even books in the lunchroom, so children can read after eating.
Reading is required at Winchester for at least 90 uninterrupted minutes a day in every class. And the last 20 minutes of the day is reserved for reading, too.
Childres also worked to get to the bottom of poor attendance at her school. After talking to parents, she learned many of the students walking to school didn't have raincoats and that kept them out of school in bad weather. So, in mid-September, she found a community group that donated 500 raincoats to the school. She provides incentives for attendance. For each day they come to school, Winchester students get two "bronco bucs," which they use to buy toys, notebooks, gifts, games and candy from the school store.
This year, because math has been a perennial hurdle, Childres has two math specialists. One of them, Gail Banks, pulls students who scored in the 29th to 50th percentile in math out of class and gives them one-on-one instruction. The other, Keisa Jackson, goes into classrooms and pulls small groups of students who are slower at picking up the concepts to the back of the room and goes over the lessons with them again. Jackson also helps teachers teach math better. She models lessons and watches them as they try to do the same lessons on their own.
On a recent Tuesday, Jackson was in Remia Wilkins' fifth-grade class. While Wilkins led a lesson on mixed numbers and improper fractions, Jackson pulled aside six students lagging behind.
They huddled at a table in the back while she drew a pizza to help them understand the concept of fractions. She wrote an improper fraction -- 13/5 -- and asked them to break it down to a mixed number.
A boy eagerly shouted out the answer: "Two and three-fifths!" The others look confused, so the boy wrote it down for them, but incorrectly wrote three and two-fifths instead.
"Did you see how he got confused?" Jackson said later. "He knew the answer. And he understood the concept enough to tell me the right answer. But when it came to putting pencil to paper, he got it wrong. We have to work with these kids so the same mistakes don't happen when they're taking the TCAP."
Childres and the principals in the other four schools rely on the Keisa Jacksons in their schools -- not the state, not the district -- to drive the change they seek. Childres says her reform goes far beyond trying to meet the federal law's benchmarks.
"I can't spend all my time worrying about AYP (adequate yearly progress)," Childres said. "I have to prepare these children for middle school, for high school, for college. I have to get them ready for life."
--Ruma Banerji Kumar: 529-2596
— Ruma Banerji Kumar
Commercial Appeal
2005-12-05
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/education/article/0,2673,MCA_22897_4289353,00.html
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