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Michigan Mentoring Plan
Ohanian Comment: Isn't it interesting that experts always come from someplace else? This is at least an improvement; the experts didn't arrive by jet for a day to dispense their expertise.
The expert educators were on loan from districts like Birmingham, Detroit and Ann Arbor and placed in the state's most needy schools with one goal in mind: helping staff improve the way students learn.
The state program -- Partnership for Success -- appears to have paid off in its two-year run, with students at most grade levels showing strong classroom improvement.
Madison Middle School in Pontiac was among the 14 schools targeted. There, Linda Smith, an English teacher at Birmingham Seaholm High School, spent two years working with the school's staff and administrators.
Among the changes that occurred with Smith's assistance:
The school brought back a team approach, in which teachers had more time to work and plan together. They began classes two hours later than normal on Tuesdays to allow for staff development. And every other month, new teachers got together to talk about ideas and strategies that worked, often getting help from seasoned staff.
Smith, now working in the Oakland Schools, the county's intermediate school district, is certain the school can keep up the work now that her two-year run is over, even with a new principal on board.
"My dream is that those things that were put in place will continue," Smith said.
The program "certainly made an impact," said Andrea Williams, who until recently was principal at Madison, a job she held for two years.
"She was able to bring in ideas that we were able to take and make a difference," Williams said.
Partnership for Success was sponsored by the Michigan Department of Education after the state Legislature mandated the department assist schools with poor scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program test.
The Partnership for Success program is undergoing changes for the 2003-04 school year, partly because funding is no longer available, and partly because far more schools need assistance, said Yvonne Caamal Canul, the program coordinator.
So instead of one expert working with one school, they will work as part of a team with experts from eight intermediate school districts and another office within the education department to assist multiple schools, 216 in all.
The local ISDs participating are: Oakland Schools, Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency and Washtenaw Intermediate School District.
Canul said she believes this will be the last year the partnership will run as a state effort. But she's hopeful it can be picked up on a regional basis and operated by intermediate school districts.
"I'm not sure how you turn a school around if you don't have some kind of outside expertise coming in to work with the people who are there on a day-to-day basis and trying to do the best job they know how to do," Canul said.
Poor-performing schools also will get help from tool kits being prepared by those involved in the program. Those kits, which Canul said should be available in March, will give schools everything they need to complete a self-analysis and determine what's needed for school reform.
Experts, called partner educators, were recruited from local school districts and assigned to a school. They spent the two school years working with the school's staff.
"We didn't presume we had all the answers. We wanted to help them discover their own solutions for their unique issues," said Ron Collins, a partner educator who worked with the Barbara Jordan School in Detroit. Collins is on loan from his job as principal at Thurston Elementary School in Ann Arbor.
Canul said the program was modeled after similar efforts in Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky. But unlike in some other states, the Michigan experts didn't have the latitude to force changes.
Canul said that lack of power didn't hurt.
"It ended up being a better way of helping the schools, because the program focused on getting school staff working together on school improvement efforts on a long-term basis."
The experts had three functions: strengthen leadership in the building by being a mentor to the principal, identify leaders within the teaching staff and help staff come up with a school improvement plan and carry it out.
Early data about the program's impact is encouraging. But more work needs to be done, because though students made marked improvement, most still are performing below their grade level, Canul said.
Another concern: The scores indicate third- fourth- and fifth-grade students in the program did worse on reading and writing tests at the end of the 2002-03 year than they did at the beginning.
The most dramatic reading improvement came at the first-grade level. At the beginning of the year, just 14.5 percent of the students were performing at or above their grade level. That number improved to 33.5 percent by the spring.
As a whole, though, students still performed below grade level.
"We're not at all happy with only half of our students reading at or above grade level. But we certainly are pleased to see there is forward motion," said Canul.
— Lori Higgins
Mentoring teachers propels students
Detroit News
2003-08-29
http://www.freep.com/news/education/npfs29_20030829.htm
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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