Ideas on how to improve public schools and enhance student learning are everywhere.  Not so widespread are programs that have stood the test—on the education frontlines.  Here's a sampling of AFT and affiliate initiatives that have taken good ideas and put them into practice.

Promote union/school district collaboration
Teams participate in training to promote sustained gains in school

It wasn’t the first time they had attended the training. This was the ninth Institute on Effective Leadership for Academic Achievement, and both Sakamoto and Gottlob were at the Jan.. 25-28 institute to sharpen their skills as workshop presenters. They would return to Pajaro Valley to conduct school, district and regional training modeled after the Brooklyn institute, held Jan. 25-28 at the UFT’s Brooklyn office.

The institute draws from the expertise of frontline educators in a way that joins teachers and administrators around a clear plan, said Sakamoto, a member of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers. “If you follow [this approach], it’s internalized” and far more powerful than just a canned program.

This chance to present training to colleagues from districts around the country offered a fresh perspective, Sakamoto said after winding up a session on communication skills. “You appreciate the support from the audience—their fantastic responses and the deep thinking behind them,” she explained. The elementary school teacher says her experience as a presenter gave her new perspective. “You’re always learning something new.”

‘Ordinary heroes’

Several speakers at the institute stressed that the work undertaken by the district teams couldn’t be more crucial in today’s high-stakes, high-pressure education climate where too many districts have pulled education reform models off the shelf and imposed them on schools like martial law.

“You are the ordinary heroes” of successful school improvement, AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese told the more than 160 institute participants, teams of teachers, administrators, principals, superintendents, higher education faculty and union leaders who came from as far away as California and Texas. “You could have gotten some silver bullet [school improvement model], but you chose to do it by rolling up your sleeves with colleagues and making something that will endure.”

The emphasis at the training was on school improvement built on consensus and the shared goal of improved student achievement. Participants learned how to draw from the expertise and diverse perspectives of the entire school community—from classroom teachers, students and parents to district superintendents and school board officials—and then discover ways in which these ideas and concerns could be grouped and prioritized. This lays the groundwork for an action plan that’s shaped and tailored to the individual needs of districts, schools and students. And because it’s work that begins with buy-in at every level, the chances are much better for sustained improvement that’s ingrained into the life of the classroom. That’s a distinct advantage over approaches that simply graft some outside models on schools and districts.

“There are two different strands of education reform,” UFT president Randi Weingarten told the crowd. “There’s the strand that will not work and [will make] people miserable, and there’s the strand that you are doing,” observed Weingarten, who is also an AFT vice president. “Your way will succeed for kids.”

Training at the institute focused on team building, effective communication, professional development and using student data for informed decision-making. There was also time set aside for individual district teams to meet and confer on how these approaches could work in their systems. In recent years, the institute also has moved to expand its reach through regional training institutes and train-the-trainer strategies.

This was the fourth institute for Gottlob, a principal at Freedom Elementary School in Pajaro, who was helping to present the team-building lesson at the January event. In California, Gottlob also has participated in two regional trainings and has seen the approaches featured at the institute take root in schools across her district. “Teachers at my school have a lot of expertise and experience,” and this approach uses it to good effect. The key to making it work for a building level administrator, she says, “is to believe in your staff.”

The institute places a premium on drawing as many diverse voices as possible from each district’s community. That broad support is the basis for a phrase repeated frequently by institute trainers: “The answer is in this room.” And so, too, are the right questions. At the Data Informed Decision-Making session, for example, small groups were presented with a dilemma many school districts face these days—a school that failed to make adequate yearly progress under NCLB because of the performance of its special education and English language learner populations. Often the response to this situation is to look for any quick fix that can at least temporarily get a bump in test scores from these groups. Instead, the groups at this session looked at the test results as an opportunity for asking the right questions: What do these and other data results at the school say about our curriculum and instruction, about student support services, about professional development, about school climate and family involvement? The questions generated in the workshop underscore the belief that student data is not a hammer (with teachers serving as the nail) but a flashlight to reveal opportunities for genuine improvement.

Ready, fire, aim

If the type of work promoted by the institute seems to be thoughtful, deliberative and painstaking, there’s good reason. It is.

The institute’s methods are a stark counterpoint to the types of remedies that, intentionally or not, have been promoted by the current installment of NCLB. The pressure cooker of making AYP, of seeing many schools mislabeled as “failures,” has prompted something akin to panic in many systems. It’s promoted strategies aimed at boosting scores rather than actually improving teaching and learning, such as focusing resources and instruction on students who can lift scores with relatively little effort. It’s what one presenter at the institute labeled the “ready, fire, aim” method of school improvement.

With Congress poised to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, one of the messages the AFT will be sending to Capitol Hill is that the new law needs to get behind real school solutions, with staying power and buy-in at every level of the school and community, Cortese told the crowd. Even with adequate resources, NCLB can still fail, she said. The next law needs to build on “mechanisms that help teachers, classified employees and administrators improve teaching and learning,” she explained, and that’s the stand the union and many other concerned education and labor groups will take into the reauthorization process.

Insist on safe and orderly schools
Parents and the public back discipline programs in schools

AFT-West Virginia and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association recently conducted a poll, which found that parents and members of the public are most concerned about school safety issues; disorderly classrooms and bullying head their list. And 90 percent of those surveyed say they want stronger policies and programs to promote student discipline.

“The public is right to say we can’t hide our heads in the sand and ignore serious problems,” says AFT-West Virginia president and AFT vice president Judy Hale. “When kids can’t concentrate because of a constant ruckus, or are scared to go to school because of bullying or the presence of drugs, we have to deal with the problem.”

In Lyons, N.Y., the union-supported school improvement team at Lyons Elementary School saw—and seized—an opportunity to address the growing number of discipline cases that were being referred to the principal’s office.

“We wanted to squash the problem before it became a problem too big to solve,” says Colleen Bezant, a fifth-grade teacher and chair of the school improvement team at Lyons. School social workers coordinate the school’s anti-bullying program, called Second Step. The program is popular with teachers and students alike; it focuses on reinforcing skills in empathy, impulse control, problem solving, and anger management.

This year, Bezant is helping the school introduce a character education program called ROAR, which highlights respect, organization, acceptance and responsibility.

Laura Pyke, president of the Lyons Teachers Association, a New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) local, says the union has a good working relationship with the district and its superintendent, and the school improvement team is quick to push for necessary changes.

The work school officials and union members are doing in Lyons is right in step with a call NYSUT made last summer: The state should provide funding to train teachers and other school employees in violence-prevention measures as well as additional aid to pay for security and programs to strengthen support among parents and community members.

“Schools must be safe, orderly places for children to learn and for teachers to teach. There should be zero tolerance for any actions that distract students and teachers,” says NYSUT president and AFT vice president Richard Iannuzzi.

“It’s going to take a combination of measures, including the work of all the key stakeholders, to ensure these schools are safe havens for children who want to learn,” says Maria Neira, NYSUT first vice president and an AFT vice president.

Use test data to improve achievement
Teachers take data-informed instruction from ‘reform du jour’ to sustained improvement

Regular testing is a big part of what happens at Ocean View, but the people who work at this Norfolk, Va., public school manage to keep the horse before the cart. The real driver at Ocean View is early identification of academic needs and opportunities for individual students through monthly assessments—information that’s married to concrete teaching strategies, presented in a constructive manner to teachers, and circulated through classrooms at Ocean View before little problems become big ones.

You can see the approach at work throughout this squat, sand-colored school that sits just a few paces off the Chesapeake Bay. In Ronetta Fulmore’s fifth-grade class one morning in January, about half of the students grab hall passes and head to the media center to research a paper on the Civil War. The remaining students stay behind to work on summarizing skills in small-group activities led by Fulmore and a classroom assistant.

Fulmore doesn’t have to guess which students should be included in the small groups or which skill areas should take center stage. The latest round of monthly assessments reveals that summarizing is the challenge these students find tough.

 “I’ve used data in other schools. You get standardized tests from previous years and you focus on that,” says Fulmore, a 13-year teaching veteran and AFT member who taught in South Carolina for most of her career. It’s ancient history, based on the performance of a completely different set of students. When it comes to testing as a classroom tool, this traditional approach helps explain why so many teachers feel they’ve been given screwdrivers in a world full of nails.

Ocean View goes another direction with testing, one that “helps us fine-tune instruction,” Fulmore explains. Students are tested monthly in reading, writing, math, science and social studies. Each assessment takes about 30-40 minutes, with longer blocks reserved for writing. The results are tabulated for each class, individual student and subgroup populations (ESL, special education and black males are groups that are monitored closely because the data indicate they perform at the lower end of the Ocean View student achievement spectrum).

A building-level committee composed of teacher leaders in each subject area, guidance counselors and administrators then reviews the results, grade by grade, subject by subject, and subgroup by subgroup.

Test data form the backbone of these monthly discussions, which focus on what went right in the last round of assessments as well as what needs improvement. Teachers who are getting positive results teaching difficult subject matter are identified so that other instructors can observe and model the successful techniques.

Discussions touch on students who once had struggled in their studies but who now seem to have turned the corner and are ready for new classroom challenges. And when the data indicate that students may be having problems in one area, the conversations are deliberately guided to remedies like one-on-one work in specific skills between students and retired teachers who continue to tutor at the school, or graphing paper exercises for students who stumble over calculations with decimals. In each and every instance, conversations at the monthly meeting end with “what’s the next step” rather than “who’s to blame.”

Third-grade teacher Debbie Price has taught at Ocean View for seven years, and the AFT member remembers well the feelings of frustration and concern that predated this constructive use of student data. “When I started here, scores were in the toilet and it was hard as a new teacher walking around the room, figuring out who’s getting it and who isn’t,” she recalls. Today, “everything is skills-specific, [and] you’re able to pinpoint” problems and opportunities in the classroom, she says.

“I don’t think I could go back” to the old way of doing business, she adds.

Institutional memory

Ocean View is not the only Norfolk school to take this approach to data. The district encourages every school to monitor progress but also to make the information classroom friendly—giving fresh, constructive and, above all, usable options in the classroom. In fact it was this approach, contained in what the district has labeled its Comprehensive Accountability System, that was specifically lauded when Norfolk received the 2005 Broad Prize for Urban Education after being named as a Broad finalist in what is dubbed to be the “Nobel Prize for Public Education” the two previous years.

Marian Flickinger, president of the Norfolk Federation of Teachers, says there is another achievement that is perhaps more important than these national plaudits: Norfolk’s approach to data-informed instruction has remained in place and flourished through three superintendents. “That doesn’t happen unless there’s support from individual classroom teachers,” she observes. Approaches like this quickly dissolve—becoming “the other guy’s thing” with each successive change in leadership—unless individual teachers buy into the approach and see it making a concrete, positive difference in the classroom, she explains. The union has taken its cue from members in this area and worked with the district, building by building, to make sure the use of data is constructive, collegial, and beneficial for students and teachers alike.

Linda O’Konek, executive director for elementary schools in Norfolk, estimates Ocean View is one of about three-quarters of the district’s elementary schools that reaped exemplary results from this approach to data-informed instruction. “It’s about looking at the individual needs of students and constantly adjusting” to meet those needs, she says. The approach has stuck in Norfolk, she adds, because “it’s hard work that pays off, and we see the result.”

The human factor

Flickinger, O’Konek and the teachers at Ocean View offer an important caveat for any schools or districts considering a similar approach to using data: Don’t take this course thinking that you’ve somehow “idiot proofed” reform. Things can and will go wrong if you don’t have building-level leadership that embraces a team approach to improvement and offers support and respect to classroom professionals. In fact, O’Konek cites the quality of building-level leadership as a key variable in determining the success or failure of the approach at individual schools; and Flickinger says the union has and will continue to voice concerns whenever data are being used as a weapon leveled at teachers, rather than as a spotlight to illuminate opportunities for classroom excellence.

At Ocean View, teachers commend the collegial, supportive atmosphere that principal Lauren Campsen has maintained. Ann Raiford, a math specialist and NFT building representative says Campsen “has set the right tone” when it comes to using data. It’s supportive of teachers and practice, and it extends down to new teachers like Marianne McDonald. A first-grade teacher at Ocean View, McDonald remembers one of the questions at her interview was “What do you think of data-driven decision-making?” She also remembers her response: “What’s that?”

Her first few months at the school brought a lot of support from literacy teacher Allison Bower, other members of the school data team, and from Campsen and other administrators.

Is the Ocean View approach working? Positive feedback from teachers would indicate it is, and so do test data. The school has made adequate yearly progress for the past three years. The achievement gap between subgroups and the general population has closed as well. Teachers at Ocean View are quick to dismiss any suggestion that “data-informed instruction” is synonymous with “magic bullet,” however. They stress it takes time and hard work to administer regular assessments, analyze results and incorporate findings into strategies developed by grade-level and vertical teams of teachers.

But, as Price points out, hard work was always a given at the school, and data-informed instruction is merely a chance to concentrate that effort in places where it can do the most good. For example, she has used the approach long enough to employ it as an “early warning system” for future lessons. She knows, from experience and from data in prior years, which lessons will probably give a lot of students trouble and which will be relatively easy for them to grasp, so she can budget time accordingly. And, for those critics who suspect that data-driven instruction somehow saps the creativity and spontaneity from the classroom, Price is more than happy to recount how she showed up in class wearing swim gear and fins to teach a particularly tough lesson several weeks ago. “It doesn’t take creativity out” of the classroom, she says. “You just focus it” where it can do the most good.

Ocean View Elementary isn’t a school that focuses on testing, Price and other teachers explain. It just focuses.

Work with elected leaders to improve schools
It’s a winning situation for students and education

And, at the national level, the AFT consistently has reached out to members of Congress—on both sides of the aisle—to provide them with the union’s and members’ perspectives on issues ranging from NCLB and healthcare for children to raising the minimum wage.

In order to improve student achievement, ensure that school buildings are up to date and well-maintained, and provide teachers and other school employees with the tools they need to be successful, even more of this type of collaboration will be needed.

When these collaborative relationships between unions and elected representatives are developed and nurtured, the result is a win-win situation for public schools, the union and elected officials. AFT Michigan, for example, was instrumental in helping Gov. Jennifer Granholm win re-election in November, and she has made investing in public education a priority there.

The state must make a major investment “in our citizens and their brainpower,” Granholm told AFT executive council members at their January meeting. The governor went on to describe what she termed “a great partnership between the governor’s office and AFT Michigan” around a number of education issues, including making college more affordable for the state’s high school graduates.

When it comes to Congress, much of the work is taking place in the home districts of national legislators where, thanks to the AFT’s Activists for Congressional Education (ACE), more and more union members are holding face-to-face meetings with their senators and representatives. The result is increased communication and a new level of mutual respect between the union and national legislators.

ACE participants and their members of Congress currently are meeting across the country to discuss NCLB, school construction and modernization, and the underfunding of domestic programs.

AFT members and their local and state affiliates worked hard this past fall to help elect political candidates with a pro-education, pro-worker agenda. The next logical step is to work with these elected officials—and others—to see to it that the promises made during campaign season become a reality during legislative sessions.

Provide the appropriate learning environment
It’s time to fix our schools and classrooms

That’s certainly the case in Jefferson County, Ala., where an innovative “extreme classroom makeover” project spearheaded by the Jefferson County AFT has flourished into a full-blown community movement to make public schools safe and inviting places in which to learn and teach.

Local president Vi Parramore says the project was the local’s effort “to think outside the box” when it came to drawing public attention to very real problems like inadequate ventilation, lack of adequate outlets and storage space, mold, plumbing and other concerns in the district’s public schools. The idea was not just to highlight problems so many buildings face but to show how, with community support, they could be addressed in concrete ways that produce lasting benefits one classroom at a time. That’s exactly what happened, and Parramore says the overwhelming public response to the project bodes well for the AFT’s effort to call national attention to the school infrastructure crisis through its “Building Minds, Minding Buildings” campaign.

The classroom makeover began in the 2005-06 school year with two schools in Jefferson County. The idea was to get all sectors of the community involved in an effort to redesign a single classroom selected from a field of entries submitted by teachers who knew their rooms were in desperate need of attention.

The selection panel ultimately chose two classrooms for the initial round of makeovers: first, a special education classroom at Chalkville Elementary where facilities were so inadequate that staff members were catheterizing students in the corner of a room, and, second, a science lab at Bagley Junior High School where students were conducting experiments on the floor.

“I didn’t expect a whole lot at the beginning,” says Debra Reeser, the winner of the science lab makeover at Bagley. “I figured it would be in improvement if they just got me enough money to buy some lab tables. I don’t think Vi and the staff realized how big this would be, but the more they contacted people the bigger it got. People were so eager to help.”

Partners in the effort included not only the school district and PTA but local businesses, trade unions and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where the schools of architecture and medicine provided help and guidance with classroom design and issues such as indoor air quality. The “reveal” of the new classrooms at the two schools turned into a community celebration, generating media attention across the state. It also served as a springboard for the local union’s successful efforts last year to win a 1 cent county sales tax increase—extra revenue that will generate $370 million for new school construction and renovation.

But the real story in Jefferson lies not so much in the big numbers but in the small classroom victories at Chalkville and Bagley. Students and staff at both schools are reaping the benefits of new classroom environments that convey high expectations to the students and provide the resources needed to get them there. The new lab tables at Bagley made classroom exercises safer and easier for students, says Reeser. New cabinets for class materials have replaced boxes in the corner, making inventory much easier for the teacher. The classroom now features wireless Internet access, making it possible for Reeser to incorporate cutting-edge software into classroom exercises. There are fewer accidents and “more room to move around,” she says. “And we no long use a coffee maker to heat water for our labs.”

And for students and staff at Bagley, the classroom makeover has been a breath of fresh air—literally. “I no longer have an instant sinus reaction when I walk into the room every morning,” Reeser says. “ I don’t have to hold my breath while mixing chemicals for labs. All students, even the most sensitive asthma students, are unaffected and can now stay in the room during labs. All [chemical] reactions are performed under the fume hood, and no waste gases are emitted in the room.”

The classroom makeover project continues this year at Lipscomb Elementary. AFT president Edward J. McElroy was on hand in late February, when a newly renovated art room was revealed at the school. The AFT initiative shows how communities are eager to get behind education projects that really make a difference in the lives of students, he says.