Leaving no child behind

It's a problem that could have been ignored or explained away. True, students attending a handful of schools in the ABC Unified District weren't performing well on standardized reading tests. But it was pretty much confined to schools on the south side, the ones serving less-affluent communities in this district located about 20 miles outside of Los Angeles. High scores also were tough to come by, since many of the Southside students come from homes where English isn't the primary language. Besides, it wasn't as if there is no good news coming out of ABC Unified--home to one of the highest-performing high schools in the state and a district were average test scores compare favorably with school districts in California.

The Southside problem could have been ignored. But that's not the way things work these days in the district. The reason is simple: Teachers, administrators and elected officials really believe that helping all children reach high academic standards--a bedrock promise of standards-based reform--isn't just a throwaway line. Moreover, they are unified in their efforts to reach a common goal set at the end of the 1999-2000 academic year: In three years, 95 percent of all students who have attended school in the district for at least three years will be reading at grade level. That means any school, including the four elementary schools, one middle, and one high school that serve the south side of the district. It's an ambitious goal, to be sure. Even though scores are improving, less than a quarter of students currently read at grade level in some of the Southside schools. But the district has been working hard to put the seeds of success in place.

Together, the union local and administration sent a delegation last year to a labor-management institute on school reform held at Harvard University, where they learned how to work together on problems such as low-performing schools. District teams of teachers, principals, administrators and union leaders also journeyed to Houston and San Antonio, where they examined successful models of school reform. With help from the AFT's educational issues department, the union-district team also has provided frontline educators with information on strategies proven to boost reading achievement, such as Open Court, Direct Instruction and Success for All. In each building, classroom teachers and administrators decide for themselves if programs might be a good fit for their buildings.

The district and union also have worked together to schedule meetings to allow these teachers and administrators to reflect on their practice through school "self-audits" and to share issues and concerns. There have been opportunities for entire staffs to visit successful schools around the state. And, once school staffs have selected a course of action for reading improvement, they have been provided the training and materials to make it work.

Today, in Southside schools such as Hawaiian Elementary, there is a sense of enthusiasm and determination to reach the district's goal.

"I think we can make it because all of the support pieces are in place," says Margene Millette, who has taught at Hawaiian for 13 years and now serves as the Success for All facilitator at the school. The staff capped weeks of visits to successful school models, presentations on research-based reform, and what Millette describes as hard-nosed staff dialogue about strategies for improvement with a secret-ballot vote last spring. The result: Hawaiian Elementary teachers voted 100 percent in favor of adopting the Success for All model beginning this year.

The school began implementing SFA in the fall. Enthusiasm, for lack of a better term, is the biggest problem Millette has faced thus far: She's bombarded with requests from staff to organize impromptu after-hours work sessions to help get the program off to a flying start. "Don't get me wrong, there is anxiety about reaching the [reading] goal, but there is also a lot of motivation and buy-in."

"People are really anxious to get started and a little nervous, but there is real excitement," says Hawaiian third-grade teacher Richard Hathaway, who is also the local's treasurer. "The AFT materials, and our local's help in getting out the information, made a big difference. It made us feel like we were making a decision based on research--that this [school improvement plan] wasn't just something we were just pulling out of the sky. That increases peoples' comfort level."

No blame game

Across-the-board cooperation didn't just happen, ABC Federation of Teachers president Laura Rico and district superintendent Ron Barnes agree. The two leaders have worked together--meeting once a week on the Southside reading initiative and other school matters--since Barnes took office last spring.

"The superintendent and I made a commitment from the outset to do something for schools that have been neglected," explains Rico. "Together, we would achieve excellence for our schools, and we would not let anybody fail--not the students, not the teachers."

"It was obvious that we had schools that were very low performing. People openly acknowledged it. It was also apparent that teachers in those schools were ready to do something different," says Barnes. "We made it clear that this wasn't a personnel issue--a good people/bad people issue. It was a system issue."

A key ally in this effort, both stress, has been the school board. One of the first proposals Barnes took to the board was a plan to focus every penny possible of a $300,000 federal grant the district received on improving reading in the Southside schools, a budgeting plan the board backed by a 7-0 vote.

"This is a school board that supported teachers from the outset--and then stepped aside to let us do what we needed to do," said Rico.

This month, both Rico and Barnes are scheduled to speak at a session on labor-management cooperation for school improvement at the Education Trust Conference in Washington, D.C. The session couldn't be a better fit, visitors to the district agree.

"Based on my observations and meetings with new teachers, administrators and veteran staff, this is a school district where relations are really quite good," says AFT executive vice president Nat LaCour, who traveled to the district at the beginning of the current school year to talk with new teachers, district administrators, and to visit with staff at Hawaiian Elementary. "There is a great deal of respect on the part of administrators for the union and its leaders, and the reverse is also true. That seems to be carrying down to the school level."

"If I were starting my teaching career over, this is the district I would select," says California Federation of Teachers assistant to the president Mary Valentine, who was on hand to make a presentation at the new teacher orientation session. She says the ABC Federation of Teachers has done a commendable job of fostering positive education reform. "It's a good example of a medium-sized AFT local that has tapped into resources at the national and state level" to improve schools.

American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO - 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW - Washington, DC 20001