School Board Retreat Begins New Year
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(Wednesday) September 1, 2010
Yvonne Folkerts
Alexandria School Board Chair
Alexandria School Board chair Yvonne Folkerts. (Photo: James Cullum)
There’s a bit of wry humor fellow Board member Charles Wilson likes to repeat whenever one of our sessions starts to run long, making us chuckle at ourselves: “The brain in a chair can not absorb more than the bottom can endure.”
We certainly were guilty of sitting a long time this past weekend, for the School Board’s annual summer retreat. Yet I am confident no one minded –because we navigated interesting discussions about raising the bar for student achievement. We looked at fundamental changes in the way the School Board holds the Superintendent accountable for a high-performing school system, and Superintendent Morton Sherman brought forward fundamental changes within Alexandria City Public Schools.
One of the ways ACPS could raise the bar is to adopt the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence. I’m sure many of you are aware of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which has become the defacto business model for thousands of companies. The Baldrige Education Award is similar, and awards those school systems that have successfully followed criteria to be that high-performing school system, with high integrity and sustainable results in today’s challenging education environment.
Already, we have asked a previous national Baldrige education award winner to work with our administrators and building principals, understanding the criteria and how to implement it into our schools. This same individual, Brenda Clark, came before the Board during our retreat and led us through a discussion about applying the Baldrige principles to ourselves as an elected body with oversight responsibility, as well as throughout the entire school division. At our level, incorporating the Baldrige criteria will help us align our processes and resources, give us a valuable framework to help measure performance and plan for an uncertain environment.
We also discussed moving to a policy governance model. This may sound esoteric, but in practice, it would be exciting for ACPS and for meeting the Baldrige criteria. Policy governance requires a School Board to approve policies which mandate results. It would focus our work on policy decisions, not operational issues. If we incorporated this governance, we would work toward monthly reports from the Superintendent to report progress on our expectations in student achievement. We intend to have a work session this fall on policy governance, and will work toward instilling the Baldrige criteria into that discussion and our work.
At the retreat, we also looked at fundamental changes within ACPS. A long, overdue change is the development of a system-wide curriculum, which will be done by Superintendent Sherman and key players he has identified. We saw examples of this work this weekend, and were excited about the rigor, critical thinking and teaching strategies that are being included in the new curriculum design.
During the retreat, Board members were given a handbook written by ACPS staff titled, “Literacy Framework: Research-based Best Practices for Promoting 21st Century Literacy.” This is a big title for an even bigger task: providing our teachers and administrators with strategies to promote all students’ literacy development. The book is available online (yes, even parents can access it!) and gives teachers information about how to assess a student’s literacy across all curricula, how to use strategies to improve a student’s reading comprehension, how to use questions and thereby encourage students’ critical thinking skills, how to improve a student’s writing, and more. A second handbook will be issued later this year for math literacy. That handbook will arm teachers with strategies to incorporate math across the board into all subjects a student is studying.
The “framework” handbooks are the foundation of a new curriculum. Board members were also given an example of curriculum “maps” to be used in the classroom. We reviewed a grade 3 math curriculum, which is divided into 12 units of rigorous instruction. It specifies what students will learn and what they will be able to communicate from each unit, as well as provides essential questions for teachers to ask their students, making sure students comprehend the subject. And another healthy sign for us: while the Standards of Learning are incorporated into the unit lessons, the SOLs are not the focus. These unit plans go far beyond the SOLs. We are indeed raising the bar.
All of these issues – the Baldrige plan, policy governance, a new curriculum – are building blocks for sustainable improvement. And the foundation must be put into practice, right? For us, that means it all comes down to what happens in the classroom. We’re addressing that, too. At the retreat, we learned that by the end of this school year, 20 percent of our teaching staff and 80 administrators will have been trained in the first level of a professional development course called “Skillful Teacher” and “Skillful Leader.” (Even more of our teachers began the training last year.) This training develops teachers’ capacities to recognize and respond to learning differences among students and emphasizes the impact of high expectations for all on student learning. As for our administrators, the “leader” development course teaches them to target their leadership so that decisions are made and action is taken which has the greatest impact on student learning.
I believe our two-day retreat opened our minds to new ways of doing business, new ways of holding the Superintendent accountable for high student achievement, and new ways for our students to be challenged in the classroom. We’re off to a great start for a new school year and as Mr. Wilson reminds me, we won’t get there by sitting down!