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2002-2003: AYP English Language Arts
2002-2003: AYP Math
Introduction Horace Mann Elementary's turnaround began in 1996. It had performed so poorly on a system of multiple measures for school accountability that Glendale Unified School District (in Southern California) mandated an academic improvement plan for the school. The school's staff and administration grounded their reform efforts in data-driven decision-making. Also vital to their success was an intense focus on standards-based instruction, accountability, allocation of resources, and professional development. As a result, Horace Mann has exceeded its California Academic Performance Index (API) growth target since the inception of the API in 1999, showing steady and continuous improvement in student achievement. In addition, Horace Mann considerably surpassed its Annual Yearly Progress criteria for 2003. When the change process began, the principal challenged the staff not to accept chronic lack of student achievement. She asked the staff if they could teach one child to read. When they responded affirmatively, the principal replied, "If you can teach one, then you can teach them all." She reminded her staff that they couldn't change external factors, but could control the teaching and learning that takes place at Horace Mann. Leadership and Management Once the challenge was issued, the staff at Horace Mann had to determine a plan of action. A staff leadership team began by analyzing data. They soon found that reading was their students' weakest area. More specifically, the data showed that students at Horace Mann struggled to read fluently as a result of poor decoding skills. Thus, learning to read became Horace Mann's initial focus. The principal worked collaboratively with her assistant principal and teacher specialists to prioritize efforts to improve reading instruction. The support staff met weekly to discuss progress, challenges, and ways to increase the school-wide focus on quality reading instruction. Administration sought out staff development on early literacy development to help primary teachers learn instructional and assessment strategies that would help their students develop stronger reading fluency as a foundation for improving their comprehension. In order to differentiate instruction to meet the various reading levels of students, administration also increased the amount of time dedicated to language arts instruction and emphasized the school-wide need to provide small group reading instruction in addition to the grade level language arts core program. Within three years, analysis of data showed that primary students were reading more proficiently, but gaps continued in reading comprehension and literary analysis throughout the grades. The support staff worked with teachers to expand the school-wide focus to include reading to learn. As a result, primary teachers maintained an emphasis on decoding, but also concentrated on developing students' reading comprehension; while upper grade teachers worked on diagnosing students' difficulties in understanding more challenging texts and teaching reading comprehension strategies. Recognizing this need to examine students' understanding of what they read, teachers and administrators articulated the school-wide goal as: Students will demonstrate increasing proficiency to read and understand grade-level appropriate materials as demonstrated in clear, coherent, and focused written responses about their reading. This clear sense of direction enabled the leadership team at Horace Mann to write a school plan that is used as a roadmap for reform. The plan emphasizes the school's focus on reading and is based on research on effective schools and on state and district goals. All decisions -- regarding professional development, resource allocation, personnel, student placement, and program implementation -- are linked to the school's plan. To implement the school plan the leadership team had to evaluate expenditures to ensure that funds were spent purposefully and linked to student outcomes. In making decisions about funding, the leadership team asks, "Will this expenditure directly impact the performance of students who are not meeting grade-level standards?" One change in resource allocation was to more effectively utilize instructional assistants. In the past, many of the instructional assistants spent more time making copies, grading papers, and putting up bulletin boards than helping students. The leadership team decided to assign one instructional assistant to do all of the copying, laminating, and similar jobs. The team also decreased the total number of instructional assistant hours. At the same time, they provided increased training for the assistants and focused their time during the language arts period to improve instruction and student results. Assistants are assigned to classrooms for different amounts of time based on student need. They meet monthly with a teacher specialist to discuss their responsibilities and for professional development that focuses on strategies that can help them support students and teachers in the classroom. Several assistants have taken advantage of this training and gone on to become credentialed teachers at Horace Mann. Also, with the money saved on instructional assistant time, the school was able to hire a teacher specialist who focuses on data and assessment, as well as reading instructional support and interventions. Glendale Unified School District has played a critical role in the improvement at Horace Mann Elementary, providing a balance of necessary support and freedom for the school. The district worked to align its curriculum with state standards and provided professional development for all teachers on the curriculum. Additionally, the district created standards-based report cards for students and trained the teachers to use them with standards-based assessments. District administrators also met with Horace Mann's leadership team as they developed improvement strategies to include in the school plan. Assessment and Accountability One of the biggest changes in school culture at Horace Mann since the beginning of their reform effort is an increased emphasis on data. No school-wide decisions are made without analyzing data on student performance. Data are examined often and thoroughly. In the past, Horace Mann would receive scores from the state and district once a year. Unfortunately, since Mann is a year-round school, scores were often reviewed near the end of the first trimester. Thus, each year the faculty would look at the data and notice that students were not making a lot of progress. Since the scores no longer had direct instructional implications for their students now in the next grade, the staff would continue working in the same manner. As part of the school's reform efforts, all staff members have been trained to analyze data, and they use it to improve instruction. The district has a clearly articulated and developed assessment plan that includes both state and district standards-aligned tests. District benchmark tests in reading, writing, and math are given each trimester so that teachers can use the results to adjust instruction and monitor student progress. Administrators and teachers carefully analyze results from these tests. Using data to inform decision-making became such an important part of the culture at Horace Mann Elementary that administrators and teachers found the need to develop and use site-based assessments, such as running records, informal reading inventories, retellings, unit tests, and writing prompts more frequently to help guide instruction. Thus teachers were involved in monthly data analysis rather than annually, as they'd done before. This way, they could gather scores on multiple measures to strategically target their reform effort throughout the year. Each month the teacher specialist collects the scores and updates the school's own assessment database. The principal and support staff frequently share the data at faculty meetings and help staff interpret them. This information is used to identify students who are struggling to meet grade level standards programs, and to design appropriate interventions. Once in an intervention, students are carefully monitored. By staying focused on data, the staff make sure that students who are most at-risk of non-promotion to the next grade level receive targeted interventions and exit programs as soon as they are ready. Professional Development In the past, professional development at Horace Mann Elementary was neither cohesive nor focused on school goals. It consisted of teachers attending conferences or district trainings based on their own individual interests, plus some sessions mandated by the school or district. To improve professional development, school staff created a schedule that provides them with regular time each week for grade-level meetings, whole-staff professional development, and teacher study groups. They created this opportunity by "banking" time -- adding instructional minutes to each day, so that every Thursday morning the students come to school one hour later. The extra hour has allowed staff to participate together in training on key schoolwide instructional practices. Professional development has come to mean professional reading, dialog, and analysis of student work, all focused on strengthening student literacy. Another important structure for professional development at Horace Mann Elementary comes from participating in a research study with the Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA). A federally funded project, CIERA provides a research-based framework for schools to look at their own reform efforts, specifically in reading instruction. The project consists of collection and analysis of student data and professional development on research-based, proven-effective literacy instruction. Some data analysis and training related to Language Arts and Math are done at each monthly faculty meeting. Staff development is also planned during the weekly "banking" meetings when teachers either meet in grade-level groups to plan and discuss instruction in Language Arts or Math, or meet in cross-grade study groups to read, discuss, and implement research-based instructional strategies to improve students' reading comprehension. The study groups, in large part, are an outcome of Horace Mann's participation in the CIERA Project. At the beginning of the year, the principal collaborates with teachers to define the school-wide goal that is based on assessment data. During professional development activities at faculty meetings or the weekly "banking" meetings, each teacher at Horace Mann Elementary develops his or her own "Plan for Professional Growth," which outlines the strategies aimed toward achieving the school goal and identifies the student work he/she will collect and analyze. Staff development and study group activities that are linked to the school goal are outlined for the whole year. Standards-based Curriculum and Instruction Horace Mann Elementary continuously works on aligning instruction with state content standards. Teachers reference standards on their daily lesson plans and on bulletin boards displaying student work. Staff development meetings provide teachers with opportunities to discuss with grade-level peers their long-range planning to meet essential standards in various subjects, especially Language Arts. Administrators follow through by visiting classrooms and observing for standards-aligned instruction, as well as by evaluating teachers in selected instructional areas targeting specific standards. Teachers also evaluate student progress toward meeting state standards using a district report card. For their core teaching resources, teachers use materials that are approved by the state board and aligned with state standards. In addition, teachers learn instructional strategies that help them best deliver the curriculum to a diverse student population with diverse levels of proficiency. To this end, teachers carefully choose materials to supplement the core adoption and reinforce standards that students haven't yet mastered. With on-going professional development in the area of reading instruction, teachers develop instructional strategies that assist them in providing access to the core language arts program for all students, while also differentiating instruction for students in small groups using guided reading. Teachers have learned to use the reading standards to set objectives for their small group reading instruction, while using strategies that are research-based. In order to meet the needs of students in upper grade who may be represent a range of reading levels from non-English speaking beginning readers to above sixth grade, upper grade teachers within the same track re-group students for an hour and a half block of guided reading instruction to supplement the grade level instruction with their homeroom students. Thus, all students have opportunities to read text at or above grade level with teacher support, in addition to reading text at their instructional level. The staff of Horace Mann Elementary also builds in intervention programs that go beyond the typical one-shot, four-week program. Interventions can take place during, before, or after school, and may include one-to-one tutoring, small group instruction, or other targeted forms of support. The school provides multiple programs that can be woven together to meet a student's needs. Importantly, a consistent message at Horace Mann is that the first intervention is in the classroom. Eighty percent of the students at Horace Mann speak English as a second language -- 40 percent speak Armenian and 40 percent speak Spanish. Historically, the school had two bilingual programs to serve these students. At the start of the reform effort, however, the staff evaluated the programs in light of student data and parent feedback and found that the bilingual programs were neither teaching students effectively in their primary language nor in English. Students were not developing the high levels of language and literacy development in their primary language that is critical for successful transfer to grade level English language and literacy proficiency. Additionally, students in the primary language program did not perform as well on standardized tests as those in the English only program. Over time, the staff and community made the difficult decision to disband the primary language instruction program and teach all students reading and language arts in English only. Then they set out to create a rigorous, schoolwide, structured English-immersion program, based on the district's English Language Development (ELD) curriculum and the state's ELD standards. Their instruction draws upon the latest Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) strategies. With this change, teachers and administrators aim to help all students meet and exceed grade-level standards. Their data show positive gains: the redesignation rate -- moving children from limited English proficient to fluent English proficient status -- has increased from 3.5 percent to 13 percent over a five-year period. Also, the rate at which students advance within the ELD levels, as measured by the California English Language Development Test, has also increased. This school is featured in the video series, "Closing the Gap: Meeting the Achievement Challenge in California." For more information go to the Closing the Gap Video Series This school profile was created in 2003. Achievement and demographic data through 2003 are included. Permission to Use Resources SchoolsMovingUp, a WestEd initiative, invites you to use our resources in your work. For uses that involve reproduction of more than one copy of the resource, please submit the online permission request form. We will reply immediately once we know your intended reproduction needs. All reproductions of the resource must include a full citation of the WestEd copyright. |
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