Who wins?

I work in an urban district – an Abbott district as we say in New Jersey. That of course means a lot of… suggestions from the state and a lot of top down directives from the administration. There’s always pressure to find and implement the next best strategy to ensure that our kids pass the HSPA (NJ’s 11th grade proficiency/achievement test) and meet AYP.

As an Abbott district, we’re required by the state to follow a whole school reform model. This means small learning communities – implemented and dubbed “clusters” in our school. There’s a lot of faculty dissatisfaction about these, but in general I do like the idea.

Instead of a duty, each core teacher (Math, Science, Social Studies, and English) is assigned a Common Planning Period. In this period, we are to meet in a common room, discuss our students, plan collaboratively, and develop an interdisciplinary project for our students.

So far so good. Add in a bunch of inane paperwork and take several of the cluster members out, though, and it’s not so good.

As of last week, I now have one other person to attend these common planning periods. Despite the absence of half the team, we’re still expected to generate a culminating project and generate tons of paper-work documenting what we do in that period.

Where Did the Other Teachers Go?

They got caught up in other HSPA-prep initiatives.

Last year we piloted a HSPA preparation “pullout” program. Students that are identified as in danger of failing the HSPA are assigned to a special tutoring session on a daily basis.

This isn’t after school – since students could simply not show up. Instead, it’s scheduled for the student’s elective period, and that student is pulled out of the elective from December to March.

Of course, you need teachers for this. Each math teacher is pulled out of his or her common planning period – if he or she isn’t already exempt – and is assigned a period to facilitate pullout tutoring.

So, although the math teacher in my cluster had regularly attended meetings and contributed to some fruitful discussions, she’s now gone. Until March, she’ll be tutoring a handful of kids each day for the HSPA, and our cluster won’t have a representative from the math department.

This year, we piloted another program. Junior English courses (and Math courses, too), have been turned into double-period blocks. To accomplish this, most English teachers have been assigned a sixth teaching period.  In the case of Junior teachers, they have three blocks. In the case of the English teacher in my cluster, she teaches four regular periods of Sophomores and one block of Juniors.

The end result? Many of the English teachers have an overloaded schedule, and they are therefore exempt from attending the common planning period.

And so, each day at 1:45 PM, I sit in a room with Mr. P from the Science department. And we wonder what it is we’re supposed to be accomplishing.

Why Rob Peter to Pay Paul?

It seems to me that one of these initiatives should take precedence.

If the clusters are really going to improve student achievement – and in all likelihood that’s the avenue for long term, sustained improvement – why should we destroy them in order to make room for other, newer, untested initiatives?

The short term effect of the blocked English periods and the HSPA pull-out is that the clusters are effectively defunct. Most of the clusters are down one teacher, if not two.

This makes it incredibly tough to actually coordinate plans, discipline, tests, etc. All of the benefits of small learning communities are being tossed to the wind, and we’re stuck with the paperwork used to make teachers accountable for their time spent out of the classroom.

We can at least hope that the HSPA pull out program will be more effective this year.

Last year, a little over 20% of our students were scored as proficient or better on the HSPA. These horrendous scores were sloughed off on the middle schools – where the same students scored about 20% proficient on the GEPA (the 8th grade achievement test).

In other words, despite our last ditch efforts, about the same incredible number of students failed as when they were in middle school.