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CHAPTER 4

Display a Laser-Like Focus on Student Achievement

Although I’ve never been in a school that does not claim to focus on student achievement, a quality distinguishes equity and excellence schools from other schools: they transform vague claims and aspirations into specific practices. First, and most important, equity and excellence schools have a laser-like focus on student achievement. This chapter reviews the specific and tangible ways equity and excellence schools demonstrate their focus on student achievement.

First, these schools display visible indicators—tangible and highly visible reminders on the school walls and in the trophy cases—that student achievement is the goal. Second, these schools allocate time differently, and they hold formal and informal conversations that vary dramatically from other schools. Third, their leadership is focused almost entirely on students and not on the many administrative demands that can consume the minutes, hours, and days of most school leaders. Fourth, their relationships with students and colleagues are remarkable for their intensity, depth, and personalization.

Considering What’s on the Walls

One of the most prominent differences between high- and low-achieving schools comes down to a simple factor—What’s on the walls? Even the most casual observer in an equity and excellence school cannot walk down a hallway without seeing charts, graphs, and tables displaying student achievement information, as well as data about continuous student improvement. The data are on display not only in principals’ offices but also throughout the schools. In addition, school trophy cases full of exemplary academic work (such as clear, concise essays; wonderful science projects; terrific social studies papers; student art work; musical compositions; and outstanding mathematics papers) are abundant. In short, equity and excellence schools make it clear to all observers—including students—that outstanding academic performance is highly prized.

The strategic use of the trophy case is not limited to academic work. Certainly, there is a place for athletic trophies, as well as for awards from the many extracurricular and academic competitions in which students excel. However, equity and excellence schools take their displays one step further. Along with the trophies are examples of student artwork, musical compositions, original poetry and dramatic works, and additional real student work that led to the awards and trophies. One middle school dedicates a trophy case to student goals. It contains the written hopes and aspirations of more than eight hundred students, encased in glass and immune from graffiti. Every hallway in this school visibly shows that the school staff care not only about collectively earned trophies but also about the individual accomplishments of each student.

Making the Most of the Leader’s Time

Every school in a district has a certain number of minutes in the day to allocate for classes, lunches, staff meetings, planning periods, and so on. But there is a difference in how equity and excellence schools allocate time. Their laser-like focus on student achievement is evident in the formal and informal conversations of grade-level, department, and entire-staff meetings. No time is wasted on announcements, but rather time is spent exclusively on discussions about teaching and learning. When I asked one equity and excellence principal, whose district had won the Broad Prize for being the best urban school district in the United States, how she finds time for all the work she and the faculty do on common assessments and data analysis plus their relentless focus on student achievement, she said, “I don’t have more time than anybody else. I just stopped doing faculty meetings three years ago. We spend every moment we have on student achievement. And besides,” she added, “making oral announcements to adults is primitive” (L. Capsen, personal communication, November 1, 1997).

While many schools allocate time for teacher collaboration under the banner of PLCs, the phenomenon of PLC lite (as discussed in the previous chapter) results in schools that have time allocated for collaboration but fritter it away without the laser-like focus on student achievement, the hallmark of effective PLCs. In equity and excellence schools, however, not a second of collaborative time is wasted, and every meeting has a purpose. Principals, administrators, and instructional coaches may not be in every meeting, but they monitor how the time is spent. Others use a very simple four-line email the collaborative teams complete in the final portion of every meeting. The four email lines correspond to the four critical question of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016):

1. What do we want students to know and be able to do? (Learning)

2. How will we know if they have learned it? (Assessment)

3. What will we do if they don’t learn it? (Intervention)

4. What will we do if they already have learned it? (Extension)

However, it’s not always possible or even necessary for a collaborative team to address every question in every situation. For example, early in the year, there is often a heavy focus on the first question so all classes in the same grade and subject have a consistent curriculum. Additionally, because using common formative assessments is a key to an effectively functioning PLC, a school might devote extra time to the second question. But over the course of every month, principals can reasonably expect teachers to address all four questions. The ultimate goal is for schools to ensure high levels of learning for all and to avoid PLC lite by addressing all four questions every month. Schools can track progress by completing a simple four-bar frequency chart at the end of each month to show how the school as a whole addressed the four questions in collaborative team meetings. If all the teams addressed all four questions, those four bars should be equal, as can be seen in figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1: The hypothetical PLC profile.

However, my experience is that the actual time allocation tends to be uneven, with the most time allocated to lesson planning (learning), somewhat less time for common assessments, even less for intervention, and least of all for extension, as figure 4.2 suggests.

Figure 4.2: The common PLC profile.

These simple displays (see figure 4.1, page 39 and figure 4.2) allow faculty members to make frequent midcourse corrections in how they allocate collaborative team time. For example, after reviewing figure 4.2, faculty members might observe, “We’ve devoted so much time to lesson planning and intervention for low-performing students that we’ve failed to address the needs of students who are already proficient. If we don’t get to the fourth question more consistently, those students are going to be bored and will become disengaged. Let’s really focus on more even allocation of our collaborative time next month.”

In equity and excellence schools, leadership decisions about time extend to the classroom and individual students. The focus on student achievement is especially important in an environment where many students come to school with academic skills substantially below grade level. These schools typically display charts showing weekly improvements from the fall through the spring, giving the consistent message, It’s not how you start here that matters, but how you finish. Improvements of more than one grade level in a single year are common, and teachers and administrators pay particular attention to students whose reading and writing deficiencies would have a profound impact on their success in other subjects. Some students spend as many as three hours per day in literacy interventions designed to get them to desired achievement levels. Leaders in equity and excellence schools know if a fifth-grade student is reading at a second-grade level, then there is no place for instructional strategies scattered among dozens of standards and curriculum strands. This student must learn to read, making up for years of reading deficiency, or the student will be headed for failure throughout his or her middle and high school years. Plus, the student will be almost certain to drop out as he or she fails to accumulate the required credits to graduate with peers.

Literacy is the top priority of equity and excellence schools, and leaders make it clear that the purpose of every lesson is to enhance student literacy skills. Teachers do not assign struggling readers to read a chapter and hope for the best. Rather, teachers have struggling students approach the text paragraph by paragraph, and then they stop the students and check for understanding, making marginal notes on paper or with the appropriate technology. Teachers prioritize comprehension over coverage. They also challenge the prevailing use of sustained silent reading because they know some students engage in little more than sustained silent sitting during this time. So, teachers frequently stop students as they read silently or aloud and check to ensure students have circled or highlighted unfamiliar vocabulary words, summarized every paragraph, and maximized every opportunity for improving literacy skills and personal confidence in reading. Teachers apply the same techniques in mathematics. Leaders and teachers understand that a significant problem in mathematics achievement concerns not merely number operations but also understanding the directions and stories in the mathematics test items.

Finally, a consistent finding in equity and excellence schools is that interventions occur during the school day. Although there are isolated examples of after-school and weekend programs having some effect, the consistent observation of equity and excellence teachers and leaders shows that students who most need intervention do not come to after-school and weekend sessions. Many students (and, indeed, teachers) have unbreakable obligations for sibling care, work, or other commitments outside school hours. If intervention is going to happen with any impact, equity and excellence schools conclude, it must happen during the school day.

Devoting Leadership Attention to Achievement

I have had the good fortune to shadow equity and excellence school leaders during their day. These leaders have no external similarities; they are young and old, less experienced and veterans, men and women, every color of skin, ebullient and reserved. But one thing they all have in common is they are frequently out of their offices and in the classrooms, hallways, and common areas of their schools. Even in the most heavily unionized environments, these leaders know they can walk into any class at any time, sit next to students, and learn about the reality of teaching and learning firsthand. It is equally important to note what these leaders are not doing. They are not answering email; in some cases, more than one hundred emails will accumulate when these leaders check their incoming mail. They are not answering their phone; rather, they have an assistant who respectfully but insistently explains to callers, “The principal has a commitment right now” to be with teachers and students. In what is perhaps the most telling decision of equity and excellence leaders, they do not attend many external meetings. At some risk to their relationships with central office department heads, equity and excellence principals decide that being fully present with students and faculty is more important than being visible in meetings. Every central office in every school system—even the very best ones I have observed—would benefit from an audit to critically evaluate the purposes and results of meetings. It is not unusual in some large systems for principals to be called out of the building two to three days each week, rendering their role as instructional leaders a frustrating impossibility. Unless the purpose of a meeting is deliberation and collaborative decision making, the goals of improved teaching and learning are far better served when the principal is in the school, not at meetings. This is particularly true when the purpose of the meetings is to deliver a message—a function that in the 21st century does not require in-person presentations.