Parents must take a leadership role in a school turnaround program

What do you think is the appropriate way to structure parental and community involvement in a school turnaround program? Is it a meaningful role if parents just choose from the administration's preferred turnaround models?

Parents in low-income communities have seen “reform” after “reform” imposed on our schools, with little success. But it is wrong to assume that we—our students, our teachers, our communities—are the problem. Instead, we should be viewed as partners in reform. What is Peoria’s/District 150's plan to bring us to the table?
Recently Empowering Parents held the first annual dinner at Glen Oak School to honor parent volunteers. The District 150 website teases that "this year-end event to celebrate parental involvement, ...will also serve as the launch for the Empowering Parents organization’s “Million Parent Wake-up Challenge.”

While this organization (who I am assuming was hired by District 150) certainly gives good information to empower parents to take back their homes, it falls short of giving parents the information needed to take back their schools and to advocate for their children when the programming is not sufficient for their child, or when schools fail to do their jobs.

One way that the District is allowing parents to get involved, is the Peoria Council for Continuous Improvement ("PCCI"). Throughout the summer, parents will be selected to add up to six more members to the Council. According to the District 150 website:

"the PCCI will focus on changes that impact the individual school (Peoria High School) as well as systemic issues that impact the entire district. It will identify areas where learning from the School Improvement Grant schools can be shared across the school system. PCCI will also help identify ways for the district to sustain changes beyond the term of the intervention. The Consortium for Educational Change will facilitate efforts to link the work of the PCCI with school Universal Leadership Teams to expand the learning across the system beyond schools targeted for intensive interventions."

Parents run the risk of being disenfranchised, when they don't seek ways to be involved proactively.

The Elements of Sustainable School Transformation:Families, students, communities and school staff, must play a meaningful role in designing and implementing a school transformation plan. The process of planning and implementing a school transformation is a key element in its success. The process of designing and guiding reform:

A school-based team of parents, educators, students (in high schools) and community representatives—the School Transformation Team—should be selected to undertake the development of a transformation plan. This team should be allowed a full school year to assess the school’s needs and challenges, and to develop a plan to meet them; The team’s assessment of school strengths and weaknesses should look specifically, for example, at such factors as:

o teacher-student ratio;
o teaching quality, the presence of experienced and effective teachers and conditions for quality teaching;
o feeder school programs and shortcomings that impact performance at the target school;
o how data is used to identify instructional strengths and weaknesses as well as student support needs;
o measures of school climate and discipline issues;
o the availability of wrap-around supports for students;
o measures of parent engagement.

A review of external obstacles that create barriers to school success should also be conducted. These might include district human resources or other structures that don’t work effectively to support schools; contractual agreements; inequitable state or district funding formulas; community characteristics, and more; A team of outside experts—like the State’s School Quality Review Team—should conduct a separate assessment of the school, and meet with the School Transformation Team to share and compare findings; Together, the school-based and state or district team should identify partnerships, agreements and structures that are needed in order to support a reform plan; The state and/or district should facilitate this process, and support it, making sure that the plan is accountable and fully resourced.

Most of the time, parents, teachers and even students know what the problems are in a school, and may have ideas for how to overcome them. And, when improvement plans are imposed on a school, rather than developed with the school community at the table, even the most dedicated teachers and parents may resist change—because they haven’t been involved or respected enough to help create the plan.Source

Economic integration as a school reform tool

In my opinion, to reap the full benefits of economic integration, the parents of the low income student must be motivated to find a balance for their child. Not only do you have to worry about parents at affluent schools hunkering down; you also have to worry about the fact that your child is in essence, living in two worlds. The low income child must have family support and possess a strong sense of who they are and where they want to go. Perhaps then, they can successfully maneuver the duality.

Study of Montgomery County schools shows benefits of economic integration

The idea is easier to apply in areas with substantial middle-class populations and more difficult in communities, such as the District, with large concentrations of poverty. Yet it lends fresh support to an idea as old as the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954: Segregated schools - in this case, separated by economics, not law - are rarely as good as diverse ones at educating low-income students.

Today, 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make high-poverty schools work," said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in New York that published the report. "This research suggests there is a much more effective way to help close the achievement gap. And that is to give low-income students a chance to attend middle-class schools."

"The conventional wisdom - and I don't want to knock the foundation of it - is that we really need to infuse the poorest schools with lots of resources," said Stefanie DeLuca, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, who has studied the issue and read an advance copy of the report. "This study turns that wisdom on its head to some extent. It says, actually, it's who you are going to school with."

Researchers say that poor schools often struggle because they tend to attract rotating staffs of less-experienced teachers and administrators, among other problems. Schools with lower levels of poverty have a range of benefits that include more stable staffs, fewer discipline problems and more support from volunteers. Parents who have one job instead of three also have an easier time being involved. And expectations are usually higher.

"This is not about 'poor kids can't learn,' " DeLuca said. "It's about the fact that we've had a legacy in this country of segregated neighborhoods and socioeconomic isolation from opportunities and the mainstream of life."

Scars from busing battles
But questions about integrating school systems have not been front-and-center since the 1970s, and scars from school busing battles have made policymakers leery of raising such issues again. Most districts nationwide now assign students to schools based only on where they live.

Parents with the means to live close to top-performing schools often have resisted efforts that would send their children to schools with larger numbers of students from low-income families.

A growing number of school districts - at least 60 so far - has in recent years been experimenting with strategies that promote economic diversity. These include magnet schools, student assignment policies that take into account economic status and agreements that give poor kids a chance to attend schools in wealthier suburbs.

Dominique Johnson, 13, who attended an elementary school in the District before moving to a public housing apartment in Bethesda, said the difference was obvious.

"It was a bad, bad school," she said of her old school, shaking her head. "The principal, I don't think she did anything about all the fights. I had this one teacher who would curse at the kids."

At North Bethesda Middle School, she said, she found rules, focus and difficult classes with attentive teachers. Her grades dropped. But after a year or so, they improved.

"Now I understand the work," she said. "I've made friends. The principal is nice. It was harder at first, but at lunch I'd go to classes and the teachers helped me."

Hat tip @ Frustrated. Read the entire article here...