In a few weeks, about 1,000 Evanston/Skokie Elementary School District 65 students will say goodbye to carefree summer days and start mandatory summer school for the first time.
The summer program is part of a wide-reaching instructional improvement effort started by District 65 Supt. Hardy Ray Murphy in July 1999 and a school board mandate to close the academic-achievement gap between minorities and whites. It targets one of seven schoolchildren.
Barely 50 percent of the district’s 3rd-grade African-American students met or exceeded Illinois Standards Achievement Test math standards in 1999, compared with just over 95 percent of the white students. Fewer than 46 percent met or exceeded the reading standards, compared with about 95 percent of white students. By high school, only a handful are in honors classes.
Instructional culture focus
Murphy’s approach to the problem focuses heavily on the school instructional culture rather than on such societal issues as poverty and racism.
“It’s our responsibility to teach children, no matter what their home life is like. They are capable of learning,” he said.
Going to the heart of instruction, “the relationship between teacher and student,” Murphy has asked teachers to adapt instruction to the needs of each child, to focus on core subjects such as math and reading, and use test data to track individual progress year by year.
“We’ve coordinated and focused instructional programs and improvement initiatives at [our] 16 schools. Each had its own separate program before,” Murphy said. “We’re testing and redesigning instruction at all grade levels and starting a preschool program.”
Martha Burns, recently elected to the board of Evanston High School District 202, approves of the effort. She also is co-president of the PTA Council for District 65’s schools and the first African-American PTA president at Orrington School.
“There’s a gap in achievement because schools have not been doing a good job of assessing each child’s needs,” Burns said. “For the first time, we have benchmark exams for kids in 3rd through 6th grades to see if they are getting what they need. Even with good teachers, some kids were being lost.”
Most important, Murphy said, exam data is being reviewed in a new way. Test results follow a student to the next grade so a teacher can gauge the achievement level of new pupils and regroup them when needed, especially in math, and get outside help.
Some at-risk children spend an hour before school in remedial programs and an hour after school with tutors to catch up. This allows them to stay in their regular math and reading classes, Murphy said, and gives them a double-dose of learning.
Project Excite
Bright minority children also get special attention. District 65, along with District 202 and Northwestern University in Evanston, are trying to prepare minority 3rd graders for math and science in high school. Pupils in the program have been assessed as having an ability in math and an interest in science; the program works to promote their high achievement.
Over the next seven years, Project Excite will target 20 minority 3rd graders a year to work with high school math and physics teachers and instructors at NU’s Center for Talent Development. Mark Vondracek, a physics teacher at the high school, and math teachers Ron Sellke and John Benson conceived the program.
Students will get a jump-start toward taking 8th-grade algebra, a gatekeeper course for the high school’s advanced chemistry and physics sequence. The program started with students from Lincoln, Lincolnwood, Orrington and Timber Ridge K-8 Magnet Schools.
Vondracek, a summer instructor at the center, said that in his six years teaching there, he’d never had an African-American student and only one or two Hispanic students.
“We want to engage kids early with new ideas and help them resist peer pressure not to succeed later,” Vondracek said, adding that other district programs start too late, in middle school or high school.
In the 3rd graders’ first class at the high school early this spring, they were excited by the patterns formed by light when it was passed through water and refracted, or bent, with plastic forms–an introduction for physics concepts they’ll encounter later.
Working with a group of the 3rd graders, Sellke said, “We must give kids an actual experience with these concepts first, and then they’ll get more focused on high-end math and physics.”
Helping the teachers
Although restructuring teaching is not cost-intensive (around $400,000 a year), the new programs require a major effort by teachers, administrators, parents and students, said Barbara Hiller, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for District 65. Somewhat overwhelmed by Murphy’s initiatives early on, teachers and principals worried about getting administrative demands without much help. “We’re working hard to provide the support that teachers need to succeed,” Hiller said.
Four instructors have been hired to help teachers in kindergarten through 5th grade modify the complex new University of Chicago math curriculum to accommodate individual learning styles.
Three retired “master teachers” are designing a program in which they’ll visit classrooms to mentor teachers and provide insight on how to help students with learning challenges.
With coordinated scheduling, teachers also have more planning time to develop new teaching methods, Murphy said.
There are more resources for professional development, Hiller added, especially for reading teachers in 3rd through 5th grades. Partnerships help, she said. National-Louis University in Evanston is supporting a special fluency program in reading, and NU is assisting with math.
In addition, teachers are now getting a chance to shape the program, not just march to top-down orders, she said. Throughout the program’s first year, teachers were asked to evaluate it. They asked for classroom teaching assistance and got it, Hiller said.
While it’s tough to juggle all kids’ needs at once, 5th-grade teacher Tina Haralampopoulos said instruction for teachers to assist children in small reading groups and having more planning time have helped. “There is much more focus now,” the Walker School teacher said.
Too early to tell
It’s too early to evaluate minority student success in District 65, Hiller said. ISAT tests in 2000 showed about 3 percent more African-American students meeting or exceeding math standards, but 3 percent fewer meeting or exceeding them in reading. Testing this spring may provide more insight by August, Hiller said.
It takes seven years to see school improvement, Murphy said. “I measure impact by whether changes are occurring uniformly, whether there is a level of expertise and if people are embracing new ways of doing things,” he said.
After starting programs several years ago to boost minority student achievement, District 202 administrators are cautiously optimistic. Average ACT scores of African-American students increased to 18.2 in 2000 from 17.2 in 1999. The top score is 36. Average ACT scores of Latino students also rose, to 19.8 from 18.3. The average ACT score for white students in 2000 was 25.9, compared with 26.2 in 1999. Improved ACT scores reflect a number of initiatives, District 202 administrators say, including the daily guidance and support students get during a home-base class period, and ensuring that all students take core subjects such as math, English and science.
Also important, they say, are an enriched math and reading program for students needing to catch up; summer precalculus and geometry programs prior to advanced classes; teaching midlevel students the habits of high achievers; and clustering minority students in honors classes for social support.
In addition, both districts have worked to coordinate standards for student achievement in kindergarten through Grade 12. New benchmark exams also are being used at the high school to measure each student’s academic growth over time, rather than comparing groups at one grade level.
Regarding overall success in closing the achievement gap, District 202 Supt. Allan Alson said there may be more minority students in high school honors classes now but seeing improvement in student achievement is “a slow growth process.”
He said it takes reshaping how students are grouped, identifying individual needs, changing teacher expectations, providing better bridges between home and school, and tackling tough societal issues such as poverty and racism.
“It’s really about giving kids the support and a belief that they can be successful and that it’s good to be successful,” Alson said. Schools also need to find better ways of identifying kids with special needs and learning challenges, he added.
Supporting parents
Support for parents is also key to ensuring that students succeed, said Bessie Rhodes, director of Project Excite.
“We’re asking a lot of parents–they’ll have to get kids to after-school classes on time, carpool, understand and support what’s happening,” she said.
District 65 is helping parents develop support groups and plan social events to bond around the academic-achievement goal, said Rhodes, a former principal at Timber Ridge.
“We also must interest parents in non-traditional ways, [such as] at church, where real listening happens,” she said. “Without the support of parents to get through school, kids can fall by the wayside. There’s peer pressure not to succeed.”
“The behavior expected and discipline should be clear at school and at home,” she added.
The PTA Council’s Burns said, “Now we have the structure to guide teachers and parents–and programs for everyone to succeed, the gifted, the kids in the middle and the low achievers.”
The next academic leap, Murphy said, is to get kids to see the interrelationship between concepts in science and reading, for example.
Murphy also wants parents, teachers and District 65 residents to help develop a five-year strategic plan for closing the achievement gap. The plan’s goals are being discussed at community advisory meetings begun this year.
“We want to meet all kids’ needs in ways that don’t compromise the students at the top,” he said.
