Last week I spent five days at the Harvard Closing the Achievement Gap Institute, sponsored by Dr. Ron Ferguson and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  The 2010 institute brought in educators from all over the United States including other areas such as Canada, Chile and the Dominican Republic.  There was a nice blend of teachers, school administrators, district level administrators, curriculum content coordinators and equity coaches, so the perspectives were healthy and diverse. The energy, passion, dedication and vision for our work was captured best by Dan A. Sims, Principal at Tri-Cities High School in East Point, Georgia, with a poem he shared called We Can Teach Them.  A video of Dan’s poem is above and a summary of each day of the institute is presented below.

Day 1 - Thursday July 8, 2010
Dr. Ron Ferguson
Framing the Work

Schools need people who interact most frequently and intensively with children (parents, teachers, peers) to nurture them in ways that contribute maximally to their self-realization as educated, healthy and fulfilled human beings.

Our reward is a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves and working with people whose values we share.

How Great School Leaders Build Trust and Credibility
ACTIONS – make it safe to make mistakes, keep promises, forthcoming with information/changes

URGENCY – Keeps most urgent challenges front and center in the district – Keeps showing up on agendas – doesn’t go away

FOCUS – Keep the number of initiatives small, help teachers and principals reduce the complexity of closing the achievement gap – not a sprint, but a marathon – celebrate short wins

EFFICACY – Explicit statements from leaders that we hold the answers to our challenges

INCLUSION – Leaders participate without dominating – let those closest to the issue/problem help in framing its solutions

STRONG RESPONSES – great leaders respond immediately, visibly, and sometimes harshly to behavior that sabotages organizational commitments

KNOWING THE STUDENTS – Great leaders know many students and press their staff to as well

PUBLIC TEACHING – Great leaders nurture open classrooms, frequent class visits, reflection

CLOSE MONITORING – Ensure non-negotiables are clear and are frequently monitored w/ ongoing feedback

PERSEVERANCE– Great leaders stick around and build a professional culture.

EFFORT – Great leaders speak and act from a belief that “Smart” is something you can get.

Preparing to Take Responsibility

-Why such an urgency to eliminate the racial predictability of achievement
-US Population becoming more diverse
-Past two years - more minority infants born than white infants
-Gap has been substantially closed before (See NAEP 1970-1990) also uneducated immigrants 19th/20th century
-Very little progress since 1990

Schools should stop comparing achievement scores among subgroups within the school and instead compared them against state averages (ie School Black Males vs State Avg for White Males)

Schools should move away from comparing proficiency rates and focused on actual scores (ie Black Males avg score w/ State avg score for White Males).

Five steps schools take toward becoming exemplary
1.     Key people accept responsibility to lead the change
2.     Declare the purposes of the work in mission statements that focus on a few ideas/priorities.
3.     Design strategies, plans, tools and tactics for broadly inclusive adult learning
4.     Develop and refine quality standards for judging teacher and student work
5.     Skillfully and relentlessly monitor plans and strategies, attending persistently and explicitly to achieving and maintaining quality

School Leadership fails when…
Leaders lack expertise
Leaders don’t know how to organize people to work together for change
Leaders are afraid to ask people to step outside their comfort zone
Leaders don’t respect other people’s ideas
Lack good ideas about what to do
Plans seem incoherent to people who are asked to do the work
Parents have not been included

Schools become exceptional when focusing on a few principles and practices.  Research suggests that adopting improvement models are ineffective and expensive for schools.  Most successful schools do their own work/research to get better.  Teams within schools begin to think differently about what needs to be done to close the achievement gap.  Currently everyone is looking for a model to replicate – real success comes with creating your own model.

Between 1972 and 2002 25% of the IQ Gap dissipated between whites and blacks

If you see low-level administrative tasks among school/district leadership, one usually sees low-level instruction in the classroom

Download Notes from Days 1-5 below

Below is the text from a speech Dr. Trice gave honoring the high school graduates of the Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate Program.

This month we interviewed Dr. Marcelle Haddix of Syracuse University.  She spoke with us about her recent article, Black Boys Can Write, that appears in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.  Dr. Haddix provides insight on strategies teachers and parents can use to promote writing along with more useful ways of framing the discourse about the education of African American males.

Additional Resources Referenced by Dr. Haddix
Dr. Valerie Kinloch, The Ohio State University
Book:  Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race and the Literacies of Urban Youth

Dr. Maisha Winn, Emory University
Book:  Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms

Ernest Morrell, UCLA
Multiple books dealing with the education of urban youth

Al Tatum
Book:  Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap

Jawanza Kunjufu
Books:  Multiple Writings

Successfully educating African American males is ground in two facts: (1) schools must ensure African American males are well connected to a positive educational experience and (2) African American males must be held to the highest academic standards.

For too long African American males have been connected to a negative schooling experience due to various factors, but primarily, high suspension/expulsion rates, overrepresentation for identification of special education services and high failure/dropout rates.

These negative indicators of achievement frame the black male schooling experience in a discourse of failure and serves to lower academic expectations for this student population as a whole.

Below are three concrete steps schools can take in developing a more positive schooling experience that promotes high academic standards for African American Males.

Establish Affinity Groups
Affinity groups are groups or clubs setup to address the unique needs of African American male students.  They should promote open, safe and honest dialogue, student accountability to one another, strategies for navigating the schooling environment and academic support.  Members of the affinity group should be expected to take on highly visible leadership roles in the school/classroom. 

Implement a Model that Builds-up Young African American Males
In the end kids are kids and they will do what kids do.  Unfortunately for African American males the consequences of their negative actions carry a much heavier penalty than those of their peers.  In addition, schools have done a great job of tearing down the esteem of young African American males and a poor job of building them up.  That’s why it’s imperative that African American males have access to an adult in the school they trust and holds them accountable – call them out when they are wrong and celebrate them when they accomplish great feats. 

Increase School Involvement
Extra/Co- Curricular activities provide a sure path to the heartbeat of a school.  For decades scholarly research has indicated that students who are involved in school activities outperform their counterparts.  Reviewing the number/percentage of African American males involved with two or more school activities is one way to gauge the health of a school for these students.  Schools can increase student involvement among African American males by aggressively recruiting them for participation in school activities, conducting a survey to determine extra/co-curricular interests and by making information available about school activities in student friendly formats (Facebook, texting, twitter, etc.).  One added benefit would be that as student involvement increases, so would parent involvement.

While these steps can’t be seen as the silver bullet, overtime they should begin to transform schools into a more positive culture for African American Males.

Dr. Rodney Trice
Success for Black Boys

Additional Resources
Follow Dr. Perry on Twitter
Black in America II – Article about Steve Perry
Video of Dr. Perry on Black in America II

Dr. Fulani is accurate – much of the discourse about the achievement gap in the United States is often reduced to a regurgitation of unconstructive achievement data for minority students.

The who, what, when, where, and how of the achievement gap has been studied – now it’s time to get the work done!

Dr. Steve Perry’s (CNN Black in America II) message to conference participants this past Saturday was clear and concise – it’s time to close schools that are not working for our kids and open schools that do!

An avid supporter of charter schools and vouchers, Perry contends that far too often public schools have become “employment agencies” for adults who have no real interest and/or expertise in teaching black, brown and poor students. 

He notes that the primary problem with schools is they’re designed to make adults feel comfortable, while chipping away at the souls of our most fragile students.

Although Dr. Perry was speaking to about 300 lively public school educators, he did not bite his tongue.  He made it plain that he has no patience for “grown people” that don’t know how to care for kids and that educators should stop complaining about their lack of pay until they can produce the kind of achievement results that will make the community proud.

Dr. Perry suggests:

• Schools of education should stop graduating teachers that are certified but not capable
• Schools should identify the ineffective teachers and have them removed
• Educators have a responsibility to extend themselves – sacrifice more (tutoring, home visits, counseling, curriculum planning, etc)
• Stop focusing on textbooks and teach students a more enriched curriculum

Additional Resources
Follow Dr. Perry on Twitter
Black in America II – Article about Steve Perry
Video of Dr. Perry on Black in America II