Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Sustaining Reform
VUE Number 9, Fall 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Developing a Civic Infrastructure
By Carolyn Akers
Carolyn Akers is executive director of the Mobile Area Education Foundation.
> Author's Biography
Audio Clips
Listen to audio clips of Carolyn Akers answering questions about her work in education reform. Transcripts are included.
LISTEN
[7 minute, 37 seconds]
You talk in your article about a “civic infrastructure.” Why is a civic infrastructure necessary for reform and how did you set about building one in Mobile?
LISTEN
[6 minute, 24 seconds]
What is the role of the Mobile Area Educational Foundation now, now that you've gone through this process and you're at the stage of implementing the reform? What is your organization's role?
LISTEN [3 minutes, 34 seconds]
At this point, at the end of 2005, how would you characterize the relationship between the community and the schools? Are they in fact true partners, or is there still work to do?
In 2001, Mobile County, Alabama, raised taxes for the first time in forty years in support
of education reform. A local education fund played a key role in mobilizing the community
and continues to do so in supporting the school district.
Four years ago, voters in Mobile County, Alabama, approved a property tax linked to public education, the first successful tax increase for public schools in more than forty years. Schools in Alabama are chronically underfunded, due to constitutional limits on the state's ability to levy taxes. So the local tax levy was a significant victory for those in the county who believed that education had been shortchanged for years.
The passage was not considered a mandate, however. Voters expected to see results for those additional tax dollars. They expected to see changes in how the school system operated in the future. The demand for accountability increased.
In the same year the property tax was passed, the Mobile Area Education Foundation (MAEF) was named one of five national sites for the Standards and Accountability grant awarded by the Public Education Network. The overall goal of the community effort was to create a deep willingness across the community to support changes that would ensure a quality education for all students in Mobile County, regardless of where they lived or which school they attended.
The story of Mobile County is one of a true grassroots campaign in which the citizens voiced that not only did they need to do something about the county's schools, they wanted to. An intensive public engagement effort, coupled with a specific reform strategy, began the momentum for change. As a result, a new public story is emerging about Mobile County schools — and about the community's role in improving them.
Three strategies became the focus of efforts in Mobile County: a citizen-driven long-range plan for school improvement, a data-driven system for decision making, and an accountability mechanism to ensure movement toward a strategic plan.
Sustained Engagement
Yes, We Can, as the citizen engagement approach was called,was a joint effort between the school system and the local education fund. The first step was to collect the voices of citizens from multiple sectors of the county. A Citizens Advisory Team emerged, with members designated as representatives of the various racial and geographic sectors of Mobile County.
Engagement does not happen
by chance. It happens through the
structure of strategic activities. The Yes,
We Can initiative ultimately engaged
1,500 people and convened nearly sixty
discussions around kitchen tables and
in living rooms, churches, and community
centers. Additional conversations
were held with teachers, principals, and
members of the superintendent's student
advisory committee. Participants
discussed assets unique to the Mobile
community, along with their aspirations
for public education.
At one point in the effort, more than four hundred people attended a school board meeting convened to pass a community agreement created in the process. All participants wore nametags identifying their communities. School board members, seeing this broad-based, countywide force for change, unanimously supported the key tenets of the agreement.
The next step was to align the community's aspirations for its schools with a specific plan of action for change that would hold the board of education and superintendent accountable for results.
The Mobile County Public School System encompasses an area of 1,644 square miles, with an enrollment of 65,000 students in more than a hundred schools. MAEF understood that a strategic plan that would support high-quality education across the county had to be developed by citizens, not sold to them. So MAEF went back to the community. In a second phase of engagement, forty individuals representing diverse demographics discussed the "realm of the possible" for what schools and communities could achieve, based on issues identified in earlier discussions. From this, a Community Advisory Team drafted the PASSport to Excellence, a strategic plan for the district and the community that outlines five priority goals for the school system. The goal areas include nineteen performance targets in:
Engagement alone, while it is of strategic importance, is not enough. Bolstered by the federal No Child Left Behind law, the Mobile County school board and MAEF understood that the community agreement structured as part of the engagement efforts must be aligned to a rigorous reform effort focused on ensuring equitable access to high-quality public education for all students. The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence was adopted as the vehicle that would address the community's priority issues.
Baldrige criteria are reflected in changes that have since been made the school system, including:
Transformed Schools
Central to the community aspirations that led to the strategic plan is the belief that what happens in the classroom matters most. The school board responded. Last spring, the school board allocated $6.2 million toward improving achievement of Mobile's five lowest performing schools, through a set of policy changes called the Transformed Schools Plan. Principals and all teachers in each of these five schools were reconstituted. Some principals and teachers stayed, but only after re-applying for their positions. Highly qualified teachers were given a bonus of up to $16,000 for voluntarily moving to one of these low-performing schools.
Central to the community aspirations that led to the strategic plan is the belief that what happens in the classroom matters most. The school board responded.
In all, the school system will spend approximately $1.8 million in performance-based incentive pay, a policy based on performance indicators used in Denver. Another $3.4 million will be used to buy textbooks and other supplies, extra professional development for teachers, and other means of support.
District policy and practice changed, too. After assessing principals' needs, central office staff created a leadership academy for principals designed around those needs. The school system also started a teacher-induction program in which new and returning teachers could participate. Parent organizers were placed in the transformation schools to help parents understand how to support and extend learning at home. For students in these five schools, the district has invested in a variety of wraparound services that students can access right at school.
Student-achievement data indicate that the schools are beginning to show progress. Recently released Stanford Achievement Tests and the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test confirm that the Transformed Schools are well on their way to "clear" status. Each school made significant gains — some as much thirty-point gains in reading and mathematics. The Transformed Schools that did not meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) were proficient in all subgroups, with the exception of special education. The district made AYP for the year; 61 of the 94 schools met AYP, an increase from 41 out of 93 from the previous year.
A New Public Story
Broad-based engagement efforts continue to be applied. Now, as attention has shifted to implementation of the strategic plan, community engagement efforts have also shifted. Now referred to as Together We Can, the engagement effort continues to involve civic mobilization of Mobile's citizens, students, and faith-based, business, and community organizations. This past spring, more than eight hundred members of the community joined the school district in a community-wide education summit to look at school progress data and recommit to the shared vision of the strategic plan. The summit is likely to become an annual event.
More than ever before, data is
being used to drive decision making.
The school system and MAEF are
using a high level of transparency and
communication about data throughout
the community to build support for
changes in policy, personnel, and practice.
Each school in the system has a
dashboard mounted in front entrances
and hallways of schools that displays
student-achievement data and compares
it to the previous year. Dashboards
show how students are doing
school by school. The dashboards have
been significant supports in creating
common understanding and language
among different sectors of the community
— especially in the business and
faith-based communities — and have
been helpful in getting all sectors to
focus on common goals.
The school district has also increased the transparency of the budget and the strategic plan itself. Each year, the school district posts the budget and financial audits on the school district Web site for all to see. The strategic plan is also posted on the Web site. In addition, individual action plans are made public online. Action plans align goals on the strategic plan to the person responsible for accomplishing each goal. This way, the community knows whom to hold accountable for accomplishing each of the goals on the plan.
MAEF: The Role of an Intermediary Organization
Yes,We Can was not MAEF's first attempt at engagement. Indeed, in the thirteen-year history of the organization, MAEF had conducted three other strategic engagement efforts, ranging from community surveys conducted through utility-bill mailings to community forums. MAEF has always seen the community as an important partner in public education and has always had as its central mission the education and engagement of citizens across the county.
What MAEF learned over time, in its own experiences and in observing other communities, is that most improvement efforts get to a plan of action but then fall short on deploying strategies that translate goals into practice. The difference in current engagement efforts is one of breadth and scale.
MAEF also has learned that continuous improvement requires continuous public engagement. As a continual reminder and representative of the community, MAEF applies equal measures of pressure and support to the school district as it makes the shift to a more accountable, more equitable system. Early engagement efforts were about collecting the voices of the people. Over time, MAEF has also moved toward facilitating agreement.
The single most limiting factor in community engagement efforts across the country has been the lack of school-system capacity to deliver needed change. School districts are fragile systems; lack of capacity in any single area (whether leadership, the quality of teaching, or resources) can stop reform efforts cold. Superintendents come and go; focus on a continual reform effort often goes with them. Knowing that, MAEF deliberately connected citizen concerns to an action framework. In this case, that framework was the Baldrige criteria.
As that reform effort deepens, the next phase of public engagement is about continuing to communicate for genuine public ownership, deployment of ongoing school reform and engagement efforts, and empowering action through a broad cross-section of civic actors that represents key sectors of the community. MAEF is tracking progress and creating short-term wins, mapping organizations, and aligning targeted actions for impact.
The single most limiting factor in community engagement efforts across the country has been the lack of school-system capacity to deliver needed change. School districts are fragile systems; lack of capacity in any single area can stop reform efforts cold.
Over time, the development of civic leaders and of civic stakeholders will be the vehicles that will mobilize the ongoing political will of the community to fund a high-performing public education system. In this way, a civic infrastructure is being built.
Because the infrastructure of the school system is fragile, MAEF is working across neighborhoods and sectors to establish a permanent, citizen-led structure for ensuring the long-term sustainability of the reforms identified and undertaken as a result of the Mobile County community agreement. This civic infrastructure can be a permanent fixture that brings pressure for change, mobilization of actors throughout the community, and support and resources. Mostly, this civic infrastructure can sustain attention to complex and difficult problems that simply cannot be solved overnight.
So What? The Results So Far
Short-term results are apparent. All 100 schools in the Mobile County school system have developed a data-driven dashboard to focus on raising the bar and closing the achievement gap. In addition, school-system-generated quarterly criterion-referenced tests provide data on student progress in meeting grade-level benchmarks in core academic areas. All principals have been trained to lead and monitor implementation of research-based best strategies matched to individual school needs. Supplemental services are aligned to address individual student learning needs in all schools, not just the Transformed Schools. All of the Mobile schools participating in the state's Alabama Reading First initiative rank in the top twenty; one school, Calcedeaver Elementary School, is the first in the state.
As the leading community-based organization supporting the reform effort, MAEF continues to champion quality instruction for all children across all schools. This is done through support of the district's efforts in:
Now What? The Challenges Ahead
The plan is in place, and the goals and nineteen performance targets have become the focus of school-district policy and practice. But the challenges continue. The next stage of Mobile County's journey will be to sustain attention to the strategic plan and accountability measures in the policy churn of a new school board; two new members took their seats this past spring. One of the key directions the new school board has already set is the redesign of key central office functions. By all estimations, the strategic plan is not just evident in these changes; the performance indicators are driving these changes.
Engagement plus a strategic reform effort looks to be the right prescription to move all children to progress. But sustaining and spreading the effort is essential. The school board knows that progress can't stop now.
Due in part to Mobile County's Southern culture, efforts here are heavily focused on relationships, which are as complex as they are broad-based. These include the partnerships among sixty different local communities in Mobile County. There are communities within communities, as well. For example, each community has its own faithbased community as well as the local business community.Within the school-system community, there are subgroups of school administrators, the central office, the school board and the neighborhoods each school or school-board zone serves.
The media in Mobile County play a strong watchdog role in the reform effort, and a central focus of the work is building relationships between the media and the school district. MAEF and the school system work strategically with the Mobile Register as well as local radio and television stations as part of the ongoing engagement and reform efforts. Media have regular access to student- and school-performance data, as well as to school-system-leadership rationales for decisions based on that data.
Despite the attention paid to developing and sustaining relationships, none of this work has been done in the absence of conflict. Like any other urban school district, these reform efforts are occurring in a climate of budget cuts, severe teacher and principal shortages, and the high-stakes, high-penalty culture of federal and state accountability measures. In addition, there is often conflict between various communities' needs and desires.
But what's changing is how the Mobile County school district and citizens are learning to address conflict openly. One example of how building relationships has led to better understanding is the superintendent's relationship with a group of "ambassadors," ministers from Black churches in the community, with whom he meets regularly. When a situation arose in which the superintendent was accused of unfairly targeting Black schools, he used data to make the case for his action.
Through the use of plain language in their community engagement process and the use of data in decision making and communicating about the decisions, the ambassadors and the superintendent have been able to mediate the conflict and keep their common focus on achievement of children in all schools, including those in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
The greatest challenge ahead is scale. Early data that show that the Transformed Schools are making progress is encouraging the school board to look hard at implementing these strategies across the district. The plan can only have serious implications if lessons learned from these efforts are implemented not just in five schools, but also across the school system. Resource alignment that has occurred in these five schools needs to be done systemwide. Data on the dashboards, which show the public a school's progress on student achievement, must be drilled down to the classroom level to identify specific strategies to move student learning ahead.
Mobile County also lacks a sufficient data-warehouse system. Viable curriculum and instruction strategies need to be aligned to ensure that more students are achieving at higher levels.
As these ongoing needs are addressed, communicating with one voice to an internal school-district and external citizen-based community remains a key priority. The capacity of the Mobile County Public School System and of the community at large must be built so that all parties are engaged in fact-based decision making.
Engagement plus a strategic reform effort looks to be the right prescription to move all children to progress. But sustaining and spreading the effort is essential. The school board knows that progress can't stop now. MAEF will continue to develop the civic infrastructure that supports the changes needed in the school-system infrastructure. Both are essential to ensure that success for all students continues to be the focus for the county schools.
Archives
Sustaining Reform
VUE Number 9, Fall 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Developing a Civic Infrastructure
By Carolyn Akers
Carolyn Akers is executive director of the Mobile Area Education Foundation.
> Author's Biography
Audio Clips
Listen to audio clips of Carolyn Akers answering questions about her work in education reform. Transcripts are included.
LISTEN
[7 minute, 37 seconds]
You talk in your article about a “civic infrastructure.” Why is a civic infrastructure necessary for reform and how did you set about building one in Mobile?
LISTEN
[6 minute, 24 seconds]
What is the role of the Mobile Area Educational Foundation now, now that you've gone through this process and you're at the stage of implementing the reform? What is your organization's role?
LISTEN [3 minutes, 34 seconds]
At this point, at the end of 2005, how would you characterize the relationship between the community and the schools? Are they in fact true partners, or is there still work to do?
In 2001, Mobile County, Alabama, raised taxes for the first time in forty years in support
of education reform. A local education fund played a key role in mobilizing the community
and continues to do so in supporting the school district.
Four years ago, voters in Mobile County, Alabama, approved a property tax linked to public education, the first successful tax increase for public schools in more than forty years. Schools in Alabama are chronically underfunded, due to constitutional limits on the state's ability to levy taxes. So the local tax levy was a significant victory for those in the county who believed that education had been shortchanged for years.
The passage was not considered a mandate, however. Voters expected to see results for those additional tax dollars. They expected to see changes in how the school system operated in the future. The demand for accountability increased.
In the same year the property tax was passed, the Mobile Area Education Foundation (MAEF) was named one of five national sites for the Standards and Accountability grant awarded by the Public Education Network. The overall goal of the community effort was to create a deep willingness across the community to support changes that would ensure a quality education for all students in Mobile County, regardless of where they lived or which school they attended.
The story of Mobile County is one of a true grassroots campaign in which the citizens voiced that not only did they need to do something about the county's schools, they wanted to. An intensive public engagement effort, coupled with a specific reform strategy, began the momentum for change. As a result, a new public story is emerging about Mobile County schools — and about the community's role in improving them.
Three strategies became the focus of efforts in Mobile County: a citizen-driven long-range plan for school improvement, a data-driven system for decision making, and an accountability mechanism to ensure movement toward a strategic plan.
Sustained Engagement
Yes, We Can, as the citizen engagement approach was called,was a joint effort between the school system and the local education fund. The first step was to collect the voices of citizens from multiple sectors of the county. A Citizens Advisory Team emerged, with members designated as representatives of the various racial and geographic sectors of Mobile County.
Engagement does not happen
by chance. It happens through the
structure of strategic activities. The Yes,
We Can initiative ultimately engaged
1,500 people and convened nearly sixty
discussions around kitchen tables and
in living rooms, churches, and community
centers. Additional conversations
were held with teachers, principals, and
members of the superintendent's student
advisory committee. Participants
discussed assets unique to the Mobile
community, along with their aspirations
for public education.
At one point in the effort, more than four hundred people attended a school board meeting convened to pass a community agreement created in the process. All participants wore nametags identifying their communities. School board members, seeing this broad-based, countywide force for change, unanimously supported the key tenets of the agreement.
The next step was to align the community's aspirations for its schools with a specific plan of action for change that would hold the board of education and superintendent accountable for results.
The Mobile County Public School System encompasses an area of 1,644 square miles, with an enrollment of 65,000 students in more than a hundred schools. MAEF understood that a strategic plan that would support high-quality education across the county had to be developed by citizens, not sold to them. So MAEF went back to the community. In a second phase of engagement, forty individuals representing diverse demographics discussed the "realm of the possible" for what schools and communities could achieve, based on issues identified in earlier discussions. From this, a Community Advisory Team drafted the PASSport to Excellence, a strategic plan for the district and the community that outlines five priority goals for the school system. The goal areas include nineteen performance targets in:
- student achievement
- quality district and school leadership
- communications and engagement
- governance
- equity
Engagement alone, while it is of strategic importance, is not enough. Bolstered by the federal No Child Left Behind law, the Mobile County school board and MAEF understood that the community agreement structured as part of the engagement efforts must be aligned to a rigorous reform effort focused on ensuring equitable access to high-quality public education for all students. The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence was adopted as the vehicle that would address the community's priority issues.
Baldrige criteria are reflected in changes that have since been made the school system, including:
- Every principal in 100 schools has a
single chart, known as a "dashboard,"
that outlines student-achievement
goals, identifies gaps between current
performance and desired targets, and
sets benchmarks for progress.
- Dashboards are posted in the campus
lobby and updated regularly for
school staff, parents, and the public
to review.
- Professional development is focused
on research-based classroom best
practices as identified by DataWorks
Educational Research.
- Commitment to world-class Baldrige
standards for organizational improvement
are included in all central office
functions.
- Educators are planning for and monitoring results.
Transformed Schools
Central to the community aspirations that led to the strategic plan is the belief that what happens in the classroom matters most. The school board responded. Last spring, the school board allocated $6.2 million toward improving achievement of Mobile's five lowest performing schools, through a set of policy changes called the Transformed Schools Plan. Principals and all teachers in each of these five schools were reconstituted. Some principals and teachers stayed, but only after re-applying for their positions. Highly qualified teachers were given a bonus of up to $16,000 for voluntarily moving to one of these low-performing schools.
Central to the community aspirations that led to the strategic plan is the belief that what happens in the classroom matters most. The school board responded.
In all, the school system will spend approximately $1.8 million in performance-based incentive pay, a policy based on performance indicators used in Denver. Another $3.4 million will be used to buy textbooks and other supplies, extra professional development for teachers, and other means of support.
District policy and practice changed, too. After assessing principals' needs, central office staff created a leadership academy for principals designed around those needs. The school system also started a teacher-induction program in which new and returning teachers could participate. Parent organizers were placed in the transformation schools to help parents understand how to support and extend learning at home. For students in these five schools, the district has invested in a variety of wraparound services that students can access right at school.
Student-achievement data indicate that the schools are beginning to show progress. Recently released Stanford Achievement Tests and the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test confirm that the Transformed Schools are well on their way to "clear" status. Each school made significant gains — some as much thirty-point gains in reading and mathematics. The Transformed Schools that did not meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) were proficient in all subgroups, with the exception of special education. The district made AYP for the year; 61 of the 94 schools met AYP, an increase from 41 out of 93 from the previous year.
A New Public Story
Broad-based engagement efforts continue to be applied. Now, as attention has shifted to implementation of the strategic plan, community engagement efforts have also shifted. Now referred to as Together We Can, the engagement effort continues to involve civic mobilization of Mobile's citizens, students, and faith-based, business, and community organizations. This past spring, more than eight hundred members of the community joined the school district in a community-wide education summit to look at school progress data and recommit to the shared vision of the strategic plan. The summit is likely to become an annual event.
More than ever before, data is
being used to drive decision making.
The school system and MAEF are
using a high level of transparency and
communication about data throughout
the community to build support for
changes in policy, personnel, and practice.
Each school in the system has a
dashboard mounted in front entrances
and hallways of schools that displays
student-achievement data and compares
it to the previous year. Dashboards
show how students are doing
school by school. The dashboards have
been significant supports in creating
common understanding and language
among different sectors of the community
— especially in the business and
faith-based communities — and have
been helpful in getting all sectors to
focus on common goals.
The school district has also increased the transparency of the budget and the strategic plan itself. Each year, the school district posts the budget and financial audits on the school district Web site for all to see. The strategic plan is also posted on the Web site. In addition, individual action plans are made public online. Action plans align goals on the strategic plan to the person responsible for accomplishing each goal. This way, the community knows whom to hold accountable for accomplishing each of the goals on the plan.
MAEF: The Role of an Intermediary Organization
Yes,We Can was not MAEF's first attempt at engagement. Indeed, in the thirteen-year history of the organization, MAEF had conducted three other strategic engagement efforts, ranging from community surveys conducted through utility-bill mailings to community forums. MAEF has always seen the community as an important partner in public education and has always had as its central mission the education and engagement of citizens across the county.
What MAEF learned over time, in its own experiences and in observing other communities, is that most improvement efforts get to a plan of action but then fall short on deploying strategies that translate goals into practice. The difference in current engagement efforts is one of breadth and scale.
MAEF also has learned that continuous improvement requires continuous public engagement. As a continual reminder and representative of the community, MAEF applies equal measures of pressure and support to the school district as it makes the shift to a more accountable, more equitable system. Early engagement efforts were about collecting the voices of the people. Over time, MAEF has also moved toward facilitating agreement.
The single most limiting factor in community engagement efforts across the country has been the lack of school-system capacity to deliver needed change. School districts are fragile systems; lack of capacity in any single area (whether leadership, the quality of teaching, or resources) can stop reform efforts cold. Superintendents come and go; focus on a continual reform effort often goes with them. Knowing that, MAEF deliberately connected citizen concerns to an action framework. In this case, that framework was the Baldrige criteria.
As that reform effort deepens, the next phase of public engagement is about continuing to communicate for genuine public ownership, deployment of ongoing school reform and engagement efforts, and empowering action through a broad cross-section of civic actors that represents key sectors of the community. MAEF is tracking progress and creating short-term wins, mapping organizations, and aligning targeted actions for impact.
The single most limiting factor in community engagement efforts across the country has been the lack of school-system capacity to deliver needed change. School districts are fragile systems; lack of capacity in any single area can stop reform efforts cold.
Over time, the development of civic leaders and of civic stakeholders will be the vehicles that will mobilize the ongoing political will of the community to fund a high-performing public education system. In this way, a civic infrastructure is being built.
Because the infrastructure of the school system is fragile, MAEF is working across neighborhoods and sectors to establish a permanent, citizen-led structure for ensuring the long-term sustainability of the reforms identified and undertaken as a result of the Mobile County community agreement. This civic infrastructure can be a permanent fixture that brings pressure for change, mobilization of actors throughout the community, and support and resources. Mostly, this civic infrastructure can sustain attention to complex and difficult problems that simply cannot be solved overnight.
So What? The Results So Far
Short-term results are apparent. All 100 schools in the Mobile County school system have developed a data-driven dashboard to focus on raising the bar and closing the achievement gap. In addition, school-system-generated quarterly criterion-referenced tests provide data on student progress in meeting grade-level benchmarks in core academic areas. All principals have been trained to lead and monitor implementation of research-based best strategies matched to individual school needs. Supplemental services are aligned to address individual student learning needs in all schools, not just the Transformed Schools. All of the Mobile schools participating in the state's Alabama Reading First initiative rank in the top twenty; one school, Calcedeaver Elementary School, is the first in the state.
As the leading community-based organization supporting the reform effort, MAEF continues to champion quality instruction for all children across all schools. This is done through support of the district's efforts in:
- assigning achievement specialists
such as reading, writing, or math
specialists to the lowest-performing
schools in the system;
- conducting individual classroom
assessments in every classroom in every
school to align student work to the
standards to assure rigor and equity;
- organizing the district's five clusters
with quality leadership teams who
monitor achievement progress on a
regular basis;
- implementing, in collaboration with
higher education, a rigorous math
curriculum, which is being studied as
a model for statewide math instruction;
and
- developing a data warehouse that makes student data accessible to classroom teachers.
Now What? The Challenges Ahead
The plan is in place, and the goals and nineteen performance targets have become the focus of school-district policy and practice. But the challenges continue. The next stage of Mobile County's journey will be to sustain attention to the strategic plan and accountability measures in the policy churn of a new school board; two new members took their seats this past spring. One of the key directions the new school board has already set is the redesign of key central office functions. By all estimations, the strategic plan is not just evident in these changes; the performance indicators are driving these changes.
Engagement plus a strategic reform effort looks to be the right prescription to move all children to progress. But sustaining and spreading the effort is essential. The school board knows that progress can't stop now.
Due in part to Mobile County's Southern culture, efforts here are heavily focused on relationships, which are as complex as they are broad-based. These include the partnerships among sixty different local communities in Mobile County. There are communities within communities, as well. For example, each community has its own faithbased community as well as the local business community.Within the school-system community, there are subgroups of school administrators, the central office, the school board and the neighborhoods each school or school-board zone serves.
The media in Mobile County play a strong watchdog role in the reform effort, and a central focus of the work is building relationships between the media and the school district. MAEF and the school system work strategically with the Mobile Register as well as local radio and television stations as part of the ongoing engagement and reform efforts. Media have regular access to student- and school-performance data, as well as to school-system-leadership rationales for decisions based on that data.
Despite the attention paid to developing and sustaining relationships, none of this work has been done in the absence of conflict. Like any other urban school district, these reform efforts are occurring in a climate of budget cuts, severe teacher and principal shortages, and the high-stakes, high-penalty culture of federal and state accountability measures. In addition, there is often conflict between various communities' needs and desires.
But what's changing is how the Mobile County school district and citizens are learning to address conflict openly. One example of how building relationships has led to better understanding is the superintendent's relationship with a group of "ambassadors," ministers from Black churches in the community, with whom he meets regularly. When a situation arose in which the superintendent was accused of unfairly targeting Black schools, he used data to make the case for his action.
Through the use of plain language in their community engagement process and the use of data in decision making and communicating about the decisions, the ambassadors and the superintendent have been able to mediate the conflict and keep their common focus on achievement of children in all schools, including those in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
The greatest challenge ahead is scale. Early data that show that the Transformed Schools are making progress is encouraging the school board to look hard at implementing these strategies across the district. The plan can only have serious implications if lessons learned from these efforts are implemented not just in five schools, but also across the school system. Resource alignment that has occurred in these five schools needs to be done systemwide. Data on the dashboards, which show the public a school's progress on student achievement, must be drilled down to the classroom level to identify specific strategies to move student learning ahead.
Mobile County also lacks a sufficient data-warehouse system. Viable curriculum and instruction strategies need to be aligned to ensure that more students are achieving at higher levels.
As these ongoing needs are addressed, communicating with one voice to an internal school-district and external citizen-based community remains a key priority. The capacity of the Mobile County Public School System and of the community at large must be built so that all parties are engaged in fact-based decision making.
Engagement plus a strategic reform effort looks to be the right prescription to move all children to progress. But sustaining and spreading the effort is essential. The school board knows that progress can't stop now. MAEF will continue to develop the civic infrastructure that supports the changes needed in the school-system infrastructure. Both are essential to ensure that success for all students continues to be the focus for the county schools.
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