Success in the City
A once troubled urban school system is lauded for blazing a new path to academic progress
Norfolk, VA.--It's hard to tell exactly when the Norfolk Public Schools hit rock bottom, but 1998 was particularly dismal across the board: Just 38 percent of third graders passed the state's Standards of Learning, or SOL, test in English; 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient in mathematics; and a mere 18 percent of high schoolers passed Virginia and U.S. history. For John Simpson, who took over as superintendent that same year with a mandate to boost achievement for all of the district's 37,000 students, the only solution was to completely shake things up. "When I arrived, people were unhappy, but many of them had the attitude that given a fairly poor and high-minority population, that might be all that they could do," says Simpson, who shifted the district's focus to improving instruction, with an emphasis on testing, testing, and more testing--and a dash of accountability thrown in on the side. "There was no room for excuses anymore."
Today, Norfolk is one of relatively few bright spots in the often bleak landscape of urban education, boasting impressive, ongoing gains of all sorts. Over the past seven years, for instance, the proportion of district students passing the SOLs has jumped in every subject, including a more than 60 percentage point leap in both fifth-grade history and Algebra 2. Educators have also made significant strides in narrowing the achievement gap--a goal considered the holy grail of inner-city education--with black students closing in on their white classmates' scores in all subject areas. In recognition of such successes, the district won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education last week, beating out such rapidly improving big-city peers as New York City and San Francisco. "This is not a one-year phenomenon--this is a district that's made real, impressive, consistent progress," observes Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a member of the review board for the award. Norfolk's record "is really significant cause for optimism, both there and because it shows what's possible across the country."
While there are many reasons for the district's turnaround, including shifting the best teachers to the neediest schools and the introduction of a standard, aligned curriculum, chief among them is assessment. Indeed, unlike peers who have bucked No Child Left Behind's focus on high-stakes exams, Norfolk has fully embraced the idea (41 of its 49 schools met the federal law's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements this year)--and even taken it a step further. All schools here test students on at least a quarterly basis, with many offering additional weekly or monthly assessments. Administrators and teachers then use the results to track progress and make specific, data-driven decisions about teaching and learning.
Data driven . At Northside Middle School, a dozen teachers and administrators from various grades and subjects gather on a recent morning to confront a towering pile of late-breaking data on last year's eighth-grade SOL writing exams. Small groups huddle together and pore over the question-by-question result sheets for all those who did not pass, analyzing incorrect responses by every possible differential, from gender and race to specific instructor, and looking for patterns. One is immediately clear: "This double negatives thing is really killing them," says a teacher, pointing out that it's the only problem that fewer than half the students got right. The discussion turns to the pervasive use of slang in the broader community, and the group agrees that merely correcting "I ain't never"s in class isn't good enough. "We need to look at some kind of buildingwide push," says Principal Andrea Tottossy, who then suggests that poor grammar in student essays is another glaring problem and wonders aloud whether teachers are correcting misplaced commas and apostrophes or focusing more on content in a new schoolwide writing program. "We definitely need to take baby steps to include grammar--we're ready for the next step," she advises, and a social studies teacher tells her colleagues that in her class she's introduced a related exercise in which students edit each other's papers, with great success.
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