Assessment/Accountability
School and District Accountability and Assistance

Report of Fact Finding Review
Lord Middle School
Fall River Public Schools

Executive Summary

Any review of the MCAS results for the students at the Henry Lord Middle School quickly reveals dramatically and consistently low performance. School leadership and planning efforts have been weak and the school lacks any commonly held vision for improvement. Several factors contribute to these conditions:

• Visionary leadership at the school is severely lacking. The failure of the school's leadership to craft a vision of school improvement has contributed to low morale and reluctance on the part of some teachers to accept collective responsibility for the school's under-performing status. There is no currently accepted vision or plan for improvement endorsed by all stakeholders and there is an undercurrent of resistance from some faculty who continue to focus their attention on parents and the composition and demographics of the student population as the sole or primary reason for poor academic performance.

• The school currently lacks any effective systems or practices designed to ensure consistent implementation and accountability for the curriculum. The absence of any system of evaluation to ensure the effectiveness and accountability of programs, practices or services is a major weakness at the school.

• The School Leadership Team's efforts to plan the steps to bring about improved pupil performance results are seriously handicapped by the school's continuing failure to assess programs and practices. Absent information about teacher, team or program effectiveness, planners focus on external factors as they seek to improve things, thereby missing or failing to address many of the key issues that must be changed if the school truly is to improve.

• The delivery of the district's adopted curriculum has been uneven and not as effective as it could and should have been. The curriculum guides in use at the school up to the point of the Fact Finding Team's visit were incomplete, lacking teaching strategies, benchmarks, rubrics or assessment techniques. Revised curriculum guides, including many of those necessary components were delivered to the school on November 15th, the Friday before the second portion of the Fact Finding Team's visit.

• The school's use of MCAS or other data to plan for improvement has been too shallow and insufficiently specific to identify either the root causes of poor pupil performance or the specific strategies the school should implement to eliminate them. This failure diminishes from the school's planning efforts.

• The observed range of instructional practices received by students is unacceptably wide, from excellent to very poor. Some of the 96 lessons observed were textbook examples of the proper and imaginative use of varied instructional techniques with high expectations for adolescent students while others were totally lacking in any use of those strategies, practices or expectations. Supervision of instructional practices is ineffective.

• Although there is strong concern about student discipline and its effect on learning, there is total lack of a unified approach to the issue. Teachers complain about a lack of administrative support while the numbers of student suspension or other disciplinary actions have increased dramatically in recent years without corresponding behavior improvements. Yet, no meaningful review of the relationship between such factors as classroom practices, instructional approaches and interactions with students and the several issues of discipline has been attempted.

• The school's practices with such mandated programs or practices as School Councils, Individual Professional Development Plans, Student Success Plans and the like are ineffective, reflective of a poor understanding of and lack of communication about their purposes and potential.

• Similarly, the supervision and evaluation of teachers' daily work, as reported in completed teacher evaluations is ineffective, failing to capture the true spirit of a process aimed at improvement. Teacher evaluation ratings are uniformly, even unrealistically, high, lacking any focus on improving the quality of instruction.

• Some current members of this predominately senior staff are resistant to changing requirements in instruction, curriculum and support of school improvement plans. It appears that little review of the match of skills and interests needed to improve student achievement at the school and the list of skills and interests held by the faculty has occurred. Such a condition hampers genuine improvement efforts.

There are some elements currently in place at the school that should be considered key components and part of the foundation used to bring about school improvement:

• The current School Leadership Team represents the most viable planning force within the school. Comprised of volunteers, they have benefited from the training they have received and the quality of their plans has shown improvement over the last several months. With the immediate departure of the school principal, they will require real support and additional assistance with their efforts. They should be commended for their willingness to continue under difficult circumstances.

• Some of the teaching teams, most noticeably in the school's lower grades, have developed noteworthy practices of planning for and communicating about their students. They represent a strength within the school and their efforts and methods could be used to assist other teams.

• The use of the revised curriculum guides coupled with increased assistance from a newly appointed principal, the Curriculum Coordinators and other district personnel can be a factor in assuring more consistent delivery of the approved curriculum.

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