Assessment/Accountability
School and District Accountability and Assistance

Report of Fact Finding Review
Gerena Community School
Springfield Public Schools

Executive Summary

The Fact Finding team convened by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education was charged with identifying the causes or reasons for poor student performance at the Gerena Community School and assessing the school's prospects for improvement. The Gerena Fact Finding team faced a challenge in developing responses to these two key questions because of the dramatic improvement in the performance of Gerena students on the 2003 MCAS. The practices in place at the time of the Fact Finding visit reflect behaviors and attitudes that are reportedly different from past practices. This report describes the factors that best characterize the Gerena Community School in September, 2003 which may or may not inform an understanding of the reasons for historically poor student performance.

I Curriculum and Instruction

The Fact Finding team visited 35 lessons during the three day visit. Of those lessons, just under two-thirds were rated average or above average, and one-third were rated below average. The practices that contributed to the quality of the effective lessons included

• Explicit objectives presented in many classes;
• Content of lessons aligned with a newly constructed building wide curriculum map;
• Checking for understanding within the lesson, connecting concepts and topics to prior learning;
• Well paced activities with smoothly orchestrated transitions between segments of the lesson.

The lessons that were rated ineffective included those characterized by

• Low expectations for student attainment;
• Poorly paced or uninteresting lesson activities;
• Ineffective behavior management

In considering the prospects for improvement at Gerena Community School, the Fact Finding team concluded that there are several strengths the school can build on to sustain its recent achievement gains.

• The existence of the Collaborative Professional Development (CPD) teachers now on staff promises to enable teachers to enrich and expand their repertoire of effective practices using in-house colleagues;
• Acceptance of responsibility for improving learning becoming widespread among Gerena teachers;

Several actions by the school and by the district are essential to supporting the improvement of student achievement at Gerena.

• Systematic, regular and comprehensive monitoring of instructional quality to identify teachers' needs and access the resources to remedy teachers' weaknesses;
• Focused attention by District directors to the instructional quality in special education classes to parallel the support to regular education teachers by the CPD staff;
• High quality support for CPD staff and regular monitoring of their effectiveness.

II School Climate

The Fact Finding team encountered a climate at Gerena Community School that is characterized by positive relationships among teachers, between teachers and administrators, and between staff and students. The team learned of several factors that have contributed to this atmosphere:

• The dramatic gains on the 2003 MCAS are credited by many for generating an atmosphere of optimism and confidence that Gerena students can achieve high standards and their teachers can positively influence their achievement;
• Teachers expressed a personal as well as collective commitment to change;
• Collaboration among teachers in grade level teams and across the building has fostered a tone of respect and support among staff.

Gerena benefits from an enthusiastic corps of community and university partners who are committed to supporting the school's improvement. This, along with a District commitment to reporting and celebrating Gerena's strong gains, enhances the prospects for sustained improvement at the school.

III Organizational Structures and Management

Several factors within the domain of organizational structure and management are influential in describing the operations at Gerena Community School. Structures that afford opportunities for teacher collaboration for improvement include

• Organization into grade-level clusters or 'pods' with common planning time;
• Whole-school extended day time each week used for curriculum monitoring and improvement planning;
• Two summer projects - the Performance Improvement Planning (PIM) project and the school wide curriculum map development project - enhanced teacher collaboration and coordination of the curriculum.

Supervision of instruction as it currently operates at Gerena is inadequate to serve the needs of the school and its teachers. Issues influencing the quality of instructional supervision are

• Insufficient commitment of time to conducting regular and systematic surveys of instructional practices;
• Absence of a building-level system for informative feedback to teachers;
• Limitations on the content of feedback to teachers allowed by the collective bargaining agreement.

IV Leadership and Planning

Elements of leadership and planning that characterize Gerena Community School include shared decision making and shared responsibility for improvement. In its current climate of change, Gerena staff and administrators are committed to basing academic program decisions on careful analysis of data. The elements contributing to the influence of this factor are

• Alignment between the PIM and district SIP processes;
• Systems in place to communicate the findings of the PIM team to all teachers;
• Delegation of responsibility for implementing change practices to teachers;

Absent from the Gerena leadership systems are strong instructional monitoring processes. As mentioned in the previous section, there is not an effective system for providing meaningful feedback to teachers. The presence of the CPD teachers (in-house staff focused on professional needs of the staff) holds promise that the instructional changes that remain to be enacted at Gerena will be realized.

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