Proven Strategies for Developing Excellent Leadership at Under-Performing Schools

Policy Paper:
Strategies For Rescuing Failing Public Schools

STRATEGIES FOR RESCUING FAILING PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
HOW LEADERS CREATE A CULTURE OF SUCCESS

The Most Important Factors in School
Turnarounds are Often the Most Difficult to Quantify

By

Alberto M. Carvalho, Superintendent
Miami-Dade County Public Schools

and

Dr. Steven L. Paine, Senior Advisor
The McGraw-Hill Research Foundation

We now have ... overwhelming evidence that strong leadership in a school
can make a real difference in student achievement – indeed, research
concludes that “there are virtually no documented instances of troubled
schools being turned around without intervention by a powerful leader”
and that “the impact of good leadership is greatest in schools where it is
most needed.”
- Christine DeVita, President, The Wallace Foundation
March, 20111

Who Will Rescue America’s Failing Schools?

The notion of “rescuing” failing schools figures prominently at the beginning of the 2010
documentary, Waiting for Superman. The film makes the point that there is no Superman
who can single-handedly save America’s failing schools – no “Man of Steel” who can
swoop down out of the sky and return our public education system to the leadership
status it enjoyed for much of the last century.

Once the envy of the world, U.S. education has fallen precipitously by all measures.
Consider that:

 An unacceptably high number of U.S. high school students drop out before
graduation, about one in every three based on the most recent data;2

 The United States now ranks as low as 18th among developed nations in high
school graduation rates;3

 A Pentagon report released in 2009 found that as many as 75 percent of young
people age 17 to 24 are not fit for military service, with 25 percent of those not fit
because they lack a high school or general equivalency diploma (GED);4 and

1 www.mcgraw-hillresearchfoundation.org

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 The most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results,
released in December of 2010, had U.S. students ranking 17th in Reading, 23rd in
Science and tied with Ireland for 32nd place in Math.5

We are failing our young people by not preparing them for the high-tech, more inter-
connected global economy and job market of the 21st century. We cannot wait for
Superman or anyone else to save our educational system for us. We will have to do it
ourselves – the hard way – over time and through trial and error. It’s not going to be easy
and it’s not going to happen overnight.

Fortunately, as more than one education expert notes near the end of Waiting for
Superman, a formula for rescuing failing schools is now well documented. Education
thought leaders and researchers were writing about and experimenting with new and
more effective approaches to public schooling as early as the 1960s. They have continued
to build upon their work over the past four decades, documenting what works and what
does not.

The main ingredients of the formula include:

 An intense focus on instructional standards;

 Correspondingly high standards for educational achievement for all students,
regardless of ethnicity or economic background;

 A robust system of measurement and accountability for meeting student
achievement goals;

 Employing the latest and most sophisticated tools to collect student performance
data for ongoing, formative assessment; and

 A commitment to developing and supporting great teachers and leaders.

The question this raises is: If we do indeed have a proven formula to make our schools
more effective, why is the U.S. educational system still leaving so many of our students
behind, especially those who attend inner-city and rural districts blighted by poverty?

This paper discusses how we (the authors) have implemented successful reforms in the
recent past (Dr. Paine, who pioneered many reform strategies as Superintendent of
Education at a school district in West Virginia in the late 1990s and early 2000s) and
currently (Mr. Carvalho, who is bringing new energy to rescuing failing schools as
superintendent of the Miami-Dade County School District – the fourth largest district in
the U.S.).


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The Challenge: Changing the Culture of Failing Schools

There is a challenge in moving from a bunch of interesting cases, in which
schools have figured out how to do this, to a system, because a lot of this
has to do with unpacking things that are intuitive and systemized. 6
- Richard Elmore, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of
Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education

Scaling innovative solutions so that they will work consistently for districts and states
creates a set of challenges involving human factors difficult to quantify. These challenges
require the kind of leadership necessary to change the climate and the culture of failing
schools from one that expects failure to one that demands success.

Systems and strategies for optimizing the overall efficacy of institutions are, by their very
nature, empirical and mechanistic; they must work predictably to be effective. But human
beings can be unpredictable -- whimsical in their actions and sometimes self-defeating in
their decisions. How else do we explain the development of an educational system that
was described in the famous 1983 U.S. Department of Education report, A Nation at Risk,
as tantamount to an enemy attack on the United States?7

Humans working within large institutions can be incented with financial and other
rewards and discouraged from non-productive behaviors (carrot and stick), but, in the
end, human beings remain unpredictable. They are not machines, and they stubbornly
refuse to behave as such. Yet large-scale organizations with specific goals require them to
work together predictably.

What we have learned is that to make even the best public education approaches work
effectively at scale, it is not enough to know what needs to happen. You have to know
how to make it happen synergistically, and on several levels all at once. This involves
convincing many different groups of adults -- sometimes with conflicting agendas-- to all
work together.

As author Daniel Pink has pointed out in his book Drive and elsewhere, humans are not
always or even most effectively incented by monetary reward alone. They can also be
motivated by challenge and the desire to be a part of something larger than themselves.
They will work hard to achieve altruistic goals that will benefit society, such as ensuring
a better future for the nation’s children. And there is arguably no societal goal more
critical at this point in our nation’s history than in seeing that all students have access to
the best possible education.

The Obama Administration knows this, which is why it is providing $3.5 billion in Title I
School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to fund improvements at the nation's 5,000 lowest
performing schools.


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“If we are to put an end to stubborn cycles of poverty and social failure, and put our
country on track for long-term economic prosperity,” Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan said in announcing the grants, “we must address the needs of children who have
long been ignored and marginalized in chronically low-achieving schools.”8

The Coleman Report and Four Decades of Education Research

There are basically only three ways you can increase learning and performance:
increase the knowledge and skill of teachers [rigor]; change the content
[relevance]; and alter the relationship of the student to the teacher and the
content [relationships]. If you change one, you have to change them all.9
- Richard Elmore, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of
Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, education researchers and leaders in the U.S., Canada
and the United Kingdom began to realize that the public education systems that had
served those Western nations for more than half of the 20th century were no longer
providing the level of knowledge or skills people would soon need to earn a middle-class
livelihood in an increasingly inter-connected and high-tech world. Educators and policy
experts began to focus on how education might change to begin meeting the new
demands of a rapidly approaching future.

A 1966 U.S. Department of Education report on education equality written by sociologist
James Coleman added both fuel and a spark to the debate. The Coleman Report claimed
that the public education system itself had little effect when it came to levels of student
achievement. Far more important, the report concluded, were the cultural and socio-
economic factors external to the school environment, elements over which educators have
no control.

Poor children from disadvantaged and racially diverse backgrounds would perform better
academically, Coleman suggested, if they attended school with wealthier and white
students – not because the wealthier neighborhood schools were better equipped or doing
a better job at teaching young people than those in poor neighborhoods – but because an
environment of poverty bred values inimical to learning. This later became one of the
prime justifications for busing African-American and other minority students to
predominantly white schools.

In other words, poverty itself made for low-performing students. It wasn’t the school
system that had to change to ensure education equality; all society had to do to ensure a
good education for all students – regardless of background or ethnicity – was to even out
the cultural and economic environments students encountered at school – a notion that is
almost as fanciful as believing that Superman will rescue our failing students and schools.


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The report served to falsely legitimize the claims of many teachers and administrators
that poor student achievement levels were primarily due to the family backgrounds and
substandard environments of the students. Plainly speaking, educators had conveniently
been let off the hook, allowed to “blame the victim” for poor school-wide academic
achievement results. Efforts to improve the student achievement levels of all children at
the school level were perceived as futile.

Some education experts at the time of the Coleman Report refused to accept its
conclusions. Researchers like Larry Lezotte in the U.S., Michael Fullan and Ben Levin in
Canada and others in the United Kingdom believed that all children came to school to
learn, regardless of economic background, and that all students could learn if provided
with good educational content and instruction.

These reform-minded education experts believed, too, that schools do have sufficient
control of the variables to assure student learning, that schools should be held
accountable for measured student achievement and should strive to ensure that all
students, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or social class, were successfully learning
the intended school curriculum. They began to gather data and study the issue more
scientifically to back up their opposition to Coleman.

First they decided that if students in the latter half of the 20th century were going to
graduate with the skills necessary to achieve a middle class income they would need to
master a few basic skills: 1. Read and do math at a 9th grade level or higher; 2. Be able to
solve problems; 3. Work with people who are different; and 4. Become proficient at
operating computers or other high-technology equipment.

After testing approximately 6,000 randomly selected high school graduates against those
standards, it was discovered that only about 10% could meet all of them.

That meant, Lezotte said in a 2002 interview, “we [had] a huge job to do in terms of
upgrading the quality and level of education … [and] you are not going to make those
kind of changes in the system … by simply working a little harder… [W]e have to go
back to [and change] the basic structure and systemic nature of schools and school
districts.”10

Over the past four decades Lezotte (who founded the Effective Schools Movement),
Fullan and Levin (who helped turn around the Ontario school system and make it a model
for the rest of the world), along with others like Ronald Edmonds and Richard Elmore
(working independently, but both at the Harvard School of Education), have created a
body of research that points the way toward creating the kind of complete overhaul of the
education system Lezotte refers to above.


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We, the authors, have been able to improve education outcomes at the district and state
level by employing and refining many of the ideas and strategies for reform these
pioneers have proposed.

The Experience in West Virginia in the 1990s to Early 2000s

[T]hey gave me a baseball bat and a megaphone – like the principal [in the film
“Lean on Me”] -- and said “this is what you’re going to need to handle the
students at this school.”
- Dr. Steven Paine, Senior Advisor, The McGraw-Hill Research
Foundation

In 1990, co-author Dr. Steven Paine was asked to serve as principal for the lowest
performing school in West Virginia. The school was also the largest middle school in the
state, with 1,200 sixth, seventh and eighth grade students.

Discipline at the school was a major problem. The kids were “completely out of hand,”
according to Dr. Paine, who had previously served as a vice principal at a West Virginia
high school with a similar discipline problem.

“I guess they thought I was a tough guy, like the principal in that movie, ‘Lean on Me,’”
Dr. Paine recounts.

“The day before I took over I had a meeting with the staff and they gave me a baseball
bat and a megaphone – just like the principal in that movie had – and said ‘this is what
you’re going to need to handle the students at this school.’”

“I said ‘well, I know some of you think that this is what’s needed to make this institution
function as a school again’ and they all applauded.” Dr. Paine went on to say that while
he appreciated the gifts, he was not going to need either the bat or the megaphone.

“We are going to become a functioning school again,” he remembers saying, “but we’re
going to do it by treating our kids with dignity and respect and they’re going to give us
the same. We’re going to raise the bar and expect great things out of our people, and
that’s how we’re going to get it done and become one of the best schools in this state.”

“Well, you could feel the wind go out of their sails. I guess they thought I had turned
discipline around at the high school with a bat and a megaphone. But we had done it by
setting standards for behavior and being consistent. There were consequences for bad
behavior, of course, but students always knew and understood those consequences, and
they were meted out fairly and evenly.”


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The first order of business was to establish a safe, orderly and business-like environment.

“We had to clean the entire school up before we could establish discipline or do anything
else.”

Nothing in the school worked well – plugged-up toilets, defaced lockers, and much, much
more. The first order of business was to change the climate – make the school a place
with decent teaching and learning conditions and establish the high expectations for
learning that are so necessary. Dr. Paine and his staff organized community volunteer
efforts to give the school “a total face lift.”

“We painted the entire place, got rid of graffiti, we fixed the bathrooms. And we did it all
through volunteer efforts and mostly donated products. This helped the community to
make an investment in the school and begin caring about it. And of course the nicer
facilities made the students feel better about being there.”

Only after the school environment had been upgraded did they begin to work on
improving discipline, which Dr. Paine and his staff focused on for the entire first year.
“We had to create a degree of professionalism emanating from the teachers,” he says,
“and the kids had to sense that.”

The second year they began to home in on the quality of the instruction.

“I don’t know how to say this without offending someone, but we had a serious problem
with some our math teachers not achieving satisfactory results. So we went to them and
asked them what they needed to turn it around.”

The teachers offered several solutions, but Dr. Paine thought they were all just “more of
the same thing.”

“I began to look at some technology-based solutions,” Dr. Paine remembers.

“There was a suite of interactive instructional video disks on the market at the time. They
looked like the old ‘33’ record albums. We bought the math series and then pre-tested our
kids. The pre-test results were abysmal. But the post tests showed amazing results. Not
only did the program help students learn math, it actually showed the math teachers how
to be better teachers by modeling effective teaching behaviors.

“So the kids would watch the lesson on TV and the teachers would facilitate and monitor,
and when you had a critical mass of 80 percent understanding the concept they’d move
on. And the teachers would focus on the 20 percent who didn’t get the concepts as
quickly as the majority. This was a very early and crude version of the more sophisticated
ongoing assessment and differentiated instruction programs now widely available to
educators.”


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By the end of that second year, the school went from dead last to being one of the top five
middle schools in the state for math achievement.11

“That was twenty years ago, and we could see then how important technology was going
to be for raising student achievement. We had computer labs and we used a very basic
software program that helped kids to comprehend what they were reading.”

Dr. Paine visited one of the reading classes, held up a book and asked if the students
would rather read the book on their own or read a section on the computer and answer
questions about that section.

“Overwhelmingly they wanted to read off the computer. This surprised the teachers. But
already these young students were learning how to multi-task. It was only 1991 – there
wasn’t even an Internet yet – but these kids were completely comfortable with
technology. It’s taken the education environment twenty years to catch up with them.”

After getting the facilities, discipline and instructional practices under control, Dr. Paine
began to focus on professional development for his teachers and using student data to
improve achievement results.

“We brought in a principal and his staff; they had all become experts in improving
student achievement results by collecting data. They showed us how to use data to
diagnose very specific learning problems that were occurring with our kids. We spent a
whole week with them just looking at and analyzing our data. And then we came up with
very specific solutions. We actually called these solutions ‘prescriptions,’ and our
teachers had to write a prescription for each different learning problem, just like doctors
write prescriptions to treat different medical conditions.”

The school established inter-disciplinary teams and teachers would work together on
those teams to create a professional learning community within the school where they
could share both problems and solutions. Teachers within each subject would get together
and have shared planning time, and teachers from different disciplines would meet to
share teacher concerns and issues that crossed department boundaries.”

“We did a lot,” Dr. Paine says, “but I’d say the focal point was a very intense focus on
instruction based on and related to our database.

“I didn’t spend a lot of time in my office. I’d go into classrooms and evaluate teachers to
help them improve. Of course there were times when I had to let teachers go if they
persisted in not meeting standards.”

Dr. Paine made it a point to build connections with the teachers’ unions and other teacher
organizations, forging a strong bond of trust with representatives and officials.


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“I would meet often with one leader from a state teachers’ organization to talk about the
issues and build a level of trust, to the point where she was almost an assistant principal
on staff. And if there was an issue with a teacher she’d come to me and let me have a
crack at it before it went into some kind of formal process.”

At the end of four years, Dr. Paine’s middle school was number one in the state in
English and number three in the Total Basic Schools Score, which combined reading,
English language arts and math achievement.12 In 2004, the school was named a National
Forum Blue Ribbon School in English; a year later it was designated by the U.S.
Department of Education as a Safe, Disciplined and Drug-Free School – one of only 10
schools in the U.S. to receive both awards.

“By then, everybody in that school wanted to contribute to its success. Even the
custodians and teacher aides would come in on weekends. We had a group called
‘Teachers Who Care’ who volunteered their own time after school to tutor kids for no
extra pay. They recognized that we had a lot of kids who needed help and they stepped up
to address this on their own, creating their own tutoring schedules.”

Building pride in the school, Dr. Paine said, was the big motivator that convinced
everyone to work together for its success.

“One thing that motivated them was – they were sick and tired of working in a school
that was commonly known as a failing school. They’d reached their limit. “This is
unacceptable,’ they thought, ‘and we’re not putting up with it any more.’

“I just happened to be the principal who came in when they’d had enough.”

Dr. Paine was rewarded by being named district superintendent of the worst performing
school district in West Virginia, where he had similar success before being asked to serve
as superintendent for the entire state.

“Being a district superintendent was the same job one level up. As a principal my job was
to assure top quality teachers. Now my job was to find the best principals for each school,
so I’d spend a lot of time with the principals in our district, getting out to schools and
walking the halls with them.

“But I have to say that when it comes to district leadership, my co-author Alberto
Carvalho and his staff have been setting the bar very high currently in the Miami-Dade
school district.

“They are exactly on target when it comes to showing how great, innovative district
leadership can change the culture of an entire district and get very impressive results.”


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Miami-Dade Today

[Our] focus is on the quality of instruction. That’s the key. You can talk about
other components that are important, but if you don’t improve the quality of
instruction you don’t improve the school.
- Alberto M. Carvalho, Superintendent
Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Miami-Dade is the fourth largest school system in the nation, with an annual budget of $6
billion. Fifty-three thousand employees teach and support the education of 345,000
students in nearly 50 million square feet of facilities. Students belonging to minority
groups make up the majority of the district’s student population, 70 percent of whom
qualify as “economically disadvantaged,” making the district an excellent laboratory for
testing and scaling up strategies for student achievement in large urban districts across
the nation.

An early initiative put in place before Superintendent Carvalho arrived to lead Miami-
Dade had sought to aid failing schools by creating an “Improvement Zone,” within which
the rules of operation would be somewhat different from other schools in the district. The
Zone strategy focused on extending learning times after the regular school day, and
provided instructional coaches in reading and math who could work with smaller groups
of students who were struggling, and even one-on-one. There was also an emphasis on
professional development for teachers in Zone schools.

“The Zone began the conversation of targeted strategies,” says Carvalho. “First off, it
made the system recognize there is a need for differentiation – you can’t treat all schools
the same -- additional resources must be put into low-performing schools. It also put a
great deal of work into collecting and organizing data; using data to drive instruction.
Because of the work done by the Zone, Miami-Dade got a head start in data, and became
much more sophisticated in using data to drive instruction and efficiencies.”

Despite a strong beginning, results for the Miami-Dade Improvement Zone were mixed
after three years. Elementary schools improved dramatically at first, then regressed. The
high schools showed very little to no improvement. Nevertheless, Miami-Dade’s
experience with the Zone was valuable in providing guidance on which strategies
worked, which did not, and which could work better with some organizational
adjustments.

One reason given for the Zone’s ultimately disappointing performance was that principals
in Zone schools received mixed signals from different areas of district leadership. There
was no one united voice speaking for school reform. The Zone office set goals and
offered principals additional leadership support and monitoring, but day-to-day
operations in the Zone still came under the authority of the district’s half a dozen regional


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offices. The principals had to function within the structure of the regional authority, and
had to go to region offices for operational support, personnel and budgets.

When Carvalho assumed the superintendency for Miami-Dade schools in 2008, there
were 13 “F” schools. He immediately set about creating a system of high standards
coupled with higher levels of support for troubled schools, building on and strengthening
the robust data system begun under the Zone. This allowed for the immediate drilling
down of useful data from student assessments and other sources into the classroom,
where it could help identify learning problems and provide effective interventions.

He replaced some principals and moved teachers who were consistently ineffective at
achieving goals, despite increased levels of professional support. In one particularly
controversial move, he moved high-performing principals who had been designated
Florida Principals of the Year, reassigning them to low-performing schools. This is a
strategy that makes obvious sense – a leader gives his or her most effective personnel the
greatest challenges – but it was not common in the education sphere.

Superintendent Carvalho also began to challenge the long-held tradition of placing
African-American principals into predominantly African-American schools, and Hispanic
principals into Hispanic schools. Instead, he began to put the most effective principals
into the schools that needed them most, regardless of whether they looked like people in
the community they would be serving.

“I went into the community personally, projected student outcomes using persuasive data
dealing with literacy and other important subjects, and said ‘Look at these scores – this is
tragic -- we have not moved the needle, and we must.’”

Within two years of implementing these and other strategies, low-performing schools
began to improve. When the Obama Administration announced it would offer
competitive School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to help turn around the nation’s lowest-
performing schools, Miami-Dade applied and received a $14.8 million grant to transform
19 of the district’s worst performing schools.

Carvalho used those funds to create the Miami-Dade School District’s Education
Transformation Office – the ETO.

The ETO is run on a day-to-day basis by Assistant Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, who
reports directly to Superintendent Carvalho. The Improvement Zone leadership, by
comparison, had reported to an associate superintendent. In that hierarchy, important
information about what was happening in the Zone often did not reach the top.

“Superintendent Carvalho gives me a free hand,” says Assistant Superintendent Vitti,
“but he is very involved with these schools and wants to know, on a weekly – sometimes


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even on a daily basis – what’s happening in them. “Having me report directly to the
superintendent cuts a lot of the red tape you see in many large urban districts,” Vitti says.

The original 19 schools quickly expanded to 26, to include some elementary and middle
schools, and these 26 schools and their principals report directly to Vitti, who focuses
primarily on curriculum, instruction, and professional development.

Under the system set up by the earlier Improvement Zone initiative, principals of Zone
schools had to go to their region heads to obtain equipment, personnel or other resources.
Vitti has established two administrative directors within his office who handle these
requests and ensure they are filled promptly, freeing up principals to focus on curriculum,
instruction, and teacher development.

“So if they need a new air conditioner or have a position in science they can’t find a
qualified applicant for, they can come to us and we take care of it – everything needed for
an ETO school goes through the ETO office.”

“Nikolai has also cultivated relationships in each of the facilities support shops
throughout the district,” Carvalho adds. “They serve as facilitators for the ETO schools.
So if any ETO principals need something fast, the office knows exactly who to go to in
each of these departments to make it happen.”

Carvalho and Vitti also developed an ETO team of content experts in reading, math and
science who had been successful in high poverty schools as teachers and instructional
coaches.

Like Dr. Paine in West Virginia, the ETO has developed a level of understanding with
the teacher’s union to do things outside of the contract for these schools.

“For example,” says Vitti, “we have common planning. Our teachers have voluntarily
given up their right to individual planning so they can come together two hours every
week to share best practices and work together on developing shared lesson plans.”

The Algebra I teachers will all come together and one will present a proposed lesson.
The other teachers watch that teacher implement the lesson plan, and then they discuss
what worked and what did not. Vitti is careful to add that this kind of mutual professional
development is lesson study, not an evaluation process. It is a way to build capacity and
best practices, facilitated by an instructional coach.

“They agree and disagree – sometimes they agree to disagree on certain strategies,” says
Vitti, “but the result is stronger lesson plans and better instructional capacity.”


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Although the Zone first implemented the instructional coaches, they also served in an
administrative capacity under the previous model, which often took them away from
coaching – their core function.

Rather than use coaches as administrators or quasi-assistant principals concerned
primarily with discipline, the ETO focuses their efforts on instruction and coaching only.
“Our coaches attend an academy every month,” Vitti says, “where we look at data, talk
about best practices and discuss other strategies for improving student scores.”

There is also a focus on making certain assistant principals are not just limited to
disciplinary concerns. Assistant principals at ETO schools have become more involved as
instructional leaders, to support the work of the instructional coaches.

“At our ETO high schools,” says Carvalho, “assistant principals are given an academic
department to oversee. That becomes their department – they own it – and they are
responsible, to some degree, for ensuring a consistent level of high-quality instruction
within that discipline.”

This leads to another key component of Superintendent Carvalho’s district leadership –
sustainability.

“We’ve all thought a lot about sustainability,” Carvalho affirms. “Assistant
Superintendent Vitti is doing cutting edge work, but some day he will be running his own
district somewhere else. All good things end and neither of us will be here forever. The
work isn’t just about him or me – it’s about systems and processes and cultural change,
and it’s also about building the next generation of leaders.”

“Our succession management plan is that – if you’re a great teacher – you become a
coach, a mentor for other teachers. Once you’ve proven yourself as an instructional
coach, you become an assistant principal. And if you do a great job as an AP you will
become a principal in one of our schools.”

But the main focus, Carvalho insists, is on quality of instruction.

“You can talk about other components that are important, but if you don’t improve the
quality of instruction you don’t improve the school. Building instructional capacity
stimulates a momentum that continues to build and have a positive effect on other areas.
Not only do academic scores and other measures of success show how we are improving
instruction, but everyone – students, parents, teachers and administrators – all begin to
take pride in the school. And once you have that sense of pride going, people will work
hard to protect and keep it.”

Carvalho and Vitti have sought to improve the quality of instruction on several fronts at
once, by establishing a Memorandum of Understanding with the teachers’ union,


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providing incentive pay and bonuses for high-performing faculty, transferring teachers
and replacing principals who consistently fail to meet student achievement goals in their
classes and schools, and expanding the use of Teach for America volunteers.

“We have 150 Teach for America volunteers in our 26 ETO schools,” Carvalho says.
“We’ve found them to be high-energy and very passionate. Many of them have just
graduated from challenging colleges and universities, and they understand the concept of
rigor and higher order thinking upfront.”

The entire district has also placed a sharp focus on college and career readiness, with dual
enrollment, while expanding options for Advanced Placement (AP) classes. Under
Carvalho’s leadership, the district has established career academies in each high school.
Students at all of the district’s high schools have the opportunity to pursue one of three
options: Dual enrollment (in a community college or training program); Advanced
Placement classes; or a program leading to industry certification in key occupational
skills.

“Our concept is – you’re either going to college after you leave us, or you’re going to get
high-level work skills while you’re here to make you employable after you graduate.”

During Superintendent Carvalho’s time at Miami-Dade, the district has gone from having
13 schools designated “F” by the state to three. In addition, a majority of schools in the
district earned an “A.”

In 2009, Miami-Dade students consistently out-performed their national peers on
National Assessment of Educational Programs (NAEP) assessments in Reading, Math
and Science. NAEP assessments are considered the gold standard of educational
performance accountability.

The ETO has seen the number of its schools rated “D” drop from 10 to 6, the number of
“C” schools rise from 7 to 13, and the number of “F” schools fall to zero.

Conclusion

A 2008 Newsweek editorial, written on the 25th anniversary of the publication of “A
Nation at Risk, wrote:

Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on
thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as
good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So
it's crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school's
mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in
staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to
choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a


Policy Paper:

strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform
has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in.

There's a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.

###

1
The Wallace Foundation, Research Findings to Support Effective Educational Policies, Introduction,
2011, p. 1; internal quotes: Kenneth Leithwood, et al., How Leadership Influences Student Learning,
Universities of Minnesota and Toronto, 2004, p. 3
2
Diploma’s Count, 2010 - http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2010/DC10_PressKit_FINAL.pdf.
3
Education at a Glance 2009 : OECD indicators, OECD, Paris, 2009. www.oecd.org/edu/eag2009;
4
Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve: 75 Percent of Young Adults Cannot Join the Military; 2009
Mission: Readiness - http://www.missionreadiness.org/
5
New York Times, December 7, 2010 “Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators.”
6
“Leading the Instructional Core, An Interview with Richard Elmore,” InConversation, Summer 2010 –
Volume 11-Issue 3, published by the Ontario Ministry of Education
7
"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational
performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Holton, Gerald, A Nation at
Risk, U.S. Department of Education, 1983.
8
Obama Administration Announces Historic Opportunity to Turn Around Nation's Lowest-Achieving
Public Schools, U.S. Dept. of Education Press Release, August 26, 2009,
http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/08/08262009.html
9
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/leadership/leadership001a.html.
10
Nancy Sellers interview with Dr. Larry Lezotte, November, 2002 edition of the Audio Journal,
Educational Research Service (ERS, www.audioed-online.com
11
Dr. Paine’s middle school was the only one in its county, which ranked 55th out of 55 counties in West
Virginia for both math and English. At the end of two years the county was ranked among the top five for
math achievement at the middle school level.
12
See previous endnote.

September 2011


Proven Strategies for Developing Excellent Leadership at Under-Performing Schools

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