Panel releases proposals for school improvement
After seven months of work, a citizens committee has released a list of recommendations of how the East Baton Rouge Parish school system can move from 48th to one of the top 10 school districts in Louisiana by 2020.
That the school system, second largest in the state, should reach top 10 status in eight years is a “bold goal” settled on by the 33-member Committee for Educational Excellence in June.
To meet that ambitious goal, the committee suggests giving principals greater say in the teachers they hire, more control of their school budgets, automatic firing for teachers whose students show the least test score growth, firing of principals who fail to meet three-year performance goals, higher pay to teachers willing to work in struggling schools, as well as greater openness in general to “innovation” and “school choice.”
The 21-page document, entitled “2011 Strategic Plan,” does not spell out how to pay for potentially expensive changes, including a call for universal pre-kindergarten.
The committee, however, calls for a comprehensive study of how the school system can reduce its costs, something the School Board is already considering.
The latest district performance scores, released in October, showed East Baton Rouge Parish as 48th of 71 school districts in the state with a score of 86.2 — an improvement of three spots from the year before. The state average is 93.9 and the top possible score is 200.
To have made it into the top 10 this year, the school system would have needed a district performance score of 107.5.
These scores are moving targets, so the school system will likely have to shoot much higher to reach top 10 status by 2020.
In 2001, the first year school districts received performance scores, East Baton Rouge Parish earned a 72, and the state average was 80.8. The number 10 district that year, Beauregard Parish, had a performance score of 94.5, a score barely above the current state average.
School Board President Barbara Freiberg said she likes the strategic plan but is eager to hear what people think of it. As to whether it will propel the school system to top 10 status, she’s less sure.
“I would hope so,” she said.
Board member David Tatman, who served as co-chairman of the citizen’s committee, is more optimistic, saying if implemented in full the strategic plan will galvanize the community and spark big gains in student achievement.
“I would be terribly disappointed if we weren’t there to 2020,” he said. “Eight years is a generation of children we will lose.”
The proposed changes in teacher rules have already drawn fire from the system’s two teacher unions. A trio of “independent education researchers” led by former School Board member Noel Hammatt has raised similar concerns, particularly about evaluating teachers based on student tests scores and paying teachers for performance.
The state of Louisiana is rolling out a new evaluation system for all teachers next fall. Teachers teaching in subjects such as English and math — about a third of all public school teachers — will have 50 percent of their evaluation determined by how fast their students improve on standardized tests compared with how those students did during the three previous years.
The committee’s recommendations go further. They urge that the 25 percent of teachers who show the most improvement should get rewards, while the 25 percent with the least improvement should be fired.
The Committee for Educational Excellence released its draft Dec. 13 and formally presented it to the School Board two days later.
Tatman said he’s familiar with the criticism, but said almost all of the feedback he’s received so far has been positive.
“I’ve heard directly from maybe 50 teachers, and all but two of them are very excited,” he said. “The two were misinformed about what was in the plan.”
Dennis Blunt, co-chairman of the committee, told the School Board that committee members often had different opinions about what to do.
“It was not without a lot of time, effort and energy,” Blunt said. “And our meetings were not ones where we all stood, locked arms and sang hymns.”
The school system has calculated that the strategic plan emerged from 45 public meetings throughout the parish, with more than 600 individuals actively participating at some point in the process.
The board is not expected to vote on the strategic plan until at least February, perhaps later. If approved, it would replace the school system’s current strategic plan, first approved in 2005 and revised in 2008.
Until it votes, the board plans to hold at least two community forums in January, one on the north, one on the south end of the parish. People with suggestions are welcomed to post their thoughts online: http://news.ebrschools.org/explore.cfm/commentssuggestions/
Freiberg said she would like to get feedback as well from whomever the board chooses as its next superintendent; the board is supposed to interview semifinalists in early to mid-January.
The Committee for Education Excellence is likely to take one last pass at the plan to consider the feedback it receives.
“We are going to do what we need to do get it where it needs to be,” said Tatman. “It’s not going to be a perfect document, but it’s going to be a very good one.”
Here’s a copy of the proposed strategic plan: http://news.ebrschools.org/eduWEB2/1000169/docs/cee_strategic_plan_2011_121211.pdf.