Bourisaw: Accreditation by Raising Achievement

The following is a repost of an SLS Watch article by R.E. Porter:

In recent weeks, St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Diana Bourisaw has presented a detailed plan for raising student achievement in St. Louis to one community group after another. The foundation of her plan is the philosophy that compassion for children from difficult backgrounds meant holding them to high standards. There can be no excuses, she said, for accepting less than their best.

At the third forum on public education from the self-styled St. Louis Children’s Agenda, for example, Bourisaw said that raising student performance was the key to regaining accreditation. She said that the district is committed to raising student test scores on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) tests and on American College Testing’s (ACT) college entrance exam.

“We will improve academic achievement by focusing on people, not programs,” she said. The district has begun providing professional development geared to classroom practice. The curriculum is being aligned to state standards as measured by the MAP test, and children will be tested every six weeks to see how they are progressing towards what the state education department expects them to know at the end of the year. Teachers get the assessment results
back almost immediately and have a week to review if the children need it. Principals have the power to assign more resource to classes that consistently have trouble meeting expectations.

Every aspect of the district’s efforts will be driven by data, she said. In addition to the benchmark tests, each school will report quarterly to the board on how they stand in relation to their targets in several different areas, including attendance and discipline. Principals participate cluster study groups for additional support, and 36 low performing schools get help from performance teams to target academic achievement. Bourisaw also said that the district is going to refocus on reading instruction, and it will continue to teach reading beyond the 4th grade where it traditionally had stopped.

The motivation underneath all those hard-headed initiatives is the realization that permitting students from poor backgrounds to fail just condemns them to a lifetime of failure. Bourisaw recount how, when she was a young teacher working with juvenile delinquent boys, she initially had made excuses for them out of a misplaced sense of compassion, and forgave them for not handing in assignments on time due to chaotic conditions at home. She said that over time she came to understand that it was more compassionate to demand that they hand in their assignments despite the chaotic conditions at home, and the more demanding she became, the better her students did in school. She developed a “no excuses” policy towards her students that drove them to raise their level of achievement.

“What they really needed,” she said, “was someone to care, someone to demand that they do the work. When you did that, they delivered.”

Strangely, former school board member Hattie Jackson, who is the wife of current school board member Ron Jackson, said after hearing the same presentation that all she heard was “excuses and demographics, plenty of excuses, but no strategic plan to to inform each individual school (and improve student achievement).”

Perhaps the fact that her husband is hostile to Bourisaw affects her ability to hear what the other 60 people in attendance heard: a sensible, comprehensive approach to raising student achievement.