Federal Funds for Equity and Access

I am privileged to supervise two family outreach liaisons, “prevention specialists”, who work across the seven title schools. I may have explained this in a previous post, but here it is again. The veteran, Michelle Myers, has served some 8 years in her position and now works at Winona, Truscott and Garfield. Gloria Major is in her 5th year in the work and serves Monroe, BF Kitchen, Sarah Milner and Van Buren. They were joined until recently by Paul Hume who now serves as Migrant Education Graduate Advocate for the ELA Administrator, Karen Hanford. All three are bilingual. Much of their early work, and still their most pressing work, is to serve as Spanish language interpreters for English as a Second Language (ESL) families with the title school staffs.

When I became their supervisor in 2008, I urged them to “redirect” teacher requests for information back to the teacher so that the main conversation, even if interpreted, took place between the teacher and the parent, not from the liaison to the teacher. After the district adoption by all schools of the “Unified Improvement Plan” (UIP) process and template, I moved the liaisons to align their work goals with priorities set by their schools in their UIPs. For instance, if improving student writing was needed, and the staff determined that adopting new writing strategies was a focus for them, then the liaisons could facilitate staff lead parent understanding of new writing activities and assessments. You can find in earlier posts my discussion of other title school responsibilities to parents to help them understand principles and practices of the Response to Intervention reform model.

The additional resources that title schools receive from Title IA funds largely go to interventionists who provide supplemental instruction to students who need to catch. The theory behind the supplemental funding is that children of poverty enter schools less prepared than mainstream, middle class students and that they need early identification and intervention to help them to become proficient as measured by state assessments (CSAP/TCAP). The Title IA program has evolved from a pull out program to what is now called “Response to Intervention” though the framework is now somewhat dated and incomplete. With the supplemental focus at the title schools, I asked the liaisons to call a sample of parents whose children receive “Tier II interventions” to collect parent perceptions of this service. Collecting and analyzing perception data is a work in progress, not widely done in our press for student achievement data.

However, school improvement requires other data than student achievement data to uncover “root causes” of low student achievement and growth. Another source of data to dig deep into student success and struggles includes student demographics such as “subgroup” membership, gender, special needs and the like. The “disaggregated” or separated out by these memberships is the most important feature of the Title IA legislation, that average achievement across a school is not as important as the success each group has to reach proficiency. Along with student achievement data and student demographic data is what I will call “process data” or what adults do to assure student success – qualifications of teachers, instructional time and practices, testing and professional practices.

Michelle and Gloria asked the sample of parents whether they had any questions about the math or reading interventions and whether there was anything they wanted to help their children be successful at school. Their calls revealed that parents of Tier II students were largely aware and generally appreciative of the supplemental learning services, the math and reading interventions. Few parents were unaware of the interventions at all, some wanted to speak with the interventionists, several others brought up other issues or requests. The liaisons shared their results with interventionists and principals at the two schools sampled. One takeaway from the activity was to make this touching base an expectation for the liaisons. As a matter of fact, at several schools whose parents were not called, this is the practice and parents do receive notifications and “frequent reports” of their children’s progress from supplemental service.

Another takeaway is to conduct a similar survey, this time with a sample from all the schools, of parent understanding and appreciation of classroom instruction to match the shift the title principals are approaching. They are considering how to move from a focus on intervention based use of Title IA funds to using the funds to build “best, first instruction”. The intent is to assure that 80% of the students become proficient readers, writers, mathematicians and thinkers from classroom instruction alone. Not getting these results means that teacher practice, and support for teachers, must shift to address the different needs students bring to the classroom, not to only send those students to supplemental services. Recent student achievement and growth data revealed by “Acuity” does show good gains in most of the schools this fall. Other data that will help continue those gains include keeping track of what school staffs determined they would do for school improvement. Collecting student and parent perceptions of the shift in classroom practices will help build those practices, too. That data can also help build focused, results based, data driven activities to build teacher and parent partnerships.