North Greene Unit District #3

An open letter to District No. 3 stakeholders,

As many of you are probably aware, North Greene High School was recently identified by the Illinois State Board of Education in Springfield as a “high priority school.” The ISBE, under the direction of the U.S. Department of Education, identified our high school as such because only 37.7% of the juniors at NGHS over the last three years (2006-2007, 2007-2008, and 2008-2009) met or exceeded in ALL subjects tested in the Prairie State Achievement Examination. (NOTE: The current juniors will be tested this spring.)

While this label is noteworthy and speaks to the need for reforms in our approach to educating your high school (and elementary and middle school) students, it is not “new” news. No other test was given. The announcement that NGHS is a “high priority school” is based on old news, packaged as “news” and less-than-indicative-of-the-truth-about-NGHS. In fact, when one thinks about it, the identification of NGHS as a “high priority school” is based on the performance of three classes over the course of three days (one for each class, in which they took the PSAE each spring) out of 528 days those students spent in school from 2006-2009. That’s a little over a ½ percent of the time those students spent in school.

I liken this to picking an arbitrary date(s) on which to judge the effectiveness of, let’s say, a baseball player, ONLY ON THE CHOSEN DATES. Let’s take Albert Pujols, for instance. This three-time National League MVP, 2001 Rookie-of-the-Year, 8-time All-Star, 5-time Silver Slugger, 5-time Player-of-the-Month, 8-time Player-of-the-Week, .334 Career hitter and Gold Glove Winner is, by most accounts, regarded as the best active player in baseball. Yet, if someone judged Albert Pujols as a baseball player, based only on his performance during the month of July of 2009, he would be judged a sub-.300 hitter (.289) with only a .485 slugging percentage (compared to .658 for the entire season). He only hit 4 homeruns (of 47 on the year) and only 28 hits in July, 2009. While these numbers are very respectable, they hardly give us a complete picture of Albert Pujols.

My point is this: Giving Albert only one month, of our choosing, in which we will judge him as a player is not quite fair. He hit .327 for the year and over the course of his nine-year career he has hit .334. This, I argue, is not unlike judging a school based on the performance of three junior classes on three days (out of 528 school days during those three years). It tells us something about NGHS. But it hardly tells us the whole story of NGHS, its students, its teachers and the learning going on there.

Nevertheless, NGHS has been singled out as a “high priority school.” I would argue that this was done to put some pressure on North Greene Unit District No. 3 to sign up for Race-to-the-Top money and assistance in addressing the problems the state, the federal department of education and we see in our education of young adolescents in our district. You will recall that we have initiated, prior to being “called out” as a “high priority” and underachieving school, a Talent Development Program. This program, spearheaded by the good people at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is aimed at helping freshmen making a better transition from middle school and junior high to high school.

The first class of freshmen to take part in the program is our current sophomore class and will take the PSAE in the spring of 2011. It is hoped that this program and a newly-added Credit Recovery program will assist students in performing better – on the one-day PSAE, the one-day ACT (where we have seen some improvements the past couple of years) and on the other 522 school days over these next three years. As we focus more attention with all District No. 3 students in the area of vocabulary, work hard to improve reading and math performance on a daily basis and provide professional development to improve teaching strategies and use data to make good decisions about curriculum, instruction and assessment, we endeavor to raise test scores AND educate the whole child for the 21^st Century.

That said, we have turned down the opportunity to access increased funding through Race to the Top (RT3, as it’s often referred to) and I take this opportunity to explain to you, our stakeholders, why we did not choose to apply for these funds in North Greene Unit District No. 3.

In December, as the ISBE was identifying 136 schools, NGHS among them, who “failed” in their eyes in one of three categories. NGHS and 14 other schools were judged to be of “high priority” because they were “Title I eligible” (based on poverty rates) who do not receive Title I funds. (NOTE: White Hall Elementary is our only Title I school who receives funding from NCLB-Title I funding directly. The other NG schools, WHE and Roodhouse, do get professional development opportunities from our Title funding on occasion.)

We were “encouraged” to apply for Race to the Top funds – of an undisclosed amount and commit to spending “above and beyond” the RT3 funds we would get to improve our high school. This commitment would also include an undetermined, at least un-communicated, amount of money and the loss of autonomy in the daily operation of our high school – in effect, turning over the operation of our high school to “partners” who were unidentified entities who might assume unspecified roles in our district – including functions heretofore directed by your superintendent and your elected board of education members.

The ISBE, having asked for and turned down for more time in which to role the RT3 program out here in Illinois, had to have an answer by January 11, 2010. I participated in a webinar on December 18 that further described the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would be due on January 11. We superintendents across the state received a copy of the MOU literally minutes before the webinar began. The four-page MOU was accompanied by 32 other pages of explanation and, still, there were more questions than answers about the commitment a district would be making were it to apply for RT3 funds and the additional assistance in school improvement endeavors.

The Race to the Top initiative has many positive components. The prospects for new, modified Illinois Learning Standards and curricular alignment, standards-aligned instructional systems, an emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) coursework, the development of a statewide longitudinal data system and the use of this data to drive instructional decisions, the use of Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching, educator supports at critical transition points, the initiation of a Career Readiness Certification Program, and using National Board Certification to improve teacher and principal effectiveness were all encouraging aspects of the RT3 initiative.

However, there were several concerns that I, and a majority of school superintendents across the state, shared with RT3. In a special Board of Education meeting on Wednesday, January 6, I highlighted for the BOE and the representatives of the local teachers union who had been invited to discuss the MOU and District 3’s participation in the initiative, my list of concerns, many of which I considered “deal-breakers” in the decision process. Not only were superintendents, especially superintendents of school districts with “high priority schools” in their districts, being pressured to sign on to the RT3 initiative, school board presidents’ signatures, and those of union leaders signed, sealed, and delivered by the January 11 deadline would garner “points” for the State’s application for RT3 funds at the federal level. (NOTE: These RT3 funds are part of President Obama’s economic stimulus funding – a one-time opportunity for such additional <and undefined levels of> funding.)

The commitment of our district spending “above and beyond” whatever funding that we would get from the feds, the loss of autonomy and loss of control over our high school were too much to get my signature on the RT3 MOU. I rightly assumed that the BOE members you elected to run our schools and the teachers’ union leadership were also loath to sign the MOU. My original recommendation was going to be to allow me to sign on. How could a high priority school, so identified by the ISBE, possibly pass up an opportunity for money and help from the state and federal government? But the more we learned, the more I was not “onboard” with this initiative.

You deserve to know that this action was not taken lightly. You deserve to know, in the midst of a time when we’ve been reminded that some things we have been trying at NGHS are not working as well as we’d all like, why we turned down an opportunity to get our hands on more money and why we’ve turned our back on an offer to help us improve our schools, particularly our high school.

We know we have much work to do to improve our test scores, our daily performance as teachers and learners, and in our approach to providing a quality education for North Greene Unit District No. 3 children. We knew that before the state and U.S. Department of Education made us a “high priority school.” You see, in our eyes, we’ve always been a high priority school at NGHS – and a WHE and at Roodhouse. That’s why we, at the urging of our fine high school teaching staff, initiated the Talent Development Program, why we have chosen to use Title I-ARRA and IDEA-ARRA funding to procure state-of-the-art technology for use in District 3 schools, why we’ve endeavored, under the leadership of Roodhouse Principal Cindy Rice, to apply for and soon will receive significant EETT (Enhancing Education through Technology) funding to provide one-to-one MacBook laptops for Roodhouse students starting next fall, why we as an Administrative Team have chosen to undertake a push for vocabulary building in all District 3 schools, and why we continue to look for more effective and innovative ways to learn, as educators, and provide instruction to our younger learners in your schools.

The decision to pass on Race to the Top was not made without careful consideration and due diligence on the part of your superintendent, members of the Board of Education, and the leadership of the teachers’ union. We saw some aspects of RT3 that we liked, much of it that we hated, and concerns we had for its successful implementation in THIS district.

We are not alone in our choosing to pass on the MOU signing. One central Illinois superintendent asked others to respond on the Illinois Association of School Administrators’ listserve on January 11, stating whether they signed the MOU or not. As of January 12, 2010 at 2:00 p.m., the unofficial poll has 33 school districts stating that they signed the MOU, while 84 other superintendents did not. This is, by no means, a complete count. There are over 800 superintendents in Illinois. Not all of them belong to the IASA or its listserve; but the 84-33 counts is, perhaps, somewhat representative of the response to the RT3 initiative. I would like to think that it is also representative of the commitment to local control of education among Illinois superintendents and their boards of education, as well. We are committed to local control because we think that, while state assessments and their results are important, they are not even close to the entire measurement of success a school or a school district has at its disposal. We are committed to being a high performing school system in District 3, as are our counterparts throughout Illinois.

The reforms of RT3, many of which will likely become law here in Illinois in the coming years, are worth consideration. We, in fact, have committed ourselves to study the RT3 initiative as it unfolds, looking for those components of the initiative that we can develop and implement here in North Greene – but sans (without) the RT3 funding and sans the RT3 restrictions on local control of our schools.

I hope I’ve been able to explain the District’s rationale for not committing to RT3 at this time. Should you, as a North Greene Unit District No. 3 stakeholder, seek more information on Race to the Top or District 3’s efforts at school improvement, do not hesitate to contact me at the unit offices, Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. I will be most happy to answer your questions and take your suggestions for making our schools better.

Your superintendent,

Les Stevens