Barron 39;s The Leader In Test Preparation

[Georgeanna Abson]

AnnMarie is a dedicated financial mentor to low-income, primarily first-generation-to-college high school students participating in the non-profit organization Collegiate Directions. The organization aims to close the education, achievement and opportunity gap that these students face by offering college counseling, targeted tutoring, test preparation, study skills, leadership training, and ongoing support through high school and college.

Specifically, Ann Marie advises these students on saving, budgeting, using debt wisely, living within their means and the basics of investing through presentations and activities, such as a stock selection competition. Her expertise as a financial advisor serves as a vehicle to broaden the financial literacy of these children so that they may persevere despite the social and economic obstacles they may face.

Etergino team member Kathy Vormack is proud to have participated in RBC's Blue Water Day as part of the RBC Blue Water Project, a 10-year global commitment of $50 million to help protect fresh water resources. RBC employees from the DC area cleaned the banks of the Potomac River at Roosevelt Island, in cooperation with Potomac Riverkeeper and the National Park Service.

The new graduation requirement followed fierce public protest in the months leading up to the vote. Critics say the exams are so hard that masses of students might not earn their diplomas and that classroom time and resources are wasted in test preparation.

State officials have cautioned the public not to worry about the new standards, which require students to pass the test known as PARCC in Algebra I and 10th-grade English to graduate. The change will start with the class of 2021, so students and schools will have time to get used to the test and learn from it and improve, said Education Commissioner David Hespe.

In 2012, 25 states required students to pass an exit exam for graduation; but only 15 states still have this requirement, said Jennifer Zinth, director for High School and STEM at the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit education organization.

Urban schools often face great challenges, low test scores and high dropout rates. Eddie Aruzza of WTTW in Chicago reports on programs that train principals to improve learning despite the odds. Ray Suarez continues the conversation on the importance of principals in troubled schools with Will Miller of the Wallace Foundation.

Principal Ernesto Matias runs a tight and disciplined school on Chicago's north side. Like most urban high schools, Wells has occasional problems, but nothing like what was happening when Matias first arrived five years ago.

There was a lot of conflicts, a lot of violence. There was a student walkout the year before. There were four teachers in remediation who were taken out of this building, not to return. And so that's what I stepped into, a lot of distrust, disunity, and a lot of beating up of staff members here.

Principal Matias also inherited a school on academic probation. For 16 years, it had failed to meet basic standards for test scores, and more than half its students dropped out. In the community, the school's very name became synonymous with failure.

Ernesto Matias is a new kind of school principal, one carefully cultivated to meet the complex and challenging needs of a 21st century urban school. He is a graduate of the Center for Urban Education Leadership at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which developed a new approach to training principals.

Our thought was that since we've known for about 35 years that a great principal could improve student learning in schools, that we ought to try to produce such principals instead of wait for them to come along.

So, how do you produce a great principal? To answer that question, the university turned to individuals like Cynthia Barron. In a career spanning 40 years, Barron began as a teacher and eventually became a principal by rising through the ranks. At the time, there were no special programs to create the outstanding principal that she became.

It was really ad hoc; people like me really reached out and found our own mentors kind of in an ad hoc relationship. Some people, I realized, did not think that that was important. I certainly did. I kind of built my own cadre of mentorships.

Mentorships are at the core of the program at the Center for Urban Education Leadership, and Cynthia Barron is now one of those mentors. She is a leadership coach who guides principals-in-training, like 33-year-old Rita Raichoudhuri. For the last year, Raichoudhuri has been a resident principal at Wells Community Academy.

I took on the responsibility of really developing the new teachers. My mentor principal never got in the way of me saying, hey, you know, I want to try this out. He never said, that's going to fall flat on its face because of X, Y, and Z. He said, OK, go ahead and do it and then we'll talk about how it goes.

The nonprofit organization New Leaders also has been preparing principals to take the reins in struggling urban schools. It has training centers in 12 cities across the U.S. And, like the university's program, it has a tough screening process for its candidates.

The individuals who make it into the program become part of a cohort that takes classes and meets on an ongoing basis. They discuss their ideas and share their progress in the schools where they are resident principals, all under the watchful eyes of already successful principals.

We want our people not only to have the training, but to go through an intern process that really prepares them to step in the front door and do the work. And you learn that, I believe, from exemplary principals who are doing that work.

Kids really observe what adults are doing. When adults are modeling that they collaborate, that they are a team, then the students start feeling that this is a school that has high expectations for me and will not let me slip through the cracks.

Will Miller is the president of the Wallace Foundation, a national philanthropy that focuses on education for disadvantaged children. The foundation funds research, including on ways of improving principal quality.

Well, they can probably never get enough attention, but the good news is that, recently, from the district level to the state level to the federal level, and even in university training programs, principals are getting a lot more attention.

I think this is driven in part by the realization that some of the strategies for improving teacher quality, like evaluating them on a regular basis and providing developmental feedback, depend on having a good principal to do that job.

Well, one of the things that was uncertain when we launched some of the research at Wallace about what makes for an effective principal was whether or not those behavior or characteristics would be teachable.

Was it just charisma that made for an effective leader, or could you learn the behaviors? And the good news, again, was that they are in fact teachable. And many principal training programs have been restructured around the kinds of internships, real-world experience, and mentoring that allows the candidates to develop these very characteristics.

Now, when I was a reporter in Chicago more than two decades ago, I covered Wells High School, and one of the first things that, under new school reform, the local school council did was fire the principal.

The principals who are in place who are well-matched with their schools, who have the capabilities to develop the characteristics that we know are effective should be supported. In fact, they should be evaluated in ways that identify the particular areas of professional development they need and have professional development delivered to work on their particular issues.

Given the formulas that we're using now for both teacher and principal accountability, are we creating disincentives to go to places where it's hard to teach, where it's hard to manage? Why would you go to a place like Wells if you want to make a career as a principal? Why not go someplace easier?

Well, there's no question that it's a very difficult job. But we also know that that's where leadership can make some of the biggest difference, in these most difficult schools that served our least-advantaged kids.

And there are districts like Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina that have made those difficult turnaround jobs the most valued and the ones where the best people go. And they have done it through a combination of culture, valuing that, giving the principal candidates going to those schools the flexibility to do the job the way they want to do it, and of course, some economic incentives.

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