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TURNING YOUR SCHOOL AROUND
also begun to provide new and effective tools for school transformation. One of these tools is the school improvement audit, which provides schools with a detailed, step-by-step self-evaluation protocol. The current audit has been designed and developed specifically for both moderately successful schools and schools that are in danger of receiving dramatic NCLB sanctions. Be warned, though, that the audit protocol is neither easy nor painless. It demands a schoolwide commitment to an intensive experience that will open every schoolhouse door and file and expose both failures and successes. It demands that teachers, administrators, board members, and parents work together in ways that many have never experienced. Once they do, however, there is great hope for the children who have for so long been left behind.
The New Accountability NCLB brought a new type of accountability to public education based on student achievement. This new world involves carefully stated and measurable standards and goals, objective assessments of student achievement, requirements for specific achievement levels for designated subgroups of students, and a variety of accountability measures for schools and school districts that are failing to achieve the standards. NCLB transformed public education. In certain areas, it eliminated the local control that had always been the hallmark of public education and replaced much of the authority that had been vested in local school boards, state departments of education, and state legislatures. It confronted and challenged “seat of the pants” decision making and replaced it with data-driven decision-making processes. It replaced “drive-by” professional development with targeted, continuing interventions that could be shown to enhance student achievement. The old “one damn fad after another” type of school improvement has given way to long-term interventions, monitoring of progress toward achieving measurable goals, and continual mid-course corrections. PowerPoint lectures by university educators and out-of-town consultants have largely been replaced by hands-on professional development activities, focused processes, and protocols. Top-down administration has also begun to give way to consensus building, committee work, and learning communities. Amid all these school improvement efforts, student achievement has remained the one basic focus.
New Hope for Low-Performing Schools At first, NCLB met great resistance in many public schools. Almost everywhere one could hear, “It’s not the schools that are failing, it’s the families.” Schools and schools districts with large numbers of children of poverty and minority students argued that it was not fair to measure their students against schools in affluent communities. They argued for some type of handicapping that provided a formula of lower expectations based on the degree of poverty in their community. So many educators simply did not believe children of poverty and minority students could learn, and they struggled for some rationale to support their beliefs (Haycock, 2001). However, as more and more high-poverty schools and school districts documented high performance, arguments that children of poverty simply could not learn began to disappear (Haycock, 2001). Today, there are tens of thousands of high-poverty, high-performing schools and school districts in the United States. These schools have been identified and publicized by the Education