1. What  were  the  factors  that  allowed  Brockton  High  School  to  be  successful?                          

2. What  implications  does  this  case  study  have  about  your  work  as  a  future  leader?  

                   

3. What  implications  does  this  case  study  have  for  PAL  1?    

               

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September 27, 2010

4,100 Students Prove ‘Small Is Better’Rule WrongBy SAM DILLON

BROCKTON, Mass. — A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachersand administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have aright to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewideexams. One in three dropped out.

Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuadedadministrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writinglessons into every class in all subjects, including gym.

Their efforts paid off quickly. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failingthe year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year andlast, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. And its turnaround isgetting new attention in a report, “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” published last monthby Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist at Harvard who researches the minority achievement gap.

What makes Brockton High’s story surprising is that, with 4,100 students, it is an exception towhat has become received wisdom in many educational circles — that small is almost alwaysbetter.

That is why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in thelast decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies,focusing more on instruction).

The small-is-better orthodoxy remains powerful. A new movie, “Waiting for Superman,” forexample, portrays five charter schools in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere — most with onlya few hundred students — as the way forward for American schooling.

Brockton, by contrast, is the largest public school in Massachusetts, and one of the largest in thenation.

At education conferences, Dr. Szachowicz — who became Brockton’s principal in 2004 — still gets

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approached by small-school advocates who tell her they are skeptical that a 4,100-student schoolcould offer a decent education.

“I tell them we’re a big school that works,“ said Dr. Szachowicz, whose booming voice makes herseem taller than 5-foot-6 as she walks the hallways, greeting students, walkie-talkie in hand.

She and other teachers took action in part because academic catastrophe seemed to be looming,Dr. Szachowicz and several of her colleagues said in interviews here. Massachusetts had instituteda new high school exit exam in 1993, and passing it would be required to graduate a decade later.Unless the school’s culture improved, some 750 seniors would be denied a diploma each year,starting in 2003.

Dr. Szachowicz and Paul Laurino, then the head of the English department — he has since retired— began meeting on Saturdays with any colleagues they could pull together to brainstormstrategies for improving the school.

Shame was an early motivator, especially after the release of the 1999 test scores.

“They were horrible,” Dr. Szachowicz recalled. She painted them in bold letters on poster paper inthe group’s Saturday meeting room.

“Is this the best we can be?” she wrote underneath.

The group eventually became known as the school restructuring committee, and theadministration did not stand in the way. The principal “just let it happen,” the Harvard reportsays.

The committee’s first big step was to go back to basics, and deem that reading, writing, speakingand reasoning were the most important skills to teach. They set out to recruit every educator inthe building — not just English, but math, science, even guidance counselors — to teach thoseskills to students.

The committee put together a rubric to help teachers understand what good writing looks like,and began devoting faculty meetings to teaching department heads how to use it. The school’s300 teachers were then trained in small groups.

Writing exercises took many forms, but encouraged students to think methodically. A scienceteacher, for example, had her students write out, step by step, how to make a sandwich, startingwith opening the cupboard to fetch the peanut butter, through washing the knife once thesandwich was made. Other writing exercises, of course, were much more sophisticated.

Some teachers dragged their feet. Michael Thomas, now the district’s operations director but who2

led the school’s physical education department at the time, recalled that several of his teacherstold him, “This is gym; we shouldn’t have to teach writing.” Mr. Thomas said he replied, “If youwant to work at Brockton High, it’s your job.”

Fear held some teachers back — fear of wasting time on what could be just another faddishreform, fear of a heavier workload — and committee members tried to help them surmount it.

“Let me help you,” was a response committee members said they often offered to reluctantcolleagues who argued that some requests were too difficult.

The first big boost came with the results of the spring 2001 tests. Although Brockton’s scores werestill unacceptably low, they had risen sharply. The state education commissioner, David P.Driscoll, traveled to Brockton to congratulate the school’s cheering students and faculty.

“It had become dogma that smaller was better, but there was no evidence,” said Mr. Driscoll, whosince 2007 has headed the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing.“In schools, no matter the size — and Brockton is one of the biggest — what matters is unitingpeople behind a common purpose, setting high expectations, and sticking with it.”

After that early triumph, remaining resistance among the faculty gave way, Dr. Szachowicz said.Overnight, the restructuring committee gained enormous credibility, and scores of once-reluctantteachers wanted to start attending its Saturday meetings, which continue today.

Brockton never fired large numbers of teachers, in contrast with current federal policy, whichencourages failing schools to consider replacing at least half of all teachers to reinvigorateinstruction.

But Dr. Szachowicz and her colleagues did make some teachers uncomfortable, and at least oneteacher who refused to participate in the turnaround was eventually dismissed after due processhearings.

Teachers unions have resisted turnaround efforts at many schools. But at Brockton, the unionnever became a serious adversary, in part because most committee members were unionizedteachers, and the committee scrupulously honored the union contract.

An example: the contract set aside two hours per month for teacher meetings, previously used todiscuss mundane school business. The committee began dedicating those to teacher training, andmade sure they never lasted a minute beyond the time allotted.

“Dr. Szachowicz takes the contract seriously, and we’ve worked together within its parameters,”said Tim Sullivan, who was president of the local teachers union through much of the last decade.

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The committee changed many rules and policies.

The school had an elaborate tracking system, for instance, that channeled students into one of fiveacademic paths. It was largely eliminated because the “basic” courses set low expectations forpoor-performing students.

The committee worked to boost the aspirations of students, 69 percent of whom qualify for freelunches because of their families’ low incomes. Teachers were urged to make sure students heardthe phrase, “When you go to college ...” in every class, every day.

When the school began receiving academic awards, they were made into banners and displayedprominently.

Athletics had traditionally been valued above academic success, and coaches had routinelypressured teachers to raise the grades of star players to maintain their eligibility. Dr. Szachowiczsaid she put an end to any exceptions.

But the school retained all varsity sports, as well as its several bands and choruses, extensivedrama program and scores of student clubs.

Many students consider the school’s size — as big as many small colleges — and its diversestudent body (mostly minority), to be points in its favor, rather than problems.

“You meet a new person every day,” said Johanne Alexandre, a senior whose mother is Haitian.“Somebody with a new story, a new culture. I have Pakistani friends, Brazilians, Haitians, Asians,Cape Verdeans. There are Africans, Guatemalans.”

“There’s a couple of Americans, too!” Tercia Mota, a senior born in Brazil, offered. “But therearen’t cliques. Take a look at the lunch table.”

“You can’t say, those are the jocks, those are the preppy cheerleaders, those are the geeks,” Ms.Mota said. “Everything is blended, everybody’s friends with everyone.”

Over the years, Brockton has refined its literacy curriculum. Bob Perkins, the math department

chairman, used a writing lesson last week in his Introduction to Algebra II class. He wrote “3 + 72

- 6 x 3 - 11” on the board, then asked students to solve the problem in their workbooks and toexplain their reasoning, step by step, in simple sentences.

“I did the exponents first and squared the 7,” wrote Sharon Peterson, a junior. “I multiplied 6 x 3.I added 3 + 49, and combined 18 and 11, because they were both negatives. I ended up with 52-29. The final answer was 23.”

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Some students had more trouble, and the lesson seemed to drag a bit.

“This is taking longer than I expected, but it’s not wasted time,” Mr. Perkins said. “They’relearning math, but they’re also learning to write.”

Brockton’s performance is not as stellar in math as in English language arts, and the committeehas hired an outside consultant to help develop strategies for improving math instruction, Mr.Perkins said.

Dr. Ferguson said Brockton High first “jumped out of the data” for him early last year. He wasexamining Massachusetts’ 2008 test scores in his office in Cambridge, and noticed that Brocktonhad done a better job than 90 percent of the state’s 350 high schools helping its students toimprove their language arts scores.

Since then, he has visited Brockton intermittently and invited some of its faculty to the Harvardcampus for interviews. The report he wrote with four other Harvard researchers includes ananalysis of exemplary performance not only at Brockton, but also at 14 other schools in five states.

The report noted one characteristic shared by all: “Achievement rose when leadership teamsfocused thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction.”

Brockton was by far the largest, but only five of the exemplary schools had fewer than 1,000students, while six had more than 1,700 and two in Illinois had more than 3,000.

“I never bought into the dogma that a huge school can’t be great,” Dr. Ferguson said.

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Voices: Conversation

Grade expectationsBrockton high school would seem to have every reason to be an academic also-ran,but principal Susan Szachowicz has found a way to make the urban school one of thenation's best turnaround stories.

BY: MICHAEL JONASPHOTOGRAPHS BY: FRANK CURRANISSUE: WINTER 2011

January 18, 2011

Home Voices Conversation Grade expectations

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Transformed Through Literacy Sue Szachowicz Principal, Brockton High School

Brockton, Massachusetts Presentation for Teachers21, May 2011

Brockton High

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n Comprehensive 9 – 12 n Enrollment: 4,261 n Poverty Level: 70% n Minority pop.: 73% n  50 different languages n Over 50% speak another

language in the home n Approx. 12% in Trans Bil Ed n Approximately 11% Special Ed

Our Demographics

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n 57% Black - includes African-American, Cape Verdean, Haitian, Jamaican, and others

n 26% White n 14% Hispanic n 2.5% Asian n  .5% Native American

Student Population

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MCAS 1998 Failure

ELA – 44% (Sped – 78%)

MATH – 75% (Sped – 98%)

MCAS 1998 Advanced+Proficient

ELA – 22%

MATH – 7%

State High Stakes Test: We faced:

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But even worse… We faced a flawed belief system:

“Students have a right to fail.”

Former BHS Principal

Brockton High School

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MCAS 1998 Advanced+Proficient

ELA – 22 %

MATH – 7 %

MCAS 2010 Advanced+Proficient

ELA – 74 %

MATH – 61 %

Then and Now

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Brockton High’s turnaround – 4 steps: 1.  Empowered a team 2.  Focused on Literacy – EVERY day,

EVERY class, NO exceptions 3.  Implemented with fidelity 4.  Monitored like crazy!

So what did we do???

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Empowering a Leadership Team How do I

“…get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people into the right seats?” Jim Collins, Good to Great

Step One for Us

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Restructuring Committee – our “think tank” n Every department represented with a

mix of teachers and administrators n Balance of new teachers and

veterans, new voices and voices of experience

n Professional strengths n Personal qualities (humor, trust!)

Empowering a Leadership Team

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The most important one…

Is this the BEST we can be???

We asked questions…

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n WHAT are we teaching? n  HOW are we teaching it? n  HOW do we know our

students are learning it?

We asked questions…

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n  What can we control, what can’t we control?

n What do we have now that we can use differently?

More questions…

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SO, what did we do??

For us, ONLY two goals: •  Increase student academic achievement (data driven!) •  Personalize the educational

experience for every student

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“Confront the brutal facts.” Jim Collins in Good to Great

For us – 75% Failure!!! Below the state average on EVERY open response (writing) question PICK ONE THING!!!

We started with literacy with writing focus

Step two: FOCUS Literacy for ALL

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Reading, Writing, Speaking, Reasoning

The “WHAT”

Literacy for ALL

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LITERACY CHART: WRITING

• to take notes • to explain one’s thinking • to argue a thesis and support one’s thinking • to compare and contrast • to write an open response • to describe an experiment, report one’s findings, and report one’s conclusion • to generate a response to what one has read, viewed, or heard • to convey one’s thinking in complete sentences • to develop an expository essay with a formal structure

c Brockton High School, 2002

WRITING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

How did we determine our focus? Literacy Skills Drafted:

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LITERACY CHART: READING

• for content ( both literal and inferential ) • to apply pre-reading, during reading and post-reading strategies to all

reading assignments, including determining purpose and pre-learning vocabulary

• to research a topic • to gather information • to comprehend an argument • to determine the main idea of a passage • to understand a concept and construct meaning • to expand one’s experiences c Brockton High School, 2002

READING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

LITERACY CHART: WRITING

• to take notes • to explain one’s thinking • to argue a thesis and support one’s thinking • to compare and contrast • to write an open response • to describe an experiment, report one’s findings, and report one’s conclusion • to generate a response to what one has read, viewed, or heard • to convey one’s thinking in complete sentences • to develop an expository essay with a formal structure

c Brockton High School, 2002

WRITING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

LITERACY CHART: REASONING

• to create, interpret and explain a table, chart or graph • to compute, interpret and explain numbers • to read, break down, and solve a word problem • to interpret and present statistics that support an argument or hypothesis • to identify a pattern, explain a pattern, and/or make a prediction based on a

pattern • to detect the fallacy in an argument or a proof • to explain the logic of an argument or solution • to use analogies and/or evidence to support one’s thinking • to explain and/or interpret relationships of space and time c Brockton High School, 2002

REASONING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

LITERACY CHART: SPEAKING

• to convey one’s thinking in complete sentences • to interpret a passage orally • to debate an issue • to participate in class discussion or a public forum • to make an oral presentation to one’s class, one’s peers, one’s community • to present one’s portfolio • to respond to what one has read, viewed, or heard • to communicate in a manner that allows one to be both heard and

understood c Brockton High School, 2002

SPEAKING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

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ENGAGING THE FACULTY:

Interdisciplinary discussion groups:

1.   In each of the four areas of Reading, Writing, Speaking and Reasoning, have we included what is required for students to be successful in your class/your content area? (whats’s missing?)

2.   Is the skill stated clearly so that all teachers and students can understand it?

3.   Is the skill applicable to ALL content areas?

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What about BUY-IN?? How did you get the teachers to buy-in to this?

So, you might be thinking…

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“Lessons Learned the Hard Way” Tip:

Put all your negative folks together in a group

so they don’t spread their toxic fumes.

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LITERACY CHART: READING

• for content ( both literal and inferential ) • to apply pre-reading, during reading and post-reading strategies to all

reading assignments, including determining purpose and pre-learning vocabulary

• to research a topic • to gather information • to comprehend an argument • to determine the main idea of a passage • to understand a concept and construct meaning • to expand one’s experiences c Brockton High School, 2002

READING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

LITERACY CHART: WRITING

• to take notes • to explain one’s thinking • to argue a thesis and support one’s thinking • to compare and contrast • to write an open response • to describe an experiment, report one’s findings, and report one’s conclusion • to generate a response to what one has read, viewed, or heard • to convey one’s thinking in complete sentences • to develop an expository essay with a formal structure

c Brockton High School, 2002

WRITING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

LITERACY CHART: REASONING

• to create, interpret and explain a table, chart or graph • to compute, interpret and explain numbers • to read, break down, and solve a word problem • to interpret and present statistics that support an argument or hypothesis • to identify a pattern, explain a pattern, and/or make a prediction based on a

pattern • to detect the fallacy in an argument or a proof • to explain the logic of an argument or solution • to use analogies and/or evidence to support one’s thinking • to explain and/or interpret relationships of space and time c Brockton High School, 2002

REASONING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

LITERACY CHART: SPEAKING

• to convey one’s thinking in complete sentences • to interpret a passage orally • to debate an issue • to participate in class discussion or a public forum • to make an oral presentation to one’s class, one’s peers, one’s community • to present one’s portfolio • to respond to what one has read, viewed, or heard • to communicate in a manner that allows one to be both heard and

understood c Brockton High School, 2002

SPEAKING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

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1.  We began with WRITING 2.  Created our P.D. scripts 3.  Trained ALL faculty 4.  Implemented according to a

calendar

Step 3: Implemented with fidelity

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LITERACY CHART: WRITING

• to take notes • to explain one’s thinking • to argue a thesis and support one’s thinking • to compare and contrast • to write an open response • to describe an experiment, report one’s findings, and report one’s conclusion • to generate a response to what one has read, viewed, or heard • to convey one’s thinking in complete sentences • to develop an expository essay with a formal structure

c Brockton High School, 2002

WRITING

SOCIAL

SCIENCE

MATH

ELECTIVE

ENGLISH

SCIENCE

We started with writing. FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS!!!

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What can we use differently? Faculty Meetings became Literacy

Workshops

Literacy Workshops

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OPEN RESPONSE STEPS TO FOLLOW

1. READ QUESTION CAREFULLY. 2. CIRCLE OR UNDERLINE KEY WORDS. 3. RESTATE QUESTION AS THESIS (LEAVING

BLANKS). 4. READ PASSAGE CAREFULLY. 5. TAKE NOTES THAT RESPOND TO THE QUESTION. BRAINSTORM & MAP OUT YOUR ANSWER. 6. COMPLETE YOUR THESIS. 7. WRITE YOUR RESPONSE CAREFULLY, USING

YOUR MAP AS A GUIDE. 8. STATEGICALLY REPEAT KEY WORDS FROM

THESIS IN YOUR BODY AND IN YOUR END SENTENCE.

9. PARAGRAPH YOUR RESPONSE. 10. REREAD AND EDIT YOUR RESPONSE.

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Implementation according to a specific timeline…

Example...

Calendar of Implementation

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As a follow up to this activity, I am requiring Department Heads to collect from each teacher at least one student sample from each of the teachers’ classes. The student samples should include:

Student Name Teacher Name Date Course Name and Level Period A copy of the reading selection and question Evidence of the student’s active reading All pre-writing work that the student has done, e.g. webs A copy of the written open response The new scoring rubric and completed assessment

After you have collected the samples from each teacher and have had the opportunity to review them for quality and completeness, please send them to me in a department folder with a checklist of your teachers. Again, please be sure that your teachers clearly label their student samples.

The Open Response calendar of implementation is as follows:

Nov 2-6: Social Science, Social Sci Biling. Nov 30-Dec 4: Wellness, JROTC Dec 14-18: Science, Science Bilingual Jan 11-15: Business, Tech, & Career Ed. Jan 25-29: Math, Math Bilingual Feb 22-26: Foreign Lang, Special Ed Mar. 7-11: English, ESL Mar 20-24 Family &Cons. Sci, ProjGrads Apr 5-9: Music, Art

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What gets monitored is what gets done!!!

For the students AND the teachers

Step 4: Monitoring

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n  Standardized assessment using rubrics n  Implementation according to a calendar n  Admin Team observing implementation n  Literacy Objective in daily lesson plans

reviewed by administration n  Walkthroughs n  Collection and review of student work

Monitor Student Progress/Improve Student Support Systems: Our Examples

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CONTENT

FORM 8 • Response contains a clear thesis and insightfully answers all parts of the question. • Response provides relevant and specific textual evidence. • Explanations of evidence are clear and accurate, and demonstrate superior understanding of the material.

4 • Response contains sophisticated and effective use of transitions and strategic repetition indicating complete control of the material. • Response is logically and effectively organized in its thesis, paragraphing, and sequencing of examples. • Response contains clear sentence structure with few or no errors.

6 • Response contains a clear thesis and adequately answers all parts of the question. • Response provides relevant but general textual evidence. • Explanations of evidence are mostly clear and accurate, and demonstrate good understanding of the material.

3 • Response contains adequate but simplistic use of transitions and strategic repetition. • Response is organized in its thesis, paragraphing, and sequencing of examples. • Response contains clear sentence structure with no distracting errors.

LEGIBILITY

1 • Easy to read

0 • Difficult to read

4 • Response contains a thesis but only partially answers the question. • Response provides a mix of accurate and inaccurate textual evidence. • Explanations of evidence are vague and/or demonstrate limited understanding of the material.

2 • Response contains some inappropriate use of transitions and strategic repetition. • Response demonstrates lapses in the organization of its thesis, paragraphing, and/or sequencing of examples. • Response contains lapses in sentence structure that interfere with the clarity of thought.

2 • Response contains a thesis but only minimally answers the question. • Response provides insufficient and/or largely inaccurate textual evidence. • Explanations of evidence are unclear and/or demonstrate minimal understanding of the material.

1 • Response contains incorrect or inadequate use of transitions and strategic repetition. • Response reflects minimal organization of its thesis, paragraphing, and/or sequencing of examples. • Response contains major errors in sentence structure.

LENGTH

1 • Sufficient

0 • Insufficient

0 • Response is incorrect. • Response contains insufficient evidence to show understanding of the material. • Response is off-topic and/or contains irrelevant content.

0 • Response contains no evidence of transitions and strategic repetition. • Response reflects no organization. • Response contains little to no evidence of sentence structure.

Evaluated by: Self Peer Teacher (Circle One) SCORING 13-14 = Advanced 11-12 = Proficient 8-10 = Needs Improvement 0-7 = Failing

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It’s about teaching stupid… Mike Schmoker, Results Now

n  Observing and Analyzing Teaching Training (Jon Saphier)

n  The Skillful Teacher

Instruction, Instruction, Instruction!!!

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1.  Freshmen Initiatives – Freshman Academy, Credit Recovery, Academic Success Plans

2.  Project Diploma 3.  Empowering students – Councils,

clubs, Boxer Buddies 4.  WE surveys (www.leadered.com)

Goal 2: Personalization

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A roadmap for success at Brockton High

AND, more importantly, for life AFTER Brockton High

Changing students’ beliefs: Project Diploma

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Freshmen September/ October: Bridges Choices Registration/ Introduction to the Career

Advisement Plan • October: Freshmen Orientation • January: Early College Planning • Early College Planning

Freshmen Academy • Student Handbook • Learning Styles • Study Skills • 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens • Goal Setting

Seniors: • September: Senior College/Career

Workshop • November: Financing Your Education • November: The Common Application • January: Financial Aid Seminar • January: College Goal Sunday • January: FAFSA: Obtaining a PIN

Number

Table of Contents and Calendar of Group Presentations

Juniors: • October: Preparing for the PSAT • December: Understanding the PSAT • March: College Admissions Seminar • April: Junior College/Career Workshop • April: College Fair  

Sophomores • January: Sophomore Presentation/Project Diploma  

All Grades Special Topics: October through May

• Anger Management/Conflict Resolution

• Mini College Fair Series • Success at BHS Groups • Assertiveness/Self-Esteem for Girls • Motivational Group for Boys • Newcomer’s Program • Substance Abuse Mini-Career Fair

Series  

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1. Empowering a team 2. Literacy for ALL – NO

exceptions 3. Implementing with a plan 4. Monitoring, monitoring,

monitoring

RECAP:

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RESULTS: What can the results be for

the students when the school takes action?

(HINT, HINT… GOOD THINGS!!!)

The good news story…

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MCAS 1998 Failing

ELA – 44 % MATH – 75%

Advanced+Proficient ELA – 22 %

MATH – 7 %

MCAS 2010 Failling

ELA – 5 % MATH – 14 %

Advanced+Proficient ELA – 74 %

MATH – 61 %

Then and Now

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TEACHER  LEADERSHIP    

Some  Schools  Stand  Out    

Comparisons  of    Complacent  HS  and  Brockton  HS  

 Ronald  F.  Ferguson,  PhD  Tripod  Project  for  School  Improvement  (www.tripodproject.org)  and  

Achievement  Gap  IniCaCve  at  Harvard  University    (www.agi.harvard.edu)  

   

Propor&ons  of  students  scoring  in  each  decile    of  the  MCAS  8th  grade  ELA  distribu&on  

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MCAS  ELA  gains  8th  to  10th  grade,    compared  to  others  from  the  same  8th  grade  decile  

(School  rank  percen&le/100)  

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n Everyone is responsible for every student

n Believing that every student CAN and MUST

n Our responsibility: to figure out how to help

Changing Attitudes!

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JOHN& ABIGAIL ADAMS SCHOLARSHIP – 2010

252 Recipients – 25% African American – 36% (4.6%) Asian – 4% Hispanic – 9% MultiRace-2% Native American – <1% White – 49 % (80%) Low Income-44% (15%) With Disability – 3%

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Amarr:“It’s not us against them.”

Terrence:“No one here would let me fail. I know, because I tried to.”

The “REAL” results

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n  Massachusetts Compass School n  Northwest Regional Educational

Laboratory – Schools Making Progress n  International Center for Leadership in

Education – Model School 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011

n  U.S. Department of Education National High School Summit

n  National School Change Award – 2006 n  Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative 2009 n  NASSP/CSSR Secondary School

Showcase 2010, 2011

Lots of GOOD news!

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Brockton High School

Brockton School District Plymouth County 470 Forest Avenue

Brockton, Massachusetts (508)580-7633

2008 2010

Lots of GOOD news!

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Turnaround at Brockton High

BROCKTON - Brockton High School has every excuse for failure, serving a city plagued by crime, poverty, housing foreclosures, and homelessness. Almost two-thirds of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and 14 percent are learning to speak English. More than two-thirds are African-American or Latino - groups that have lagged behind their peers across the state on standardized tests. But Brockton High, by far the state’s largest public high school with 4,200 students, has found a success in recent years that has eluded many of the state’s urban schools: MCAS scores are soaring, earning the school state recognition as a symbol of urban hope.

Principal  Susan  Szachowicz,  shown  chaFng  at  lunch  with  Yiriam  Lopez,    is  in  many  ways  the  school’s  biggest  cheerleader.  (Essdras  M  Suarez/  Globe  Staff)    By  James  Vaznis  Globe  Staff  /  October  12,  2009    

Emphasis on literacy brings big MCAS improvement

Published: January 14, 2010 Published in Print as: Making Standards a Classroom Reality State Standards Loom Large in Mass. Classrooms

Tests Heighten Stakes for Schools and Students By Erik W. Robelen Brockton, Mass.

…the principal believes the heart of the matter is “great instruction” tied to high standards. “It’s about what happens in the classroom between the students and the teachers,” she says. “The teachers know clearly what they have to teach, and they teach it well.”

Susan Szachowicz, Principal Vol. 29, Issue 17, Pages 20-23

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GO

Boxers!!!

September 28, 2010

Boxers in the NEW YORK

TIMES

High Expectations NO Excuses!!!

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And recently, the MOST unbelievable moment for our Brockton Boxer Buddies

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But not just ANY Pledge of Allegiance…

These are our hands!!!

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Making change takes tenacity, not brilliance…

Final Thought…

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TO JUDGE BY its demographics, Brockton High School looks like lots of urban high schools that have failure written all overthem. The sprawling complex is the largest public school in Massachusetts, with more than 4,100 students navigating its mazeof hallways. Nearly 70 percent of them, more than twice the statewide average, come from low-income homes, and two-thirdsare black or Hispanic, the two groups that sit at the lower end of the achievement gap. One-third of the school’s students don’tspeak English as their first language, also more than double the statewide average.

All too often those indicators point to dismal student achievement levels, and that was certainly true at Brockton High School inthe late 1990s. Nearly half its students were failing the English portion of the state’s high-stakes MCAS exam and 75 percentwere failing math. That’s when Sue Szachowicz and a handful of her colleagues, alarmed by the prospect of thousands ofBrockton students being denied diplomas when the MCAS exam’s high-stakes graduation requirement took effect in 2003,began a highly focused effort to turn things around. The results have been extraordinary, with the school now tracking thestatewide average for MCAS in English, and recording among the largest achievement gains of any school in Massachusetts.

Szachowicz was head of the history department in the late 1990s when she served on a committee that restructured the schoolday into fewer periods of longer length. But it soon became clear that the exercise was a bit like rearranging deck chairs on theTitanic. “If you have 66 minutes of not a good thing instead of 45, you’re no further ahead than you were before,” she says. Inthe end, she and her colleagues concluded, it wasn’t the structure of the day but the quality and rigor of classroom instructionthat was at the heart of why a school thrived—or failed. They set their sights on an ambitious literacy initiative, recognizing thatreading, writing, and reasoning skills were the underpinnings of success not only in English class, but in every discipline across

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the curriculum.

The initiative they developed called for intensive use of a very prescribed and structured teaching blueprint— used in everysubject in the school—designed to boost skills in reading, writing, reasoning, and speaking. The program involves relentlessreview of student work by department heads and other administrators. “What gets monitored is what gets done” is a favoriteSzachowicz saying. That monitoring allows school leaders to make sure all teachers are following the literacy charts, whichhang in every classroom in the school. But it also lets them compare student performance in different classrooms, a windowinto which teachers are providing the most effective instruction and which need help or mentoring to get the most out of theirstudents.

Just 6 percent of Brockton 10th-graders failed the English portion of the MCAS test last year, and 71 percent scored in the toptwo categories, advanced and proficient, nearly matching the statewide rate of 78 percent. Even more impressive, whenmeasured in terms of growth in English scores from 8th grade, the year before entering Brockton High, and 10th grade,Brockton students showed greater gains in 2009 than 98 percent of all Massachusetts schools. Meanwhile, the achievementgap in English separating black and Hispanic students in Brockton from white students statewide has been cut in half.

Brockton High was included in a recent report directed by Harvard researcher Ron Ferguson, which spotlighted 15 “exemplary”US high schools that were raising achievement levels and narrowing achievement gaps through improved instruction. Thereport helped land the school on the front page of the New York Times in September, with PBS and CNN crews soon beating apath to the school’s doors.

Some of the interest in Brockton’s impressive gains comes because the school seems to stand apart from even the smalluniverse of urban schools that have broken through the demographic expectations and shown high achievement among low-income minority students. Its mammoth size undercuts arguments that only small schools can give these students the attentionnecessary to succeed. Szachowicz and her colleagues have had to work within a traditional six-hour school day that ends at 2o’clock, and a strong union contract gives her none of the unilateral control over staffing that leaders of many high-achievingcharter schools say is key to their success.

What Szachowicz has mastered as well as any leader of a large urban high school is the art of the possible. She’d love reformslike a longer school day or more autonomy in personnel decisions, but says the approach at Brockton High has been to seizeopportunities to make big change that are possible within the structure you are handed—and go at that with all you have.

“Well-behaved women rarely make history,” reads a bumper sticker on the wall above Szachowicz’s desk. The 57-year-oldBrockton native is hardly ill-mannered. But she has little tolerance for excuse-making—among staff or students—and unyieldingexpectations for what students at her alma mater, regardless of their background, can achieve.

The restructuring committee that first devised the literacy project a decade ago is still going strong, meeting once a month onSaturday mornings, an approach that puts teachers at the center of reform efforts. The committee is now turning its attention tomath, where Brockton has made gains but lags well behind state averages. When the restructuring group started, Szachowiczsays she had to beg to get 20 teachers to join. Now she has to turn away faculty who want to serve on the 32-member panel,whose members she calls “the think tank power brokers of the school.”

Ferguson, the Harvard researcher, says the initiative has been so well baked into the culture at Brockton High, and is so fullyembraced by the school’s leadership team, that it wouldn’t lose its force at this point even if Szachowicz left. That said, hercontinued presence surely doesn’t hurt. “She’s a powerhouse,” says Ferguson. “She’s determined, she’s smart, and she’stotally dedicated to that school and that community.

I sat down with Szachowicz in her office at Brockton High. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

—MICHAEL JONAS

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COMMONWEALTH: With all the attention Brockton has received for its impressive achievement gains, the $64,000 question, ofcourse, is, how did you do it?

SZACHOWICZ: That is the first question everyone asks and the first answer I always give is: hard work, hard work, hard work.On the part of everybody—the teachers, the administrators, the students. It really has been a concerted effort. But that’s sort ofthe simple version. The heart and soul of what has happened at Brockton High School has been the literacy initiative thatyou’ve heard about. It’s about an intense, tenacious focus on the literacy objectives we have here, which are reading, writing,speaking, and reasoning. We don’t veer from that focus and that is in every discipline, every day, every subject.

CW: Just to back up a little bit, start the story back in the late 1990s.

SZACHOWICZ: When everybody was failing.

CW: Right. Can you describe what set in motion what has really been a decade-long effort.

SZACHOWICZ: I’m glad you said it’s been a decade long. The attention has come recently, and we kind of smile amongourselves because we’re being talked about as a turnaround school. This was no fast pirouette. This was a slow progression ofchange. The group that led this change was a group of teachers and administrators that were on our restructuring committee.And it started after the [MCAS] scores came out in 1998 and we had a 44 percent failure rate in English and a 75 percentfailure rate in math. And then the scores didn’t get better. In fact, they actually got worse in math.

CW: You’ve referred to what the school was facing as “massive failure.”

SZACHOWICZ: It was. What else to do you call it when we were looking at 75 percent of the kids not getting a diploma? I’m agraduate of this school, so it really hurt. It would have been one thing if 75 percent of the kids in the entire state were failing,and then you’d say this was a horrible test. But guess what? That wasn’t the case.

CW: You were bringing up the rear.

SZACHOWICZ: We sure were, and we really needed to look in the mirror. There was nothing else you could do.

CW: So your focus initially was on driving up the MCAS scores and passing rate?

SZACHOWICZ: We did try to attack the test first. And I’ll tell you a funny story. We didn’t know what to do. I was a historyteacher and my buddy that co-chaired the committee with me was an English teacher. We get this pile of numbers back andwe’re looking at them. We saw that, for two years in a row, there were Shakespearian sonnets on the MCAS. So guess whatwe did first? We did this big work on Shakespearian sonnets. Guess what wasn’t on the test the next year? We realized thehard way that it wasn’t going to work to try to outguess the test. And was that really what we wanted anyway? So webroadened the discussion to, what are the skills that kids needed for the test? And what do our kids need to know and be ableto do to be successful graduates?

CW: And so it broadened fast from the idea of learning Shakespearian sonnets.

SZACHOWICZ: To reading, writing, speaking, and reasoning —and there isn’t even a speaking component on the MCAS. Wehappened to feel like we needed that in the school because we couldn’t stand how they spoke. When you look at our literacyskills, they are those skills that adults use and need in the world all the time.

CW: So you came to the broad conclusion that literacy skills were what you needed to try to tackle. But how did you put thisinto place?

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SZACHOWICZ: The angle that we took was people are going to support literacy but you need to define it for them, and thenteach the teachers how to teach it to the kids. The real success story here is not just about students learning, it’s about adultlearning. It’s about us then teaching ourselves—teaching the teachers, who then taught the students—because we, therestructuring committee, did all the training. So what does literacy and reading mean? It means that you know how to do pre-reading and use vocabulary and read for content and generate a response to what you’ve read. What does writing literacymean? It means that you can also generate a response to what you’ve read, viewed, or heard. You can write an openresponse. You can debate an issue. You can compare and contrast. In speaking, it means you speak in complete sentences.We drafted these skills. Every one of them has a set of definitions. We wanted every teacher that looked at them to say, “Yes,a kid ought to be able to do that in my class.”

So, starting in the 2000-2001 school year, we tackled writing first. We felt out of all of them, that was the key to a kid’s success.Test-wise, writing was over 50 percent of the MCAS test. But, as I said, we had learned our lesson—it wasn’t just about testprep because we failed at that one. But writing is thinking, so if we could get our students writing differently, they were going tobe thinking well and they were going to be reading more intensely. So we trained every teacher in the school on a format ofwriting instruction.

CW: And then the results of the MCAS came in.

SZACHOWICZ: I was the associate principal bythen. My buddy, Paul Laurino, and I had beenco-chairing the restructuring committee, and wefelt it important to put a very confident frontforward. “This will work. This will work,” we’d tellall the teachers. People weren’t buying it. Theywere following the initiative because we werepushing it. Behind the scenes we would say toeach other, “Oh my God, if we don’t see someimprovement, we are just dead in the water.” Butwe thought we were onto something good. Wehad gone hard at writing for a whole year, noexceptions. We had fought a lot of battles. Then Igot a call from the [state education]commissioner’s office. I immediately thought thatsomeone had cheated or I had miscounted the test booklets or some God-awful thing that happens in MCAS administration.

CW: A scandal was coming.

SZACHOWICZ: Yes, a scandal is coming. When my secretary said it’s the commissioner, I assumed she meant thecommissioner’s office, having not been called usually by the commissioner himself. So I picked up the phone, and he said,“Szachowicz, Commissioner [David] Driscoll here.” At which point my heart sank like you wouldn’t believe. I had a knot in mystomach that was beyond measurement. Front page of the Globe. A scandal, whatever it is. And he said, “What did you dodown there anyway? You are the most improved school in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” I don’t think I could speak forfive seconds – which is a miracle. And he said, “I’m coming to Brockton High to tell everybody.”

We had this big assembly in the auditorium. It was a very powerful moment because we had never been recognized foranything academically. He said, “You are a school of champions in your city of champions.” And then he looked at the facultyand he said, “and that is because you taught them better than any other faculty in this Commonwealth. Thank you very much.”And that’s when we had buy-in. We had buy-in when we had results. I always say, whenever I’m working with other schools orprincipals, you cannot wait for everybody to buy-in. Because that day isn’t going to happen. There are always going to bepeople who are going to hold back and say, “You need to prove it to me.”

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CW: So, initially, you didn’t have really widespread support for the initiative?

SZACHOWICZ: No, we did not. We had people cooperating. We had some people who went really above and beyond, but Ithink most people had been through an awful lot of ed reforms.

CW: There’s always a new thing coming around that corner.

SZACHOWICZ: There was always a new thing, and they thought, we’ll wait this out, too. But this time something worked. Andyou saw immediate results. In that first year we cut our failure rate in half, and then the following year, in half again. So inEnglish we went in two years from a 44 percent failure rate to 13. And in math, from a 75 percent failure rate to 36.

CW: Talk a little bit about this idea that with the literacy program you decided this has to be something that is done across theboard, in every discipline, phys ed, art, everything.

SZACHOWICZ: I felt strongly that if you start exempting people it diminishes the value of what the exercise is. I think that’sbeen a key to the success. Everybody can do this. In phys ed, it wasn’t like they’re reading Shakespeare in the gym. But thereare great non-fiction pieces on wellness, fitness, cardio issues.

CW: You are also unapologetic about the idea that, across the board with almost 300 teachers, they are doing the identicalthing using the literacy rubrics that have been developed. Some people would say, what a mind-numbing way to approachthings.

SZACHOWICZ: Yes. I’ve heard that. When people say, “That’s so formulaic,” my answer to that is, you’re right. We say, it’s aformula for success. How does anyone really learn something? Any musician or coach knows this: practice, practice, practice.And you can’t complicate the matter by saying, depending on what classroom you’re in the standards are different.

CW: Do you subscribe to this idea that we hear so often today that effective teachers are really the whole ball of wax.

SZACHOWICZ: I do.

CW: Can you talk a little bit about how you evaluate teachers? Because that’s also something that’s getting a lot of attentionnow with talk about remaking evaluation systems—across the state, across the country. It’s a big part of the Race to the Topinitiative.

SZACHOWICZ: The evaluation instrument is contractual. And it’s horrible. It’s just check boxes. It’s broken. However, we’repretty good here about saying, what can we control and what can’t we control, and what do we have that we can usedifferently? Well, beside the check boxes it says, “comments.” So we had an opportunity. I called Research for Better Teaching[an Acton-based consulting organization run by noted education leader Jon Saphier, which specializes in teacher developmentand teacher evaluation] and said we need some help, but you can’t change our instrument. They helped us use it much betterand that has changed all of the evaluations. We train every new administrator in how to do this and it’s now a pretty powerfulevaluation tool.

CW: Another thing that you do that’s very concrete is, because you have these common assessments and common rubrics,you look at how students are faring under different teachers and take a really hard look at disparities in the progress ofstudents.

SZACHOWICZ: And we’ve gotten much better at looking at it. At first we had teachers submit student work to departmentheads mostly because we wanted to make sure it was being done. It was more about monitoring the process, but when welooked at it, we learned so much. We were sort of stumbling onto things. We would go in that conference room [motioning to aroom adjoining her office] and we had the work spread out, and what became clear to us was the simple data question we now

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always ask: What do you notice? We were so unsophisticated. But it was the best question we could have asked becausewhen we laid out the work on the table, we noticed that the rigor and consistency and how it was being graded was all over theplace, even though we had a rubric. There was great disparity between what the expectations were from one classroom toanother.

And we’re looking at work from one class and we said, “Look at the results Ms. Nelson is getting. Geez. How come her kids aregetting this and this and others are not?” We started pairing teachers up, so that if you’re getting really high level writing in yourclass and I’m teaching the same group of kids and I’m not, we put the two teachers together—not to beat anybody up, but tosay, what do you notice about the work produced here?

CW: There’s a lot of concern expressed these days that it’s threatening to teachers or it’s been a sticking point for teachersunions. Do you feel that we need to be looking at the relative performance of students under different instructors?

SZACHOWICZ: It’s part of moving the improvement agenda forward.

CW: How have you gotten that to be seen as something that can really improve things here, as opposed to something that’ssort of ominous or threatening to teachers?

SZACHOWICZ: It is not ominous. I think if you ask people, they wouldn’t find it that way at all. It’s a dialogue. What’s nothappening here, and of course it’s sort of the elephant in the room, is there’s no pay for performance, so this is about schoolimprovement and kids being held to the same standard.

CW: And with the teachers contract governing how evaluations are done, student performance is not a formal part of howteachers are evaluated.

SZACHOWICZ: That’s absolutely correct.

CW: Do you think it should be?

SZACHOWICZ: I don’t know yet. I think we’ve been onto some improvement strategies here. How that plays out withevaluation tools, I don’t know. I don’t know where all of that debate is going to go. We sort of have always worked within thesystem here, and there may be things that I don’t like—and there are plenty—but I feel like I can either choose to work withinthe system and make it successful or you look for a different route altogether.

CW: In a lot of ways isn’t that the Brockton High story—that you’ve managed to achieve what you all have accomplished—.SZACHOWICZ: Within the box.

CW: Yes, exactly. You’re a large school, the largest in the state. You don’t have a longer school day. You don’t have the sort ofhiring autonomy that, say, a charter school has.

SZACHOWICZ: Right. Yes.

CW: You made a decision to not do what some schools have done whose students are struggling to gain proficiency in basicskills, which is “double block”—devote twice as much time to English and math, which often comes at the expense of art ormusic or things like that.

SZACHOWICZ: No. We don’t do that. We never went that route of taking that away because my belief is that’s the hook. Ourkids would follow the band director off a cliff, or the football coach, or the choral director. There are kids who will burythemselves in fine arts. So we went the route of embedding literacy into those areas they love. In chorus, they were doing apiece for the Handel and Haydn Society. I found a reading about the times that this piece was about that they were singing. It

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was about the French Revolution period. The people were miserable and they were all angry. [The chorus instructor] had themread it and do a writing piece. Then she looked at me and she said, “And then they sang it differently.”

CW: Even though there is so much talk in education about these big kind of reforms that we need to have, some of whichyou’re a believer in, is the Brockton High lesson that there is a lot that can be done even without those sorts of bigtransformations?

SZACHOWICZ: Yes, there is a lot. I am a fan of most of those big transformations. I find it absurd that I as a principal can’t calla teacher’s meeting without having a grievance. But I’m not going to use that as an excuse and do nothing and say, poor me,poor me, and guess what, kids aren’t graduating. I just think far too often that’s used as an excuse. The literacy initiative costsnothing. It was about changing instruction in a building and changing the focus in a building.

CW: So it’s really about the mission and the culture of the school.

SZACHOWICZ: Right. Raising expectations costs nothing. It costs hard work. It makes us roll up our sleeves and it’s aboutdoing things differently. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to keep fighting for a longer day and a longer year, because I hatethat kids walk out at two o’clock.

CW: Did you think 10 years ago that you’d be sitting here having someone come to talk to you about the really noteworthyprogress at Brockton High?

SZACHOWICZ: Not in a million years. I could not have imagined it. Nor were we even aiming for that. We were really justfocused on kids graduating, which sounds like such a low standard. But we were in such trouble that they weren’t going to gettheir diploma.

CW: With Brockton’s MCAS scores, you certainly aren’t leading the state; you are more or less now tracking the statewideaverages. What makes it so impressive is you’re doing that with more than twice as many low-income kids.

SZACHOWICZ: Yes, and English language learners are increasing here hugely.

CW: Boxing has a big history in Brockton, so maybe the best way to describe it is to say you’re punching above your weightclass.

SZACHOWICZ: Oh, I like that. We get kids here from everywhere. In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to get kids who haven’tbeen to school for some time. Our largest percentage of students is from Cape Verde, where you don’t have to go to schoolafter the sixth grade. So it’s not uncommon for us to get a student who’s 18, 19, or even 20 years old, who has not been toschool for six or eight years. We welcome them to Brockton High—and get them invested in literacy right away, because theyhave to pass that test, too, like anybody else.

CW: How do you view MCAS? Because it seems like it was the introduction of it and the high-stakes graduation requirementthat lit a fire here, when push was going to come to shove. Is that the case?

SZACHOWICZ: Yes. Totally. I am totally in favor of the high-stakes test. Totally. And I get so angry when the suburbanprincipals say, “Oh, this is so bad for the poor urban children.” No, it isn’t. People had very low expectations of our kids. Thehigh standards aim to get kids to a place that is what all middle class parents want and expect of their children.

CW: Your scores are not nearly as good in math. But you’re now working on an initiative around that?

SZACHOWICZ: Yes, because we made great inroads at first and then we plateaued. And we don’t like plateaus here. We’vestayed at this 15 percent failure and about 60 to 65 percent proficiency [in math] and we’ve soared in ELA [English languagearts], which doesn’t make sense, because most of our kids are bilingual and they should be doing better in math and struggling

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in English. Some of it is instruction and we’re working on that. I think the problem is also the curriculum. Our kids are held backbecause they’re not getting algebra in Brockton until the 9th grade. I think it should be earlier.

CW: All these impressive gains in the numbers in a way don’t really mean anything if they don’t represent something about thetrajectory that kids are on when they leave here. What do you know about that? How they are doing? What have you been ableto measure?

SZACHOWICZ: A greater percentage of our kids are going to college now. Of the class of 2010, 48 percent went off to four-year schools and 89 percent overall were planning some form of post-secondary education.

CW: And how are they doing there?

SZACHOWICZ:That’s what we can’t get our hands around yet, and we need to. It’s very hard for us to track even our ownstudents. Where do they go? I really do want to track them in college and see what happens.

CW: There’s nothing simple about this—it’s involved so much hard work and dedication. On the other hand, do you feel like theability to really have an impact in urban schools is right there in front of us?

SZACHOWICZ: I think it is. Are we ever going to match the scores of the highest-flying district in Massachusetts? Unlikely. Butit doesn’t mean we won’t aim for that.

CW: Looking around your office, I notice that you have that very famous Margaret Mead quote about how to make change inthe world not just in one spot but in two places.

SZACHOWICZ: Yes, I do—because I really do believe that: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed peoplecan change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I really believe it.

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