"I am glad you are explaining the reading scores to us," a young Latina woman said as she pointed to the overhead image of 3rd grade reading data. She turned to the assembled group of parents and teachers and admitted in Spanish, "I feel bad that I haven't done it before, but now I will start finding ways to help my child."
In a nearby room, a Vietnamese father shook his head and declared in his native language, "The reading level is too low compared to the benchmark. We are very surprised that it is so low. We need help from parents and teachers."
Across the hall, a Cambodian woman voiced the concerns of many of her fellow parents, asking, "Why the increase in reading scores for 1st graders and the decrease for 2nd and 3rd graders? Why aren't the students reading at grade level?"
Ultimately, the question that echoed through each of the overflowing classrooms that November evening was, "What can we—parents and teachers together—do to improve reading?"
This was the first-ever "accountability event"— a meeting of parents and teachers to review schoolwide student literacy achievement—held at Hawthorne Year-Round School in Oakland, California. The purpose of the event was to bring parents and teachers together to review the data about student achievement in reading, to involve parents as partners in the education process, and to find ways to work both at school and at home to increase student reading levels.
Hawthorne's History of Reform
Located in Oakland's largely Latino Fruitvale neighborhood, Hawthorne—with more than 1,400 children—is the largest elementary school in the district. Eighty-eight percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The student population mirrors the state's diverse population. Students come from at least 12 different ethnic and cultural groups, and 74 percent of them speak only a limited amount of English. All communications with parents are written in six languages: Spanish, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Cambodian, English, and Lao.
Hawthorne's school reform history dates back more than 15 years and spans three principals. With support from the state and the district, the school has implemented a wide range of programs for families and students in an effort to build a responsive, caring, and inclusive community—a difficult task in such a large school. Programs and services include TRIBES (a process that builds respect for diversity and communication skills among children and adults), conflict mediation, a health and dental clinic, mental health services, and a parent center. As a result of these efforts, Hawthorne now serves as a model for how a school can meet the varied needs of its community in a respectful and resourceful way.
Hawthorne also is a Leadership School in the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, the regional Annenberg reform initiative. This Collaborative has stimulated and supported Hawthorne's reform work, in part with its vision for mutually accountable partnerships between school and community. Involving parents in the core work of teaching and learning and developing mutual accountability for student achievement continues to be a challenge, however.
Mutual Accountability for Student Learning
The organizers of Hawthorne's accountability event, dubbed "Parents and Teachers Together: An Honest Look at Reading Scores," had hoped that 150 parents and 150 students would attend. When the evening arrived and it began to get dark outside, lights were blazing at the school. People scurried back and forth between the rooms making sure overhead projectors were in place, translators knew their roles, and circles of chairs were set out. Families poured in, and they kept pouring in. Teachers and administrators looked at one another in disbelief. At final count, there were more than 300 parents and 300 children.
By the end of the evening, when families crowded into the main auditorium for the grand finale student exhibition of Brazilian martial arts and a turkey raffle, dozens of flip chart sheets papered the classroom walls. The charts were filled with ideas for how the community could work together to increase student literacy.
Acknowledging publicly that many students were not reading at the levels where their teachers and families wanted them to be was a big step. The admission raised all sorts of issues among the faculty members: deeply rooted fears of finger-pointing and talk about student failure, the potential for conflict regarding bilingual education strategies, and concerns about the biases of tests and about district pressure to raise test scores.
However, Hawthorne staff members were convinced they needed to look at student outcomes to be confident that the school's reforms were working. They recognized the need to evaluate the reform efforts systematically and to hold themselves accountable for improving student achievement. And, although Hawthorne could have done an in-house assessment of progress, in keeping with its tradition of inclusiveness, it opened up its reflection, assessment, and visioning process to all members of the school community.
Laying the Foundation
- Whole community consensus-building. "The school...involve[s] the larger community in building a consensus around [rigorous] standards for both students and the school."Advocates of small schools stress the importance of providing regular opportunities for faculty members to come together and discuss teaching and learning issues (Meier 1995). Because Hawthorne is a year-round school with one quarter of its 61 teachers on vacation at any given time, that goal is impossible to achieve. But the school has chosen to invest its resources in something close: regular retreats.In 1994, more than 100 members of the school community—including teachers, instructional assistants, parents, office staff, administrators, and custodians—attended a retreat. The outcome was an overall vision for the school, with a primary goal of all children reading at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. Two years later, the school community came together again, with more parents and community members present, to review the vision and monitor progress toward achieving the goal.
- Partners in decision making and accountability. "The school routinely and systematically involves its stakeholders...as partners in...decision making.... All members of the school community hold each other accountable for student learning."Collaborative decision making has been an element in most school reform efforts during the last several decades. However, true collaboration—not simply a one-way, unequal relationship—between educators and community members can be difficult for schools to implement (Guskey and Peterson 1995).Hawthorne leaders have faced some challenging questions in their efforts to create such a partnership: Once a collaborative decision-making structure exists, how can its members ensure the continued participation of a wide range of people? How can collaborative decision-making groups have conversations across a wide span of interests, expertise, languages, and cultures? And what should those conversations be about?In 1994, Hawthorne restructured its decision-making process to provide a widely representative leadership team with the authority to guide the school toward its reform goals. The team evolved into an increasingly collaborative and mutually accountable group. Each year it modified its structure and membership a little bit to involve a more diverse group of parents, students, and community members. The team also changed the time and location of meetings so that more people could attend. It now meets off-site for a full day every other month, and for an afternoon at school during the in-between months.Last year, the leadership team decided to adopt a schoolwide reading assessment to provide both class-specific and aggregated data on how the school was doing in this priority area. "An Honest Look at Reading Scores" provided the forum for teachers to share these data with parents and to initiate a collaborative effort to improve them. Parent members of the leadership team played a key role in determining how the event would be structured.
- Two-way communication and mutually beneficial relationships. "Relationships within partnerships are ongoing, mutually beneficial, agreed-upon, and characterized by open, two-way communication and involvement between both parties."A two-way partnership can be difficult for teachers and administrators. They must consciously make time and space to hear others who share a strong concern for student outcomes but who may not have professional expertise in teaching. To be mutually beneficial, partners must continually ask whose needs are being met and whose interests are being served by the partnership activities. They must work to meet the interests and needs of everyone.An opportunity to build such a partnership occurred recently at Hawthorne. In separate meetings with teachers and administrators, parents of Vietnamese and Cambodian students expressed concern about losing touch with their children as their children lost touch with their native language. In some cases, families literally could not communicate across the generations because the children now spoke only English and the parents spoke only their native language.As a result of the meetings, the school has begun to offer after-school Vietnamese and Cambodian language classes. The school encourages parents to join the classes to build their own literacy skills, along with their children.
- Partners in the substantive work of the school. "The school routinely and systematically involves its stakeolders...as partners in...the substantive work of the school."Parents need to be informed about progress toward reform goals, but they also need to play a part in achieving them. To that end, Hawthorne has begun to test the theory that parents are more likely to become involved in the school and in their child's education if they develop a strong, trusting relationship with the child's teachers.Four teachers piloted an effort in this direction last year. The teachers were already working closely together to create a seamless continuum of expectations, curriculum, and relationships among their K–3 Spanish bilingual classes. The next step was to involve the parents of their students in a project they called Home-School Connections.Activities included frequent information updates via phone and mail; family homework projects that encouraged reading at home; a series of family seminars on such topics as homework help, discipline, and reading; and social events. Parents felt free to visit the classrooms during and after school and to communicate with the teachers by phone. Through this pilot effort, parents got to know not only their child's current teacher, but also the teachers their child would have in the next several years. Although it is difficult to assess the direct impact of this close family connection, last year the students in these classrooms had some of the highest reading scores in the school.
Making a Difference
Several years ago at Hawthorne, people didn't have an answer when asked the question, "How do you know what difference your reform efforts are making?" As one teacher reflects, "Hawthorne's reputation for being such a good school came from having so many teachers who were using creative teaching strategies. But we weren't looking at how that translated into actual student results."
Today, Hawthorne staff and parents have a good idea where they are. And although they have yet to meet the ambitious Bay Area School Reform Collaborative standards, they have demonstrated a good deal of progress in that direction.
