MPS School Shows How It’s Done: Scores Soar at Garland, Where Focus is on What Kids Learn

By Alan J. Borsuk, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Jan. 3–ONCE UPON A TIME — six years ago, actually — a small elementary school in Milwaukee had bad test scores. In 2000-’01, in the five academic areas in which fourth-graders statewide are tested, there wasn’t one area where at least 40% of the students at Hamlin Garland Elementary School were proficient or better. A new principal arrived that year who encouraged the teachers to focus on what was actually accomplished in their classrooms — as some of them put it, to examine not what they were teaching but what the children were learning. That may sound like word games, but they say it was a big deal. Here’s how big: In 2005-’06, when that year’s fourth-graders took the state tests, there wasn’t one area where fewer than 90% were proficient or better. If you counted only students who had been in the school at least a year, in four out of five categories the proficiency total was 100%. And it wasn’t a one-time accident — scores have risen steadily at Garland in recent years. This year, it was one of two Milwaukee public schools — along with River Trail School, a kindergarten through eighth-grade school on the far northwest side — to win U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon School awards. The moral of the Garland story is one that MPS officials hope will resonate throughout the system in coming years, because it supports so many of the current trends in education. “We did pretty dramatic things to make that happen,” says Ruth Maegli, who was principal of Garland during its rise. Located near Mitchell Airport, Garland had some things going for it that not all Milwaukee Public Schools have, including a generally united and stable staff, fewer students from socioeconomic backgrounds associated with poor educational outcomes, a sense of intimacy to the whole place. Even so, MPS thinks it can duplicate the school’s successful turnaround by following its example. Put simply, the lesson is this: What goes on in classrooms matters. Teachers can make things better by the way they teach. All that jargon — alignment, learning targets, classroom assessments, and so on — means something. “We’re hoping it’s Garland today, the rest of the district tomorrow,” says MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, praising what the school community did to improve results. Small school on south side Garland is one of the most and least visible schools in MPS. It’s tucked into the southeast corner of the interchange of I-94 and the freeway spur to Mitchell International Airport, and thousands of people pass it every day, almost surely without noticing. With just over 300 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, there’s little reason it would attract outside attention, except maybe for having more Muslim students — about 30% of the school — than any other school in MPS, according to staff members. Maegli says she became principal in October 2000 with an awareness that the school was a candidate for closing, parents from the area were choosing in large numbers to send their kids elsewhere, the staff was ready for change and big gaps separated what was being taught and what state standards called for students to learn. “We started looking at our practice of teaching,” Maegli says. That included focusing on which students were achieving, which ones were struggling and what to do with the struggling kids. The school got involved with an effort centered at Alverno College called the Southeast Wisconsin Assessment Collaborative, which built teachers’ skills in systematically monitoring student work and responding to individual needs. How it works in kindergarten Here’s an example of how this plays out in the 5-year-old kindergarten room where teachers Kathie Quarles and Kathy Holinka are teaching 27 students how to estimate. A set of photos is posted on an easel. A girl eating a bowl of noodles. Shrimp arrayed on a plate. A group of children. A bunch of buttons. Are there about five things in each picture or more than five? You don’t need to count them, just go by what it looks like, Quarles tells students. Quarles has individual students step to the easel and choose whether to put a label on one of the photos — it has “about five” objects or “more than five.” It is easy for some kids, hard for others. Then Quarles passes out handfuls of little plastic bears to each student. Do you have about five? More than five? Next is a sheet for each student with drawings of three jars with marbles in them. Write under each jar whether it has about five, about 20 or more than 20, she tells the children. Basic math skill Estimating is one of the specific math skills students are supposed to learn. It is likely to be part of the questions on the state’s standardized tests that these kids won’t even begin taking until three years from now, when they’re in third grade. “They’re getting ready way back in kindergarten,” second-grade teacher Jackie Jensen says. But there’s more to this than teaching to the test. Stop back to visit Quarles during her lunch break, and she’s adding the results of how each child did on the written sheet to a large loose-leaf binder she keeps to monitor student math progress. The record tells her who got each lesson and who didn’t — a little under three-quarters of them got it, in this case. The ones who didn’t get it will get extra attention from her or Holinka until they master the skill. If a large enough group doesn’t succeed in a lesson like this, the class will do it again together. “We do this all the time,” she says as she goes over the sheets. Years ago, she says, she kept a lot of grade books but not much was done with the information in them. Now she keeps these thick binders of student results in math, reading, writing, social studies, science and health — and this is for a 5-year-old kindergarten class. Quarles says, “Everyone’s going to be successful eventually.” For some kids, it will be today; for others, it will be in a few weeks, with a few more rounds of attention. Quarles calls the process “the science of the art of teaching.” Some people think teaching is an art; some think it is a science. This way, she says, it is both. One of the jargon words in education is “alignment” — getting each teacher to do things that are in line with the goals for each grade set by the state and by MPS itself, as well as getting teachers within a school all on the same page when it comes to what kids should learn as they go from grade to grade. Visits to classes and interviews with teachers at Garland indicate the concept is unusually alive there. Patty Wagner, Garland’s literacy coach, said teachers have gotten used to asking themselves and others whether what they are doing is part of a bigger picture. “There has to be a reason why you’re doing everything,” she says. Hrysanthi Kinis, a first-grade teacher, says part of that is having consistent behavior rules for the school, where everyone, both adults and kids, knows what is accepted and what happens if you don’t stay within the rules. Maegli has moved on now — Andrekopoulos named her principal of Elm Creative Arts School last summer. Maegli says the lesson she gained from her years at Garland was: “Focus on student learning. You have to move away from the idea of teaching . . . to student learning.”"We didn’t ever sit on our laurels,” Maegli says. Fight still going The fight for the school is not over, she adds, not only because it’s always a challenge to teach children but because of outside factors — changing population trends mean fewer children in the surrounding areas, changing MPS transportation policies mean less busing to the school. And if I-94, at the west boundary of the school, is widened in coming years — an idea being considered — that could shut Garland. The new principal, Taimi Parey, says the staff continues to work closely together to improve the teaching techniques they use. “We always strive for better,” she says. There are always challenges, she adds, but “as long as this staff continues in the same mode of operating it has for the last five years, Garland will be spectacular.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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