Training school leaders
to initiate change
 UCLA
program helps bring reforms to struggling K-12 schools
BY Cynthia Lee
UCLA Today Staff
For the last 12 years, a group of educational professionals, who
regard themselves as “UCLA’s best-kept secret,”
has been helping under-performing K-12 schools all over the state
shake up their traditional power structures and faulty belief systems
to help their students learn.
So far, more than 700 schools have sought out the turnaround experts
from the UCLA School Management Program (SMP) to bring about positive
changes through school reform.
Over the next three years, SMP, a self-supporting unit of the Graduate
School of Education & Information Studies, will be hard at work
in 11 low-performing, high-poverty schools in the Los Angeles region.
The SMP staff helped the schools successfully apply for $8.4 million
in federal grants funded by President Bush’s No Child Left
Behind Act. SMP will receive at least $2 million of this funding
for its services, provided under contract to the schools and districts.
While its practices have been tested by research, SMP faculty are
neither educational researchers nor academics, SMP’s executive
director Dan Chernow explained. “They are teachers, principals
and district personnel who’ve spent years in the trenches,
earning reputations as highly respected leaders of reform,”
he said.
Some have been coaxed out of retirement or hired temporarily from
their school districts to work for SMP, to lead retreats, coach
at schools and build 10- to 20-person leadership teams at each school.
Teams include the principal, lead teachers, parents and even skeptics
among the faculty.
“SMP focuses on building the capacity of these school leaders
to lead the transformation,” Chernow said. “We don’t
tell them what to do. We ask them a lot of questions that push their
thinking forward and advance their learning.” The focus is
always on student work. “You’d be amazed at how many
school meetings there are when student work is never discussed.”
To start, teams determine what the school culture is — who
makes decisions and who provides leadership. They look at the belief
systems that are in place. “One commonly held belief is that
low-performing students learn better if you give them skill-driven
worksheets, while high-performing students learn by getting challenging,
interactive work,” Chernow said. “But is that true?
What does the research say?”
To help lead teachers bring about change, SMP offers them seven
intensive institutes and initiatives, four of which are taken through
UCLA Extension. Team members, for example, learn about an important
tool, the Classroom Walk-Through. Trained observers visit classrooms,
and then, through questions, observations and dialogue, provide
teachers with feedback to help them understand how their classroom
practice affects student learning.
In another initiative, the Critical Friends Groups, the team meets
two hours each month to set student learning goals, help each other
improve teaching practices, examine student work together and identify
issues in the school culture that affect student achievement.
“The culture at many schools dictates that when good things
happen in the classroom, it stays there,” Chernow said. “There’s
little sharing, little collaboration among teachers. In our program,
teachers share what they learn.”
Education and Public Policy Professor Wellford “Buzz”
Wilms has been an observer at Baldwin Park High School since 2003
when principal Julie Infante brought in SMP.
“I went into this as quite a skeptic,” Wilms said.
“So many reforms fail to touch the teaching process. Instead,
they address everything around it.” Baldwin teachers, he found,
were initially mistrustful when they were brought into the decision-making
process.
But eventually, the 17-member leadership team began to gel. “They
formed a very definable, cohesive team, and they were able to articulate
what strengths and challenges the school had,” the professor
said. “Once they could articulate what the priorities were,
they could then delve into the teaching itself.”
In 2003, Baldwin students increased their Academic Performance
Index scores by a whopping 110 points; the following year, 2004,
they gained 26 more points.
“It’s been a turnaround for the climate of the school,”
Infante said. “It’s given us some structure to follow
to create positive changes, and it’s energized the teachers.
They always come back from UCLA’s SMP training all excited.
The first thing they ask is, ‘When can we start this?’”
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