UCLA consultants turn struggling K-12 public schools around

By Sean Brenner

Among California principals and teachers, word is spreading about a group of UCLA-based education consultants with a remarkable track record for transforming underperforming schools.

The School Management Program (SMP) has consulted with more than 800 public schools during its 15-year history, enhancing learning opportunities for tens of thousands of students along the way. "We feel like they're the wise elders of education in Los Angeles," said Chris Ferris, principal of Our Community Charter School in North Hills, which hired SMP to help get the school off the ground when it opened in 2005.

Civic leaders are taking notice, too. SMP's latest accolade came by way of a proclamation from the Los Angeles City Council, which on Jan. 25 commended the program for improving "student achievement by fostering well-managed schools where professional development enhances teacher effectiveness, builds community, and results in personal transformation."

A center of the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, SMP provides K-12 teachers and administrators with techniques for improving their schools. It works mainly with California schools, although a recently opened satellite office serves schools in New England and New York.

Among SMP's primary strategies are showing teachers how to conduct more productive "walk-throughs" of other classrooms in their schools and coaching them on how to share best practices with one another.

Better communication among teachers might not sound like the cure-all for underperforming schools. But Wellford W. "Buzz" Wilms, a professor in GSE&IS who does not work with SMP, has seen the results first-hand. Wilms observed the transformation at Baldwin Park High School, which began working with SMP in 2004, when low performance on the California Academic Performance Index (API) put the school in danger of being taken over by the state's Department of Education.

Teacher meetings, he said, were just the spark for a wide range of improvements. "From there, the trust started to build. Then, as teachers learned to do classroom walk-throughs, they started to see that one improvement connected to others. If they had engaging lessons, the discipline problems started to go away. They brought students into a mutual evaluation of where things broke down and how to fix it."

Under a mandate from the state, the school needed to improve its API score by 16 points. In the first year of SMP's contract, Baldwin Park's score rose by 110 points; in the second year by 25 points. The two-year gain of 135 points outpaced every other school in California.

"[Teachers] had concrete action plans and concrete goals," said Julie Infante, who was the school's principal during the SMP contract and now is a principal-at-large for the Baldwin Park Unified School District. "And we could tell they were attaining those goals, too — we didn't have to wait until August to see the test scores."

In addition, Infante said, discipline problems diminished and morale among students and teachers improved. Wilms said the school even started to look better: "The campus was cleaner. You could see it."

One of the major reasons for SMP's success is its consultants. "All of our faculty are principals, teachers or school board members," said Dan Chernow, the program's executive director. "They're school-based practitioners, many of whom take a leave of absence to work with us full-time, so there's ... not a major learning curve."

According to Ferris, teachers and administrators at his school credit UCLA for making such an impact. "UCLA is doing a tremendous service to the Los Angeles community by doing this," she said. "In a very deep way, they're creating true reform and increasing student learning. They're going to wherever the need is and helping schools get better. That's the only way education reform really happens."