Class Acts: No excuses
The Sixth Street Prep School in Victorville faced a challenge when its students’ math scores began to plummet at the turn of the millennium. One reason, the principal and staff realized, was that many of the students previously drawn to the parent choice charter school were leaving for new schools in Victor Elementary School District that focused on the performing arts, music, sports, exploration and other specialties parents found attractive.
Most of its students now live near the school in downtown Victorville, a town about 80 miles north of Los Angeles. Half of the students, most of whom are Hispanic, are English language learners, and at least 90 percent qualify for free and reduced-price school meals.
Principal Linda Mikels saw no reason for the demographic shift to lower expectations for their students. “We do not make excuses,” Mikels is fond of saying. Neither poverty, ethnicity, language barriers nor parent education are reasons for students to fail, she insists.
Many schools have pledged similarly, but Sixth Street Prep is one of the rare ones to make good on its promise: Despite all obstacles, 92 percent of its students in grades 3–6 scored proficient or advanced on state standards tests in 2008. The school’s Academic Performance Index has grown steadily, to 890, and they have made their federal goals for adequate yearly progress every year.
What’s their secret?
Basically, it comes down to giving all students plenty of opportunities to practice and think about what they’re learning, Mikels explains.
In Sixth Street’s program, dubbed “10-a-Day,” teachers present the class with 10 multiple-choice math problems. One at a time, students prove or disprove each answer on their own dry-erase white boards. Then, using handheld devices, students select the answer they believe to be correct. In moments, the tally for each answer appears on screen, allowing the teacher to see how well the class understands the concept.
The innovative program received a Golden Bell award from CSBA in December.
Having students disprove each wrong answer is a valuable test-taking strategy, Mikels says. Many multiple choice tests include answers derived through common mistakes, such as errors in subtraction or regrouping. Students who have made one of those mistakes may select an incorrect answer if they see it among the choices, so Mikels says students are helped to avoid that trap when they learn to identify common errors.
“We’re teaching them much higher-level thinking,” she says. “They are analyzing and evaluating and doing the highest level of thinking processes, which is only going to reinforce their learning.”
One goal of 10-a-Day is to give students continual practice with concepts that will be on the standards tests in the spring. Likewise, teachers “preview” concepts that have not yet been formally introduced by asking their students to reason and work through the problems together. By the time that topic is taught, there are a lot of light bulbs going on,” Mikels observes.
“This is not just a pedantic march through a test book. Kids are continuing to cycle every day, every week, every month, all the skills they’ve learned.”
Sixth Street Prep’s “no excuses” approach draws on the philosophy that, given enough time and practice, all students can master the standards. Mikels likens it to the way all children—absent disability—eventually learn to speak and walk, although they may not do so at the same age.
In line with their “no excuses” mind-set, teachers take full responsibility for what their students learn, so they don’t assign homework. Sending a child home to practice a skill they don’t fully understand could do more harm than good, Mikels explains, especially if their parents don’t speak English or know the subject very well. The inevitable discipline and detentions assigned to punish students for not completing their homework are simply counterproductive, she explains: “We changed the accountability pendulum to educators. We take full accountability for all students meeting and achieving the standards.”
The quest to help all students reach proficiency is a sea change in educational accountability. In the past, teachers typically graded on a bell curve, which allowed some students to fail and a few to score at the top of the class, with most falling somewhere in between. “[Teachers] usually felt validated if they plotted their student test scores and most of them fell within the bell,” Mikels explains, but that’s not OK any more. “Children were continually being left behind by the old bell curve system, which was the whole point of No Child Left Behind.”
—Kristi Garrett