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Chelsea schools improving at
required rate, says state DOE
By David J. Craig
Chelsea educators last month got a dramatic affirmation that their reforms are paying off: not one Chelsea school was on the list released by the Massachusetts Department of Education of 194 schools that did not adequately improve standardized test scores over the last two years.
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| SED Dean Douglas Sears, chairman of the BU Management Team that oversees the Chelsea public schools, and Chelsea Superintendent of Schools Irene Cornish. Photo by Fred Sway |
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The news also meant that the Chelsea public schools, which have been
run by BU in a unique education reform partnership since 1989, are in
compliance with last year’s federal No Child Left Behind Act. The
sweeping legislation mandates that all American public school students
be proficient in English and math, and it levels sanctions against schools
that don’t improve quickly enough toward that goal. The federal
act enforces a higher standard than simply passing the state-mandated
Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test; it requires
that by 2014 all students in this state post a score of either “proficient”
or “excellent” -- the two highest of four scoring categories
-- on both the English and math sections of the test.
To improve at the required clip, Chelsea’s Berkovitz Elementary,
for example, had to boost the percentage of its students earning a proficient
or excellent score on the MCAS English section from 56.4 percent in 2000
to 62.6 percent in 2002. The school surpassed the goal easily, with 67.2
percent of its students scoring at least proficient in English. Of Chelsea’s
four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school, only
one elementary school didn’t meet the target in English, and where
it missed the mark it had come so close -- within three tenths of a percentage
point -- that it wasn’t placed on the state’s list of underperforming
schools.
“That we don’t have a single underperforming school now is
an amazing accomplishment,” says Chelsea School Superintendent Irene
Cornish. “It’s particularly impressive when you consider that
Chelsea is an urban district where 80 percent of students come from homes
in which English is not the first language and 80 percent of students
are eligible for reduced lunch. But we haven’t used the demographics
of our city as an excuse, and we’ve met the high expectations that
were set for us.”
First things first
Cornish attributes Chelsea’s dramatically improved test scores to
several recent changes in the school system, including the hiring of language
specialists, who hold professional development classes for teachers and
assist them in the classroom, and an emphasis on teaching students how
to answer the sorts of open response writing questions featured on the
MCAS. In addition, the district has provided before- and after-school
remedial programs in English and math, and an MCAS prep course at Chelsea
High School. The changes were precipitated by a close analysis of previous
MCAS results, which not surprisingly showed that the English skills of
Chelsea students needed the most attention.
“Because we have a very large number of students moving in and out
of our district during the school year, we always have students at all
grade levels to whom we’re teaching English before we can teach
them any other subject,” says Thomas Kingston, Chelsea’s assistant
superintendent for curriculum and instruction, who also is an SED professor
of curriculum and teaching and a professor in the CAS writing program.
“Right now, we’re targeting third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade
teachers for a lot of professional development in English and writing
instruction, to make sure everyone is on the same page with our curriculum.”
In the past two years, BU has most directly helped Chelsea improve its
test scores by identifying necessary changes to the curriculum, Kingston
says. “At the beginning of the partnership the school system was
very idiosyncratic, with teachers choosing their own material, and quite
naturally, teaching what they knew best,” he says. “So you
might have had a third-grade teacher teaching the same material that a
second-grade teacher had already taught. But with the help of experts
at BU’s School of Education, we’ve gradually established a
consistent curriculum that now is very closely aligned with the state
standards.”
Cornish says that the success of recent reforms was made possible by initiatives
begun many years ago, in the early stages of BU’s oversight. “We’ve
been laying the foundation for this success for many years,” she
says. “We’ve gotten central office administrators into the
classroom to observe what’s going on, and our principals have been
working consistently to impress upon parents the importance of having
their children in school.”
SED Dean Douglas Sears, who chairs the BU Management Team that oversees
Chelsea’s schools and was Chelsea school superintendent from 1995
to 2000, says that Cornish’s background as an attorney and her knowledge
of education law, combined with two decades of experience as a teacher
and school administrator, have made the district more efficient. “We’ve
seen fewer and fewer problematic cases of suspensions and expulsions in
the years that Irene’s been superintendent, and only one labor grievance
has come before the Management Team in that time,” he says. “Irene
also has terrific common sense about what works in the classroom, she
works hard, and she’s graceful, yet tough as nails.”
Improving communication between Chelsea educators and parents has been
another time-consuming but crucial part of the district’s turnaround
on the MCAS, says Cornish. “We do a lot of parent workshops, and
I maintain an open door so parents know they can call or come in and see
me if they have a concern,” she says. “It’s taken a
long time to build a good rapport with parents, but we’re seeing
more and more parents getting involved in what their children are doing.
And they’re more knowledgeable about what goes on in the schools,
and they’re holding us accountable in ways that they didn’t
in the past.”
Adds Kingston, “Also, BU Chancellor John Silber has taken a direct
interest in the Chelsea project and worked very hard to support it. He
deserves a lot of credit for showing the courage to take on the partnership,
and for his consistent care and goading on behalf of the Chelsea schools.”
Miles to go
While Chelsea’s MCAS scores have improved, Cornish points out, they
still are far below state averages. And she says meeting the target improvements
required by the No Child Left Behind Act will become increasingly difficult
in subsequent two-year assessment cycles. Sears, meanwhile, criticizes
the act for placing an unrealistic burden on individual school districts
to correct problems that he says in some cases result from irresponsible
education policies. He points to Massachusetts’ recently reversed
bilingual education laws as an example of policy that lacked “a
shred of intellectual support,” but survived because of interest
group politics. “Over the last few decades, policy-makers and education
researchers in this country have cooked up one disastrous reform idea
after another,” he says, “and the ones paying for it now are
teachers and kids, especially those in urban districts.”
But Cornish points to several initiatives she hopes will further boost
test scores: Chelsea is phasing out bilingual education completely next
fall in favor of a full immersion approach to teaching English, and the
district is seeking private funding to support remedial math programs
at its middle school and high school. In addition, Chelsea educators are
exploring possibilities for new partnerships with local businesses, with
an eye toward eventually prospering independent of BU.
“This is a much stronger and more durable district now than it was
10 years ago,” says Kingston. “That’s in large part
due to the fact that the partnership with BU is vibrant, but also because
Irene has established a very high level of credibility with Chelsea’s
community support organizations and with the political structure of the
city. Now, our challenge is to maintain our momentum and to remain sophisticated
in how we plan for our schools’ future. It’s a different world
today in education, and we’ve got to run our schools in a more businesslike
manner.”
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13 December 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations