Birmingham Education Foundation summit outlines challenges and ...

"It was understandable to want to have all positive information, but it wasn't real," Froning said.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- For Birmingham City Schools to improve, the system will have to confront difficult and often unpleasant truths, Michael Froning, director of the Birmingham Educational Foundation, said Thursday night at the organization's educational summit.

School leaders have not always wanted to take that hard look in the mirror, he said. In recent years, school board members have said openly in meetings that they did not want to have negative information about the schools.

"It was understandable to want to have all positive information, but it wasn't real," Froning said. "We need to be real if we are going to make real change."

The first school system"report card" the Birmingham Education Foundation released Thursday is the product of the two-year-old organization's efforts to qualify and quantify the challenges and opportunities of the Birmingham City Schools system. In the last year, two graduate students from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education have distilled more than 14,000 complaints and suggestions that more than 2,000 residents and parents gave at 125 community meetings and focus groups.

Many of the findings are daunting.

In Birmingham, the number of students living at or near the poverty level is nearly twice the national average and well above the state average. What's more, as students have left the school system, the percentage of students living at or below poverty level has climbed.

In Birmingham, the number of students who will move from one school to another in a given year is 25.3 percent, meaning teachers and principals have trouble establishing relationships with many students.

In Birmingham, test scores have fallen and student achievement has faltered. The average ACT score among students is 18. UAB requires a score of 21 from its applicants to enroll, Froning said. The school system has a high school graduation rate of 55 percent.

But not all the findings were disheartening.

Of about 1,500 teachers in the system, 121 have achieved the highest level of certification from the National Board of Teaching Standards. Sixty one percent hold master's degrees and 93 percent are "highly qualified" under No Child Left Behind.

To improve educational performance, the Birmingham Education Foundation has worked with Birmingham City Schools to create four "strands" of goals for improvement.

First, the foundation will work with the city schools to improve parental involvement. That mandate came from parents, Froning said.

"The things that parents told us about what they wanted for their children and their children's schools were the same as you'd hear in Berkley, Calif, New York City, or Mountain Brook, Ala.," Froning said. "Parents all over the world want the same things for their kids."

Second, parents demanded better high schools. Working with Superintendent Craig Witherspoon, the foundation interpreted that to mean more career and college preparation in the system's high schools.

Third, parents wanted better principals in the system. It is not that principals are bad, Froning said. Rather, school administrators are often so overwhelmed with their work that they are too busy for professional development. A goal of the system will now be to give those administrators the time and support they need to improve.

Fourth, parents wanted more advanced learning opportunities for their children, like students in other systems have available to them.

"We have interpreted that to mean that we have to work early with kids to get them ready for the gold standard of learning in this country and that is the AP [Advanced Placement] test," Froning said. "You can't pass the AP tests unless you've learned something."

Further, AP tests are identical and simultaneous among schools across the country, and the scores give schools an apples-to-apples comparison for measuring achievement.

For those four strands, the foundation and the superintendent have set corresponding goals for the system. Those goals include:

• increasing parental involvement by 15 percent annually and achieving an 80 percent parental satisfaction rate;
• making 100 percent of students college or career-ready by 2016;
• implementing the Professional Learning Communities model in all schools by this year;
• raising the AP test passing rate to the national average by 2015;
• raising the average senior ACT score to 20 by 2016.

A key component to turning Birmingham schools around is to expand the career academies already established by Witherspoon, Froning said. According to Froning, one of the greatest challenges in education is showing students how the things they learn in the classroom will serve them in life after graduation.

"One of the brilliant concepts of career academies is that it ties a kid's present to their future," he said. "They are not only studying in school, but they are practicing for their life."

In the past, career-centered education has skewed toward yesterday's job market. The foundation and the school system are working with the Birmingham Business Alliance to identify future-focused career paths, he said.

And to help engage the community, the foundation has created a website, www.weareed.org, where parents, teachers and administrators can help shape the future of Birmingham schools.

"Too often our national political conversation is more about blaming poor people for being poor than helping poor people make the next step," Froning said. "We have a full range of folks in Birmingham, but our perception as a nation and as a state is that in Birmingham parents and the community don't really care about their schools. We know that's not true."

In his state-of-education address following Froning's presentation, Witherspoon said that when he first came to Birmingham, the then-president of the foundation worried that the foundation's work wouldn't match Witherspoon's direction for the school system. Witherspoon said that the opposite was true.

"What was described for you are things that we are already doing, that have already started to take form and take place," Witherspoon said.

For years, Birmingham schools have lost students by the hundreds, Witherspoon said. Going into the current school year the system had about 24,500 students, about 130 students fewer than last year.

"What we are doing is, not only going to help stabilize the student population of the school system, but will grow it," Witherspoon said.

In the last three years, the system has started 10 new pre-kindergarten classrooms in the system. Those are students who will stay in the system, Witherspoon said.

While Birmingham schools have a 55 percent graduation rate, that does not mean that the system has a 45 percent drop-out rate. Some are dropping out, but others are transferring to other schools. According to Witherspoon, the system must better track those students to make sure their needs are met.

According to Witherspoon, programs such as No Child Left Behind have focused on students at the low-end of the performance curve, sometimes to the detriment to students at the top end. Moving forward, the system will use AP scores to better measure how students at the top end are performing and the system will focus on growing the number of high-achievers. Part of that effort will be to expand the career academies, which have a graduation rate of 97 percent, he said.

In addition to the career academies, the system is working to create an International Baccalaureate program at Ramsey High School. The system has talked about about starting an IB program for years, Witherspoon said, but so far it has had little to show for it.

"Somebody said they had graduated from Birmingham City Schools about 18 years ago and they were talking about IB then," Witherspoon said. "Hopefully we won't have to wait another 18 years to bring that to fruition."

Meanwhile, the system's career academies will increase the opportunities throughout the system. Career and technical education should not lock students into a career path, Witherspoon said.

"Our goal is to merge the technical education piece with the academic," he said. "We don't want our students to think that there is an either-or. You can do both and the student can decide in the future what is best for them."?

Source: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/11/birmingham_education_foundatio_3.html

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