Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report - S8

LESSON LEARNED

When it comes to
turning around lowperforming schools,
“outreach to the
community is vital.
[Community members]
give you that extra
push you need when
you’re ready to
give up.”

SCHOOL
TURNAROUNDS

Mary Ronan
SUPERINTENDENT
Cincinnati Public Schools

BY ALYSON KLEIN

S8 |

>

LEADERS TO LEARN FROM www.edweek.org/go/leaders-report
EDUCATION WEEK • February 6, 2013

T

he first order of business for Mary Ronan as the
acting superintendent of the Cincinnati school
system four years ago was making big changes at more
than a dozen of the city’s lowest-performing elementary
schools. Many of them had been plagued by stagnant
student achievement for more than a quarter-century.
Four years later, none of the 16 schools that Ronan
and her team targeted for special interventions is stuck
in “academic emergency”—the lowest rung of the Ohio
accountability system, and the label most of them
shared before the turnaround. A dozen of those schools
have reached the level of “continuous improvement”—
the midlevel rating—and others have gone on to be
rated “effective” or even “excellent.”
“The first year [of the effort] was really hard,” Ronan
recalls. “We were asking our teachers to do a lot of extra
work; … we got a lot of pushback. There were folks
who said we should call it off.” But at the end of that
year, some half-dozen of the 16 targeted schools made
adequate yearly progress, or ayp, under the federal
No Child Left Behind Act, something they had never
achieved before.
“That was really the turning point,” Ronan says now.
That was when the other schools—and the rest of the

community in this midsize city along the banks of the
Ohio River—realized what was possible, she says.
The schools in what became known as the
“elementary initiative” in Cincinnati first had to
embrace some major instructional shifts. Each was
required to offer 90-minute blocks each of reading and
mathematics—as opposed to the scattershot scheduling
that some had been using. Instead of whole-class
instruction, teachers were shown how to divide their
students up into smaller groups based on their abilities
and needs.
And school officials created “data folders” to keep
track of the academic progress of each student.
Teachers were tasked with reviewing the data with
their students every couple of weeks.
“That gave principals a tool to see how every child
was doing,” Ronan explains. “You’re not just teaching to
the middle anymore.”
The schools’ leaders, likewise, were given an extra
boost of intensive training. Using money provided under
the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,
Ronan sent the principals of the elementary-initiative
schools—along with teacher leaders—to the University
of Virginia’s educational leadership training program.
http://www.edweek.org/go/leaders-report
Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report

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