UF Professor Reports Steps To Help Schools Make The Grade

February 7, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Using steps she says are applicable to any school, a University of Florida education professor has worked with teachers to help an urban elementary school deemed failing under state standards raise its test scores and make the A list.

Elizabeth Bondy, in her sixth year as a UF professor-in-residence at Alachua County’s Duval Elementary School, said more instruction tailored to students’ specific needs was the secret to the school’s success.

Florida will again grade its schools based on scores from this month’s Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests, or FCAT. The writing section of the FCAT will be administered to fourth-, eighth- and 10th-grades on Feb. 8-9. Students in third- through 10th-grades will be tested in reading, math and science from Feb. 28 to March 11.

“Duval is very similar to any other school in a low-income area, with 94 percent of the students on free or fee-reduced lunch,” said Bondy, who has been part of the collaborative problem-solving team at the school. “Most of these children’s families are either at or below the poverty level.”

Almost half of the students move in or out during the year, and high levels of mobility are common in other failing or low-scoring schools, she said. “There are many other schools in the country that would say, ‘That’s just like my school.’”

After Florida started grading schools in 1999, based on FCAT scores and progress in the classroom, Duval received annual scores of a D and two Cs.

“Then, in spring 2002, it was a major blow when Duval received an F,” said Bondy.

The school immediately began changing the ways its students were taught. The following year, Duval earned an A, becoming the first school in the state to soar from an F to an A in one year. Duval continued to improve, maintaining its A for the 2004 year.

After the second year of success, Bondy met with teachers and administrators to determine which changes were seen as most influential.

“The most noted change in the school was increased opportunities for instruction tailored to students’ strengths and weaknesses,” Bondy said. “The teachers tutored groups of 10 students in the third- through fifth-grades after school for two hours of uninterrupted instructional time twice a week.”

In addition, a small group of children who had been identified in the lowest quartile – the lowest scoring kids in the school – were tutored for an extra 30 to 35 minutes on the skills they needed most, Bondy said. The schedule was rearranged to give those children the focused teaching they needed about twice each week in addition to the four after-school hours all the students were receiving.

Ongoing analysis of students’ achievement data also helped to drive instruction.

“The teachers were constantly meeting to analyze the achievement of their kids, on homework, writing assignments, any kind of data they collected,” Bondy said.

Teachers also sought to understand what students were expected to do on the standardized tests. At Duval, students weren’t performing well on the reading portions.

“We realized that something wasn’t working well, so we needed to look closely at the test and understand what the students were being asked to do,” Bondy said.

For Duval, change came after its reading program was restructured to help children develop some skills that were not directly addressed in the program.

“We realized, after analyzing the kids’ performance, that some of the kids were just writing what they thought answers on the tests should be, but not paying attention to the text,” Bondy said. “So they added a strategy called Prove It!, where it wasn’t enough to answer the questions, but you had to go back to the text and prove how you got the answer.”

Bondy said a change in the teachers’ disposition also resulted in the improvement.

“The teachers at Duval say, ‘No Child Left Behind is requiring what of me? OK, let’s go to it,’” Bondy said. “It’s a moving-on, no-excuses attitude that is responsible for many of our changes.”

Bondy stressed that the changes made at Duval are realistic for any failing school.

Her research was accepted for publication by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s journal, Educational Leadership, as well as in the Association for Childhood Education International’s journal, Childhood Education, and is applicable in helping schools advance in accordance with the No Child Left Behind policy.

“There is a growing interest in urban schools,” Bondy said. “It does matter that kids are living in poverty, but it isn’t only the urban schools where you have those high poverty levels – they can be found in any setting.”

Pedro Bermudez is a facilitator with the National School Reform Faculty, a professional development program that focuses on developing collegial relationships and rethinking leadership in restructuring schools, and an administrator with the Miami-Dade County School Board. He confirmed the national application of Bondy’s research and its accordance with the No Child Left Behind act.

“If we truly mean to provide every student in the country with the highest possible education quality, we have a huge challenge,” Bermudez said. “It isn’t done with more testing but with the teachers and administrators learning how to best reach their students through redesigning schools. That was what Dr. Bondy started at Duval, and similar changes can occur in any learning community.”