Kayla Gahagan, Journal staff | Posted: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 11:00 pm
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Connie Krueger
isn't sure where to go from here.
The Central High
School literacy support specialist is "on the downhill slope" of
her career, she says, which has included 27 years of teaching in
Texas, Colorado and back to South Dakota.
She's been in the
Rapid City district 20 of those years, serving as the senior
adviser for its curriculum remodeling, receiving accolades from the
Legislature and the South Dakota Council of Teachers of English,
and still, after all these years, loving what she
does.
Which is why,
after a rocky road to get the literacy support specialist
"coaching" program where it is - years of ongoing training,
implementation and finally an available full-time position she took
this last year - it felt like a sucker punch to see the program on
the chopping block during the district's contentious
multi-million-dollar budget cut two weeks ago.
Board members said
it was difficult to cut part of the program, but decided to cut the
high school program in half, with one coach remaining. The middle
school program was left untouched, as was the elementary program,
which runs on a mixture of grants and district money.
The high school
math support specialist program, which has been modeled after the
success of the literacy program, was also cut by one position.
Middle school was also cut in half, with elementary
untouched.
The cuts are
expected to save about $270,000. The people in the positions that
were cut will be reassigned to another position within the
district.
Talking about the
last month brought Krueger to tears. She doesn't know where she
will be next year, or what she'll be doing, whether to give away
her "Romeo and Juliet" books to another teacher or to pack
them.
"The thing I've
worked the hardest on is relationships," Krueger said. "It hurts so
much to think about leaving this."
Sharon Rendon, who
teaches half-time and coaches other teachers half-time at Central,
said she is also frustrated.
Rendon said the
saddest thing about the cuts is that the teachers in the coaching
positions are veteran teachers with seniority and they will be the
ones shuffled around next year. She's lucky, she said, because she
could stay at Central and take an open math position. But there are
no open English teaching positions for Krueger.
Even more
frustrating, Krueger said, is the uncertainty of the program, which
she whole-heartedly believes in.
The program works
on a system of teachers asking to work with one of the support
specialists, who will coach them on ways to improve their
teaching.
"The focus is not
on fixing teachers," Krueger said. "It's on extending
teaching."
She remembers her
first years as a teacher, a time when she made many mistakes but
said there was no system where she confide in someone and get
help.
"I swore that if I
ever got to be an old teacher … I'd share all my warts with the new
teachers, and all the weird and ugly things I've tried," she said,
laughing. "It's a lonely profession. What do you do when it doesn't
work?"
Nicole Swigart, a
literacy support specialist at Stevens and the academies, agreed
and said "each teacher has different needs and we really take the
cue from them of where they want to go."
She said she also
mentors first-year teachers.
"I've really taken
that part of the job seriously," she said. "We hire teachers; we
give them a class, 150 students, a curriculum and say
go."
It's not enough.
She said she knows she's valued in the district, but she also
worried about the cuts to the program.
"How does anyone
in my position serve the 89 teachers at Stevens and 100 at Central
and 30 teachers at the academies, how does one person serve them
all well?" she asked.
Rendon said there
has to be a level of vulnerability and a trust between the teacher
and the coach for the system to work, which is why the possibility
of having one coach try and serve multiple schools "is
crazy."
The district has
been criticized for not making cuts in sports and not offering a
salary freeze for administrators. The district says they gambled
with spending last year by more than $8 million than the year
before, but unfunded state and federal mandates like No Child Left
Behind required it.
The state
Department of Education has countered that the district shouldn't
have added programs it didn't have money for.
Krueger said
support specialists or "coaches" were added for the right reasons,
but without any financial foresight.
"Our district
committed to coaching before it was financially ready," Krueger
said, adding that she understands the board was in a tough
position. "I know the district had to make cuts, but this is where
we're going to affect student achievement."
If the program was
a pilot, they should have been warned that it was something that
might not have financial support in the future, she
added.
"I know people are
probably saying, 'She has a paycheck, why be so upset?'" Krueger
said. But she, like many of the support specialists, gave up
teaching positions that they can't go back to now.
Krueger said she,
and others have fought for this program and it's showing results.
She's not ready to be done.
"I finally have
made it," she said, fighting tears again. "I know where this
(program) could go."
Rapid City
School Board not alone in NCLB complaints
The recent
sentiments of the Rapid City School Board have been echoing around
the nation since the implementation of No Child Left Behind began
more than seven years ago, said an educational researcher with the
Center for Educational Freedom.
The board staged a
press conference during the State Board of Education meeting last
week to protest unfunded state and federal mandates, and it's the
age-old argument of NCLB proficiency demands without any money to
go with it, said Cato Institute researcher Neal
McCluskey.
"The problem with
that argument," McCluskey said, "is that (districts) don't really
ever specify what it is they really need to get kids to proficiency
and why they can't afford it."
Nationwide, he
said, per pupil expenditures for students since the 1960s has
almost tripled, compared to foreign countries who score much higher
on tests and receive much less funding.
"What that really
screams is that the problem is not needing more money to get kids
to proficiency; money has gone up and performance hasn't," he said.
"It's very hard to believe that schools can't bring kids to
proficiency simply because they can't afford it," he
said.
But the Rapid City
School District has said that's exactly the problem. The district
received less this year than it did the year before from the state
Legislature, but spent $8 million more in its operating budget than
it did the year before. That, coupled with a drop in revenues and a
tightening economy, forced board members to cut about $2.7 million
from its budget for next year.
If things don't
change, said board member Sheryl Kirkeby, the schools will suffer
from even more cuts next year.
State Department
of Education Rick Melmer said the district added valuable programs
but shouldn't have if it didn't know it would have the money to pay
for it.
But board member
Eric Abrahamson said that's not the whole truth, adding that the
state can say it doesn't specify where the money needs to be spent,
yet it is the authority that grades what each district does with
the money.
"They're going to
approve the plan and are in control of our continued ability to get
accreditation," he said. "If you want to continue to be accredited,
you have to submit an improvement plan for each school; they can't
say they're not telling us not to spend money."
McCluskey said
it's a great example of what NCLB stands for - "perverse
incentives."
"It says 'state
and districts, we will punish you if you don't get proficient on
tests you write and standards you impose,'" he said.
How the Rapid City
district is changing to keep up with NCLB, is the same thing other
districts are doing across the country, Abrahamson
said.
He pointed to a
recent audit by the state that gave the district high marks for its
new programs.
"They said we
should keep what we're doing and do even more," he
said.
Since NCLB, the
district has increased its spending for staff development
substantially, Abrahamson added, because most research says school
improvement starts with investing in teachers.
The district also
started a building leadership team program, expanded its reading
literacy, math, reading and recovery programs, and added support
specialists or coaches to support teachers.
Nicole Swigart, a
literacy coach at Stevens High School and the academies in the
district, said she has noticed major changes in the way the
district operates since she was hired in 1991.
"I think every
single teacher feels the pressure of NCLB," she said. "We know
children's learning is a high stakes process and facing those tests
every spring and meeting those requirements definitely is something
that has changed."
Critics of the law
have complained that testing a certain grade of students and then
comparing it against what the next year of students do is not a
true reflection of test scores.
"That's one of the
most ridiculous things," McCluskey said, adding that it has
resulted in states finding ways to dodge the requirements by making
tests easier, or redefining what "proficient" means.
"It's so they can
meet the letter of the law without the hard work of meeting the
intent," he said. "Schools need to do better, but too many have
said, 'we'll just make ourselves look better.'"
But Melmer said
that's not new since the advent of NCLB.
"That was
happening before," he said.
McCluskey said he
would do away with NCLB entirely if he could because it gives
federal government control of education and tests all states as if
they were not a diverse group of people.
Swigart
agreed.
"South Dakota is
definitely not in the same boat as other students in the nation,"
she said.
Melmer said
despite the problems with the law, it's still a lot more good than
bad, particularly when it comes to shining the light of education
in the U.S.
"People can see
what schools are doing," he said. "It's a lot more transparent
today."
The system is not
perfect, he said.
"It's a lot more
friend that foe, and in the process, students are reading better
and getting better," he said.
Swigart said it
all goes back to how she can get the kids to where they need to be
to succeed.
"I think the good
in this is that teachers want students to learn and be the best
they can be," she said. "We have to have programs in place to do
that, or it's only going to get tougher in the
future."
Is Rapid
City 'backloading' NCLB test scores?
South Dakota
Annual measurable objectives for each grade span and subject
area:
K-8
9-12
School Year
Reading Math Reading Math
2002-2003
65% 45% 50% 60%
2003-2004
65% 45% 50% 60%
2004-2005
78% 54% 66% 67%
2005-2006
78% 65% 66% 54%
2006-2007
82% 65% 72% 54%
2007-2008
82% 72% 72% 63%
2008-2009
82% 72% 72% 63%
2009-2010
86% 72% 77% 63%
2010-2011
90% 79% 83% 72%
2011-2012
94% 86% 89% 81%
2012-2013
96% 93% 94% 90%
2013-2014 100%
100% 100% 100%
South Dakota is
one of 23 states "backloading" its plans for raising students'
proficiency to 100 percent by 2014 under No Child Left Behind
requirements, according to the Center on Education Policy
(CEP).
Each state is
required to lay out a schedule of "annual measurable objectives"
under NCLB and the report says that almost half of the states have
called for smaller achievement gains in earlier years and much
steeper growth in later years.
The report, "Many
States Have Taken a 'Backloaded' Approach to No Child Left Behind
Goal of All Students Scoring 'Proficient,'" says that a backloaded
approach in accountability is likely to make it more difficult for
schools and districts to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under
the NCLB accountability system and to lead to an increase in the
number of schools identified for NCLB improvement.
It's one of the
ways, said Neal McCluskey of the Center for Educational Freedom
through the Cato Institute, that districts try and dodge
accountability of NCLB.
"It's a gamble,"
he said, with districts saying they will make a whole lot of
progress in the very end in hopes that the law no longer is in
existence by 2014.
It could happen,
he said; there's lots of historical evidence of other educational
standard programs disappearing, the 1994 Improving America's School
Act being one of them. "The states just ignored it, and they got
away with it," he said.
But South Dakota
Education Secretary Rick Melmer says that just because some states
didn't take average incremental leaps toward proficiency each year,
doesn't mean they are purposely backloading.
No changes were
made to the objectives for any of the grade levels for reading and
math from 2002 to 2004, he said, because they needed time to
prepare for the new requirements, which were passed in
2001.
"We wanted to get
tests established," he said, and make sure districts were
accurately implementing the requirements.
Most of the
increments for improvement for the state are steady, he pointed
out, but South Dakota might have made the list because objectives
for students in grades 9-12 stayed at 63 percent from 2007 to 2010,
but jumped 10 percent in the last year from 90 percent to 100
percent.
Liz Venenga, the
district's elementary literacy coordinator, said she was surprised
to hear South Dakota made it onto the backloading
list.
"I would say that
we would be the opposite," she said, pointing out that the state
set the goal of 82 percent proficiency for elementary reading by
this year and Rapid City was at 86 percent this last year. "We're
definitely not waiting until the end."
