by Leisa Gallagher

The Reaching and Teaching Struggling Learners (RTSL) initiative, a Michigan Department of Education, Office of Special Education (MDE, OSE) Mandated Activities Project, strives to ensure positive outcomes for struggling learners by exploring effective secondary school practices and their impact on ALL students.

The RTSL initiative formed its first cohort of 15 secondary schools in the 2007-2008 school year. Each school has a team consisting of principals, parents, counselors, general educators, special educators, school improvement leaders, and technical educators. Each team in the cohort selects 15-20 students who may be at risk for academic failure and dropout.

Each team studies their own group of struggling learners and conducts a collaborative data inquiry to explore whether their building’s system meets the needs of these students. The RTSL initiative provides support for the cohort over a three-year period to strengthen the cohort’s collaboration among colleagues, to increase trust between them and their struggling learners, and to foster a culture of high expectation for all students at the school. The RTSL initiative facilitates a learning community for the cohort. The teams share data, observations, and ideas with each other and their staff as each team works to create positive outcomes for students by addressing school improvement practices.

Secondary redesign research often focuses on the three “Rs”—Relationships, Rigor, and Relevance. A point of emphasis for this initiative is improving staff-student relationships to increase the likelihood of student success. Without prioritizing relationships, the relevance and rigor of the curriculum is less likely to have a positive impact on student achievement.

This FOCUS on Results article shares school success stories about how the Reaching and Teaching Struggling Learners (RTSL) initiative helps schools to reduce the risk for student academic failure and dropout. The RTSL initiative is part of a coordinated, integrated system—known as Michigan’s Integrated Improvement Initiatives (MI3)—that promotes increased system efficiencies and effectiveness as well as improved student performance.

The RTSL initiative’s structure is based on the following concepts:

Shared Leadership—School improvement is a function of a cohesive team rather than a byproduct of a charismatic leader. Shared leadership must be part of the school culture.

Teams Are Coached—Facilitators from each school attend their own professional development days and support the school teams during the teams’ professional development days.

Teams Align Their Practice With the Michigan School Improvement Framework—The team follows school improvement strands: school-community partnerships, quality data systems, shared leadership, professional learning, and teaching for learning.

Teams Make Data-Based Decisions Aligned With Dropout Prevention Practices—Effective dropout prevention practices include: tiered levels of secondary literacy interventions; high impact instructional practice; math support across course content areas; student-centered, strength-based approaches; successful transitions across middle and high school grade levels with a particular emphasis placed on success from 8th to 9th grade; and social and emotional skill promotion.

Since February 2008, 15 building teams involved in the RTSL initiative have strengthened the teaming and teaching practices needed to reduce student risk for academic failure and dropout. Almost 100 middle and high school educators have worked to study the early warning signs of dropout and to adopt the interventions needed for struggling students. These schools are working through a research-to-practice cycle, which includes studying how to build a system that achieves success for each and every student. These secondary buildings are focusing on how to achieve successful transitions from 8th to 9th grade to ensure that their current or future freshmen stay on track for graduation and postsecondary success.

The schools in the initiative have three years to become more socially cohesive, student centered, and effective with their struggling learners, which includes students with disabilities. Their efforts mirror the challenge identified by researchers studying how 9th graders become “on or off track.” Johns Hopkins researcher, Ruth Curran Neild, has identified a variety of factors that contribute to the success or failure of a freshman in high school. Her work, highlighting the significance of this entry-level grade, addresses the negative and positive influences of family, friends, and teachers. She notes that freshmen with a history of academic failure are particularly vulnerable to falling off track when they enter high school. The risk is even greater when students, due to this lack of proficiency, also reflect poor study skills and inconsistent access to helpful adults. Everyone is impacted by an infrastructure which lacks the social networks and supports needed for students to catch up.

Perhaps the most relevant aspect of Curran Neild’s study is the effect that the buildings’ structures have on 9th graders. The research attributes the organization of schools as a contributing risk factor. Schools that are bureaucratically, rather than communally, organized are likely to increase the dropout rate. These schools may not have the capacity to promote positive student engagement nor build the time outside of class needed to support student progress. Curran Neild reiterates the small schools research by noting that schools with student populations greater than 1,000 are more likely to de-emphasize teacher/student engagement. In these larger buildings, teacher allegiance may be organized along departmental, rather than schoolwide, student-centered goals. In addition, rather than matching struggling students with the most experienced teachers, 9th graders may be paired with less qualified or less experienced teachers.

The RTSL teams are working to empower their buildings to address these structural issues. All the teams are finding time to help students catch up. The teams are investigating their students’ reading and math needs. Simultaneously, these teams are studying—through case scenarios—whether their students have the personal and social skills required to transition into and become successful in high school.

DeWitt Jr. High School, Greenville Middle School, Jefferson Middle School, and Morrice Jr. High School are looking at the system improvements needed as students begin 6th grade. The following success story describes Greenville’s effort to adopt a universal tier of literacy intervention.

Greenville Middle School: Grade-Level Work Shifts to Schoolwide Literacy

Greenville Middle School staff selected literacy as their target after analyzing the entire student population’s reading scores. Before participation in the RTSL initiative, staff had interventions in English language arts, by grade, but they did not have a schoolwide literacy approach. Within a semester of joining the initiative, the staff institutionalized a reading program in which every student, every day, in every class, reads for 30 minutes. One member of the team reported, “Our students are talking like readers, as if they were in Oprah’s book club.”

Greenville’s adoption of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program required a shift from a departmental/grade level strategy to a schoolwide literacy effort. In addition to the satisfaction of hearing students talk about their books, staff reported additional benefits:

• An increase in literacy attainment.
• An increase in parent involvement (parents held fund raisers to support the new literacy initiative).
• An increase in the use of the library.

The media specialist noted that more library materials were checked out in one month than had been borrowed in the entire last year. Student results for Greenville Middle School will be available at the end of next school year (in 2010).

As all of these middle schools drive their individual progress, they join their high school partners to explore the quality of their data-based decision making.

Building a Culture of Quality Data

In order to adopt a target of literacy, math, and behavior, all the RTSL teams collected and analyzed more comprehensive data, which better reflected the needs of the whole child (see Figure 1). Each team collected student data in four areas: personal/social skill attainment, student engagement, core academics, and stretch learning. The International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE) developed, and communicated through their Model Schools Summits, these four learning criteria. These domains are critical to developing an adequate needs assessment for struggling learners. This approach to data analysis is consistent with the literature in Breaking Ranks and dropout prevention research. The ICLE has contributed much to secondary redesign by articulating the need to use the learning criteria in order for educators to inquire about how student engagement and academic performance interact.

Each team selected 15-20 students about whom the staff felt ill-equipped to reach and/or teach. Once selected, staff obtained the more comprehensive data sets and began assembling a plan to improve their system. The collaborative data review surfaced patterns about how student behaviors were impacting course failures. Tardies, missing homework, and zeroes were not necessarily associated with deficits in student abilities. Conversely, As and Bs in core courses did not translate into strong scores on standardized tests. The team dialogue which began with the four learning criteria led to more substantive questions about grading practices and the need for study skills. As a result, many of the high schools in the initiative have created time in the school day to address the social and personal skills needed.

As all schools addressed the needs of the whole child, many of the high schools realized they didn’t have the structures in place to meet the needs of their struggling learners, especially when their students’ proficiency levels were two or more grade levels behind.

Atherton High School, Fruitport High School, Kenowa Hills High School, Kent Transition Center, Lincoln Park High School, Morrice Sr. High School, Northwest High School, Novi High School, Suttons Bay High School, Thurston High School, Waterford Mott High School, and Wavecrest Career Academy are all finding time for these additional supports. The  story below describes how Fruitport High School approached the challenge of building time in the school day.