Formula for success: New superintendent has plan to turn district around - Marin IJ - Oct. 3, 2006 - By Reporter Don Speich

Formula for success: New superintendent has plan to turn district around
Don Speich
10/03/2006 09:38:23 PM PDT

Marin City's Martin Luther King Jr. Academy middle school has a fresh coat of paint, and in the small quad there are new green tables with awnings for students and staff. There is new grass and a new banner draped on the outside of one building that congratulates students for recent scores on the STAR test.

Inside the school - where half the graduates have failed to make it through high school in recent years - much is new as well. There are new instructors skilled in teaching the basic skills crucial to academic success, a new principal with a track record of success and a new, more rigorous curriculum.

Responsible for all these changes in the 283-student, three-school Sausalito Marin City School District is new Superintendent Debra Bradley, who by all accounts is tough, single-minded and determined to succeed.

"She rocks," said Trustee Whitney Hoyt, a former principal of Mill Valley Middle School. "She focuses resources and teaching on back-to-basics programs. She is giving children strategies of how to learn."

Hired in April, Bradley is a longtime educator who specializes in raising test scores through improvements in curriculum and teaching methods. She is considered by the board as the key player in its plan to take hold of the schools and turn around the education programs. She replaces Rose Marie Roberson, who was ousted by the trustees.

Bradley, who resides in San Francisco, is a former superintendent of both the Lompoc Unified School District in Santa Barbara County and the Fontana Unified School District in San Bernardino County.

She recommended the hiring of Cherisse Baatin, a Contra Costa County school administrator, as the new principal of Bayside Elementary School and Martin Luther King Jr. Academy. She filled a vacancy left when longtime principal Ruby Wilson, a beloved figure in Marin City, retired in June.

The district has continued to improve its test scores, as gauged by the state's Academic Performance Index. The district's API is not where officials want it to be but, as they are eager to say, they're on the move.

The district's motto is "Vision 900," which means the district will achieve an API of 900. California's goal for public schools is an API score of 800 or higher, which is based on a scale of 200 to 1000. The state's best schools, including many in Marin, consistently score in the 900-plus range.

Bradley noted the district's API was 739 for 2006, up 47 points from 2005.

School officials maintain everything is moving upward, turning the corner after more than 40 years of failure.

Everything being tried - new teachers, administrators, curriculum, facilities - is aimed at one thing: improving test scores. Whether the changes will push scores higher on a sustainable upward climb will not be known for several years.

Baatin says moving students toward success, toward "Vision 900," is a challenge.

"I know that a lot of the children are coming from a successful elementary (school) experience," she said. Therefore, she added, "I think one of the surprises is how deep (MLK) students believe they are not capable."

Because of this, she said, "there is a resistance to attempting more challenging work. We are working to build confidence."

Some of the problem, she said, stems simply from the difficulties confronted when entering adolescence, that "it's not cool to be smart, to stand out in a crowd." She says it is important to tell students not to be afraid of success. "I tell them school is serious business, and I tell them their job is to come and to do well."

Bradley talks of outlines for success she has implemented with a thin smile that suggests they are almost too obvious to mention.

"It's a three-legged stool," she said of her strategy for success. "The three Rs: respect, responsibility, results."

Respect, she said, means "treating one another with dignity and respect, respecting the time in the classroom, respecting our children, respecting the rules."

Responsibility, she said, is "teaching all students at grade level every day with appropriate intervention É so (a student) can be successful. Our responsibility is to maximize instruction time, teaching from bell to bell even if the bell doesn't ring.

"Responsibility to work with parents and our community to further engage them in the instructional process."

Increasing parental participation has been an uphill struggle over the years and has, according to experts, played into the district's struggle to improve education. The involvement of parents in the classroom and after school at home with such things as homework is considered key to a student's academic growth and success.

Bradley said attendance and interest at a couple of school events for parents this year was good, thanks to a concerted effort to make sure parents, through e-mails and phone calls, are kept informed of school events.

As to results, the final leg of the stool, Bradley said, "We are a standards-driven district, and we are a data-driven district."

Every day, she said, it is necessary to make sure students are being taught at the appropriate grade level - meaning that a seventh-grade student is doing seventh-grade-level work - "and we've got to do assessments along the way to be able to (measure) student performance, and that will allow us to refine our lessons to fill in learning gaps.

"We had three days of in-service training (for teachers) before the beginning of the school year, designing lessons to make sure students understand the material being taught by teachers."

That was new this year, as was a Bradley policy that all students in kindergarten will read at the third-grade level when they are in the third grade. "That was never assessed before," she said.

Additionally, she said, students who transfer into the district during the year will be given a placement test to determine their academic level. This, she stressed, does not mean students who transfer from the fourth grade at other schools will be placed in the third grade if that is the level of their ability, but that special instruction will be given to bring them up to grade level.

She said it is important that the curriculum - which at MLK includes algebra, algebra readiness, language arts and social science - be taught "with fidelity."

To this end, she hired an entirely new group of teachers for MLK this year, possible in part because a number of veterans retired. Hired were a new science teacher and math teacher and technology instructor as well as a new social studies and English teacher.

A former math teacher was reassigned to teach physical education. Previously, each teacher was responsible for P.E. instruction in his or her class. Now, with a full-time instructor, teachers can use the time to help students who are struggling academically.

"I'm in heaven," said Amanda Cohen, a veteran educator from the South San Francisco School District and the new seventh-grade mathematics and seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher.

"The support is phenomenal. If you want something, you get it. I can't wait for the payoff."