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August 2, 2004 - Issue 4.30  

SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE

"New" Accountability is Old Hat in Beaufort SC

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Hold their feet to the fire! This summarizes the new attitude prevailing in Washington, DC where Democrats and Republicans are spinning similar packages that tie funding and rewards to academic results, not programs.

Result driven funding is a novel and exciting idea in Washington. The traditional federal role has been one of specific funding for program mandates. If a district sought federal money it had to apply for the money and operate the program as Washington saw fit. The new administration is taking a performance based approach that gives states and school districts the freedom to innovate, and to deploy federal funding as they judge best, all the while insisting on real accountability for results, with tangible consequences for success and failure. [1]

Federalism – state power and control (oversimplified) – drives the new education initiatives that are quite similar. The Bush plan promotes four objectives: school accountability through state standards and testing, flexible federal funding, providing rewards for successful programs, and providing parents with options when schools cannot improve, and the choice includes private schools. The Democrat's plan strives for the same things sans vouchers for private schools. While the voucher component is a political hot button that the talking heads in DC love to quarrel over (because it involves the financial structure and political control of public education dollars), its practical impact on district would be small.[2]

The real work is the easy-to-say but tough to do academic development of standards and accountability in an effective and comprehensive way. That is to say, in ways that improves student achievement and administrative command. Educators have written tomes on this, so simplified themes will do here: schools need to internalize rigorous academic standards, clear assessments for students and schools, and foster community action. The task is large but it has been done. Where? Beaufort, South Carolina.

Beaufort is a true southern comfort well described by The Washington Post's Peter Mendell,

Once known as the "Newport of the South" because of the mansions built here by wealthy planters of rice and cotton, and famous more recently as a sort of Hollywood South ("The Prince of Tides," "Forrest Gump" and "The Big Chill" were all filmed here), Beaufort is famous for its carefully preserved pre-Civil War homes, outfitted with two-story, colonnaded porches and southeast frontages to make the best of the available winds. And although Beaufort is about halfway between Charleston and Savannah, Ga., when you visit you feel as if you are in a separate seaside dominion with its own, sometimes lavish, local atmosphere.[3]


Yet don't let the lazy Southern grace fool you, schools are hard at work under that Spanish moss. Beaufort County School District began developing locally driven standards – even before South Carolina had state standards – in the mid 1990s. Their approach was based on three principles: rigorous academic standards, clear assessments for students and schools, and community action.

The standards building effort was based in eight "content-specific design teams" composed of 19 members each: 10 teachers, two parents, two community leaders, two business leaders, one school administrator and two students. The teams took six months and fashioned new benchmarks in math, language arts, natural sciences, social studies, foreign languages and a few other subjects. Then they presented their work at town hall meetings "for public review and critique."[4]

Once the content standards were ready Beaufort took a more difficult step - infusing them into schools and classrooms. This task required changing how teachers teach and administrators administer. Indeed, it was nothing short of a cultural shift to standards based accountability; and the effort is working. Scott Thompson, vice president if the Glen Rock Public Education Foundation, described how Beaufort teachers are shaping the standards and lessons around the children's learning progress.

One teacher explained to me that she had 17 4th graders and 11 3rd graders. The 3rd graders were all performing at the 4th grade level, but six of the 4th graders were performing at the level of a beginning 3rd grader. 'You adapt your classroom to meet those needs,' this teacher explained. The emphasis is not on having students in a particular grade at a particular age, but on enabling each child to meet all standards according to his or her individual developmental needs and ways of learning. Another teacher in this school, who teaches 1st and 2nd graders, says he sends one of his students down the hall to the 2nd and 3rd grade class for reading, because that's the level he's performing at in this subject.[5]


Indeed, children have individualized learning plans because teachers know just where the children should be at each level of their education.

Once the benchmarks existed and the standards culture took root, Beaufort went about constructing a technology backbone to support the program that far anticipated the federal call for technology funding and accountability. Along with standard desktop computers in classrooms, media centers and computer labs, laptop computers are now in the hands of more than 2,600 of Beaufort's middle and high school students and teachers. Laptops are available for students to carry back and forth between school and home, for learning in the classroom and in the living room. Schools have been wired for both local area and wide area networks, and Internet access is available in classrooms. Technology resources and tools are becoming an everyday part of the instructional process and the plan is to continue to use technology to strengthen the district's academic program.

The district's technology plan nicely frames Beaufort's effort.

It’s all about learning. Technology is a tool that opens doors to learning [--] it is not the end objective. Teachers will learn to use new tools to comprehensively and creatively address the needs of students. Students will learn the skills needed to succeed in school and beyond. Families will learn how to have increased access to the learning process. And both the local and global communities will learn to share ideas and information in a new way. Our educational technology plan is designed to center on learning, demands a wealth of creativity and involves an entire community of participants. It is more than learning to use computers. It is how to learn in the Information Age. [6]


The federal government is creating a buzz by demanding that schools hold their feet to the fire. How that is done is a state matter, the federal role is to promote education enterprise. According to The White House's No Child Left Behind proposal, "The [federal] priorities…are based on the fundamental notion that an enterprise works best when responsibility is placed closest to the most important activity of the enterprise, when those responsible are given greatest latitude and support, and when those responsible are held accountable for producing results."[7] Well, what's new in Washington is old in Beaufort. Because this district has such a tremendous head start on the nation you can be sure that more news about this comfortable southern town is on the way.

David A. DeSchryver
Issue 1.10
3/2/01

ENDNOTES


[1] See Checker Finn, Bruno Manno, Diane Ravitch, et al., Education 2001: Getting the Job Done, Thomas B. Fordham foundation, December 2000, http://www.edexcellence.net/education_2001.html, visited February 15, 2001.

[2] JAY P GREEN, PHD, AN EVALUATION OF THE FLORIDA A-PLUS ACCOUNTABILITY AND SCHOOL CHOICE PROGRAM (Manhattan Institute February 2001) (This report examines whether FL schools that faced the prospect of having vouchers offered to their students experienced larger improvements in their FCAT scores than other schools. The results show that schools receiving a failing grade from the state in 1999 and whose students would have been offered tuition vouchers if they failed a second time achieved test score gains more than twice as large as those achieved by other schools. While schools with lower previous FCAT scores across all state-assigned grades improved their test scores, schools with failing grades that faced the prospect of vouchers exhibited especially large gains. [The threat of voucher remedy's the feared impact].), see https://thedoylereport.com/resources/IssueResources/IssueResources_Choice.

[3] Peter Mendell, Southern Comfortable; Beaufort, SC, is Flanked by Touristy Savannah and Charleston, but it's Miles Apart, The Washington Post, October 22, 2000.

[4] Steve Piacente, Beaufort is Setting the Pace for Education Improvement, The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), November 1996.

[5] Scott Thompson, Confessions of a 'Standardisto', Education Week, October 6, 1999, http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=06thomps.h19&keywords=beaufort, visited February 14, 2001.

[6] BEAUFORT COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT, EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY PLAN 3 (January 2001), , visited February 13, 2001. (The report is kept on file with The Doyle Report and with the Beaufort School District).

[7] PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND 2 (January 2001), https://thedoylereport.com/resources/IssueResources/IssueResources_Federal, visited February 15, 2001.


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