press releases 2009

Dr. Beverly Hall, Superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Addresses the U.S. Panama Business Council on "The Turnaround of an Urban School System"

June 24, 2009

Dr. Beverly Hall

Given my life’s work, I feel a special connection to all children. Whether in Panama or America, all children share common needs and experiences. For example, I’ve learned that some form of jump rope, hopscotch and tag is universal in children’s play in most cultures around the globe.

Many of us will remember that those games require several skills: dexterity, agility and speed. Some children excel at the games, while others don’t. However, all children deserve to have fun and be happy. That’s really the ultimate objective of child’s play: to have fun and to be happy.

Similarly, we know that children enter the school building with varying skill levels and challenges – from the high-performing student who comes from a supportive environment to the student who needs extra help but his or her family may not have the means to provide it. Regardless of their individual situations, I believe all children deserve nothing less than a high-quality education that prepares them for college and career.

And that’s what I’d like to share with you today: our efforts in Atlanta to reform public education so that our students can compete in the global economy. It is my hope that by sharing Atlanta’s story of reform and improvement, I can in some measure assist others who are developing their own formulas for education reform.

I believe the best way to explain our work is to divide my remarks into three brief sections:

• First, I will describe my school district and tell you a little about the students served.
  
• Then, I want to share a few of the school district’s accomplishments.
  
• Third, I’d like to explain the details of our reform strategy.
  

At the end of my remarks, I will show a short video before answering your questions.

(Atlanta’s Vital Statistics)

Let me start with the year 2014. That will be a significant year for our respective counties for a couple of reasons.

First, I understand that the expansion of the Panama Canal is scheduled to be completed by then, which will be a defining moment in Panama’s modern history.

Second, in the United States, 2014 is the year the federal government has set for every American student to meet basic expectations in math, reading and science. Likewise, such an accomplishment would serve as a defining moment in America’s modern history.

I feel fortunate to be able to say Atlanta Public Schools is on track to meet that goal. Our students are not only meeting academic standards; they are exceeding them.

But just 10 years ago, if anyone here had asked our own teachers if meeting such a goal were possible, they would have said, “No.” 

Shortly after I began work as the superintendent in 1999, we surveyed kindergarten teachers, who are some of the most optimistic people on Earth. Their students, only 5 years old, are eager to learn and are full of promise. And yet, nine of 10 Atlanta Public Schools kindergarten teachers admitted they did not believe their students would complete high school.

They based their opinion on the fact that in 2000, more than half of Atlanta’s students were not meeting basic education standards in every subject and grade level.

Our school district has an enrollment of about 50,000 students – who attend approximately 100 elementary, middle and high schools. More than 90 percent of Atlanta’s students are African American and Latino. And the majority of our students come from families living in poverty.

(APS Accomplishments)

Fast forward to 2009, at Atlanta Public Schools, we have been able to prove that our students can master the learning material. Not only are students graduating from high school, but they are earning generous college scholarships to prestigious universities around the United States and abroad. And our teachers now hold the highest expectations for their students’ success.

Just a month ago, I was thrilled to watch more than 2,000 students graduate, and they walked across the graduation stage with more than $92 million in college scholarship offers. This amount is a significant increase, up $28 million over last year. It means that our graduates are leaving Atlanta Public Schools better prepared to meet rigorous college requirements.

Those students have proven the skeptics wrong. Indeed, they can and do perform … when educated in environments that have strong ties to business and civic organizations and robust instructional programs with quality teaching.

I believe if it can happen in Atlanta, it can happen in any other city across the globe.
Over the past 10 years, our school district has made reforms that are multi-layered and comprehensive. As a result, by state and national standards, very few school districts in the United States can match the rate of student progress in Atlanta.

Prior to the reforms, only 47 percent of our eighth-graders met or exceeded standards in English-language arts. That was in the year 2000. Today, 90 percent of our eighth-graders meet or exceed standards, which are more challenging than they were in 2000. We see similar improvement in other subjects and grades levels.

From scores on standardized tests to the graduation rate – which rose from 39 percent in 2002 to our preliminary estimate of nearly 75 percent this year – student achievement has risen steadily and significantly in Atlanta.

(The Turnaround Strategy)

So what are the key elements of our reform strategy?

As I said early today, when I spoke to the members of the U.S. Panama Business Council, I want to be careful not to oversimplify the answer. If I could categorize our plan of action, I’d focus on two areas in particular:

• First, instructional integrity inside our classrooms
  
• And second, a community of partners outside our schools

(Teaching, leading and accountability)

Research shows that the single-biggest predictor of student achievement is teacher quality. No one thing or one person impacts student achievement more than a passionate, knowledgeable and engaging teacher in the classroom. Therefore, at the centerpiece of our reform work in Atlanta is quality instruction.

When I arrived in the school district in 1999, one of the first actions we took was to study the data and research on school reform programs that had been successful in raising student achievement in other parts of the United States. From 1999 to 2003, we put those research-based, nationally proven curriculum reform models in every single school – both low-performing and high-performing schools. Curriculum reform models such as Project GRAD and the International Baccalaureate Program (in one private school in Panama, according to the IBO Web site) have added strength and excellence to our academic program.

At the same time, we invested in intensive training for teachers so that they could improve their instructional practices. I want to emphasize that ongoing teacher training has been a key element of our reform strategy. Teacher training occurs throughout the year, even during the summer months, when most students are out of school.

According to the research, it takes most teachers three to five years of experience to reach their peak effectiveness. However, when I arrived at Atlanta Public Schools, too many teachers were leaving within their first to third year in the system. We commissioned a study and learned that 90 percent of the teachers who were interviewed said they came from college feeling totally unprepared for the unique challenges of an urban school environment.

We knew then that the school district had to take more responsibility for teacher preparation. Therefore, we designed a comprehensive teacher-support system across our school district. I’ll share a couple of highlights.  

First, through an intensive teacher induction or orientation program, we began pairing new teachers with trained, veteran mentors. The mentors work full time with teachers – in select schools and subjects – during the new teachers’ first two years of service. We’re very pleased with the results so far.

Yet effectively inducting new teachers is just one side of the equation. As with most school systems, the vast majority of our teachers – 90 percent – are veterans. Clearly, our efforts as a school district have to focus on improving the skills of those veteran professionals, our largest and most viable source of teachers.

Therefore, Atlanta Public Schools deploys a team of instructional experts who serve in every school helping teachers. They’re called academic coaches, model teacher leaders, instructional liaison specialists and instructional facilitators. Their job is entirely supportive; they are not hired to judge teachers or punish them for their performance.

Rather, these instructional experts work one-on-one with teachers, advocating for them, offering individualized feedback, and building teachers’ knowledge and skills, especially in how to use student performance data to guide instruction.

Of course, we also elevated our focus on our school principals. I was a three-term principal, so I know that schools cannot be successful without high-quality leadership. Since 1999, we have replaced 89 percent of our principals. I believe a large percentage of that turnover is directly related to the school district’s new direction, especially the aggressive performance-based accountability system we put in place several years ago.

In Atlanta, each public school has custom-tailored goals for students’ attendance, achievement in math and reading, and enrollment in higher-level courses. My annual evaluation is based on meeting those goals, as are the evaluations of principals and central administration staff.

When schools meet their goals, all staff members – from the cafeteria workers and bus drivers to the teachers and the principal – receive additional performance compensation. I believe everyone in the school building owns a share in student success. We publicly celebrate staff performance at our annual convocation ceremony, as you’ll soon see in the video we’re going to show you.

With teaching, leading and accountability, our school district has employed a collection of effective strategies that are reinforced every day across the school system.

(Broad-based community support)

Another element of our reform strategy is the tremendous support our school district has received from the broader, external community – which is the last category I wish to address before I close.

Truthfully, I couldn’t have a discussion about our school district’s consistent level of achievement without talking about the impact business, philanthropic and community partners have had on our students’ learning environment. 

In the 1990s, a powerful coalition of Atlanta business and community leaders mobilized on behalf of the education system. At the time, the school system was notorious for its political infighting and unstable leadership. In fact, I was the fifth superintendent in 10 years.

Understanding that school reform was critical to Atlanta’s economic health, the coalition aggressively recruited quality school board candidates. A school board has oversight over a local school system, much like a board of directors’ role in private companies or nonprofit groups. The coalition of leaders wasn’t looking for quick fixes. The leaders understood that results would be incremental at first but would eventually add up to sustainable, dramatic improvements.

With the community’s financial and political backing, in 2000, we targeted our lowest performing schools with new resources for teachers and social support services for students. If we could fix the worst of the worst, then we could establish our credibility and make believers out of non-believers. Today, schools once labeled “low performing” are now called “model” and “distinguished.”

Atlanta’s taxpayers pledged their support as well. They have voted three times in local referenda to pay for a one-cent increase in the sales tax to help renovate and construct schools. Since 1999, we’ve been able to invest $900 million in creating state-of-the-art school facilities.

And, through the years, as national philanthropic organizations saw the progress and heard about the level of support from key local business, civic leaders and taxpayers, they helped fund the school district’s transformational initiatives.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $10 million toward efforts to make our high schools smaller, more personalized and more academically challenging. The GE Foundation awarded Atlanta Public Schools $22 million for our mathematics and science undertaking.
And recently, we partnered with Nanjing University in China and Emory University in Atlanta to open the first and only Confucius Institute in the Southeast United States. Our school district is now a central site for the study of Chinese language and culture.

I should mention that Atlanta’s public schools provide foreign language courses of study in Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and French to children as young as 5 years old – from kindergarten through high school. We also offer Arabic and Latin to some high school students, some of whom participate in cultural exchange programs around the globe.

We’ve been able to tap into a pool of foreign language teaching talent through our partnership with the Visiting International Faculty Program. Teaching Spanish in Atlanta’s classrooms are highly qualified professionals from Chile, Columbia, El Salvador and Spain. 
Because of the extensive network of community partners by the school district’s side, we’ve been able to enrich our academic program and support our students in ways a school system could never do alone.

(Education: The Best Profession)

In closing, I’ve come to value every position I’ve ever held in the field of education – as a teacher, principal, deputy chancellor and superintendent. Outside of parenthood, I believe no other responsibility allows an individual such as an educator – and a teacher especially – to change a child’s destiny.

We know that an educated, informed citizenry is healthier, has higher earnings and contributes more to the economic strength of society. In Atlanta, we’ve shown that students can learn at high levels when educated in environments that have a robust instructional program with quality teaching and strong ties to business and civic organizations. That formula has truly made all the difference in our student’s lives. 

And now, I’d like to end my presentation with a video that I think captures the spirit of our school district. Every smiling voice and singing voice is that of an Atlanta Public Schools student, teacher or principal. Toward the end of the video, you will see excerpts from our annual convocation ceremony, during which we celebrate achievement.

Again, thank you for the opportunity to share the Atlanta experience with you this afternoon. Following the video, I’d be happy to answer your questions.