Six Principles Needed for Schools to Be Successful
I recently heard Luis Cruz speak at the Nebraska Excellence in Education Conference. Dr. Cruz is the principal at Baldwin Park High School, located about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. He spoke to our group on the topic of Graduating In Spite of the Odds. During the lecture, Dr. Cruz related six principles for school success as identified by the Beat the Odds Institute.
1. Clear the bottom line. Emphasize the achievement of every student in every classroom and take responsibility for that performance. These schools have a mission, vision, values, and goals that are essential. Schools have a plan for transferring that mission, those values and those goals into their day to day operations.
2. Ongoing assessments. Teachers and administrators assess student achievement early and often and use the information to drive improvement rather than to assign blame. In these schools, teachers and principals are collecting and pouring over any metrics and measurements, catching problems as they arise.
3. Strong and steady principal (leadership). The job of the principal is to spread the leadership. Create a team atmosphere. These principals keep pushing ahead.
4. Collaborative solutions. When you bring people together, incredible things happen. First of all, we face the facts (confronting the brutal facts—i.e. not ALL of our students are graduating). Ask, “What can we do to see that this changes?” Collaboration vs. CoBLABoration: If you begin to talk about the big game last Friday, you’ve begun to engage in coBLABoration. Collaboration is a process by which teams work interdependently to achieve a common goal.
5. Stick with the program. We tend to move from one program to the next. There is no magic bullet. Find a good program with a strong track record over time and then stick with it.
6. Build to suit. Customize instruction and interventions so they fit exactly what the student needs. Strong instruction only exists if students are learning.
And an additional principle provided by Dr. Cruz: patience is essential. Change is going to take time.