Updated 8/31/2016
It’s that time of year when kids go back to school, and luckily each year tends to be a fresh experience for students – new teachers, new curriculum and often new peers in the classroom. But for teachers and administrators, and sometimes even students, it can feel like the same old thing.
Not so in the Silverton School District, located in the northern Willamette Valley of Oregon. As Marie Traeger knows well, teachers and school leaders are changing it up. After teaching for 28 years, Traeger embraced the opportunity to help the whole district overhaul its evaluation and professional development systems for teachers and administrators. This may sound like dry human resources work, but it’s transforming how learning happens in the classroom, and how teachers and administrators collaborate.
Traeger, the collaboration grant manager for the district, explained, “We are learning practices to help improve teaching, do continual learning, more student directed learning. It’s a difficult thing to get to, because it means teachers have to release the power of the learning responsibility to the students.”
The ultimate goal is to increase student success. “One of the greatest successes of the grant was an ’AHA!’ by one of our veteran teachers. This teacher used to stand in front of the class and lecture for most of the period. With a strategy learned through professional development, this teacher learned ways to gradually release responsibilities to the class and saw increased test scores and better wellbeing for the teacher.”
This quiet revolution in teaching and learning is thanks in large part to the Chalkboard Project, launched in 2004 by Foundations for a Better Oregon’s six founding members: The Collins Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust, James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, The Oregon Community Foundation (OCF) and Wendt Family Foundation.
Chalkboard researches and pilots promising practices to transform Oregon’s K–12 public school system to produce high quality schools, have stable funding, elevate student success and eliminate disparities in student achievement. Oregon’s high school graduation rate of 72 percent lags behind the national level of 82 percent, and for several racial and ethnic groups the rates are even lower.
After extensively engaging teachers, administrators and parents, Chalkboard’s leaders decided to focus on elevating teacher and school leader effectiveness and developed Creative Leadership Achieves Student Success (CLASS). It provides mentoring and coaching to school districts that can demonstrate collaboration among the superintendent, school board and teachers’ union, to develop new career paths for teachers, meaningful performance evaluation, relevant professional development and alternative compensation models. CLASS has achieved demonstrable improvements in student achievement, which is why it is being implemented in the Silverton school district.
Another core strategy adopted by the Chalkboard Project is advocacy to advance state education policy. Informed by the successful CLASS initiative, Chalkboard’s advocacy achievements included establishment of the School District Collaboration Grant Program, which incentivizes CLASS expansion.
In an interview with NCRP, OCF CEO Max Williams said Chalkboard has leveraged its limited dollars effectively:
“In districts where it has implemented programs with research and evaluation, we’ve seen dramatically positive improvements. It was patient money that had to wait, and eventually we were able to make policy changes. … [O]ur little bit of money that we invested over years is now leveraging probably $30–$40 million a year in state money to build the model in [other] parts of the state.”
According to Chalkboard executive director Sue Hildick, after conducting an equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) audit, in 2014 Chalkboard developed an EDI framework and three-year workplan, which contains specific goals, strategies and actions.
“We ran three pilot programs that touched 65 percent of school kids in the state… and we are seeing opportunity gaps closing across some groups but not all,” said Hildick. “So we spent the last three years in a deep space about race and inequity and how to propel change in those areas.”
I see three key lessons in this story for funder collaboratives:
- If you are trying to change systems, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. The Chalkboard grantmakers have been at it for more than a decade, taking time to engage stakeholders in shaping strategy and using data to inform mid-course corrections.
- Policy advocacy is an essential tool in systems change. While a lot can be done by improving and aligning services and programs, ultimately most issues require better policies or more public resources to achieve progress. The resources of foundations, even when pooled, will always be dwarfed by public funding.
- Equity has to be an explicit, upfront goal if you want to reduce disparities. Often a rising tide does not lift all boats, especially if systems perpetuate disparities, even unintentionally. Chalkboard’s EDI audit helped identify areas for strategy refinement. Ideally, equity focus is built in at the beginning of the initiative.
Kudos to Foundations for a Better Oregon for incorporating all three. As a result, Traeger believes that Silverton will see better outcomes for underserved populations with the CLASS approach. “With the shift of students being engaged more, that is going to help students with language barriers and different styles of learning. Doing the same thing for everyone doesn’t work.”
Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), where she leads Philamplify, an initiative that combines expert assessment and critical stakeholder feedback to improve grantmaking practices and boost equitable outcomes in communities.
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