Let’s celebrate Allenbrook’s success, but not draw simple conclusions

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I hope you got a chance to listen to and/or read my recent piece on Allenbrook Elementary School’s dramatic academic gains, which come at a time when many other high-poverty schools are seeing setbacks. Everyone involved in public education needs opportunities to celebrate, and it’s a joy to share success stories.

After this kind of reporting, I often get comments suggesting that this just shows how simple it is to make a difference. If only everyone had the same attitude as the principal or used a particular strategy or …

I urge you to resist that temptation. There’s nothing easy about reversing cycles of disadvantage and failure.

Allenbrook Principal Kimberly Vaught and I talked about this. She’s been in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools for 23 years, enough time to see several versions of turnaround programs. Many have started with getting the best principals into the highest-need schools.

In 2008 CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman launched a Strategic Staffing Initiative that offered big incentives to do just that. He hired Suzanne Giminez to take over Devonshire Elementary — and Giminez hired Vaught as an assistant principal. Devonshire was a success, and the program got national attention. But most of the other seven schools targeted made little to no progress, and the program vanished after Gorman left CMS.

Then there was Project LIFT, an ambitious partnership between CMS and the community’s biggest corporate and philanthropic players. They pumped $50 million in private money into West Charlotte High and its eight feeder schools — including Allenbrook — to break the link between poverty and academic struggles. Again, there were financial incentives to entice the best principals and teachers, along with additional services and extra hours of learning for students. After seven years there were some valuable lessons learned, but no measurable turnaround.

Vaught was recruited to Allenbrook as part of a state initiative to boost the lowest-performing schools. The school is using the state’s Restart program, which provides extra flexibility. At this month’s state Board of Education meeting, state Superintendent Catherine Truitt said only 46 of 151 Restart schools have gotten off the low-performing list so far. The program began in 2017.

In short: There’s no surefire formula for turning around a single school. And no one has managed to take a successful turnaround effort to scale.

Ann Doss Helms

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WFAE

North Carolina’s ‘scattershot approach’

At the February board meeting, Truitt outlined an array of programs to support North Carolina’s low-performing schools. Each has its own acronyms, rules and funding streams. Not only is that confusing, Truitt said, it can be counterproductive when schools get visits from multiple officials bearing different messages.

“I would characterize what’s happening now as a scattershot approach to school improvement,” she said. “And we can do better.”

She’s reorganizing the Department of Public Instruction staff who oversee school turnaround programs in hopes of providing support that’s “intentional, coordinated and well funded.” She and the board are asking the General Assembly for $16.5 million in the upcoming budget to provide more support to principals and teachers.

Allenbrook's secret?

So what’s making the difference for Allenbrook? The school has a strong tutoring program, with high participation from students and faculty. Vaught made it a point to remove barriers to participation: There’s food, transportation and fun to make the extra hours palatable to parents and kids.

Vaught reorganized staff to focus on academic coaching, which has created success even for teachers whose kids weren’t showing gains before. She didn’t talk much about social and emotional support, the hot buzzwords of recent years. But when I asked about that, she said support for students and families is essential. It’s not so much a separate category, in her view, as something that has to be part of everything else the school does.

Almost everyone agrees that principals are key to any turnaround, partly because they determine whether a school can get and keep top teachers. Vaught says she’s had great mentors as she moved into administration and tries to provide that for others. She also relies on spiritual support from women friends outside of CMS to keep her energized for the work. “It isn’t easy, but it is 100% worth it,” she said.

Vaught signed on for a three-year turnaround stint. That term, and the extra pay that accompanies it, ends this summer. “The school is supposed to have turned around by then, and it has,” she said. Vaught says she isn’t sure whether she’ll stay at Allenbrook. “I love this community. I love this work,” she said.

But a new superintendent will be coming on board at about the same time, and principals who have succeeded in turnarounds tend to get promoted or tapped to lead other struggling schools. Vaught says one of any principal’s most important jobs is engaging the community with a school’s success.

“Now it really is turning it back over to the community,” she said.