Mixed results for HISD initiative
Houston ISD students attending schools benefiting from the district’s Achieve 180 campus turnaround plan continued to make modest academic gains in the program’s second year, but they still missed classes, received suspensions and learned from lower-rated teachers at the same rates as before, recently released data shows.
A comprehensive district-produced report details consistent successes and stumbles at the 50-plus schools covered by Achieve 180, an initiative targeting HISD’s lowest-performing campuses. The district spent $42.5 million in the program’s first two years, largely on teacher stipends, increased staffing and employee benefits designed to increase the quality of instruction on Achieve 180 campuses.
While the initiative is about to enter its fourth year, HISD officials this summer unveiled extensive results from 2018-19, the program’s second year. In an interview last month, district administrators touted “some incredible gains” at several of HISD’s longest-struggling schools, such as Kashmere and Worthing high schools, while acknowledging the lack of progress in other areas.
“We’re feeling pretty positive about it,” said Yolanda Rodriguez, HISD’s interim chief academic officer. “We know it’s a large amount of money, but it did fill in a lot of the need as it relates to specific supports for campuses.”
Initially launched in 2017-18 under former Superintendent Richard Carranza, the Achieve 180 program directed millions of dollars into 44 schools with a history of failing to meet state academic requirements. Many of the campuses struggled with high staff turnover, student behavior challenges and below-average student attendance rates. All served large percentages of students of color from low-income families.
In their first year under Achieve 180, many schools produced notable — if not quite spectacular — improvements on state standardized tests. The gains were enough to cut the number of Achieve 180 schools falling short of state standards from 27 to 11.
Still, the initiative produced virtually no improvements in other key areas. Attendance rates did not move. Students continued to receive out-of-school suspensions at a similar clip, roughly three times higher than non-Achieve 180 schools. The share of highly rated teachers employed at the 44 campuses did not budge despite a $5,000 bonus offered to educators at those schools.
Headed into 2018-19, the district added another nine schools and $10 million to Achieve 180 — and saw largely the same results.
Elementary and middle school students at Achieve 180 schools showed fractionally better standardized test gains than their peers, while high schoolers made significant progress in math and continued to struggle with English. The number of F-rated Achieve 180 schools also dropped to 10, down one from the prior year even after the addition of campuses.
“I saw great work with that money being put into those schools, giving them what they needed,” said HISD Trustee Wanda Adams, whose board district includes six campuses that met state standards under Achieve 180 after previously falling short.
Yet, challenges with attendance, discipline and teacher staffing remained unchanged.
For example, the percentage of students at Achieve 180 schools who were chronically absent — defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days — increased from 14.4 percent in the year before the initiative to 14.9 percent in 2018-19.
“It just seems to be something we haven’t really been able to make great gains on with attendance,” Rodriguez said. “However, this experience with remote learning is really going to be a game-changer. … Now, we have a valid, reliable, systematic way to keep our kids engaged when they cannot come to school.”
HISD administrators and school board members have not pushed for major changes to Achieve 180, which had a projected budget of about $37 million in 2019-2020 and this upcoming school year.
However, the district’s research and accountability department issued several recommendations in its 373-page report. In particular, the district staff suggested “it may be prudent to ensure that only teachers of the highest quality” are hired, retained and paid extra money.
The researchers also recommended the district “consider intensive efforts” to reduce suspensions and other so-called exclusionary discipline practices.
Robert Sheffield, director of the Center for School Turnaround and Improvement at WestEd, a national education nonprofit, said long-struggling schools often benefit from strong principals who change the culture and quality of instruction on a campus. The challenge, Sheffield said, is finding enough strong principals to fill those roles and stay in them long term.
“For the most part, the examples we see nationwide are a school transformed by a great superhero leader,” Sheffield said. “Because that leader is successful, oftentimes that leader leaves and the DNA of the school reverts back to the lower levels of performance.”
Some principals reporting the most improvement in Achieve 180 schools, such as Kashmere’s Reginald Bush and Blackshear Elementary School’s Alicia Lewis, remain at their campuses headed into the 2020-21 school year. Others, however, have received promotions or moved to new schools in the past year, including the now-former principals of Mading Elementary School, Lawson Middle School, Worthing High School and Woodson PK-5.
Roxana Cabrera, the mother of two second-graders at Pugh Elementary School, said she worries that principal turnover will cause the Denver Harbor campus to slip. Cabrera lauded the teachers and the dual-language program at the Achieve 180 school, but lamented that Pugh will start the year with its third principal in three years.
“It kind of makes me sad and concerned,” Cabrera said. “I have seen more changing for the best for kids of the school, and I just hope with this new principal that it’s going to be the same.”
The 2018-19 results from Achieve 180 likely will be the most comprehensive data available for at least a few years. Due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, students did not take state standardized exams this past school year and only partial data will be available for nontest-based metrics.
The disparate impact of the coronavirus on lower-income children, who are believed to be more likely to fall behind, likely will skew future performance.