SALT WORKS - School by School

Office of Progressive Support and Intervention

A School-centered plan to improve teaching and learning

Letter from the Commissioner

Please join me in reshaping Rhode Island public education.

As most of you are already keenly aware, Rhode Island's vision for education is ALL KIDS! This means leaving no student behind as we strive to make our schools better places for learning. We need to make sure our schools become places where all students learn and thrive.

As we raise our standards, we also need to individualize our approach so that every student is challenged. I believe, as you do, that all students can learn. I also believe that it will take unprecedented commitment to renew our school environments and reshape our classroom thinking.

Many of you have already begun this work by forming school improvement teams, launching self-study and writing school improvement plans. Some have even begun implementing their school improvement plans and are working diligently to create standards-based curriculum, instruction and assessment in the classroom.

We at the Rhode Island Department of Education know that you would like help to make the best use of much of the information that has been released to you over the last year. We hope this publication, SALT WORKS School by School, will be a good resource.

SALT WORKS School by School is a map to the School Accountability for Learning and Teaching (SALT) process. It provides a broad conceptual context for many of the tasks you will be performing. Two additional SALT WORKS publications, School Guides and School Resources, have been designed to provide more practical information to help you meet the legislative requirements of Article 31. They will arrive soon after you receive School by School.

It is critical to the success of this endeavor that we keep our eyes on the central point, improving our schools so that all students have the opportunity to reach high standards.

Most importantly, SALT WORKS is not a finished work. As part of our effort to reshape our educational environment, we want to focus on your needs. It starts right here, right now. Give us your reactions on the enclosed feedback sheet and let us know when you need our help.

Thank you.

Peter McWalters

About SALT WORKS

Welcome to SALT WORKS, our best first attempt at helping schools meet the challenges set forth in Article 31.

This material – Book One - “School by School” is the first of three publication packages you will receive.

We have divided SALT WORKS into three parts:

“School by School” defines the vision of SALT, outlines the requirements of Article 31 and explains how the SALT concepts mirror and respond to the demands of Article 31;

“School Guides” contains practical guides giving schools specific advice on implementing SALT;
“SALT Resources” provides resource materials to allow people to read more about SALT.

SALT WORKS is meant to supplement, not replace, the help available from your district, the department, institutions of higher education and your school's community and business partners.

The demands on schools come from the new economy, the public insistence on higher-performing schools, the Governor's Comprehensive Education Strategy and the Legislature's Article 31. SALT helps schools respond to those demands.

SALT WORKS offers our best thinking about how schools can be successful at meeting those expectations. It is the primer for Rhode Island school improvement.

This is the first full introduction of SALT to Rhode Island schools. We hope you find it helpful and that you will continue to work with us to get it right. This text is a work-in-progress -- just as school improvement is an on-going process. It will be revised as our experience grows. We strongly encourage you to respond to SALT Works. Please feel free to suggest how we can make it better.

We want it to be easy for you to tell us where the document succeeds in helping and where it fails. The feedback sheets after every major section should make this convenient. In addition to these sheets, we will hold focus groups to get your feedback.

Members of the department's Field Service Teams will work closely with a number of schools as they try to work with this document, so we will have some direct information about what their experience has been like. We intend to use all of this information to make the document more useful for the 1999-00 school year.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Tailoring the Approach to Learning and Teaching, School by School

What do teachers, parents and community members know about their schools that test scores can't define? Do they know that their school has a serious problem with racial division or gangs or drugs or asthma or English language skills? Do parents know that their children passed sixth grade but can't read the newspaper? Do they know that each math class has its own unique standards - that teacher X fails almost everyone, while teacher Y gives out predominantly "A"s? Do people know these problems, but perceive them as insurmountable barriers because they are not within their scope of influence?

What if they were? What if a team of teachers, parents and community members at each school were to meet and share this information - analyzing it along with test scores and other collected data? What if they wrote reports defining the problems and potential solutions?

And then what would happen if that team's reports were taken seriously? What if the barriers crumbled because every state agency, parent, business owner and politician were committed to making the changes outlined by each team?

The answer is SALT.

The vision of SALT (School Accountability for Learning and Teaching) is to invest each individual school with the power to assess achievement and address issues. SALT means an end to school-blind policies, an end to policies of assigning blame and meting out punishments and rewards.

SALT places trust in each school to know its own shortcomings and to define its own path to success. And SALT requires that schools - once they've gotten to the point where they know what to ask for - work towards getting help from every sector of their community: from neighborhood groups to the Rhode Island Department of Education.

SALT recognizes that strong individual efforts are not alone sufficient to make public education flourish. It will take the involvement of a much broader community combined with a more focused and school-centered approach to close the equity gaps in schools, raise our standards and challenge our students.

We will all be partners in this. We will share our triumphs and our failures together

We will refuse to fail. If we achieve this vision, we will all benefit.

Schools with a large immigrant population will get help to address the language and cultural challenges those students bring. Teachers will spend more time on professional development. Schools with gangs will have help from police and gang counselors. Schools will promise to teach relevant skills in exchange for more job opportunities for graduates. Local corner stores will agree to keep cigarettes behind counters and report drug dealers loitering around their business. Parents, who have often acted as lobbyists with one-child agendas, will assume an enhanced role in improving the whole school. Statistics and test scores will not gather dust. They will be used to improve teaching and learning. Students will learn to read and read well. Teachers will agree to consistent standards for grading and parents will get involved in making meaningful changes at schools.

The plan is to focus on professional judgment like never before and to meaningfully expand our notion of how to assess achievement. The plan is school-centered, holistic and eminently malleable. The idea is to allow schools to use the SALT process to mold a plan fitting their own needs.

SALT is not a piecemeal approach to change. The idea is to make global, comprehensive changes and to be certain that schools have a reliable web of support to help them make changes.

SALT doesn't restrict its focus to the most challenged schools. ALL SCHOOLS can improve.

SALT is process oriented, with the idea at its core that there is always more work to be done. As part of this process, there are cycles of information gathering (self-study) and decision-making (school improvement plans) that will repeat.

Much of this work will involve the shedding of assumptions by everyone involved. Just because a specific school request has been refused in the past is no longer a reason not to demand it now. In order to work as a team, we must pull together and help each other to meet our collective potential. Although we face challenging times ahead, we believe in our schools. SALT is our best way of proving our trust that schools can do it.

W H Y S A L T N O W

The SALT approach was developed over the past five years by the Rhode Island Department of Education in conjunction with dozens of educators and schools. In 1995, Governor Lincoln Almond and Education Commissioner Peter McWalters convened the Rhode Island Goals 2000 Panel, which developed the Rhode Island Comprehensive Education Strategy (CES). In March 1996 another task force of fifty Rhode Island educators created a blueprint for implementing the CES called School Accountability for Learning and Teaching (SALT).

The CES and SALT blueprint were written into 1997 state legislation. That legislation - Article 31 - requires schools to engage in self-study and goal setting. Article 31 sets rigorous requirements for schools and starting in November, 1999 schools will need to respond.

The Rhode Island Department of Education has created SALT WORKS to help schools meet the requirements of the legislation while also providing a broader conceptual framework.

Rhode Island's Comprehensive Education Strategy
The strategy has two central approaches

IMPROVE TEACHING AND LEARNING

CREATE RESPONSIVE SUPPORTIVE SYSTEMS

High Standards
What students need to know to meet the demands of the 21st century

Opportunities for All to Achieve High Standards
How each school has the capacity to meet the needs of its students

Accountability and Assessment
The way we know how well our students are doing

Community and Family Involvement
How the people inside and outside the building work together as the school community

Accountability and School Improvement
How each school knows its students and organizes to meet their needs

Broad Public and Political Support
How education becomes Rhode Island's top priority

How SALT Works: Achieving the SALT Vision

SALT is based on the belief that schools should develop their own expertise to use a wide variety of information to improve learning and teaching. SALT locates the improvement process within the school, and works to have the district, RIDE, families and others fully support the school. SALT has been built as a comprehensive and coherent approach to accountability that recognizes the important responsibility of schools and teachers. The emphasis of SALT rests on the professional judgment of teachers and other adults close to the student. These are the people who can change learning and teaching and schools.

For that reason, SALT's predominant concern is to support and develop the professional judgment of those who work within schools.

SALT's main strategy is to help schools use information to make effective changes to improve learning and teaching.

SALT also seeks to:

Help schools network into consortia

Help districts support schools more effectively
Connect Field Service support to schools

The vision and the strategies of SALT are defined by the SALT principles, focus areas, and the SALT cycle.

The SALT Principles

1	Gaps in student performance should be closed.
2	Closing the gaps in student performance depends on strengthening the process of teaching and learning in the classroom.
3	To strengthen classrooms it is necessary to improve schools.
4	Use standards to push schools and students toward better performance.
5	Specify progressive steps for how school districts and RIDE should intervene to improve a school.
6	Acquire useful information about what is happening in the schools.
7	Support professional development as integral to the actual work of teachers and school staff.
8	Use state mandates to protect basic rights and to promote teaching and learning directly.
9	Include in the accountability system all agencies that create and shape policies that influence schools.
10	Support public discussion of the standards and practice of Rhode Island schools.

The SALT Focus Areas

The focus areas clarify the essential concerns of SALT. They also increase the rigor of all SALT activities by providing a common focus for each activity in the cycle.

The three interrelated focus areas are the same for all activities in the SALT cycle. These areas are:

Focus Area 1: Student Learning

This area focuses on what the students in a school have learned and how well they have learned it. It includes what a school knows and understands about what its students have learned. It also includes how a school assesses student learning.

In this focus area, a school will develop conclusions about:

Achievement gaps and equity gaps in state assessment scores and in other school/district assessments

The school's expectations and standards for student achievement and behavior

The characteristics of the students in a school in terms of their curiosity, respect for self and others, pride in the school, sense of purpose, and motivation

Focus Area 2: Teaching

This area focuses on the role teachers play. It focuses on how closely teaching methods and materials are linked to learning patterns and needs. The focus area asks educators to assess classroom activities and how well they address learning standards. The evaluation should also provide an assessment of how well the teachers are moving their students towards meeting standards.

This area does not focus on the performance of individual teachers at your school, but on the overall quality of instruction in your school.

In this focus area a school will develop conclusions about:

How effectively instruction, assessment and professional development are integrated and aligned with standards

How well standards are used to promote good teaching and learning

How well instruction addresses the diverse learning needs of students

The capacity of teachers to close the gaps in student performance

How well teachers assess student learning on a daily basis and how well they use daily formal and informal information to improve their instruction

Focus Area 3: The School

This area focuses on all the structures and processes within and outside schools that promote and support teaching and learning. The school needs to be viewed as an organization and a community and assessed from those viewpoints. Questions need to be asked about student learning standards and how well they flow from grade to grade. Are the sixth graders expected to know material that the fifth grade class hasn't been assigned? The school needs to ask what it does with published information such as the SALT survey and state assessment scores. Does the school effectively use that information to adjust teaching methods? If, for instance, a school has shown consistently low math scores, has it reviewed its math curriculum and set up a forum for teachers to discuss the problem together?

The school's web of support – the district, state and outside community – need to be evaluated and shortcomings addressed.

School improvement teams and visiting teams will develop conclusions about the above mentioned issues as well as additional issues such as:

How the organizational structure of the school promotes improvement of teaching and learning

The quality of the school's educational leadership

How equitably the district distributes its educational resources to its schools and how well schools use educational resources to meet the needs of their students in a fair, reasonable and effective manner

The manner in which the quality, substance and structure of adult-student and adult-adult relationships enhances learning

How well the school engages its families and community

The degree to which district and school policy protects the rights, safety and health of everyone in the school

How well the teacher evaluation system supports the improvement of classroom practice.

SALT activities are organized as a cycle. Within this cycle each activity becomes meaningful by its relation to the other activities. For example, assessing student performance in relation to standards is not very meaningful unless it is connected to activities that help a school use this information to improve student learning. That is why assessment information, for example, is connected to self-study in the SALT cycle. Furthermore, self-study is not meaningful unless it results in conclusions about how the school can do better. That is why self-study is connected to school improvement planning. School improvement planning is not useful unless it results in action that improves learning. That is why school progress is subject to the outside review of parents and the community in School Report Night.

While most of the activities in the SALT cycle are not new to schools, their organization into this ongoing cycle is new. SALT is a system of accountability that works to empower schools to become the agents of their own improvement.

The SALT cycle is several activities:

Self-Study

Self-study activities are focused inquiry activities that the school improvement team conducts. These activities are deliberately chosen and provide the school with information about what the school improvement team regards as the most important issues for the school to address in the three SALT focus areas.

Self-study activities lead to the school improvement team's conclusions about how well that school is doing and recommendations about what it needs to do to improve.

School Improvement Plan

The school improvement plan is critical to the success of the SALT process. Self-study will not be an effective process if what is learned isn't translated well into the school improvement plan.

Every relevant issue discussed and reviewed in the three focus areas should find its way into the plan. The plan should be comprehensive. The team should not try to restrict itself to easily remedied problems. The process demands total openness.

The plan reflects the judgments made by the school improvement team based on a set of conclusions and recommendations from self-study activities.

School Visit

A team--comprised of a majority of practicing Rhode Island teachers, a parent, a school administrator, school committee member and someone from higher education and usually a member of the RIDE staff--will conduct a four-day visit to each school in the state. Each school can expect a visit approximately once every five years.

The visiting team writes a report about how well it thinks the school is performing in each of the three focal areas of SALT and offers advice for the school to pursue.

School Support and Intervention Agreement

Once the school has revised its school improvement plan on the basis of the report from its school visit, it develops a School Support and Intervention Agreement with its district and the department of education. The purpose of this agreement is to ensure that the school has as much capacity as possible to implement its revised plan. The agreement specifies what the district and the department (and possibly other partners) will do to support the school.

The revisions the school makes to its improvement plan may include changes in the: roles and responsibilities of the school staff, instructional program and the support services the school provides for its students, and the school's site-based expenditures. An initial priority is redirecting resources already available at the school.

The agreement may also specify changes in the way the district supports the school both programmatically and fiscally. These changes should be reflected in the district's strategic plan as well as the support agreement. The agreement may also specify new levels and kinds of assistance from the department.

The school prepares to formalize its School Support and Intervention Agreement by discussing the conclusions and recommendations of its school visit report with its district and its Field Service representative. It must decide on whether it should change its school improvement plan to incorporate what it has learned from the report of the visiting team, and if so, how the plan should be changed.

The school should keep its district and the department informed of its emerging decisions at appropriate intervals The agreement should specify the support it needs to implement the revised plan in a way that is persuasive to the district and the department.

Once the school has completed this process, the school, district and the department are ready to formalize the School Support and Intervention Agreement. This should be done in a time and place where the school, district and department can conduct a finalizing discussion.

School Report Night

Schools report to their parents and community at least once a year on how well they are doing, their plans for improving results and how the school community can help the school to address those challenges.

Meeting the Challenges Ahead: What Article 31 Requires of Schools and How SALT WORKS Will Help

Article 31 holds schools, districts and RIDE responsible and accountable for improving student performance in reading, writing, mathematics and health. In its definition of school and district accountability, it makes several general requirements of districts and schools.

The department, with the advice and consent of the legislature, has turned what Article 31 says into the specific actions that are required from schools and districts in a given year.

Based on Article 31, schools must address two requirements by November 1999. (For schools scheduled for a SALT visit there are three requirements.) Each requirement is listed below, followed by the department's best advice on how it can be fulfilled, based on research and our emerging experience with SALT.

1998 and 1999 Requirements, SALT Activities, and related SALT Guides

REQUIREMENT

SALT ACTIVITY

RELATED SALT GUIDES

Each school completes the strategic direction section of its improvement plan

Each school establishes an improvement team

Building a School Improvement Team

The school improvement team fully understands the standards the state assesses.
The school improvement team conducts self-study activities.

Conducting Self Study Activities
Using State Assessment Results
Considering Equity Gaps
Using SALT Survey Information

School improvement teams write conclusions based on their self-study activities.

Building Conclusions

School improvement teams use the conclusions they write to inform the strategic direction of their improvement plans.

School Improvement Planning

Schools inform their superintendents about their improvement plans.
Schools think ahead and select their self-study activities for 1999-2000.

November 1999 School Improvement Team Report Form

Each school hosts a school report night.

School will clarify for the faculty what their role will be in the report night.
Schools proactively invite their families to school report night.
Don't stop at school report night!

Conducting School Report Night

Some schools host a school visit.

Selected schools host a scheduled visit.

Preparing to Host a SALT Visit

Each school establishes an improvement team.

This team should represent the school, the families of its students and its community. Although it takes time and energy to establish a school improvement team, each school needs the help of its families and community in order to improve student learning.

The school improvement team fully understands the standards the state assesses.

Without an understanding of the standards that students are required to meet, it will be difficult for a school improvement team to recommend how a school can become a better place for learning. In particular, the school improvement team should spend time reading and discussing the state standards.

The state frameworks and content standards are available from Office of Instruction (222-4600 x2131) or your Field Service representative. The state assessment standards are available from Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement (800-228-0752). Schools in districts that are members of the Skills Commission consortium may order the state assessment standards from the Skills Commission at (401) 222-4600, ext. 1-2191. You may use Article 31 professional development funds to purchase these.

The school improvement team should also create ample opportunities for the entire faculty of the school and the families of its students to become familiar with these standards.

The school improvement team conducts self-study activities.

The self-study process should be coordinated so that the team looks at various kinds of information about students and teachers, as well as about the school as a whole. Based on this information, the team should build conclusions in each SALT focus area about how well the school is working and recommendations for what the school should do to improve.

Self-study activities help a school generate and use new information about itself.

Self-study is important because each school needs to thoughtfully diagnose its condition before it can create a meaningful prescription for change. For example, each school must identify which students are not learning before it can discover why those students are not learning. The school improvement team should make sure that self-study activities are focused on the most important student-learning issues in the school.

In order to find out which students are not learning, a school should conduct a gap analysis of its state assessment results. For information about why its students are not learning, a school can analyze its SALT Survey data and other information that is available at the school.

School improvement teams write conclusions based on their self-study activities.

In order to bring the self-study process to a point where a school can begin to act, the school improvement team should write its conclusions about how well the school is doing. These conclusions should be based on the evidence the school has considered (for example, data on student achievement, data from the SALT survey, and information about its instructional programming), what the school already knows about itself, and a broad-based discussion at the school.

In order to keep self-study focused on learning and teaching, the school improvement team should write its conclusions about the previously described three SALT focus areas:

Student Learning

Teaching

The School

See the SALT Works guide:

Once a school has arrived at conclusions about how well it is doing, it should write recommendations for change that are based on those conclusions. It should use these recommendations to inform the strategic direction section of its school improvement plan.

Each school's progress in developing a school improvement plan will be different. Some schools may exceed the expectation that they will complete the strategic direction section of the plan by November 1999. These schools should create action plans to achieve their goals.

See the SALT Works guide:

Schools inform their superintendents about their improvement plans.

The district needs to know what improvements its schools are planning so that its action plan can support its schools. A district should explain to its schools how it wants them to report their strategic direction section. (A sample form is provided in the SALT Resources).

Schools think ahead and select their self-study activities for 1999-2000.

The school improvement team should think about and then select the self-study activities for 1999-00. These should be based on the school's judgment about what it needs to know next. The school might decide to continue its self-study by: analyzing student learning data that comes from classroom assessments, studying the impact of the school day on an individual student, observing the interactive process of teaching and learning that goes on in classrooms, or considering school structures (such as scheduling) and processes (such as those that place students in instructional settings) that promote and support students achieving standards.

Each school hosts a school report night.

School report night is an attempt to explain to families and the community what the school is doing to improve student learning. This means a school needs to explain to parents what it is trying to teach their children. Since teachers are trying to teach students to meet standards, some natural roles for the faculty are to: explain standards to the families of the school, describe to families what it means for a student to meet a standard in terms of the work the student needs to produce, and tell families what they can do to help their children do better work.

Schools proactively invite their families to school report night.

Experience has shown that it can be difficult to attract families to a school report night. No one seems to have a foolproof way to impress on families the importance of their attending this event, but many schools report success in combining open house and School Report Night. Because a school needs the help of its families, it must invent and discover ways to bring parents to school report night.

Don't stop at school report night!

School report night is only one activity in the school year. To create meaningful connections with families, a school must keep the conversation going all year. It needs to reach out to families frequently, using a variety of techniques. Doing this well require a school to rethink its personnel needs.

See the SALT Works guide:

Selected schools host a scheduled school visit.

Preparing for a visit requires effort from a school. The school must conclude its self-study processes, draw its conclusions and write its school improvement plan prior to hosting a visit.

Use the interest generated by the school visit to spread the involvement in the visit preparation activities as broadly as possible across the school and its community.

The visit is an opportunity for the school to gain an outside perspective on its efforts to improve. The visit report will comment on the challenges the school faces in increasing student learning and it will comment on what the school can do to improve. The more people from the school who are familiar with these subjects are involved in this process, the more the school will benefit from the visit.

See SALT Works guide:

After the visit is over, the school improvement team should engage as many members of the school faculty and community as possible in discussing the report. The visit report will not tell a school what it must do. Instead, it will tell a school what an external team--a majority of them Rhode Island teachers, using their professional judgment--had to say about how well the school is doing and what it needs to do to improve. A school must realize that conclusions and recommendations are intended to help move a school forward.

Consequently, the school will need to carefully discuss the merit of the conclusions and recommendations, rather than accept them without question. If these discussions are broad-based, the school is more likely to benefit from the report. A school is not required to follow any or all of the recommendations in the visit report. A SALT visit report is intended to be provocative and persuasive, not prescriptive.

The school will be asked to present the recommendations it will incorporate into its school improvement plan at a meeting of the district, state and school to prepare the School Support and Intervention Agreement.

Use the SALT Survey

In 1997-98 the SALT Survey was introduced into all Rhode Island schools. Because many schools had never heard of SALT in any other context, they assumed that the survey was the whole of SALT. The survey, in fact, is a valuable source of information that schools should use in self-study. It is therefore a major source of information about how several key groups of people see the school. As information for self-study, the survey results are helpful in preparing the school improvement plan.

Feedback on SALT WORKS

We welcome your reactions to SALT WORKS. We intend to keep refining it so it benefits from those who actually use it. Questions, comments or criticisms about SALT WORKS should be addressed to:

Ken Fish
Director of School Improvement and Accountability
Rhode Island Department of Education
Shepard Building
255 Westminster Street
Providence, RI 02903
(401) 222-2650
fish@ride.ri.net

Acknowledgements

SALT WORKS was prepared under the leadership of Commissioner Peter McWalters. Many Rhode Island educators have played and continue to play an important part in the development of SALT and SALT WORKS. Including The Lab at Brown, especially Dr. Thomas Wilson, Dr. Susan Lusi and Joseph Di Martino; Members of the Rhode Island School Accountability Team (1995-96; prepared SALT: A Blueprint for School Accountability for Learning and Teaching); the faculty and staff of the 17 SALT pilot schools; RIDE staff; Catalpa Ltd., especially Dr. Thomas Wilson, the principal consultant to SALT; InfoWorks! Team, especially Dr. Robert Felner and Julia Steiny; Rick Richards, SALT Project Manager, working closely with SALT Leadership Team, oversaw the preparation of this edition of SALT WORKS; Murphy and Murphy provided the graphic design and final editing.