A Culture of High Expectations: What We Can Learn from Texas’ Best Schools

Edcouch-Elsa High School sits in the middle of a field at the intersection of Farm to Market Road 88 and Mile 20, deep in the heart of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. All but two percent of its students are economically disadvantaged; 70% are considered officially “at risk” by the Texas Education Agency. All of the students are Hispanic; more than a third are just learning English.

The school ranks in the bottom third of Texas high schools, according to Schooldigger.com, and it certainly has never merited a mention on the coveted “America’s Best High Schools” list published each year by Newsweek and The Washington Post.

But that isn’t stopping it from copying what those schools do well.

Back in 2008, Edcouch-Elsa High School was in dire straights: just 35% of its 9th graders met the minimum standard on the mathematics portion of the TAKS test and only 60% met the reading standard (the state average that year was 60% for math and 84% for reading). A 2006 Legislative Budget Board report listed 80 things the district needed to do to effectively educate students, but nothing seemed to be getting done.

In desperation, the district turned to Teach for America for assistance, hiring several of the organization’s teachers to work at the high school (and in other district schools) in an effort to boost achievement.

The Teach for America teachers, in conjunction with the school’s longtime teachers and administrators, developed a plan not only to raise test scores but also to foster a sense of academic worth among students. The Teach for America teachers ripped a page out of the playbook of top tier schools: they demanded academic excellence and they refused to listen to any excuses for poor performance. The youthful teachers, all of whom were fresh out of college on two-year contracts for Teach for America, breathed fresh ideas into the school with an enthusiasm that was infectious: they organized after-school study halls and Saturday study sessions, and constantly told their students that hard work would pay off, using themselves as examples.

In 2010, Edcouch-Elsa reaped the rewards of its new system: 77% of its 11th graders scored in the proficient range for mathematics and 87% scored proficient in reading. These were the very same kids who, three years earlier, barely passed the test. Although their scores were still lower than the statewide averages (89% for math and 93% for reading), they demonstrated tremendous growth in the right direction.

“They set a realistic goal and they invested the kids in those goals so that they would work hard,” says Robert Carreon, the executive director of the Rio Grande Valley branch of Teach for America. “[The school] created a culture of high expectations.”

A Culture of High Expectations

Any parent with school-age kids has heard how important it is for schools to create “a culture of high expectations”. It is an often-repeated mantra of districts, administrators, and teachers charged with increasing student achievement in today’s high-stakes educational setting. While many schools talk about it, implementing it is another matter.

That’s why national school rankings have become so popular: they give parents an easy way to measure which schools in the country, and in their own towns, actually deliver on those expectations.

Newsweek, for example, ranks schools using six key factors: graduation rate, college matriculation rate, AP tests taken per graduate, average SAT/ACT scores, average AP/IB/AICE scores, and the number of AP courses offered.

Here in Central Texas, only a few schools made Newsweek’s list: Austin ISD’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Academy (#21) and Anderson High School (#474); Round Rock ISD’s Westwood High School (#47); Eanes ISD’s Westlake High School (#72); Lake Travis ISD’s Lake Travis High School (#488); and the charter school Harmony Science Academy in Pflugerville (#144).

Although the schools may differ greatly in where they fall on the list, their approach to education is similar: students are expected to excel academically. No exceptions.

“When kids come here, they know that people are serious about learning; they know that we have an expectation of people performing at their best level,” says Donna Houser, the principal at Anderson High School. “We have a culture in which it is important to achieve and perform the best they can.” Given the fact that Anderson has 2,160 kids enrolled this year, this is no small feat.

All but one of the top 10 schools on Newsweek’s list are academic magnet schools, which accept only the best and brightest students in their districts (the only non-magnet school in the top 10 is BASIS charter school in Tucson). Comprehensive high schools, like Anderson, must accept every student in their boundary area, which means they cannot cull the field for the so-called “cream of the crop”. Instead, they must create a school in which all students —from gifted and talented to learning disabled— not only are challenged academically, but also succeed.

Some would say this is an impossible task, but Ms. Houser adamantly rejects that idea. Sure, it’s difficult for comprehensive high schools to pull off the kind of achievement Anderson enjoys, but it’s absolutely possible when you hire excellent teachers.

“Every teacher [at Anderson] looks at their students individually and that is such an important thing: they see their students’ individual needs and they work hard to meet those needs,” she says. “My teachers rarely leave before five or six at night — I have never seen a staff who worked any harder.”

Good Teachers

Good teachers can be found at nearly every school in the nation. However, the difference between the highest performing schools in the country and the lowest performing schools is that, by and large, the high performing schools demand excellence in their teachers: strict adherence to goals, teaching methods that fully engage their students, and an ideology that doesn’t accept failure. In short, they hire not just teachers, but classroom leaders.

“When teachers operate with the mindset and the orientation toward effective leadership, we see kids who are far behind perform at levels that people otherwise think is impossible,” says Robert Carreon of Teach for America.

That leadership model is precisely the formula used at Harmony Science Academy in Pflugerville. Newsweek named the school one of the Top 10 “Miracle” high schools in the nation because it manages to achieve a 100% graduation rate and an 86% college attendance rate with a population of kids considered poor or at risk: 60% of Harmony’s students receive free and reduced lunch, which is the national indicator of poverty. The Pflugerville campus, one of 33 Harmony charter schools in Texas, is characteristic of the Harmony model: concentrated in areas with high poverty or otherwise at-risk student populations, the schools typically are small and offer a rigorous curriculum focused on science, technology, engineering and math skills. Teachers are expected to do whatever it takes it get their students to achieve, which means they have to be innovative leaders rather than proficient followers.

“We don’t have any secrets to success,” says Harmony Superintendent Dr. Soner Tarim. “It’s hard work and dedication, from both teachers and students, and support from our parents—Our motto is, ‘Excellence is our standard.’”

Of course, leading a couple dozen kids —Harmony’s Austin campus had 22 students in its 2011 graduating class— to excellence is a lot more straightforward, some would even say easier, than managing several hundred. And here in Austin, most public high schools have several hundred students per grade, sometimes many more. Finding teachers who can motivate each and every one of those kids to succeed is a daunting task, but Dr. Tarim says it absolutely can be done.

“What we’re achieving in a small school can be replicated in a large school setting,” Dr. Tarim says. “You can have high schools with 1,500 students, and if you break that large group into smaller sections within the high school, you can easily replicate the same success.”

The trouble is, truly excellent teachers — those with boundless energy to develop unique learning plans, stay after school to tutor students, schedule Saturday learning sessions, and occasionally pay for their students to take specialized exams— can burn out quickly in large-school settings, especially those in which the students’ needs are very high.

“We can’t expect all of our teachers to shoulder the responsibility of creating transformative classrooms within schools that often don’t have the mission or the capacity to change students’ trajectories, let alone provide teachers with the training and professional development necessary to teach this way,” writes Teach for America’s founder Wendi Kopp in her recently published book A Chance to Make History.

In other words: We need different kinds of schools to help these teachers —and their students— succeed.

Options & Assistance

Many school districts have taken this message to heart. In Dallas, home of Newsweek’s top two public high schools in the nation, the answer was to create magnet schools for the city’s top performing students. Both the School of Science and Engineering and the School for the Talented and Gifted have extensive application procedures that echo those for college, and students forfeit their positions in the schools if they do not maintain a certain GPA. It is no surprise that both schools receive applications from more students than they can accommodate. Rather than building more magnet schools, which is not economically feasible, the district has moved to “satellite magnets” — essentially, magnet schools housed within comprehensive high schools. The satellite magnets follow the same basic educational model as the top tier magnets, but allow students to take advanced coursework at their home campuses. In other words, they bring excellence to the students, rather than the other way around.

Austin ISD has done the same thing, but in reverse. The district’s flagship magnet, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy (#21 on Newsweek’s best schools list) began as two separate magnet programs at LBJ and Johnson High Schools back in the 1980s. In 2002, the magnet programs merged to form LASA — much to the consternation of faculty and parents at both originating schools, who didn’t want to see the programs removed from the home campuses.

In 1991, AISD also created a comparable advanced academic program for high achievers at Anderson High School. Similar to Dallas’ satellite magnets, Anderson high School’s International Baccalaureate program brings the demanding academic model of a magnet school to a comprehensive high school, allowing students to receive a prestigious IB Diploma if they successfully complete a series of rigorous classes, write an extended essay, and pass a battery of exams. The IB Diploma is considered by many to be the gold standard of education, and its purpose at Anderson High School is to attract and maintain highly academic students. The program has had an interesting side effect, though, says Principal Danna Houser: the high expectations for the IB students have filtered down through the rest of the school, raising expectations, and standards, for all. (This side-benefit was one of the reasons LBJ and Johnson fought to maintain their magnet programs before they merged to create LASA.)

Despite the concern that LASA would steal resources away from its original home campuses, the school’s unusual educational philosophy may end-up having far reaching effects for many AISDs schools. Unlike most academic magnets, LASA does not expel students who have difficulty keeping up with its rigorous curriculum. Instead, it does something unique: it makes a commitment to each and every student to do whatever it takes to help them succeed.

“We’re going to meet you halfway; we’re going to help you if you have holes [in your academic knowledge],” says LASA’s new principal Stacia Crescenzi. “We’re not going to lower our expectations, but we’re going to have that scaffolding in place to help you be successful. That’s our commitment to you.”

This commitment is both uncommon and rare, not just for magnet schools, but for public schools in general. Education experts, however, say it is a crucial element for educational achievement.

“All students should be enrolled in a rigorous courses of study—I absolutely believe that,” says Dr. Paul Cruz, Austin ISD’s Chief Schools Officer. “After providing that course of study, it’s about how we provide support for those students to achieve at those levels.”

It is well known that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds tend to receive this kind of support from parents —in the form of after-school enrichment, tutoring, and other academic assistance— so academic hand-holding is not necessarily an outspoken tenet of the schools they attend; indeed, at highly academic schools, it may even be frowned upon. But for schools in lower socio-economic areas, such as East Austin, students are less likely to have access to after-school academic enrichment or even to parents who themselves attended college. For this reason, rigorous classes must be combined with a solid plan to ensure student success in them.

AISD hopes to do that with a program called Early College Start. The program launched this year at both Reagan and LBJ High schools: it allows students to take college level courses beginning in 9th grade; if they complete all of the Early College Start classes during their four years in high school, they will graduate with 60 hours of college credit. All of the teachers participating in the program have been certified by the Austin Community College to teach these advanced courses; moreover, and perhaps more important, they received specific training to ensure that their students succeed. If the pilot program shows success, AISD will consider offering Early College Start at other district high schools.

No Short Cuts

There is no secret to building a great school, no magic bullet to get kids to succeed academically. In fact, most educators can tell you the formula without blinking: schools must have high expectations, dedicated teachers, and offer absolutely no excuses for failure.

Although magnets and charter schools have more freedom to achieve academic success —given they operate by different rules than comprehensive schools— it is clear that comprehensive public schools can do it too if they have

the will not only to demand excellence, but to foster it.

Dr. Paul Cruz, of Austin ISD, firmly believes schools in his district have that will. Indeed, he is so passionate about academic success for all students that he sounds almost robotic in his constant repetition of the phrase “a culture of high expectations”. But you can tell from the tone of his voice that he means it: schools simply must set the bar high and then give students the tools to surmount it; excuses to the contrary should not be tolerated. He vehemently dismisses any suggestion that low-income students or those with limited English skills cannot succeed academically. They can, he insists, if we provide them with the means to do so.

This does not mean building more magnets or admitting more charters. Although they make a splash in the national rankings, the hard fact is that they aren’t right for all kids — or, frankly, cash-strapped districts. First of all, magnets cost more money than most districts have to build, and they serve only a small population of students. And although some charter schools are excellent, here in in Texas children in charter schools actually tend to perform at a lower level academically than in traditional schools, according to a 2009 CREDO report.

“If you’re looking for a one-size-fits-all solution [to student achievement] you’re not going to get it,” says Ms. Crescenzi of LASA. “I think the key is figuring out which kids we aren’t serving and then serve them. We need to meet everybody’s needs in different ways. ‘Fair’ [education] is not the ‘same’ [education]: it’s giving kids what they need.”

The highest performing schools in Texas, and throughout the country, offer a blueprint on how to do that. And districts are paying close attention. In the end, true success at all schools may boil down to something Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp calls “a talent mindset”: schools must aggressively recruit talented administrators and teachers and then give them the freedom to do what works for their students. The top performing schools already do this. Now the rest must follow suit.

“[We] need to recognize that, if we can have success in a single classroom, we can have it throughout the school. There is no magic formula to getting there and there are no short cuts,” says Robert Carreon of Teach for America. “It takes a great school leader who has a vision and is relentless about getting the best teachers and administrators to work on their campus. They are obsessed with creating a culture of achievement on their campuses. So while we have to have high expectations for students, we have to have those same expectations for teachers and administrators.”

Hiring great teachers and holding them accountable for student achievement isn’t enough, though: top notch teachers need constant professional development and extensive administrative support to remain effective. “Teacher dedication is out there,” says Dr. Tarim of Harmony Schools, but without adequate backing from the top, “you may lose those teachers or they’ll eventually burn out.”

Top tier schools know this, and struggling schools like Edcouch-Elsa High School are learning from them. Although Edcouch-Elsa may still be below the state average for reading and math performance, its TAKS scores are improving each year through a combination of solid goals, innovative teaching and administrative support. No, the school isn’t likely to be featured on any national “best schools” list anytime soon, but it is proving it has the drive to enact educational excellence — and that is where great schools are born.

“I have to believe there is a will [to improve student achievement] because I see it happening every day in my community in South Texas,” says Mr Carreon says. “I see people on a daily basis who are making the commitment and demanding something different from the public education system and that is ultimately going to break the cycle of poverty in my community.”