Our Non-Strategic Plan

Five ways to make Decatur Public Schools better which aren't in the DPS strategic plan (but should be!).

There are still people out there that are discussing “Strategic Plans”.  Duane discussed the absurdity of this in his last article and I’m going to pile on while the topic is hot with school board candidates and existing board members.  If you add up what we’ve spent on our 2018-2025 Strategic Plan in consulting fees and administrative time (time that is apparently still being spent with the rework of the DPS strategic plan web pages), not to mention the hundreds of hours wasted by community members, we’ve certainly spent over $100,000 on the current plan. Did you get that? Over $100,000!  And what do we have to show for it?  At best some meaningless metrics to gauge our performance – metrics for which nobody can nor should, in all honesty, be held accountable.  And if certain people get their way, what would the next iteration of a Strategic Plan look like?  Exactly like what we have now – a useless website that everybody ignores.

If you analyze the major educational changes that have taken place in DPS over the last ten years, the item at or near the top of the list might be an intense focus, starting around 2018, on lesson plan uniformity across all district grade level classrooms.  We stripped away much of the autonomy principals and teachers had in their buildings and classrooms and demanded that everyone works (literally) on the same page.  This major change was clearly not in the strategic plan which was developed around the same time.  In fact, the strategic plan lists as our second core belief:

Equal opportunity requires that each person has the right and the ability to learn in a style and at a pace tailored to their individual needs.

Prior to this change, teachers would determine the level of the curriculum necessary to spark the curiosity of each individual child, but the implementation of this type of classroom uniformity, with the micromanaging it required, was a significant departure from that and drove away several excellent teachers and administrators.  (A regional Illinois Principals Association’s Principal of the Year, for example, left recently - possibly because of the lack of autonomy allowed in our district.)  Since the core belief of teaching “at a pace tailored to students’ individual needs" is 180 degrees away from the major change implemented in 2018, it’s fair to ask – does a Strategic Plan really matter? 

The clear answer is NO!  If you want a better school system, we don’t need platitudes and hyperbole (like - “the development of the whole person is essential”.  Really?  I didn’t know that!), what we need are real plans of action.  WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO RIGHT NOW.  This is not the time for politicians.  It’s the time for work.  So, I’m going to use this as an excuse to give you a few ideas Duane and I have discussed in previous posts that we can and should implement RIGHT NOW, add in a little detail, plus throw in one new idea.

So, here’s the DPS Chalkboard Non-Strategic Plan – action items we can implement by the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year which will help our students succeed.

1.      Move to more homogeneous student grouping.

This is an academic way to say:  group kids with similar reading and math (for example) abilities together, so the teacher can effectively teach to the level of the group.  I’ve written about this before, but the concept comes down to the simple idea (and there is evidence to support this) that kids will learn more if they’re taught at their ability level.  Grouping naturally takes place in high school, but we must recognize differences much earlier, or we will continue to leave some students behind and bore other students.  While heterogeneous classrooms should be the norm, dividing children by ability for math and reading should start as early as first grade.

This notion is not radicle.  Homogeneous grouping is the way most of us went through elementary school, and as mentioned above, it’s the second “Belief” listed in our Decatur Public Schools 2018 Strategic Plan.  How did we get away from this model?  What changed to make us believe every third-grade child would be ready for the exact same math concepts at miraculously the exact same time?

The objection to this concept takes two approaches.  First, someone might say you will create self-esteem problems for the kids that are in lower academic groups.  Our response to this is that the long-term academic issues you create when you continually try to teach a child at a level where they cannot keep up are far worse than the temporary problem an elementary school child might have because they are in a lower reading group.  I was in a lower reading group in second grade, and it may have only motivated me to try harder, but it definitely didn’t have any lasting psychological effect. 

And the second criticism of homogeneous learning is that every child deserves the opportunity to learn at the highest level.  To this criticism, I can only say, we have spent far too long in this country blaming schools and teachers for poor academic performance and it might be time to face the reality that all children do not learn at the same rate.  It might be time to take an approach that recognizes this simple fact.  And lastly, regarding grouping or not grouping children – how’s our heterogeneous approach working out for us?

2.      Move to one High School.

This naturally follows from point one above.  One high school will allow the district to better focus on the needs of multiple academic levels of students, creating more opportunities for the top and bottom quartile of learners.  Additionally, in our extremely difficult hiring environment, we can use economies of scale to reduce our teacher needs.  If both schools currently have 5 math teachers, the new school will most certainly not need 10, even while adding a more diverse curriculum.

One high school would also mean expanded opportunities for extra-curriculars.  Sports opportunities would expand, likewise with music, and every other area where you need larger enrollments to make extra-curricular groups work.

Finally, the integration with our single high school and our excellent Ag Academy will only be easier with one school.  We also propose taking this opportunity to open our Khan World School-like experience (we explored this issue previously here).  Nothing will allow students to learn at a pace tailored to their individual needs more than a Khan World School, self-contained within our one high school.  We are to the point in district-wide enrollment that the decision to close one school does not need a public “referendum”.  When the combined enrollment of our two schools drops below the number of students that used to attend only one of the schools – the idea needs to move from concept to serious discussion of implementation quickly and should be on the immediate agenda of our newly elected school board.

What then becomes of the other ($35 million) school?  This was a short discussion for us – make the other school our Decatur Middle School housing grades 6, 7 & 8.  The infrastructure of Stephen Decatur is awful and a better facility with more square footage will help our middle schoolers.  A new building for these intermediate grades will give kids the opportunity to expand their horizons in many different directions, so we would push for (and have a future article coming on this) more extra-curricular activities in these critical grades.  We would also propose giving the high school teachers who are willing to get recertified (if necessary) a one-time bonus for making the move to middle school.  This middle school change should also allow us to close the other 7^th and 8^th-grade classrooms in the district.  The effort to create small middle schools in other schools, necessitating four middle school teachers in each of these other buildings, was a failed attempt to appease parents that didn’t want their kids to attend Stephen Decatur – and frankly who could blame the parents?  To make this new single middle school concept palatable, we would need to expand the opportunities for our highest quartile of middle school students – give them accelerated options in these grades, allowing these students to advance with a peer group at a rate they wouldn’t otherwise have in a single 30-child 7^th grade, for example.

3.      Ban Cell Phones in the Classroom.

I’ve already written about this here, but this idea is very simple to us.  I would defy anyone to walk the halls of one of the high schools, or through the halls of Stephen Decatur, and look in classrooms at the learning taking place, and tell us that cell phones are not an enormous issue.  Other districts, states, and even countries are addressing this issue – why not Decatur Public Schools?  We are talking about approximately 25 or 30 hours (depending on grade level) out of the week where we would not allow children to have cell phones.  We have heard all the reasons why this is a bad idea – from people that think there is some legal issue involved (there is not), to others that believe kids need to learn how to handle this distraction (why would you set kids up for failure like this), to helicopter parents that need to be in touch with their child 24/7 (we are not pulling all phones out of the school).  I’ve written and discussed this issue enough.  It’s simple – kids will learn more if they are listening to the teacher rather than looking at their phones, and there will be fewer fights in school if we don’t allow cell phones pointing at kids throughout the school day.  So I’ll say it again – ban cell phones in the classroom now.

4.      Develop more Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs.

We have a future article coming on CTE opportunities in a district like ours, but for now, I’ll let the New York City schools Chancellor, David Banks, lay it out for you…

“What you’re seeing all across the nation, this idea that everybody’s just promoting college, college, college.  There’s got to be another way, and another track, and another pathway for kids to be successful.”

Banks went on to emphasize that college may still be the right path for many students. Plus, additional training or education beyond high school is essential for many careers. But he argued that the city’s public schools must better prepare students to transition to the workforce.  What we need is to recognize that all students are different (do you notice a theme in our plan) and give them multiple ways to learn, grow, and flourish in today’s world.

5.      Give teachers and administrators more autonomy.

Finally, we need to move our DPS management style to the type that puts the students first and the employees a very close second.  Employees want autonomy, purpose, and the ability to master their craft.  Daniel Pink discusses these concepts in his excellent management book "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us", and it should be required reading for everyone in a DPS management role.  These are concepts that have been adopted by companies large and small across the world.  We need to move to a culture that emphasizes autonomy and trust, where employees are given the freedom to make more of their own decisions, and in return, they’re expected to take ownership of their mistakes.  We must do a better job of recognizing employees as people with needs and desires if we want to retain our best teachers and administrators.

Alright.  That’s it.  This is not political theater, where you can pretend to move around a few pieces and act like you’re making a difference.  There are 7,000 students and over 500 teachers and school building employees that are counting on the decision-makers in our district to do what is best.  We don’t need another set of community engagement meetings, and long-winded speeches, and goals to “Establish a support network that will identify and address students' physical, social/emotional, and mental health needs to allow each student to reach their full potential”.  Who does this really help?  What should we try and accomplish right now?  Let’s get busy.