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Teacher program pondered

Instructor retention rates higher

By CHARLES LUSSIER
Advocate staff writer

DONALDSONVILLE — In a bid to turn around its image and meet its academic goals, a local charter school group is in the middle of adopting an increasingly popular school reform program developed by former junk bond king Michael Milken and his brother Lowell.

Of the five public schools operated by Advance Baton Rouge, Dalton and Lanier elementary schools and Prescott Middle, all in Baton Rouge, have already adopted the initiative, known as the Teacher Advancement Program, or TAP, sponsored by the Milken Family Foundation.

The faculties of Glen Oaks Middle in Baton Rouge and Pointe Coupee Central High in Morganza plan to vote Tuesday on whether they too will adopt TAP.

Advance Baton Rouge, or ABR, operates at schools that the Louisiana Department of Education has taken over for chronic low academic performance. ABR’s first year, though, was not very successful. Its schools performed no better, and in some grades worse, than the schools they inherited, even though they had half the student enrollment of the schools they replaced.

ABR last spring brought in Hank Shepard, who had led the Algiers Charter School Association in New Orleans, as its new chief executive officer. Shepard is bringing with him TAP, a program that all Algiers schools use.

TAP, formed in 1999, is already in 41 Louisiana schools; 15 more are considering adopting it.

Several faculty members at Pointe Coupee Central High last week visited one of those 41 schools, Donaldsonville High School in Donaldsonville.

Donaldsonville High and Lowery Intermediate are the two Ascension Parish schools that use TAP. In Baton Rouge, Cedarcrest-Southmoor and Claiborne elementary schools also participate in TAP.

Accompanying the teachers on Wednesday’s trip was Pointe Coupee Central High Principal Kim Germany.

Germany was pleasantly surprised. A previous trip to a TAP high school in Algiers was less useful, she said, but Donaldsonville High has much in common with Pointe Coupee.

Both are rural high schools near the Mississippi River with lots of students who are black and living in poverty, and schools that have had difficulty through the years attracting and retaining teachers. Both have middle school grades.

Germany wanted to see how Donaldsonville teachers liked the program.

“I want to use TAP as a recruiting tool for my school, because we have so much (faculty) turnover,” Germany said.

Germany said she thinks Pointe Coupee faculty will vote “yes” on Tuesday.

Avery Moore, a world geography and American history teacher at Pointe Coupee Central, said he liked the camaraderie that he saw among the teachers at Donaldsonville High.

“There is genuineness about what they’re doing,” he said.

The Teacher Advancement Program pulls together several different ideas for improving the teaching profession and puts them into one package:

• A “career ladder” where teachers can make lots more money if they take on added responsibility.

• Much more extensive on-the-job teacher training and support than is the norm.

• Better evaluations of how teachers do their jobs.

• Performance-based pay and bonuses connected partly to increases in student test scores, but also based on other factors settled on by the teachers themselves. In particular, the program relies on “value-added” testing, which aims to see whether children gain at least a year’s worth of learning, regardless of where they start the year.

TAP’s use of performance pay is the best-known aspect of the package. While controversial at first, performance pay has become more mainstream; it has been championed by the Obama administration.

Advance Baton Rouge estimates that adding TAP will cost its schools about $100,000 each per year to implement. The organization is planning to use some of its federal funding, as well as other state and federal grants, to pay for the implementation.

While TAP is popular with many teachers and some of its components have a research base, the whole program has undergone limited outside scrutiny.

Mathematica Policy Research is in the process of just such an evaluation of TAP at several public schools in Chicago. In spring 2009, Mathematica reported on the first year of its five-year inquiry. It found no evidence that TAP schools improved student achievement any more than comparison schools that weren’t using TAP. It did find that the TAP schools were able to retain a higher percentage of teachers than the non-TAP comparison schools.

Louisiana’s TAP office, however, reports that TAP schools in this state generally outpaced non-TAP schools during spring 2009 standardized testing compared to the year before.

Wednesday’s visit to Donaldsonville High focused on how TAP allows teachers to learn from each other to do their jobs better.

Monique Wild, a master teacher at Donaldsonville High, led a weekly “cluster” meeting of middle school teachers at Donaldsonville High, a meeting which the Pointe Coupee teachers sat in on.

Wild, a teacher with a background in English, walked the teachers through some short essays students wrote on topical subjects, including the Manning football family and U.S. Sen. David Vitter’s recent letter to the NFL decrying the league’s effort to stop the sale of T-shirts bearing the phrase “Who Dat” related to the New Orleans Saints.

Wild has been freed from teaching duties to work directly with teachers. At first, she said she hung back and would not correct teachers on the spot, but she is now quick to intervene if she thinks a teacher could improve.