U-46 'cluster' plan pays off for school performance

Imagine being told that instead of reporting to an intermediate manager, you would have to answer directly to the chief executive officer of your company.

Something like that happened to five Elgin-area elementary school principals last year.

Officials in Elgin Area School District U-46 realized last year that newly appointed Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education Carmen Rodriguez would have her hands full with 40 elementary schools.

So they divided the schools into five groups, or clusters, based on student performance and other factors. Each cluster reported to a different administrator. Five schools known as "Cluster A" - Highland, Hillcrest, Lowrie, Garfield and Parkwood - were to report directly to Superintendent Jose Torres.

"No one was going to get fired," Torres said this week, "but people felt, 'Gosh, we report to the superintendent.'"

The pressure appears to have worked. Seventeen U-46 elementary schools saw notable gains in reading and math this year; all five Cluster A schools were on that list, Torres said.

Parkwood Elementary School in Hanover Park saw the most dramatic increases of the Cluster A schools, improving its reading and math numbers by more than 10 percentage points. The rest of the Cluster A schools were in Elgin; Highland stood out among this group, boosting reading numbers by 10 percentage points and math by almost five points.

"I am really proud of what we did," Highland Principal Steve Johnson said. "Last year we were really able to take the resources and support; together with the faculty, they made a big difference."

The difference, District U-46 officials said, was not only the greater accountability (reporting directly to Torres) but also additional support at the five schools for literacy and behavior.

The district hired a firm to conduct a literacy audit of its Cluster A schools (along with some other elementary schools) to identify areas of improvement during the first half of the 2009-10 school year.

The schools discovered they needed to do more work on phonics - teaching kids to match the right sounds to letters and combinations of letters.

The Cluster A schools purchased literacy materials, implemented additional phonics instruction in kindergarten through second grade, increased collaboration within grade levels, did more staff training and met with parents to teach them how to reinforce reading lessons at home.

"We expect students to read every night at home," Johnson said. "That's part of every student's homework."

The schools also piloted a robust Response to Intervention program (RTI), an initiative that identifies struggling students and uses research-based methods to tackle the areas where they need extra help. "We called it RTI on steroids," Torres says.

Now, the challenge is sustaining those gains as state standards grow more stringent and U-46, which made significant budget cuts last year, has fewer resources with which to work.

"It is going to be challenging," Torres admitted this week. "There is no magic bullet. It's about collaboration, teachers looking at data and making decisions based on that data."