Change is tough anywhere but especially so in public education, where years of tradition, bureaucracy, long-held expectations and teacher autonomy combine to preserve the status quo. But changes have come to the 11 schools singled out by Fort Wayne Community Schools in its LEAD program. The struggling schools haven’t been transformed overnight into top performers, but new approaches that put student learning first have turned them in the right direction.

Visits to North Side High School, Northwood Middle and Abbett Elementary schools show signs of fundamental change:

•Once-skeptical teachers have embraced new ways of teaching. At North Side, half a dozen teachers were attending an optional workshop during their prep period to learn new technology. Abbett teachers Jennifer Dinet and Mandy Smith teach different groups of first-graders, but work closely together, sharing ideas on what works.

•School principals work as instructional leaders, continually dropping in on classrooms in “snapshot” visits to see how students and teachers are interacting. “You don’t see teachers lecturing a lot,” Northwood Principal Adam Swinford said. “The days of standing up and lecturing for 54 minutes don’t work anymore.”

•High school classrooms find every student fully engaged in discussion or activities – no daydreaming or goofing off. Middle school students speak confidently of the expectations and their own role in helping their school succeed.

“I see kids rushing to class,” eighth-grader Emrah Omeragic said. “The way they are teaching us is better.”

Impetus for change

Early 2010 held bleak days for Fort Wayne Community Schools: Budget cuts, teacher layoffs, two schools marked for closing and two others facing state takeover if they didn’t improve. The faint hope of federal Race to the Top cash was crushed and nearly a dozen schools were falling behind in accountability demands.

In most districts, targeting the takeover threat would have been the expected course – addressing problems at North Side and South Side high schools and hoping everything else fell into place.

But FWCS officials took a wider, longer view. The budget crisis and accountability demands combined to fuel the urgency for comprehensive changes. Reform efforts that began as early as 2002 – administrative training, reading instruction reform, full-day kindergarten and more – became the foundation. From those efforts, LEAD – Leading Educational Achievement with Distinction – was born.

In addition to North Side and South Side, Wayne High School, three middle schools and five elementary schools were designated as LEAD schools, serving as laboratories for best practices eventually extended districtwide. Northrop and Snider high schools were tapped for continuing changes under a high school redesign process already under way.

Most of the principals in what were to become LEAD schools were replaced and, with concessions from the teachers’ union, the district laid off all teachers in the 11 schools and invited them to reapply for their current positions or new ones. The process resulted in a harrowing summer, with some veteran teachers interviewing for the same jobs they had held for years and younger teachers let go by budget cuts scrambling to land a job in a LEAD school.

Then the real work began.

LEAD teachers returned to work early, learning a whole new approach to curriculum, instruction and assessment. They were taught to interpret data and how to use it to guide their teaching. A new school governance system was established, with students at the top, supported by classroom teachers, instructional coaches and teachers trained to intervene when students struggle. Educators working directly with students would be backed by a principal, academic support personnel, area administrators, a school turnaround consultant, Superintendent Wendy Robinson and the school board.

“The worry I had as superintendent, with so many ties to the community, was that it took a group of people working the hardest they could and saying, ‘Good enough isn’t good enough. You’ve got to ramp it up a notch,’ ” Robinson recalled in an interview last week. “And the scale we did it on was so big. But how do you do just North Side and South Side and not all of the schools that feed into them?”

Today, the ambitious undertaking is winding up its first school year. Success will be measured in standardized test scores due next month, but signs suggest the district might have pulled off a remarkable feat. When Tony Bennett, superintendent of public instruction, comes to the city June 21 for public hearings at North Side and South Side, he isn’t likely to hear the “don’t take over our schools” pleas he’s heard recently in South Bend and Indianapolis. Instead, he should hear of extensive work, pride and progress.

The process hasn’t been entirely smooth. The overhaul gave LEAD principals the authority to choose their entire staffs, so that nearly every school started the year with as much as half of the staff new to the building. The change was unsettling for some. Students, especially high school students, were unhappy with tough new rules and a new schedule.

The “snapshot visits” by building administrators, turnaround consultant Ardys Morgan, area administrators and even, occasionally, Robinson herself, were viewed suspiciously by teachers unaccustomed to close supervision. Early on, some derisively referred to them as “drive-bys.”

But by the second semester, a new attitude seemed to emerge. Teachers began seeing the visits as an opportunity for helpful feedback on their instructional methods, and students began increasingly to recognize their responsibilities in learning.

At North Side and South Side, where state officials were due to make a return visit to see whether improvements were under way, an attitude of “bring it on – we can’t wait to show you how we’ve changed” took root. When the observers visited, some students were even disappointed when the visitors didn’t drop in on their classes, according to North Side Principal Chad Hissong.

Unfinished task

Robinson is hesitant to declare success, but she’s clearly pleased.

“It’s very hard not to get extremely emotional about this work,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve had a year where we’ve demanded more, pushed, prodded, challenged people, had all of the external things going on, like the legislature. And people do have personal lives going on. I can never, ever express just how proud I am.”

The superintendent is quick to credit teachers for the success, with a note of caution for school districts looking for a magic bullet.

“I firmly believe that any superintendent who tried to do it alone couldn’t. Or any board who tries to mandate change without teacher buy-in,” she said. “Those teachers own it, and they are working hard.”

Robinson is particularly proud that no students were moved in the LEAD process. Cost-saving, not academic improvement, was the aim in closing Elmhurst High School and Pleasant Center Elementary School last year.

“We didn’t move a single child,” she said. “We moved the adults. It has everything to do with changing the expectations of the adults.”

If not intended, it’s still a subtle rejoinder to reformers at the state level, who insist they are putting students first but push for changes that will uproot them for unproven charters, parochial and private schools with policies that seem to favor certain groups of adults.

There are still challenges at the LEAD schools, Robinson insists, and work demanded districtwide to ensure no FWCS school will ever be at risk of state intervention. But she allows that a culture change has taken place in the 11 schools – a difficult task in public education.

Board President Mark GiaQuinta agrees.

“I don’t think we would ever have gotten the reviews from the state (from the January visits to North Side and South Side) had the LEAD program not been put in place,” he said. “We would have been lumped in with everyone else. They said these two schools have separated themselves from the pack. This is real change, not cosmetic change.”

But GiaQuinta also insists more is needed. He described “pockets of resistance” from teachers in some buildings.

“Frankly, the district has to be a place where there is no place to hide for teachers who believe ‘it’s my job to put it out there; it’s their job to learn it,’ ” he said.