The Echo

Since late spring, Mr. Look has been overseeing a dramatic shakeup at Shawnee that is meant to turn around years of anemic academic achievement at the school and help fulfill U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s $3.5 billion mandate to fix the nation’s most chronically underperforming schools over the next three years. If Mr. Look doesn’t produce improved academic results in the school year that commences Aug. 17, he will lose his job at Shawnee.

“Some days, I’m feeling like I need performance-enhancing drugs to make the kinds of changes that people say will take at least three years to do,” said Mr. Look, a Louisville native who has led Shawnee since August 2008. “Well, I have one year.”

Mr. Look’s superiors in the 98,000-student Jefferson County school district—which includes the city of Louisville—have similar misgivings about what, realistically, can be delivered, especially on such a compressed timeline and using what many educators argue are unproven strategies. Six of the city’s schools, including Shawnee, are undergoing the turnaround interventions.

“We don’t disagree that something has to happen in these schools and that we’ve got a great opportunity with more urgency, funding, and potentially more-focused support,” said Joseph C. Burks Jr., an assistant superintendent who oversees the 21 high schools in the district. He is Mr. Look’s boss.

“But why not give people more than a year to start?” Mr. Burks said. “Very few people, if any, know how to turn a school around dramatically in one year. We are in desperate need of good training on how to do this.”

The most disruptive change—replacing half of Shawnee’s teaching staff—took place last spring, though those teachers who aren’t returning to the school were not fired, and most transferred to another campus in the district. The turnover in faculty was required by the federal rules of the “turnaround” model that Shawnee is using as its method for school improvement. Mr. Look recruited nearly all of the 25 teachers who will be new to Shawnee this fall. Most of them are experienced instructors. He still has few openings left to fill, though, including an instructional assistant and someone to run the school’s ROTC program.

With the teaching team mostly assembled, Mr. Look planned a retreat for them late last month to lay out the school’s priorities for the next 10 months and get the teachers fired up for the high-stakes year that awaits them. But first, they have to learn one another’s names. The entire social studies department is new to Shawnee. Five of six English teachers are new.

Roderick Pack, 28, is Shawnee’s new chairman of the social studies department... “The amount of intensity in how all of us at Shawnee care about the students and what’s at stake is really amazing and has me very optimistic about the school’s prospects,” Mr. Pack said. “At the same time, we can’t just get caught up in the monitoring that will be going on and worrying constantly about what the test scores are. That won’t work. We’ve got to really teach these students and have expectations for them beyond a score on a state test.”

MORE HERE:  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/08/04/37kyturnaround_ep.h29.html?tkn=RSWFfDulozUJnCIQKknmKX10UKBkA1x%2F3vhu&cmp=clp-edweek