How a "bad news" summative designation can lead to great results

Dr. James L. Hayes, principal of Harvard Park Elementary in Springfield, talks about the "Comprehensive" summative designation his school received in 2019, and how IL-Empower helped his campus achieve a vast improvement. 

Listen to the end for surprise positive outcomes that reach beyond the gradebook.

Our theme music is by José Rivera.

Transcript

How a "bad news" summative designation can lead to great results 

RHODES  00:05 

Hello, we are the Illinois State Board of Education and we love Illinois schools. I'm Dusty Rhodes in the Communications Department at ISBE.  

The 2022 Illinois Report Card has just been released for the first time since 2019, it includes summative designations. That means some school leaders are discovering that they have a targeted or comprehensive designation. The news can seem discouraging, but it really shouldn't be. To help explain why, we sat down with the principal who now says the comprehensive designation his school got a few years ago has resulted in positive changes.  

I guess first, I just need you to introduce yourself.  Sure. 

HAYES  00:45 

Jim Hayes, building principal here at Harvard Park Elementary School in Springfield, Illinois. A little bit of background about myself… I'm originally from Chicagoland area, came down to Springfield to pursue a masters and a PhD from University of Illinois Springfield and Illinois State University. I was always high school, taught high school. I did some admin work in high school. There was some movement in the district. So I was asked to come to an elementary school.  

I had no background in elementary school whatsoever. And the first year was an assistant principalship and in the second year, they asked me to stay as the head principal. And I've been here -- this is my 10th year as head principal at Harvard Park School. 

RHODES  01:30 

Okay, tell me a little bit about Harvard Park Elementary first. 

HAYES  01:35 

Yeah, Harvard Park Elementary School is on the Southeast side of Springfield. Depends on where you really look, depends on where the data is coming from, anywhere from 90 to 95% low-income students. We are one of the largest elementary schools in Springfield, at about 400 students for enrollment. We pull kids from all different walks of life, right. We've got kids that are foster kids that are getting bused from all over the city of Springfield, to a lot of your blue-collar type of families that live in the neighborhood here. We are a very old school. It was founded in 1911 and so the same as the neighborhood. So a lot of history, a lot of tradition, we try to get the community involved with everything we do. 

RHODES  02:30 

So in 2019, you found out that Harvard Park Elementary had received a comprehensive designation. From the State Board, correct? 

HAYES  02:37 

Yep. So your first initial response to that, for me anyway, was disappointment. It was sad, because here we had been working, at that point, it was like my sixth or seventh year. We felt we had kind of worked through a lot of the struggles. So, I would say collectively, it was… it was a slap in the face. It was just like, bam, what? After we kind of got off the ledge a little bit -- that took some time, you know? it took the staff some time to do that -- we had a lot of standing meetings and had a lot of very, very passionate conversations about all different levels of education, you know, about what they were doing in the classroom. We started pointing fingers at the district, we started pointing fingers at the state, we started really kind of self-destructing, so to speak.  

But once that dust settled, things started to turn around and started to look good, because then we started hearing about all these additional supports were going to get. Even though we didn't quite understand what we could do, and how we could use those supports, we felt comforted in the fact that, okay, hey, you know what, we've been asking for help here at Harvard Park for a while. And, and here it is, right? So here's part of what our ask has been, you know, we're low income or high needs, high poverty. We don't have a lot of the things that more affluent schools have. So great. Let's start digging into some of these things that we could use. 

RHODES  04:33 

So it sounds like at first, your first reaction was to start pointing fingers, find blame outside of the school. But then you realize that the school had been asking for help, and this could be it. 

HAYES  04:46 

Yeah, so I'll be honest, when we switched from No Child Left Behind to this new format, I wasn't very astute to what was going on. I was in the middle of my PhD so I didn't spend a lot of time with what was going on in the state. I'm barely surviving here, personally and professionally. But once we started realizing what that designation truly meant, and looked at the data, I'm a data guy. How the data was pulled? Where was it pulled from? Where that designation actually came from? It was less scary. It was a smaller pill to swallow and it made a lot more sense. Our designation made a lot more sense to us.  

Yeah, we are comprehensive because of this subgroup, because of the lack of growth here. And then what does that mean? Well, that lack of growth could mean a couple of different things. It could mean, A, B, or C or D, E, F; we need to figure out which one it is. So once we got more in touch with the designation, once we started seeing, basically, from the ISBE website, and all the different channels that you can go to, we started seeing all the supports that were there, and we started getting excited. Like holy cow, we're getting help from the State of Illinois. This is a real deal here.  

I mean, this is the state, right? It wasn't about shutting down the doors. It wasn't about, am I going to be removed as a principal for being a failing principal, you know. It was that for about five minutes, but then after we got over that, and we got past that, we started getting excited about what that designation would mean for us. 

RHODES  06:35 

Okay, let's fast forward the next year. You got what designation? 

HAYES  06:39 

So actually, the next year, we moved up to commendable. We moved up to commendable. 

RHODES  06:44 

And how did that feel? 

HAYES  06:45 

At first, we thought it was a mistake. We had another stand up meeting. Like what? But again, back to, we didn't quite understand what moving up to that designation meant. So here we were thinking that it was just simply bottom of the state, middle, middle, higher part of the state. But then when we started looking into what commendable meant, okay, we definitely looked at commendable because everybody, there's no way they're going to be there. We were just trying to get out of comprehensive, right? So we started looking at that. And then we went and looked at our data. And lo and behold, yeah, at that point, it was math. We had shown more than 50% in multiple subgroups of growth in math.  

So then when you understand what that meant, well, that means that we did a better job than 50% of those students' peers in the entire state. And looking at their averages of their group. So then it's like, well, that makes sense. And then you start talking about, if you're at very low comprehension, you have much more room to grow. And then people are like, wait a minute. This actually makes sense, the way this state set this up, the way they set up the rubrics, taking the averages, real time averages, so it's not just like, here's comprehensive, you have to meet this threshold. It's not like that. It's a moving target almost.  

And so now we're like, we're really being compared to our peers, in real time, in real economic hardships and then when you get into COVID, we even felt more, you know, comforted in the fact that everybody's going through the same hardships as we were. So that helped out a lot. 

RHODES  08:47 

We're not actually trying to take over schools or just shut anybody down. We want kids to succeed.  

HAYES  08:57 

And, and part of why I was excited, even to do this podcast, is because we were in that same boat of ignorance. We didn't know we didn't understand all the nuances with the new designations. And, and I'm still learning things. I mean, I just learned yesterday that I could get online and request a one-on-one consultation with Rae Clementz, right?  

RHODES 

Yes.  

HAYES 

And I'm just like, what? Bam, done, set it up, November 10. Let's go. It's just, the more and more we as a team, me personally, as a leader, dig into all of the bells and whistles that ISBE is offering, the more we get excited because we feel more supported. That's the bottom line. 

RHODES  09:51 

How does your staff feel now that you've gotten a better summative designation? 

HAYES  09:57 

So at that point, you know, we were flying high, right? We capitalized on it. We talked about it. We looked at the data. We figured out what we did to get that growth.  

RHODES  10:12 

What did you do?  

HAYES  10:13 

We raised our math scores.  

RHODES  10:15 

How did you do that? 

HAYES  10:16 

Well, through the use of the funding that we got from Illinois Empower, and it was a significant amount for us. I mean, it was $100,000. That first year, I think it was even more, but then we had to give some to our partner, right. We got to choose a partner. We went with AIR, American Institute of Research. From there, well, so that was, that was one part of it, their involvement with our planning structures that we had in the school was one part of it. The other part was being able to shuffle some money, other money around, and then fill that void with Illinois Empower money to then allow me to bring in more people. 

RHODES  11:00 

Okay, so basically, Illinois Empower is like money with strings attached, that has to be used specifically to heal that group that's underperforming. 

HAYES  11:15 

 Closing the achievement gap. Yep. So we, in our school improvement plan, would put in targeted areas, right? So you had targets in literacy, math, and then what we call SEL. It’s the climate of the school. And so we look at our data we see -- and this is usually done annually, or at least it should be -- and we say, here's where we need to hit. Here's our deficit areas. Now, what do we need?  

Well, for us, we believe in people, not programs. I say that all the time. We don't need more programs. We need creative, like-minded individuals working together to achieve a common goal. And what's our goal? Our goal is to move these kids academically, behaviorally, socially and emotionally. So my job and the job of my team is to figure out what resources do we need. A lot of resources are spent on people. But a lot of those resources were also spent on material items.  

To bolster our curriculum, we've started seeing a trend with our math curriculum especially. And so that told us we need to supplement our math curriculum with outside sources, outside activities, outside skills. So we used some of these resources to bolster that person. But before we had Illinois Empower funds, those skills and resources were just going to the classroom teachers, for them to utilize. With Illinois Empower funds, we were able to hire not teachers, so paraprofessionals, right, teaching assistants, classroom attendants, to then work with student groups in math, in reading.  

That I feel is where we got our biggest bang for our buck. It was efficient, it was effective and another piece to it was making sure that we knew how to run those small groups. That was something else that AIR helped us with. So a portion of our money automatically had to go to a partner. We got to pick the partner, right? We picked them. We've had an amazing relationship with these guys. I mean, like, first name, phone calls, emails, texting, come to my house, hang out type of thing. 

RHODES  14:04 

Did you know them before?  

HAYES  14:06 

No.  

RHODES  14:07 

Okay. 

HAYES  14:10 

But I mean, yeah, not like best friends, right? We're not having an over for birthday parties or anything like that. But if they're in town, and we can make it happen, we'll meet up for lunch. So they were very instrumental not only with us, but with other designated schools at the district level, teaching us about short cycles of data inquiry, right, nothing new. That's PDSA, plan, study, do, act cycles, right?  

At first that was forced. You know, it's forced upon us that we got to do this. Kicking and screaming the whole way. Data was a four-letter word here for a very long time, day to day, because we didn't understand how to use the data. We didn't understand that data was not harmful, it was helpful.  

What AIR did for me as a building principal who is a data nerd, I mean, I have a PhD in something that would bore you to death, right? Most people would fall asleep reading my dissertation. But to me, data is important, right? Data driven decisions are what make things move, growth, and kids. But what AIR did, what our partners did for us, again, back to what we were able to buy, purchase -- here we go, here's the whole package.  

And now the last piece of the puzzle, was feeling comfortable with utilizing, using and driving the school based on data. Fast forward now, post pandemic, even, we are crazy about our data. It's insane. If I showed you what we've created with Google Docs, and links, and increased levels of progress monitoring -- which is, again, short cycle data analysis, right, that's all it is -- your head would blow up, your head would explode. I'm not kidding. But data is now something we get excited about.  

So we created this classroom data tool, me and my coaches, boom, here we go. It started when Google first came out, we had a collaboration log, I presented it to the principal, the district, it was like creme de le creme 10 years ago, right? Here, this young principal created this log where committees can all put down and all see real time needs wants action items, miscellaneous notes. Whoa! The district started with a collaboration hour, one hour a week. And people freaked, like what are we supposed to do? Teachers are going to be on their own for an hour, what? Like, no, here's what we need them to do, we designate and we as a district have come a long way with this one hour week, too. But we designated committees to give action items to team levels on what they need them to do. So my ILT, my instructional learning team, boom, boom, boom. My behavior team called BBSS, 3rd grade team, 4th grade team, boom, boom, boom. So that has morphed from 10 years ago to just this colossal data, that was more record keeping, right that collaboration log. But that opened the door.  

Then when we got this training, we all knew what PDSAs are, if you have a master's degree in education, you know what that is, right? Take a class, it's like required. But it was always done with like, useless data. We were never getting down to the nitty gritty until we started talking to AIR and they started showing us what we can do. And then we got excited with data. And then we started figuring out ways we could pull and get more data. So we did things like I would have, I would have a teacher, slightly modify her math block, using MAP data, to start doing some creative things with skill based groups. You know, and let's do it for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and see how those kids are doing those skills. We also did stuff like we would, I wrote a grant, an SEL grant. And we would have paid teachers for their lunch and their prep. Without any assignment that's their time, so I pay them. And we had a team that would pull kids that were in detention during lunchtime, and start doing SEL groups, and then tracking those kids’ behavior data. And it started getting like teachers started being in competitions with one another over who could get more creative with how to pull, decipher, and then use and drive their instruction, based off of data, not curriculum.  

Before it used to be up here's the curriculum. You know, this day this day, you know, back was planning, boom, boom, boom. Now, when we, when we plan, we go to our classroom data tool. From there, we can go to different links that teachers are collecting this data. Real time data on their kids from last week and change groups. Move kids classes during core, so math, reading, writing, oh no, you need to go to this group that this teacher is doing, because now it's also led to hey, let's take these people that we've got, these interventionists, and put them in the classroom and have them start teaching. I've got interventionists that are, you know, came into the school with very little educational background, that are now going back to school to become teachers because they're good. They are making significant gains with their kids. And it's like, they're like, wow, this is amazing stuff.  

We've also piloted a co-teaching model here. So last year, we had one of our resource teachers co-teach with a fourth and third grade classroom. And they created even more spreadsheets on how to collect data. They're collecting attendance data. From that attendance data, this year, we created an attendance team. That now, well, let me in let me back up now we've got co-teaching going on in four classes this year. And now we look at these kids in these, these only these core co-teaching classes. And we pair them up with like a check-in, in the mornings with adults, based on this attendance data that they're collecting. So that's, that's, that's where we're at now.  

I also would add, that the district has seen what we're doing. And they have now offered us more planning money. So I've gone to them and say, hey, you know, I did this co-teaching model. Last year, we had two classrooms. I really think we could do more with it. If I could give the teachers an extra hour or two a week in planning. Do it. Don't tell the whole world about it, you know, but whatever, right? Because now more teachers are doing it. So it's not a secret. 

RHODES  22:09 

And you've got the data that that proves the result, or I mean, that's one really cool thing about data is that it can help you in an argument. 

HAYES  22:20 

Completely removes all opinions. It's subjective, it's no more subjective based on what you believe is going on in the classrooms. It's not observational data. It's not walkthrough data, which is what we were, we were like relying on, right. You know, you do a walkthrough, you do an evaluation, 20 minutes in a classroom, you know, and then I as an instructional leader, and she was telling teacher what she's doing right and wrong. But when we can now pull classroom collected, teacher leveled classroom collected data, the excuses have been removed. There's no more room for this data is horrible. Where did they get this data from? Oh, it's not accurate. Oh, it's not reported right way. It's not recorded the right way. It's like no, that that has been removed.  

And now I've got teachers coming to me middle of the day, when they get results back from something that they created an assessment that they created based off of a district assessment. But because they had extra planning time, they were able to create skill groups, based on deficits, kids’ deficits, and then scaffold those with all these resources that we were able to purchase through Illinois Empower money. And now we're seeing kids who -- three, four years ago, couldn't write a sentence -- are writing when they don't, they're not even expected to write. Like they are now using these skills that we want them to use in trying to find answers out.  

RHODES  23:54 

So cool.  

HAYES  23:55 

The possibilities are endless. And so now one of the teachers last year, that did this co-teaching model said I want to do it again, but I want to loop. So she's looping. And now we're trying to show and it's early still, right? So only October, but we're seeing kids on district assessments compared to their other... I have got three classrooms at every grade level and it's still early -- I want to preface it, it’s still early, so it could be a fluke -- but we're seeing kids’ proficiency levels increase in math and reading, in this one class that did this looping, that did the co-teaching last year and this year, two extra hours a week of teaching. Those teachers are rockstars, people not programs. And now we're trying to plant the seed and start this chain of teachers moving up with their kids and going back every 3-4 years. Well, it's going be too hard, but you're going be an amazing teacher. You're going to know what your kids learned last year, after a first time through that cycle, you're going to know what they need to know next year. Think about the possibilities. And it all goes back to, in my opinion, this catalyst that we got, this boost that we got, from Illinois Empower from the state, from our designation. 

RHODES  25:23 

From your bad designation. 

HAYES  25:24 

I mean, not to talk too much about this one particular class, but I think we found like that that secret sauce, the secret recipe, to closing this achievement gap. I really do. I mean, we've got kids now that we think might do well on the gifted test.  

RHODES  25:45 

How did the kids feel about it?  

HAYES  25:47 

That's a really good question.  

RHODES  25:48 

Can the kids tell that they're growing? 

HAYES  25:53 

I would say based on their excitement level, so they're excited. Right?  

RHODES  26:01 

Can their families tell? 

HAYES  26:03 

I would think so. I would think so.  

Another piece that we do with this particular class and other classes that are doing... The kids will track their own progress. MAP helps us with that tremendously. So we take MAP three times a year -- fall, winter, and spring and we just basically set goals, the kids will set a goal. What do we need to do to achieve this goal? Well, you need to work on math computation, you need to work on fluency, you need to get your stamina up in reading, right? These are things, these are definite concrete skills that we not just run faster, right? A track coach can't tell somebody to run faster. They have to say, loosen up your arms, spread out your stride, you know, specifics, so that these kids can now look at their goal, and say, okay, it comes this assessment, let's see how I do. And they're starting to show mastery.  

And so also, principals with students who don't listen all the time, which happens in every school in America, we're seeing less and less behavior problems. I would venture to say, in my opinion, 80% of behavior problems stem from kids not feeling supported, not wanting to feel stupid, not wanting to not know what's going on in the classroom. You know, peer pressure.  

So, I mean, we don't have any kids in the building today. And that's great for this purpose. But normally, when we have kids in this building, years past and slowly decreased, we'd have all kinds of kids being sent to the office or coming down the office. Some of them throwing fits, and enraged in their downstairs and just, we're not seeing as frequent and as large of an amount of kids that are displaying these types of behaviors. They're still there, we still have meltdowns, and we still have fights. Don't get me wrong. But we're seeing a decrease in behaviors, outlying behaviors. 

RHODES  28:22 

How do you define success? 

HAYES  28:26 

How do we define success? Well, I don't think we do. I think the data define success. I mean, that's when we say, you know, this is the skill we want to work on. And we want the kid to achieve this particular, this class. Then when we do that assessment, or when we see the kids meeting that, that test’s a success. When kids are writing letters to each other, apologizing to one another, that’s success. When we've got kids that ask to stay in for lunch and recess to work on assignments, that to me is success.  

You know, our mission is to create productive citizens that have critical thinking skills and problem solving skills that will make them successful throughout their life. So that to me is what we're trying to do here at Harvard Park. 

RHODES  29:23 

That was Dr. James Hayes, Principal of Harvard Park Elementary School in Springfield District 186. To learn more about your school's summative designation, and Illinois Empower, visit our website that's isbe.net/il-empower. Thanks for listening. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai