Growing Hope as a Determinant of School Effectiveness

Abstract

The EdVisions model of secondary schools grew out of the belief that there must be a better match between the educational environment and the core needs of adolescents. Mr. Newell and Mr. Van Ryzin present convincing evidence that focusing on these needs is not at odds with NCLB's focus on raising student achievement. ********** DEFINING an effective school has always placed educators in a difficult position. The passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the rapid growth of state testing systems are complicating matters rather than simplifying them. Standards and standardized tests fail to take account of students' characters or their attitudes toward life and learning. The focus of such measurement is squarely on a single kind of ability at a single point in time. Such data can be useful when diagnosing individual needs in basic skills and knowledge, but they are insufficient when judging the effectiveness of and schools. What we need if we are to judge school effectiveness is a means by which schools can be assessed as cultures that create sets of relationships, norms of behaviors, and values and obligations that lead to the development of healthy and productive adults. Although such elements appear difficult to judge, it is possible to use a series of scientifically sound self-perception surveys in conjunction with a set of school design concepts created to produce growth in the dispositions needed for success in life. Focusing on youth development is a legitimate means of determining the effectiveness of schools. In a previous Kappan article, Dr. James Comer outlined how the Yale Child Study Center Project was able to effect significant academic growth in children when teachers and administrators bought into the value of basing their work on the principles of child and adolescent Comer argued that practices in education that have been developed over the past two decades have been less successful than they might have been because they have focused primarily on curriculum, instruction, assessment, and modes of service delivery. (1) We could not agree more. Our experience reveals that when certain concepts are built into a learning community--concepts that value personhood over ruthless efficiency and encourage student self-directedness and teacher/student ownership instead of top-down hierarchies--then that community can indeed foster healthy development. EdVisions, an intermediary organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create and sustain secondary schools that use teacher ownership and student-directed learning, now has more than six years of experience in designing and implementing schools that pay attention to adolescent development as a means to academic success. Over the years, EdVisions schools have consistently achieved adequate yearly progress (AYP) under NCLB in both reading and mathematics. Moreover, many of the schools have posted additional indicators of success, such as performance levels in the top 25% of comparable schools, and the schools reliably meet NCLB standards for attendance and graduation, despite serving student populations that often have higher-than-average numbers of low-income, special education, and limited-English-proficient students. To support our efforts to expand our network of schools, EdVisions not only has created the design essentials, the characteristics, and the tools by which such schools can be built, but also has constructed a school-wide measurement instrument to assess how well each individual learning community is using the EdVisions toolkit to meet the developmental needs of its students. This instrument is called the Hope Study. The Hope Study was originally designed to evaluate whether our educational setting would produce more positive student outcomes than the traditional model of a secondary school. The basic proposition of our model grew out of the theory of adolescent development known as stage/environment fit, which hypothesizes three core, overarching needs of adolescents: autonomy, belongingness, and competence. …