The real test Bouncing back from disaster Lucio Padilla
“In God we trust.
Everyone else must bring their data,”
said the presenter to a room
full of administrators.
And my instincts told me that
the statement was wrong.
But a second later, I noticed that
everyone was nodding in agreement.
So then, so did I.
The year was 2007. It was at the heart of
the “No Child Left Behind” era.
And it was my first year as a principal.
And the second week of school, our local
newspaper published an article titled,
“Scores Equals Success.”
And in this article, it referenced many
of the success stories
from schools across the Valley,
but it also included a list under the
label, “Bottom of the Barrel.”
And my school, Jefferson Elementary,
was at the bottom of the barrel.
Lowest performing elementary school
in the county.
During this week, I received several
calls from angry parents.
You see in this year, our district had
opened up a brand new school
and 20% of our students that resided
within our school boundaries
were now part of the new school,
and parents that still resided
within our boundaries
called and demanded angrily that
I help them have their child be moved
to the new school.
Because as they stated,
this was the worst school.
I cut out that newspaper clipping of
“Bottom of the Barrel,”
taped it to my desk
to serve as a sense of motivation.
I was motivated by the opportunity to
turn around a lower performing school,
I was motivated by the stark criticism
of the community at large,
and I was committed to research
and to following best practices,
and this included being data-driven.
The state accountability system at the
time
had identified us as a Program
Improvement School,
and to be able to exit Program
Improvement,
you need to meet your state and federal
targets for two consecutive years.
This is something that our community
wanted, we wanted it badly,
because it would be a symbol of success.
And after one year, we achieved
minimum growth,
but by our second year,
we had met both our targets.
We got a little taste of success.
We got excited, we felt confident,
we were more driven now to use
data to drive our instruction,
we felt it in the air that this was
gonna be our year.
But about thirty days before the
state testing window opened,
we left for Spring Break.
And on that Sunday, that Easter Sunday,
April 4 2010,
our community was hit
with a 7.2 earthquake.
The earthquake shook our campus so hard
that the cement soffits
fell and shaved the doorknob.
We suffered the most damage
of any school in the county.
Luckily nobody was there.
One quick tour of the campus and you
knew
that that week from Spring Break
that we’d be off wasn’t gonna be
enough for us to be
able to resume school.
We’d be away from our campus
for an unknown period of time.
And after two weeks, several of our
teachers worried about the impact
that this would have on our test scores
and our ability to exit Program
Improvement, our ability to feel success.
I began to reach out to students and met
with them in our public library,
providing several academic sessions,
trying to keep the rhythm going,
trying to continue to prepare them.
We returned back on May 12, missing 23
days of school,
and missing our state testing window.
Our K-1st grade students were distributed
among three of the local schools,
neighboring schools,
and our students in grades 2nd-6th
returned to the original campus,
using the modular buildings around
the perimeter of the main campus
with a wooden wall separating them,
and our cafeteria, outside.
We took an administrative state test
on the last three days of school
and we left wondering what impact this
would have on our scores.
When we returned from summer,
we learned that our scores would
be considered invalid,
that they would never score them, that we
would never know the results,
and that although they wouldn’t count for
us, they certainly counted against us.
As we reverted back to phase
1 of Program Improvement,
this was disappointing and
disheartening for our school community
because we felt that success
was within reach,
and we were robbed of this
opportunity to feel success.
But we couldn’t dwell
on this for too long
because we knew that the rebuilding
process would start soon
and we needed to come together.
We were rattled but we’d be more focused
than ever
on providing a great educational learning
experience for our students.
And this was the beginning of a
transformational period for me
as a leader and as an educator.
Over the next two years, where we served
students changed by year by year,
and that second year, our 2nd-6th
grade students were bussed across town
to an old abandoned, deteriorating former
school campus,
one that had no library because we had
no room for a library,
one where we couldn’t provide tutoring,
because we needed to bus students
across town immediately after school,
one that lacked proper phone lines
and internet service
around some areas of the campus,
but this didn’t matter, because we looked
for new opportunities.
We started to invest in technology.
We started asking ourselves, how can we
provide voice and choice for our students?
How can we re-think what we’re
doing with instruction?
And we began a student ambassador group.
Our student ambassador group were
very eager to provide tours
of all our visitors in the media
that wanted to know how our students
were adapting to our current conditions.
They were eager to show what we were
doing academically,
what we were doing with
technology as well,
and they had a news broadcast where
they would inform our students
about the current progress of the
rebuilding and remodernization process
of our school, and also about
current student events and activities.
Our school demonstrated tremendous amount
of perseverance, of unity, of culture.
It was beginning to amplify student
voice and provide an authentic audience,
all things that were not measured.
But it didn’t matter, I didn’t care.
I no longer cared about test scores,
and I only cared about our students
and about our community.
We had a successful re-opening
of our school campus,
and I stayed on for two more years
serving as their principal.
For the last five years I’ve been
at the district office.
And at the district office I’ve had the
opportunity to have
access to some of the leading minds
in education,
and a tremendous amount of
opportunity
to reflect and rethink about
my time at Jefferson,
and many things have been revealed to me.
You see, now I know that while the
physical building was being rebuilt
and remodernized, it wasn’t the only
thing that was being rebuilt.
My leadership as an educator and
as a leader was being built.
The leadership capacity of our staff
and our community was being built.
We were resillient, it built
character, it built pride,
we no longer were the school and nobody
wanted to be at.
Our staff, parents, and students were
proud to be Jefferson Tigers.
So I’ve learned many lessons since then.
I’ve learned that the data driven
mentality that I had
led me to narrow the curriculum for our
students.
I’ve learned that the instruction
that we’re providing was very scripted,
very explicit, but also very
irrelevant to our students.
I learned that our assessment practices
were designed for short-term learning,
as opposed to deep and powerful
learning experiences.
And I now question the success that
I thought we had
the year that we exited
Program Improvement.
I began to rethink my
definition of success.
As a leader, my focus on being data-driven
was well intended.
But the realities were that our
instructional schedule
was predominantly about English, Language
Arts, and Math,
and very little about Science, Social
Studies, the Arts, STEM,
project-based learning.
It was also very focused on
our rising stars,
the group of students that were
right below the bar,
that we gave very targeted instruction
and intervention
to help them move above the bar
so it could help us achieve our scores.
But at the cost and the neglect of not
providing the same equal attention
to our students that needed us the most:
our students that were below basic
and far below basic.
As a leader I played the game.
I played the game that was made for adults
to satisfy adults,
but at the cost and expense
of our students,
one that would cause them to be
more and more
disenchanted and disengaged with schools.
I now know that “scores” does
not equal success.
I now know that “In God we trust.
Everyone else must bring their data,”
only leads to a culture of distrust.
Moving forward I know that in many
educational communities
it’s still very strong the
will to being driven by data,
but moving forward, I want to be an
advocate for students and staff.
I want to be an advocate that we come
together as a community
and articulate what are our hopes
and dreams for our students,
to assess our objectives and
everything that we do,
to ask ourselves: What is our
primary objective?
What inspires us, and what inspires our
students to get up every morning
to come to school?
I want to engage as many people as I can
in conversations,
I want to foster curiosity, ask,
What would happen if?
What if we did this? What if we did that?
I want to work collaboratively.
I want to ask, is the data guiding
us or leading us astray?
The picture here is the one where
our students were engaged
filming their solar racing cars
as they were racing them.
And it was days like these, like when they
built their solar ovens,
and got to bring their own food of choice
from home and cook it,
it was days like these like when they
focused on project-based learning
and were working toward converting their
school into their dream school,
it was the days that they were working
with multimedia…
that they were the most engaged,
that they were learning the most.
My data was seeing their eyes lit with
excitement
and to see how engaged they were.
I want to end with a quote from Michael
Rosen, who says,
“First they said they needed data about
the children
to find out what they’re learning,
then they said they needed data
about the children
to make sure that they’re learning,
then the children only learned what could
be turned into data,
then the children became data.”
Thank you very much.