County schools get grants to boost performance

$6 million contributions will target improvements in procedures, curriculum

‘‘What we need to be able to do is work with all [the] schools,” county schools Superintendent John Deasy said Tuesday during a press conference at the Sasscer Administration Building in Upper Marlboro. ‘‘It’s an investment in a plan that has very specific deliverables.”

The program, which will be piloted at nine schools, will include a system-wide data warehouse that will facilitate communication about procedures and curriculum among the schools.

The money will go toward internal research, the data warehouse and to train teachers and principals in how to use it, said schools spokeswoman Tanzi West.

The school system applied for the grants this past school year, she said.

The program will also give financial incentives to teachers and principals whose schools show academic improvement. Its aim is to improve student achievement and reduce unnecessary work by school administrators.

The pilot schools are Fairmont Heights High, Bowie High, William Wirt Middle, Samuel Ogle Middle, Morningside Elementary, Suitland Elementary, Columbia Park Elementary and Fort Washington Forest Elementary schools, as well as the H. Winship Wheatley Special Education Center, Deasy said.

Schools spokesman John White said as schools improve, they will become more self-governing.

‘‘We [also] have set up a system by which schools can progress into what’s called ‘autonomous zones,’” he said.

As student improvement is demonstrated, there is more freedom in how the curriculum is implemented, he said.

According to the Bethesda-based nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education, Prince George’s County high schools have a graduation rate of just 57 percent.

‘‘We’re going to close the achievement gap [between different groups of students],” said Amber Waller, at-large county school board member, about the performance management system.

According to the 2007 Maryland Report Card, Asians were 80.8 percent proficient in reading and 81.1 percent proficient in math in the Maryland School Assessment tests. American Indians were 68.1 percent proficient in reading and 59.9 percent proficient in math, Whites 83.5 percent in reading and 80.5 percent in math, Hispanics 58.7 percent in reading and 58.5 percent in math, and African-Americans 63 percent in reading and 56.7 percent in math.

As part of the data warehouse component, educators will be trained to use dashboards - data-organizing user interfaces - that will allow them to access information about individual students and track students’ academic progress, which is currently followed through the grading system.

‘‘It’s using data to drive decision-making processes—to ensure what the administration is doing works,” said Joe Siedlecki, program officer for the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. ‘‘They can change things when they aren’t working, not at the end of the [school] year.”

This will help educators reassess students’ needs to keep them from falling behind, he said.

E-mail Anath Hartmann at ahartmann@gazette.net.