COMMENTARY: Bentonville School Impresses

— Even in the era of accountability, many public schools serving advantaged kids just coast, since rich kids will ace standardized tests even if their teachers do very little during the school day.

That’s what makes Bentonville High School so impressive: BHS doesn’t rest on its laurels. My associate, Josh McGee, calculated measures of how much children learn in a year in school, value added, for nearly every public school in Arkansas. I’m spending two years visiting the top performers while researching a book. BHS was among the leaders not only on student achievement but also on value added, what teachers do during the school day and beyond.

I was fortunate enough to spend Nov. 17, 2010, at BHS when Principal Kim Garrett kindly gave me free run of the place.

I talked with 31 administrators, teachers and students.

Conventional wisdom says a school of 3,500 can’t succeed, but what struck me were the staff’s successful efforts to “small down a big school” so that every student has one or a few grownups taking responsibility for them. How does Bentonville High do it?

First, though many schools play lip service to Small Learning Communities (SLCs), Bentonville High School staff seems to take the four SLCs (“Steam, Scrubs, VPAC, and Impact”) seriously.

Over the years they have become part of the culture. The four are fairly independent, with distinct staffs and separate assistant principals whom principal Garrett consciously refers to as “my principals.” In effect Garrett serves as a branch manager, while her principals are the linemanagers. SLCs put key decisions at the lowest levels, where folks know what goes on. That means that instead of a huge school of 3,500, students find themselves in smaller communities of 700 or so, where the principal, counselors and many of the teachers actually do know their names. At the same time, the leadership team as a whole meets frequently to handle brush fires and assure common practices.

Second, within the SLCs are Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in which teachers of the same subject develop and use common assessments and measures, to find and foster what works. I attended one of the Algebra PLC meetings, and was very impressed with how teachers went over student results problem by problem, intending for learning to flow from grade to grade and class to class. They took responsibility for student results (which are already very good) and focused on improvement.

Similarly, school leadership shares student learning data, as well as less formal information, discussing what works, what needs improvement, and how to motivate individual staff and students.

Finally, I liked the generalattitude at the high school.

School teachers and leadership were not just data oriented;

they were also willing to take ideas from the outside, including from parents. For example, the PTO came up with and helped refine the idea of doing course registration on-line to save time.

The day I visited, the staff did after action reviews to see how to improve the process for the spring.

In short, Bentonville High rocks. While “best practices” call for smaller schools, there is a danger to the whole best practices business. On balance smaller schools are better for some kids, but they may be worse for others, and in any event if you have something that is working well, you should be careful about changing it. From what I have heard the benefits of small size don’t really kick in until you get under 1,000 students, so dividing BHS into two might not cut it. It might make sense to keep Bentonville High School as it is, while considering additional options like charter schools or magnet schools to manage enrollment growth and to serve children who for whatever reason, need a fresh start or a different fit.

But then I don’t live in Bentonville. I’ve crunched some numbers and spent one day there. Ultimately the Bentonville community and school board will have to use their own data to decide what works for their kids, while making sure not to mess up the great high school they already have.

ROBERT MARANTO IS THE 21ST CENTURY CHAIR IN LEADERSHIP IN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION REFORM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.

Opinion, Pages 6 on 12/20/2011

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