Transcript: Supt. Osborne's Opening Day Speech

Welcome back! It is great to be here with you. Being an educator, I love September. It is a chance to begin again, to renew our efforts and to once again pick up the journey to a better future.

Those of you who are new among us, will you please stand? You have joined a truly fascinating place, a school district with a history of exemplary performance and a commitment not only to diversity, but also to grappling honestly and openly with all that being a diverse learning environment entails. Welcome! We are glad you are here, adding a fresh perspective and optimism to our mission to prepare every single one of our students exceedingly well for higher learning in the 21st century. Your selection demonstrates that you share our core values that:

• every child is worthy of intellectual respect,
• great teaching matters,
• true appreciation of difference is essential for a quality education,
• we are all learners, and
• parents are our partners.

You’ve been hired here because you believe that it is our professional responsibility as educators to do whatever it takes so that every single student achieves high academic standards. Look around you and know that everyone here is ready and eager to support you.

Let me also single out a few people who have answered the call to provide instructional leadership as administrators. First, I’d like to recognize Tina Lehn, the new Principal of South Mountain School and Catherine McDonough, Assistant Principal of South Orange Middle School. Both of these incredible educators have a long history of service in our district, and we are grateful to you for taking this next step in your career here with us. We also have several people joining us as administrators from outside our district: Susan Grierson as Principal of Jefferson School (Susan is also a parent and resident); Judith Hanratty as Supervisor of English language arts and social studies K-5; Raquel Horn, as Assistant Principal of Seth Boyden; and Faye Lewis as Assistant Principal of Columbia High School. We know how deeply dedicated you all are to equity and excellence for every child, and we thank you for taking on this challenge.

Two years ago on my first opening day with you, I evoked the imagery of that great poet Antonio Machado who so beautifully wrote “se hace camino al andar; al andar se hace el camino” which means we make the road by walking. We talked then about how we would make the road to our future together by building on a renewed sense of pride in the incredible work that you do in South Orange-Maplewood, extending that greatness to every single student, and walking together in a spirit of partnership.

Over the past two years, we have walked far together, undertaking a journey toward the future of South Orange-Maplewood, a future of a district that makes good on its mission to prepare each and every student for higher learning and success in the 21st century, and one that provides proof to the nation that it is possible in public education to break the links between race, class, and academic outcomes.

This morning I want to make three points about this journey that we are on together. First, our journey’s start has the momentum, direction, and optimism we’ve achieved by making the road together over the past two years. Second, our journey has come to a crossroads, an intersection of the centuries that, like every crossroads, comes with some decisions to make and rough terrain to cross. Third, our passage through that rough terrain is marked by some strategic signposts, some areas of common effort that will help us navigate our way together.

The momentum in our creation of a new road together is growing – with a sense of purpose and optimism. We have accomplished a great deal together, supported by a board of education and a community that places tremendous hope and faith in us.

Because of your tireless efforts, your dedication and professionalism, our students excel in the classroom as scholars, on the field as athletes, on the stage as actors and in the studio as artists and musicians. We sent students to the most competitive colleges in the nation. Ninety-three students were Advanced Placement Scholars, an all time high, with 6 National AP Scholars. You have pushed, guided and counseled them to winning awards and overcoming personal obstacles. The best part of my past two years has been watching our students in action, meeting the challenges you set for them.

We also see momentum of our journey in new ways, with more and more of you effectively integrating technology into your practice. I congratulate and thank those of you who took the call for greater levels of innovation to heart. It is so confidence inspiring to see teacher websites posted in classrooms, to hear from students that in some classes they can access their assignments online, to hear praise from parents for those of you who get those emails returned in a timely fashion, and to see teachers creating tutorial podcasts. When students get to interact using videoconferencing in their classroom through a smartboard with children halfway across the globe, that’s momentum. Not everyone is embracing the use of technology to improve their practice, but more and more of you are, and you’re forming a critical mass that will achieve real breakthroughs in our profession.

The numbers of students taking AP courses is on the rise, and course failure rates are falling. Our classrooms and corridors are becoming safer and more studious environments thanks to your hard work. Preliminary results on the state standardized tests show that the largest percentage of eighth graders scored proficient or better on the state English language arts test and the state math test since the testing began. If these preliminary results are confirmed, it will mean that we have the most academically ready class entering Columbia High School in the past decade. That’s some momentum for our journey!

There is momentum in our commitment to health, physical education, music and the arts. The district was selected as one of the Best Communities for Music Education in the nation and Columbia High School was recognized as one of 13 Model Schools in the Arts by the State Department of Education and the Arts Education Partnership. When the 17th Annual Music Marathon tops 1,200 student participants, that’s momentum for our journey! And you may have heard that the physical education department pulled together to win a $1.4 million competitive grant to help push our cutting edge to physical education even further.

And beyond these great accomplishments of our young people whom you have pushed, coached, challenged, cajoled and supported, we as a district have gained momentum through the strength of our partnerships. The district and SOMEA partnered to ramp up our mentoring program for new teachers, to co-sponsor professional development sessions, and to jointly support 21 teachers who are going for national board certification. Congratulations to all of you who have taken this step.

Now, we are making the road together and we are moving with direction and momentum, with optimism and determination, and up ahead there is a crossroads.

The crossroads is the intersection of the centuries. In one direction lies the familiar path of the 20th century, and in the other direction lies the way of the 21st century. We could continue on the familiar path where the South Orange-Maplewood School District has done very well in the past. But this familiar path won’t take us much further, because the model is becoming outdated as the world rapidly changes.

In the 20th century public education model, not all students were expected to learn to high levels. The 20th century model of public education followed from schools built for an industrial age. Some students were deemed worthy of a future of invention or leadership, and to those students went all the best that schools could offer – the most rigorous curriculum, the best teachers, the highest standards, and all the accolades, praise and encouragement that went with being so special, so smart. They were taught to create, problem-solve, work in teams, comprehend and analyze complex material, communicate compellingly, and to win. Other students learned skills that prepared them for a different world of work, one that demanded a fair amount of competence and a great amount of obedience, the ability to do assigned work and change tasks at the sound of a bell. A major part of the school’s job under this 20th century model was to sort the students accordingly, making early judgments on how far students would go based on assumptions of student potential and intellect. Disparities in outcomes were expected, since the model was designed that way.

Does any of this sound familiar? Our outcomes show that we still produce the disparities associated with this outdated model for education. For example, AP course taking is one of the indicators of readiness for success in higher learning in the 21st century. Last year, we graduated 465 students from the South Orange-Maplewood school system, and 44% of those had taken at least one AP course. This was up from prior years, a very good sign. However, only 18% of the graduates that were economically disadvantaged and only 24% of our black graduates had taken one AP course, compared with 51% of graduates that had not qualified for free/reduced price lunch and 71% of our white graduates. Is the crossroads coming into view for anyone here now?

Let’s look at another indicator, our test scores. Now, our analysis of test scores should always come with a couple of caveats: they don’t reflect everything that we value and they don’t represent all that we do. Yet, as narrow a snapshot as they are, they are emblematic of much that happens within our system. Comparing the scores of black and white test takers in our system will typically reveal a percentage point disparity in the 30s. The most alarming disparity in our test scores is on the High School Proficiency Assessment in mathematics. Scoring advanced proficient on this test is an indicator of being well prepared for higher learning in the 21st century. This past spring, 443 of our students took this assessment. 57% of our white students scored advanced proficient, and 9% of our black students scored advanced proficient. I have been hearing since I got here that the comparisons aren’t fair comparisons because of mobility rates and the large numbers of students who enter our district late in their academic careers. So, to try to make the comparison a fair one, we looked only at the scores of students who have been in our district from fourth grade or earlier. The percentage of black students who have been in our district since fourth grade or earlier scoring advanced proficient is 15%, better than 9% but still a far cry from 57%. So, yes, mobility is an issue, but it is not the issue. The issue now is whether we have the will and the courage to take the path to the 21st century, where all students must be educated with 21st century skills, and where ALL means ALL.

The economic reality that may have made the 20th century model feasible at one time on a national basis no longer exists. Jobs that allowed a high school graduate to provide for family with dignity are disappearing. Consider that more than half of our graduates will one day have jobs that are not even invented yet. In the 21st century, all our students need the 21st century skills that were once the province of only some. This is why President Obama and so many others have called public education the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

There is another way. We can have courage at the crossroads, and our journey down the road can make a turn. And this other way is the way into the 21st century, one in which excellence, equity and innovation exist for all students. The terrain is more challenging and more demanding, but it leads to a better day. Few school districts have courageously taken on this terrain. On the national scene, the proliferation of choice options like charter schools and federal government initiatives around accountability and performance pay have come about in part as a reaction to the stubbornness with which traditional school districts cling to the 20th century path. But some districts are letting go and creating a better road to the future, and we can too.

At this crossroads we need to abandon our 20th century ways and forge a new road to the 21st century. Our goal is to maximize the potential of every student, and our professional responsibility is to motivate, inspire and lead with passion.

This brings me to my third point about our journey together, and that is the way to a brighter 21st century school district will take a strategic emphasis on a handful of fundamental aspects of our business. Clearly we need to change, and our change must be purposeful, strategic and sustained, not change for its own sake. We have six strategic signposts to guide our way, all rooted in research and the success stories of other districts that have come across similar crossroads and had the courage to abandon the familiar path. Those strategies are to strengthen leadership for learning, adopt rigorous and consistent standards-based curriculum, regularly review data to identify and meet the needs of individual students, enhance how we support and evaluate teaching, expand access to rigorous coursework to more of our students, and support 21st century learning environments. I’ll briefly outline each of these areas.

The first strategic emphasis is to strengthen our leadership for learning. Under the 20th century model, leadership was command-and-control, focused on compliance, mostly around the operational aspects of schooling. In the 21st century, leadership must be for learning, recognizing that we are all learners discovering the most effective ways to navigate this new terrain and break the links between race, class, and academic outcomes. Leadership can come from any level of the organization without regard to rank or hierarchy. It can come from anyone in this room who is courageous enough to accept the professional responsibility to proactively work with colleagues to do whatever it takes to support every student to a high level of achievement. To facilitate this leadership, we’ve begun Professional Learning Communities in every school so that all of us achieve and maintain a laser-like focus on teaching and learning, and all of us must engage in the core question of what defines good teaching and learning for the 21st century. Leadership for learning also comes from having school leaders who see the levels of learning of the adults in the building as their primary responsibility, and our recent hiring certainly reflects the primacy of that value.

The second strategic emphasis is the adoption of rigorous, consistent, standards-based curriculum. On the 20th century road, school districts tightly manage everything from finance to personnel, transportation to zoning patterns, but leave what and how to teach to the artistry of the classroom. Two years ago, our own district had nine schools but a myriad of ways to teach reading. Over time, and beginning this year with an English language arts curriculum in grades K-8 that is structured to the learning objective, we will develop, implement and monitor a rigorous, standards-aligned core curriculum for use in every classroom. Our instructional leadership will be dedicated to learning and supporting the core curriculum. Our professional development will be focused on teaching teachers to deliver the core curriculum using differentiated instruction so that every student has a point of entry. We’re not talking only about workshops here, although they will be an important part; we’re talking about a major multi-year cultural shift in how we approach the core of our business.

I’d like to thank the dozens of teachers and library media specialists who have helped to completely overhaul our ELA curriculum under the leadership of Rosetta Wilson, Gary Pankiewicz, Judy Hanratty, Kim Beane and Terry Woolard. The result is a well-structured, teacher-friendly curriculum detailed to the learning objectives, built around a unit approach, steeped in readers and writers workshop and guided reading, delivered in a defined literacy block, with needed materials in every classroom that now must be implemented with fidelity, and evaluated and strengthened over time. Teachers will be required to lesson plan in ways that support the individual student’s attainment of the learning objectives spelled out in the core curriculum.

The third strategic emphasis is a serious and sustained focus on how we support and evaluate good teaching. Under the 20th century model, teachers were mostly on their own, and their evaluations were likely to be overly dependent on who the evaluator happened to be. To improve practice, we must have a common language and common definition of what good teaching and learning looks like in the 21st century, so that the conversation shifts away from gotcha and toward continuous improvement. Using Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching as a basis, together we will revitalize our efforts to coach, support and evaluate teachers. The Danielson framework will provide a common foundation based on research and practice for us to explicitly define and continually develop a shared understanding and common language about good teaching and learning for the 21st century. The Danielson framework describes good practice across four domains: planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction and professional responsibilities. For the past several months, every administrator in the district has been engaged in reading the materials and discussing how the framework applies to our work in supporting and evaluating teaching. The framework is available in every school library and online, and I urge everyone here to become familiar with it.

The fourth strategic emphasis is to regularly review data on student performance in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of individual students and patterns of strengths and weaknesses across groups of students. By looking at student work and student data, we must ask ourselves questions of
what we are teaching, how we are monitoring our students’ progress, and in what ways we need to alter or tailor our approach to better teach the particular students we have. We need to learn to consider with much greater purpose and frequency the evidence of student learning that is in front of us. By giving careful attention to data on each individual student’s strengths and weaknesses, we can identify patterns, diagnose needs, and adjust instruction so that student learning is accelerated. Implementing formative assessments periodically, setting individual achievable results by student, and progress monitoring are critical to our ability to keep all students engaged and intervene academically, both proactively and effectively. We have begun this work over the past year, with kindergarten, first and second grade teachers trained to assess students’ reading using the DRA, preloaded onto handheld devices that will help teachers access and organize the results much more quickly and efficiently than with paper and pencil. Our English language arts curriculum has unit assessments in both reading and writing that are tied to the learning objectives. In grades six through ten we’ve added common midterm and final exams in the core content areas. Let me be clear here: our instruction will not be test-prep, we will not over-test our children, and we won’t use the information in any inappropriate ways. We will regularly review data so that we have a better understanding of our progress and we will make decisions about our programs and resource allocation that follow from what we learn about how we’re doing and how to improve.

The fifth strategic emphasis is to expand access to rigorous coursework to more of our students. With a foundation of strengthened leadership for learning, enhanced support for and evaluation of teaching, a rigorous and consistent core curriculum, and a habit of reviewing data to identify and meet the needs of every student, we will be better positioned to expand access to rigorous coursework to more of our students in a way that raises the level of learning for all students. The questions surrounding how we assign students to class are some of the most pivotal at this crossroads. At every level, we need to think about how to give all students our best. We’ve come a long way in this area already. This year, we’ll be including all 5 year olds for the first time ever with full-day kindergarten; we’re including more students with special needs in the least restrictive environment than ever before; and we have students who stepped up in level as a result of participating in our enhanced summer school offerings. The Bridge to Success program once again grew dramatically for the second year, with 56 students participating in an intensive summer program to make sure that they are ready for high school. And Columbia administrators and teachers expanded the classroom walls beyond the state’s borders by taking some 40 of last year’s participants to Atlanta to look at colleges, learn part of our nation’s history, and perform community service. Overall, summer school participation increased by about 50% across the board, expanding opportunities for students who need extra support to be ready for the rigors of the next grade. We now need to reexamine the thorny questions of how we prepare students for the rigors of the next grade and higher level classes, what we believe about intelligence and learning, and how we assign students to classes.

The sixth strategic emphasis is transforming our learning environments to support 21st century learning by targeting our fiscal and facilities resources at improving instruction. The budget passed last spring for this school year shows support for 21st century learning. During a time of national economic hardship, this budget has actually added teachers, special educators and resources focused on instruction. Under the leadership of Business Administrator Karla Milanette and her team, and with the support of the board of education and elected officials in the two towns, we were able to secure passage of a budget that provides unprecedented levels of support for instruction while keeping the overall impact on stressed taxpayers to its lowest in three decades.

And we know that where we learn and work makes a difference. Our operations must support learning, by creating learning environments that reflect the realities of the 21st century and are comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. Conversions of classroom equipment to be more modern and multi-media friendly, lighter corridors, roofs that don’t leak, learning environments that are adequately heated and freshly painted, carpets that are in good condition, fields and stages that support extracurriculars, and much more are all explicit parts of our strategy to improve teaching and learning.

We’ve moved in this direction, and will continue to navigate the difficult terrain that comes with a strained economy. This year, in our first stage of a long range technology plan developed under the leadership of Chief Information Officer Paul Roth, we have outfitted fifth grade classrooms with the multi-media equipment needed to integrate technology into the delivery of instruction. We are moving toward wireless infrastructure and increased bandwidth in our schools to support your efforts to become more innovative in integrating technology into your practice.

The momentum that we have and the strategies that we are employing together give us the courage to abandon the familiar 20th century path. The demands that the future places on our young people give us the mandate to change. Yet it is the people here today in this room that give us the inspiration that together we can get to a better place, we can envision the South Orange-Maplewood School District the future, a place where all students are held to high expectations and taught 21st century skills.

And so we have undertaken a difficult and most worthy journey together with optimism, and our collaboration, partnership, and early accomplishments have created a momentum that is carrying us forward on the road that we are making together. Our journey now takes us to a crossroads, one that challenges us at a fundamental level, inviting us to make a transformation. And as we choose the more promising path toward a 21st century school district where ALL means ALL, we will move boldly and strategically toward our goal of equity, excellence and innovation for every child.

More than anything, this crossroads is about mindset, our attitude and outlook about where we have been so far and where it is taking us. As you come back to work, bring a 21st century mindset, an openness to change, and a determination to be the difference for your students.

The mindset comes down to how you look at your students when they come to you this week. As we do our job and look at the students in front of us, are you asking the question: how motivated is this student? That positions us as the judge and jury regarding how far that student can go. The question has to be: how is this student motivated? Then our professional responsibility is to seek the answer and feed that answer so the student can thrive.

You have my complete support and my deepest appreciation as our students return.

Thank you and may you have a terrific opening of school!