By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
Mark Tallman with the Kansas Association of School Boards took the 2023-2024 school year traveling around Kansas to schools whose achievement was higher than expected by their demographic makeup. He has a few ideas on what helped those districts overachieve.
"The top level thing I believe I found is that all of those districts, all virtually without question, are doing the kind of things that the State Board of Education, State Department of Education's Kansans Can Plan talks about," Tallman said. "They are focusing on early childhood education. They are focusing on making sure you're meeting the social emotional needs of students. They're focusing on helping students start early on career planning to get them a better sense of what they want to do after school so they can be prepared to do that. But, the second bucket of things, and this is much harder to quantify, and in almost every place, I used to, I ended up kind of joking about this. Eventually someone says, we think we have become more intentional or more intensive or more focused than we were before, particularly those that are showing growth."
Policies and programs are important, but attitude is also important.
"When I would press people, it would come back to saying, for a lot of different reasons, it came about by saying we weren't satisfied," Tallman said. "We knew we were going to have to do things differently if we want to get different results, and we got buy-in from every teacher, from the school board, from the community to make those changes or shift that focus or get that intensity. That's what leaders say drove the change in these districts I visited."
Data collection is important, but only if you use it to focus energy on the important areas.
"It comes back to focus, intensity, and maybe as much as anything, you have to have shared goals," Tallman said. "You have to decide what is it that's really important and how does the data tell us that we're doing on that important things, and then what can we do to improve those results?"
You can follow Tallman's blog and go back through his individual stops at kasb.org.