Organic approach falls out of sync with standards

A little more than a decade ago, a new approach to education was supposed to revolutionize the ways schools were managed in the United States.

Instead of a top-down approach, where administrators in an office far away told teachers what to do, the decisions about what and how to teach would be decided in the schools -- where student learning really happened.

The plan was this strategy, called site-based management, would create higher student performance because the people who made the decisions knew the kids they were teaching.

"In theory, some people thought it would result in higher satisfaction at the schools," said Janet Alcorn, director of the University of Northern Colorado's Tointon Institute for Educational Change.

The problem was that school-by-school curriculum doesn't work in a culture where the state, through the Colorado Student Assessment Program, demands that all students learn the same information.

Greeley-Evans School District 6 was slow to pick up on that.

"The era of site-based management became out of sync when standards-based education came around," said Renae Dreier, District 6 superintendent.

Pat Sullivan is a former District 6 school board member who helped write legislation in 1993 that required schools to teach to standards. Part of the reason he wrote it was because of the lack of focus he was seeing in District 6.

"Nothing was focused on the children and what they actually needed," he said.

Even after the standards and CSAP were created, the school district still seemed slow to change and began falling behind the rest of the state, Sullivan said.

"After the standards, schools had to change the way they taught, and District 6 dropped the ball," Sullivan said. "I never did feel that District 6 ever took it seriously once the standards and CSAP were created."

Alcorn, who is also a former principal in Jefferson County, said that many of the state's bigger school districts made the shift to a more focused curriculum with the advent of CSAP.

"The bigger school districts probably made that decision quicker than District 6 has," she said. "The instructional piece really wasn't paid attention to for some time."

Alcorn hopes the district doesn't make the switch to an entire top-down approach and leave schools with no decision-making power. Still, she said, some things have to be uniform.

"In a standards-based situation, all decisions can't be made at the school level," she said. "I'm not saying that schools shouldn't have any power to make decisions, but there has to be direction from the district and that's what's been lacking."