Stephen Schatz

Stephen Schatz’ twin sons will be entering kindergarten this fall — "public school kindergarten," he affirmed — so the stake he has in the progress of Race to the Top reforms is a personal as well as professional one. And those results might not be fully measured for several years.

"We have to look at short-term and long-term indicators of success," said the state Department of Education’s assistant superintendent of strategic reform, whose chief job currently is oversight of the federally funded Race initiative. "Obviously we look at our student achievement results, but we also want to look at things like our ninth-grade failure rate … how many of our kids are going to college, and, of those kids, how many are actually enrolling in college-level courses and how many need to take remedial courses."

Schatz (himself a twin, brother to the current lieutenant governor), is coming up on a banner week for his current mission. A team from the U.S. Department of Education will be here in a few days to check on the status of the $75 million grant projects. Hawaii’s aim is to restore confidence that the reforms are advancing fast enough to take the project off the high-risk status it was assigned late last year.

Schatz, 39, began his career as an educator through Teach for America in California’s Compton Unified School District, considered an inner-city student population in L.A., eventually becoming an administrator there. Back in Hawaii, he was vice principal and principal, respectively, at Waialua High and Intermediate and Pohakea Elementary schools.

He hasn’t forgotten his early experience — "I had trouble with classroom management, like most first-year teachers do," he said — which is why he thinks teacher coaching and mentoring is key.

"What ends up happening is a lot of teachers leave the profession in the first two to three years," he said. "And that’s what we don’t want.

"We don’t want teachers, especially talented folks who could really be a benefit to our students, to give up because we didn’t give them the necessary support."

QUESTION: How was the scope of Race to the Top amended in response to the federal finding that insufficient progress was made?

ANSWER: The changes that we requested amendments for, to our scope of work, were mostly timeline related.

Q: You mean deadlines?

A: Yeah, mostly. We got a bit of a slower start than we had anticipated in the first year of the grant, so many of the amendments were timeline related. We did not significantly change any of our goals, our outcomes, our projects or our deliverables. Neither the U.S. DOE, nor the Hawaii DOE, would want that or allow it.

Q: How important was the recent agreement by the Hawaii State Teachers Association to extend instructional time?

A: It is a major advance, I think. Extending learning time for our students was a core tenet of our Race to the Top proposal, so getting an agreement with the HSTA is really exciting. For us, it’s a step forward, both in terms of the services we can provide but also in terms of our collaborative relationship with our union partners. With the extended learning time agreement, it’s additional instructional time for students, but it’s also 12 additional professional training days for our teachers, which we think is great, too. Because we’re really expecting a lot of our Zones of School Innovation, so we need to provide the training necessary for those teachers to make a difference in the classroom.

Q: So that was central to the original proposal?

A: This was certainly a main strategy.  … Our application originally was to extend the instructional day for our students, so that we could provide the type of remediation necessary for those struggling students who need to reach grade level, but also to be able to provide the necessary enrichment activities for our students who are excelling but who might not have the opportunity to do that during a traditional instructional day.

Q: Did the feds give feedback suggesting the need to extend learning time?

A: Not about our school day in particular. I think the important thing to remember, too, is we need enough instructional time to make a difference, but we need to use the instructional time we have well. So now the charge for those complex area superintendents (CAS), principals and teachers in the zones is to use this extra hour to make an impact on students and student achievement. So they have to be really strategic about the use of that time, so we can make an impact on kids.

Q: Keaau, one of the schools in the zones, showed improvement in a recent round of testing. In general, how are the other schools doing now?

A: To be quite honest, the CAS would be the ones to be able to gauge the progress for each individual school. But certainly on a preliminary basis, we’re seeing progress in each of our zone schools, and in the zones as a whole. The theory behind creating zones was that you don’t fix a school in and of itself. You have a team approach that’s about the kindergarten through 12th-grade continuum. You do changes within the system, and also within the community, to ensure that the students have the services that they need to be prepared when they come to kindergarten.

So that’s why we’re doing preschool subsidies for our students in the zones; we’ve already awarded around 200 subsidies for our preschool students in the zones. We have four additional preschool classes that were set up in Keaau-Kau-Pahoa. The zone approach is really a comprehensive one — it’s not just about what happens in an individual classroom; it’s about what happens in that entire complex area and that entire community.

Q: What are the advantages of doing this in a complex of schools?

A: First of all, I think we have to realize our students are going to matriculate from one school to another. So if they go to a successful elementary school, and then the middle school struggles, that’s going to make it really tough for them to get to high school graduation, and being college- and career-ready when they do graduate. So vertical articulation — vertical continuity of curriculum, instruction and assessment — means that you have a student who goes through a system that makes sense for them.

The other part is we have a lot of kids who transition from school to school. So when we have different curriculum approaches, instructional approaches, it makes it difficult for students to transition from one school to another.

And the other part is it’s about building leadership capacity in all of those schools in the complex and building our teaching force. There’s also an economy of scale around training. If you do individual training for an individual school, that’s a cost; if you do the same training for 255 schools, you’ve suddenly been a little more efficient with your resources.

Q: The zones are then all the schools in the same complex?

A: They’re complex and complex area schools. They’re the high school and all of their feeder schools. … Students might go from Makaha to Maili. And if they’re at different places in what they’re learning when they go to different schools, that’s going to make it really difficult to ensure continuity of learning.

Q: Can you comment in general about how we’re doing with Race to the Top?

A: We’ve made a lot of improvements. When we look at where we are with our Race to the Top scope of work, we’re moving forward on every single project. I think our implementation of the common core state standards is second to none. We’ve had a great training rollout statewide, and I think if you go to any elementary school in the state and talk to those kindergarten through second-grade teachers, they’re implementing those common core state standards, and they’re doing it with fidelity and rigor.

Q: Beyond the zone schools?

A: Oh, beyond the zones, in all 255 of our schools. I think that’s great. I think the extended learning time is a huge step in the right direction. Our scores on what’s called the “national report card” — which is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, which came out a few months ago — showed that we were the only state or jurisdiction who took the NAEP to show gains in all of the subjects and grades tested. … We’re nowhere near where we need to be in terms of our achievement, but we showed a lot of growth in this past year on our NAEP scores, and that growth has actually been something that started since 2003. So we’re on the right trajectory.

Q: How much of a hurdle is the issue of reforming teacher evaluations, basing them in part on metrics of student academic growth?

A: One of our theories of change in our Race to the Top is we need effective teachers in every classroom, and effective leaders in every school, in order to make a difference for our kids. So oftentimes we talk about evaluation, but evaluation is just one piece of helping teachers to become effective at their craft.

When we envision an evaluation system that works, it would be one in which teachers are getting all kinds of feedback about what they’re doing: classroom visitations, direct feedback from their principal, from coaches …

Q: Mentors?

A: Induction and mentoring, which is another one of our Race projects, and also some student achievement data. And all of these pieces of feedback put together would give a principal, a teacher, the information they need to effectively analyze their own practice and change practice to make a difference for kids. Currently we have a system where our teachers are observed at times maybe only once every five years.

So the last thing we want to do is hand a teacher the keys to a classroom, when they first become a teacher, and wish them luck, without the help for them to be successful. And the only way we can do that providing good induction and mentoring, good coaching and good feedback about their performance.