Hi. How's it going? I have a question. What are you doing? I'm recording a podcast about Washington. Hey, can I be in the podcast? Yeah, what do you guys talk to me about? What do you guys love about school? We love this school because the teachers do mini games with us when we do all our work and listen. What do you love about Washington? It's really fun here. And does math. What about you? What do you love about teachers in Washington? That they're really nice to us and everything.
Makes you feel relaxed to know that someone has your back. I love about the kindness of the students, especially my principal and principal. Everything was organized, especially my teachers. I care for them. These are just a few of the students I spoke with from Washington Elementary. Part of the Madera Unified School District in Madera. Never heard of Madera? Well, it's a city dead center in the state of California. It's just outside of Fresno and about 60 miles from Yosemite National Park.
Population about 70,000. It's primarily in Agtown filled with migrant workers. 80% of which are Hispanic. I've spent time speaking with many families in the area and the majority of them told me similar stories of settling here with the dream of giving their kids a better life. And education is how they believe they can make that happen. We've had that priority that kids have in education. Translation. Our priority is our children having education.
And in Madera, the school district takes that responsibility very seriously. Welcome to Rising from the Margins. How the struggles and successes of California's poorest schools are writing a story that could be a model for the rest of our nation. I'm your host, Byron Watkins. In California, there are about 2,600 schools whose student populations are made up of 85% or more low income students. There's a number of ways a child can be identified as low income.
But in general, it means the household qualifies for free and reduced school lunch, according to the federal income guidelines. And when a school has this large of a low income student population, it brings with it a myriad of additional challenges. Unique health, behavioral and nutritional issues, high numbers of students with English as a second language, and high numbers of parents with no high school diploma. Many of the kids in these schools will be the first in their family to graduate.
We will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools. College and career readiness standards. Critical thinking, learn how to live out your full potential. We just have not committed to the underlying problem. Then when you layer in overcrowded classrooms and outdated teaching materials, what you find are teachers stretched to their literal limits, just trying to do what they're passionate about, but getting bogged down in bloated systems and self-doubt.
And all of this existed well before COVID dropped a bomb, right into the middle of it. So in this podcast, we're going to visit schools who serve a large low income student population, and who are taking innovative and novel approaches to questioning how education has traditionally been done.
We'll explore how these schools are attempting to rewrite their future, how the challenges they face inside their fences ripple far beyond the communities they serve, and why the need to invest heavily in our schools is not just an option, but a necessity. This is Rising from the Margins. Chapter 1 Washington Elementary in Madera, California Oh wow, that's nice. Here, we're a 100 year old school. We just turned 100 last year, November, and we, everything is not centralized.
That's school principal, Alberto Hernandez, or Beto for short. He joined Washington 10 years ago with the goal of transforming the school's culture, climate, and outcomes. Washington serves the poorest community in Madera. 99% of its students are considered low income. 66% of its students are emergent multilingual, also known as English learners, and every student is on the school lunch program.
In over that 10 years, this traditionally underperforming school has gone through a radical transformational shift. To meet the needs of their students in new ways, Beto, along with the district, has sought out external support in order to create the change they needed. And it's been working. Here's Beto. It's not a surprise for me. We had already been attempting to implement a lot of the best practices of the PBIS, culture and climate systems.
PBIS stands for Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. It's a set of ideas and tools used in schools to improve students' behavior and shift the overall culture of the school. And now just having the CCE come in and really take it to another level of detail, take it to another level of understanding of the PLC process at work, has really opened your eyes like we wouldn't have expected. PLCs aren't new concepts. As you may or may not know, it stands for Professional Learning Community.
At its most simple, it's a team meeting between teachers at each grade level. It happens every so often and they'll review things like curriculum, rigor, assessment, schools, etc. etc. Ask any school and they will probably tell you, oh yeah, we do PLCs. But here's the thing. There's not really a shared meaning among schools about what constitutes a PLC. So everywhere you go, it's going to be different. And it will have different rigor and importance. At Washington, it's everything.
The teachers that are here and that choose to work at our school know that it is one of the toughest schools to work in Modera. The traditional standard of practice for teachers is to operate from this mentality. My kids, my classroom, my lesson plans. That's the way it's kind of always been. Teachers mostly operating in silos and very protective of their materials. It's so ingrained that to shed this way of thinking, the school typically needs additional support.
And so for Beto and the teachers at Washington, they're being coached to handle PLCs and their teacher culture in a much more rigorous, collaborative way. If our kids don't feel that the teachers care and believe in their ability to learn at high levels, then we're never going to reach our goals. Teachers' egos are left at the door and ideas are shared for the betterment of not just one student or one classroom, but the entire grade level.
It's changing the mentality of my kids, my classroom, to our kids, our classrooms. And it doesn't stop there. We have put such an emphasis on bringing the right people on board so that we can create successful systems and culture and climate to be ready for intense work like the solution tree, PLC process or project. And that took us, right, it's our second year, so it's taken us, it took us five to seven years to turn it all around.
How about a reflection point can be that we all need to, I know, can I borrow yours? We all need to be aligned with teaching the digit form because this is what they're supposed to be able to do. I made my way into the Second Grade Teachers Collaborative Meeting, or PLC. All four second grade teachers were huddled around a table in an empty classroom. Each had their laptop open and a stack of recent tests they'd given on hand.
A small sign was displayed between them that outlined their process for communicating and collaborating. They were collectively reviewing a math test they had all given to determine if they all agreed that all their students understood the assignment. One thing to note here is the way Washington's PLCs are structured. Each collaborative meeting is rooted in four essential questions. Question one, what is it we expect our students to learn? Two, how will we know when they've learned it?
Three, how will we respond when some students do not learn? And four, how will we respond when some students already know it? Yes, my student understands how to draw it, but they're not understanding or at least not demonstrating that they can write digits. What's cool is I really got to see a PLC in action. As they were in the process of discussing the results and assessing how they were grading the students' work for actual comprehension, something clicked for them.
So I think that, you know, do you guys agree that we can go back and reteach like this? Yes, I agree. I mean, definitely. Because it's a lot of position. Ultimately, by comparing test scores across not just one classroom, but the entire collective second grade, these four teachers came to a meaningful conclusion that would better serve all of their students. And this process doesn't just benefit their students. It's also insightful for the teachers themselves. How so?
Here's second grade teacher Veronica Solario-Paredes. It just helps me be more aligned with our expectations and our standards, just being more aligned, more organized, having a better roadmap of exactly what I have to do, better targets, being more organized. Here's another teacher, Maria Alameo, from the Collaborative Meeting. I love coming in and just knowing that if I'm unsure about something, I can ask my team, how do you feel about this? What do you think with this?
What happened here? And yes, case in point, what we're doing right now, it's like, wait, I didn't think about that. So how are we going to evaluate this? And for me, this is my fourth year. And my first year was really difficult because we were not working together like we should have. We're taking a look behind the curtain a bit here. Because check out this stat. 73% of Americans are either completely or somewhat satisfied with the education received by their students.
But we've learned here that most schools are nowhere even close to achieving these levels of collaboration and standardization among their teachers. But why is that? It comes down to the administration and the guiding coalition understanding the concept of your school being a professional learning community. Okay, so it sounds like a true professional learning community is a much larger concept that doesn't seem to be confined to any one grade level or school site or even district.
It seems to reach far beyond just looking at how kids learn and fundamentally changes what it means to teach, administrate a school, and even how communities as a whole support education. And disrupting the traditional way of getting education done is not an easy concept to get buy in on. We bring the right people on board that can handle the workload, that have emotional intelligence.
We teach them the skills they need to meet the needs of our kids, and we have strong systems in place at every tier. You know, all over the state we're seeing that growth is really stagnant but not at Washington. And I think that is a tribute to the whole PLC process, really diving into it and making it such a serious and professional endeavor. That's Todd Lyle, superintendent of Madeira Unified. He's been a champion for this approach to education for a while.
Todd believes in it by any means necessary. And it's been one of the many successes for the Madeira Unified School District. We've learned from studying high performing countries and their educational systems that there isn't a single system on earth that succeeds beyond the skill level of their teachers. Okay, hold on. What are you saying there sounds important? Let's listen to that again. There isn't a single system on earth that succeeds beyond the skill level of their teachers.
Okay, so if this is a fact, as a state and in our school districts, are we doing what is necessary to be sure our teachers have the support they need to continue learning after they get their credential? Or are they mostly left treading water, having to learn how to swim on their own? And the teachers at Washington are really trying to professionalize their own work. They're taking that really seriously because they see the need.
And I don't think that we always see that in the U.S., right? When schools are doing well, they're well enough in a lot of cases. But the situation here is more dire than that. And I think the staff really feels like there is an amazing amount of student potential that's really latent. And all it needs is the opportunity to manifest. And so they don't want to be what stands in the way of the kids and their success, right?
So they're really professionalizing their work. They're having a lot of courageous conversations group by group. The team leaders here in their PLCs are really well placed. They have a lot of credibility. They care deeply. They're doing everything that they know how to do and they're hungry to learn more.
So Solution Tree has been kind of a godsend. I mean, they've shown up just in time with the school's culture being stable, the commitment to quality behavior, a commitment to professional ethics. And then here comes, you know, this incredible opportunity from CCEE. The opportunity Todd is referring to was sort of this supercharging to the workbedo in Washington's teachers had started.
The teachers had built the heart. They were working hard to disrupt old ways of thinking. Yet they needed further structure and guidance. The school had a vision for its future, but due to limited funding and restrictions, the distance line was years away. That's where CCEE stepped into bridge the gap or supercharge the process, if you will.
This is not popular or easy to admit for any principal, but I'll admit it. In the past, we were doing PLC light, meaning that you're implementing surface level concepts or strategies. And, you know, you can read all the books, you can go to all the conferences and now going through this, if you don't experience and immerse yourself in the work at this level, or like I said, go to a school that's doing it.
And it's a model PLC school that's doing it right. And it's been verified to be a model PLC school. It's really hard to picture or imagine like you getting to where we're at right now on your own. It's also hard to admit that, you know, I couldn't have got here on my own, even as a more experienced principal. That's tough for someone like Beto to confess. He grew up in Madera, graduated from Madera High. He sees himself in his student population.
He's smart and progressive in his approach. You probably won't find another principal as passionate about these kids. And yet, here he was, struggling to get his school and teachers where they needed to be. Now imagine how it must feel for a first year teacher at a challenging school.
In the absence of being always present, principals trust that PLC work is actually happening step by step. What they don't realize often is, without some oversight, some guidance and some quality leadership, without touching this, are we adhering to the process so it becomes automatic, so it becomes ingrained?
And typically the answer is it isn't. Not with staff turnover, not with the amount of fluctuation in the labor market. People are in and out. And we're really trying to stabilize that here in Madera Unified. But over the years, very few districts have stabilized it, right? So there's been so much movement in and out of the profession, so much movement between schools.
And then we've created some of our own chaos by diving into dual language and creating a heritage language program here at Washington. Hold on. Todd said something you might not know. Dual language immersion is a classroom where both English and Spanish is taught at the same time, with the goal of creating bilingual students. But this also means teachers have to be bilingual as well, and this creates its own staffing challenges.
And so what we really need to do is go back to a really professional gold standard of what a PLC process looks like so people find success and buy into it on a really deep level, and they really own this work. For me, it's just what I know about what PLC is. The planning, the collaborating, just bringing in data, unpacking standards, the constant trainings that we have to.
So that's all I know because that's what I walked into. But when I explain it to my other teacher friends, they're like, oh my gosh, that's a lot. But for me, I'm just like, I'm used to it. It's just ongoing learning that we're doing. That's sixth grade teacher Daisy Miguel, who began her teaching career three years ago here at Washington. This way of teaching and standardization is all she's known. It does sound like more work, right?
Constant collaboration, communication, and criticism from colleagues resulting in the necessity for self-reflection. That is a daunting idea, a real challenge for the ego. But here's more from Daisy. I think it really helps me just come into my workspace without any possibility of closing myself or limiting me to what I can learn or be willing to learn.
I'm stepping into a space where it's just so natural that you want to keep learning or you want to reflect on what you did do and see how you can perfect that even more. And then there's fifth grade teacher Elizabeth Ramirez, who told me this. I feel like I have more energy. Wait just a second. More energy? More supposed work and yet more energy? What Elizabeth is really sharing is not that she has more energy, but actually that she's wasting less energy. Let's make a little analogy here.
Pretend you have 100 BTUs of brain energy that you can burn in a day. Anything that you put thought to burns BTUs against your 100. That could mean things like worrying or confusion or self-doubt, anger, assuming, fighting or stress. All of these would burn up valuable energy you need to feel whole and make it through your day and hopefully to still have energy to be with your family when you get home.
More and more, it's being said that burnout is not working too hard or too much, but feeling that the work you are doing is pointless or isn't leading to anything meaningful. So when it becomes clear how much confusion and isolation is traditionally present among teachers, it's not hard to see why they're burning out at such an alarming rate. So what this supposed more work is actually doing is eliminating that confusion and isolation.
It's clearing up spaces where teachers spend a lot of time wasting those valuable BTUs. And it's making them a stronger team, which means less misunderstandings and more collaborative support among colleagues. All of this has measurable results and deeper meaning that can stave off that destroyer of momentum. Burnout. Here's Elizabeth. She's in her second year with Washington doing PLC intensive work. Even when I go home, I feel I have more time.
Now I'm not trying to see what I'm going to teach. Now I'm trying to find how to maybe make it more engaging, how to take my students to a different level, the ones who are now understanding it. I feel like it just changed my whole mindset of what it is to plan and be prepared. Now it's not like, oh, I have to plan. It's like, oh, yeah, we're planning. Like, I know what I'm doing and now I have like clear expectations of what I'm going to do.
I know where I'm going with my sequence of my lessons. Sounds great, right? This seems like the approach all schools should be taking for their teachers. But the unfortunate part is that quite frankly, they're not. And why is that? Well, if we take a step back here, there's a missing component of this that may be worth noting. And that is... We don't have in education a really powerful sense of what it means to be a professional, but we've been educated. We have tons of college units.
We have really brilliant people that work in education across the district. But typically because we rely on publishers to create content that we later mislabel as curriculum and we utilize teachers' editions, we have created kind of a learned helplessness around reacting in real time and really taking on a level of responsibility in our own classrooms. And we can improve with the times. Obviously, science and history are ever-evolving.
We like to imagine that the book is static and that history is static. And somehow when we get into education, we imagine that it's all done. And we're dealing with a static framework of curriculum and content instead of something that's dynamic. Here's fifth grade teacher Elizabeth Ramirez again. Last year was maybe one of my hardest years, but it was maybe one of my best years, if that makes sense.
I just learned so much by being able to just focus on a standard and unpacking it and really seeing like, what is our end goal? What do I want my students to learn and being able to integrate that into my actual lessons instead of the old way that I used to see it, like you get your teacher book in front to back. It's just a whole different experience and I feel more prepared when I go and I teach my lessons. This new experience, as she puts it, seems to have a profound effect on the staff.
But what about the students? Are they noticing the shift? So I asked sixth grade teacher Daisy to share some of her insights. We've seen just so many benefits from it. Like, just last week we had a CFA. A CFA is a common formative assessment. We had it on Friday. After school we just met just to see, okay, let's look over our constructed responses and see how we're going to grade them, how are we going to score them. So we were just there just talking, we were laughing, joking.
It didn't really even feel too much like work and then we were talking about, well, most of my kids miss this question and we see like a whole bunch of red and we're like, oh my gosh, like embarrassed. And like just thinking like, well, what did I do wrong? And then another teacher said, well, most of my kids miss this one. So then just within like five, ten minutes, we're already teaching each other. Like, well, this is how I did it. Well, Monday we're coming back and we're reteaching.
And so then yesterday exactly the way that Maria taught me is how I showed my students. And then it wasn't even a full hour of math and giving an exit ticket at the end ended up showing that 29 of my students ended up meeting that criteria and we're completely okay with that standard now. And it's just crazy how even another teacher's support, which is like five to ten minutes, just completely changed in less than an hour in my classroom.
It's just amazing to see how those little moments can just really benefit our kids in the long run. And Elizabeth echoed a similar sentiment about the shared meaning of true PLC work. And it's not seen as a competition. It's seen as what are your strengths and how you could help me to improve what I need to in my classroom.
In essence, working together in true collaborative form and seeing each other, not as separate, but as a whole, one collective unit, striving for excellence of not just your class, but your entire grade level, has such a profound and lasting effect. There's so many other things teachers are asked to do. There are so many curveballs thrown at them, you know, all day long, whether it's from the kids or whether it's from me or the district office or who knows.
There are so many things that they have to deal with in real time that things get murky fast. Things get lost quickly. Corners get cut out of a need for expediency. There's so much time in a day, right? And there's a lot of work that has really got to be done to do it properly, to dive in deep. When teachers walk away, having worked through collaboratively with a sense of efficacy and responsibility in a PLC meeting, they walk out with a level of confidence that is empowering and they need it.
And it brings them a sense of clarity amongst one another. Clarity. That's a word that kept coming to me as I spoke to the teachers at Washington. They had clarity about what was being asked of them, what they were supposed to do. They weren't wasting energy trying to figure out what to teach or how to teach it. I'm not seeing it as a, it's just another thing to do. I'm actually doing something with it.
Like imagine how much more our students would grow and more students would do if we would all have that mentality as we're all in it for the single. The rigor of the PLC process at Washington had focused them so much that they were now doing what I imagine every teacher hopes teaching really is. Building strong relationships with kids and helping them achieve self-actualization. Helping them truly believe in themselves and who they can become.
This sense of shared responsibility that comes out of those meetings and answering those questions, I think changes the entire nature of the work as they go engage it alone and in real time and take on the curveballs of their classroom. The things that are going to happen in their classroom are innumerable in their variables. Anything can happen with little kids in the classroom. Sometimes they're really funny and sometimes they're not funny at all.
But teachers have to always have the ability to go back to that clarity that they had in their meeting and to try to refocus and achieve what they said they were going to for the sake of the team. When that gets lost, it becomes PLC light. When that gets lost, corners get cut. When that gets lost, quality control begins to spin out of control.
And the teachers feel that and once they feel what the real success is like around the level of clarity that they come out of together, that sense of being together in this, they want it and they want more of it. When you hear that, it sounds very normal, healthy even. You might even have said, yeah, well, that's how it should be. But we should acknowledge here the intense amount of internal work that one would have to do to not let their ego get in the way of this work.
The complicated skill of understanding and admitting when we're wrong or need help to do our jobs can be uncomfortable and difficult. It can be violent even. It's a lot of reflection on data and what we're learning, what we see in the classroom, like checks for understanding. Before data was just like, oh, you have to give an assessment. It was like, I have to give an assessment because I have to give an assessment.
Now I actually like can't wait to give an assessment to kind of look at that data and see, oh, here's where we're struggling. And here's where we need to move forward. And in our team, it's amazing to be able to be transparent with the data because then we're seeing it as our students. And we could see which students are struggling and group those students by the skills that they need to work on instead of one teacher trying to juggle everything on their own.
The data is a key component that became clear throughout each and every conversation I had at Washington. But it's the way that you perceive that data, how you interpret it, how you absorb it and take ownership of it, which was even more revealing in Elizabeth Ramirez's fifth grade class. Because the students were also excited about getting their hands on the data. My students, I feel like being able to actually share with them the data too and give them a visual.
And we share with them, like this is where we're at as a whole level. And this is our goal. And just a couple of weeks ago, we had our first very post and pre and we showed them and there's their excitement of seeing that growth. And I feel it doesn't only give me a visual of our angle and what we need, but also the students, then understanding like why we have learning targets, why we have our ICANN statements, and they're able to kind of be in charge of their learning.
And some of them will say, I can't do this yet. So then I'm like, it's fine because we're not there yet. So it's helping them to be accountable for their learning. On one hand, what is happening at Washington might seem daunting. Perhaps it's too much of a change for us from the way we've always done things. The process of implementing this in our schools is complex and multifaceted.
The teachers, school, administration, district, and the state have to be on the same page, open to a new process and willing to truly see themselves as part of a whole. And yet, on the other hand, it's also fairly straightforward with an obvious approach to education and a clear process for continued learning and personal growth among teachers that is creating not only clarity for the teachers, but also actual results that can be seen in the data. Here's Beto, Washington's principal once again.
Now, going through this experience, it's not PLC-lighted anyway because when you have an administrator coach come in who's led a school to be a model PLC, who's currently a principal, right, like Mr. Matt Devann, who's our PLC administrator coach, comes two days a month, right? So he's come so far for a year and a month, two days, spent two full days a month with us coaching us on this work and really coaching us on the leadership aspect of the work.
When you have that support from someone who's lived it and helped other schools and districts do that around the country, that outside support is a game changer. So let's zoom out for a moment and take a look at the numbers. What has the work that Washington's done in its culture and this intensive PLC support meant for their state assessments? So these numbers are for similar schools in the state of California who have 98% or more low-income students, which is roughly 300 schools.
In 2015, only 15% of Washington's students met or exceeded the standard in ELA testing, which is the English Language Arts and Literacy State Test given to students. Then in 2023, Washington recorded their highest results ever in the school's history, doubling 2015 with 30% of students meeting or exceeding standard English Language Arts and Literacy. This ranks them fifth across the state in ELA, across those 300 schools. And then here's a big one.
In 2023, their sixth grade students had 43% of students who met or exceeded the standard in ELA, ranking them number two, also their highest ever. And remember, this is coming out of the learning loss due to COVID. And finally, get this one. 2017, they suspended 31 students and for the 2022-23 school year, they had zero. So Washington is moving up. They're on their way.
The work they are doing to become a full model PLC school still has a few more years of hard work to make it fully sustainable, which is why funding from CCEE is so vital to make sure that supercharging continues and that they can complete the work. I've just grown so much from when I first started in the classroom and I reflect back to how easier it would have been if I would have had this. And I have questioned, like, why aren't we doing it like this? Why aren't all schools doing like that?
And I've had, I've heard other teachers say, well, it's totally different. Like, it's, it's, you're doing more and it's not. Like, if you really learn the process and you're, you really understand it, it's so much easier than what I was doing before. Schools that deal with the types of challenges that Washington faces traditionally have high teacher turnover, especially among first year teachers. It can be a very challenging undertaking that leaves teachers looking for less stressful schools.
But given what we're learning here and the excitement, clarity, and professional growth we're seeing among Washington's teachers, maybe this intensive PLC work can reverse that trend, creating a place where teachers want to stay, maybe build their careers.
Everything we're building right now is going to be sustainable whether I'm here or not and whether we have turnover or not, which is one of the biggest challenges any school has is when you have administrator turnover, teacher turnover, sustaining best practices of the PLC process is difficult.
So you're implementing the process with fidelity and ingrained in the culture of the school but are written down and are articulated in a way that a new administrator or any teacher can come in and understand them and carry them out with coaching and support then this project and this intense support will help the school sustain growth and achievement over the years. That's our goal, is to become a model PLC.
It seems safe to say that Washington's approach to collaboration and standardization into the idea of a true learning community where the whole school marches to the same beat will have an overarching positive impact on this community and everyone that it serves, long into the future. There's a ton of integrity here, there's a ton of responsibility and they own every aspect of the success or struggle of these kids and they make no apologies and they make no excuses.
And I think that's what we're looking for in American education generally, but you find it here. And it's an unlikely place to look, it might be an unlikely place to find it but anybody who wants to see what it looks like, they can come to Washington. Thank you for listening.
This series was brought to you by CCEE, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence whose mission is to help transform public education so that every student is left inspired and prepared to thrive as their best self in the world. If you would like to learn more about CCEE, log on to ccee-ca.org. Additional support was provided by Parsek Education. It was produced in Fresno, California at Winsong Productions.
And then stay tuned for the next episode where we take a look at a district with a rich history, a complex reality and amazing potential. Inglewood, California.