Over the past two years, the faculty in a rural high school in Southern Maine, which serves approximately 700 students, has worked to identify a small number of skills in which students must demonstrate proficiency in order to complete a course. This focus is "an attempt to explicitly raise the standards of what is expected of students, regardless of track" (CES Coach Interview, June 2001). Teachers then collaborated to create common course assessments, which are being phased in as part of students' graduation requirements, in which students show their mastery of important skills and knowledge.
This school's faculty couples their rising expectations for student performance with markedly increased support for students. Capitalizing on their CSRD funding and their work with CES, they sought "to significantly increase the kind of support that the school provides to help students of all tracks" by establishing and promoting "Completion Labs" on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. This time was already designated for faculty to be available to offer extra help, but students did not take advantage of the faculty's availability on a regular basis prior to the creation of the common course assessments. The Completion Labs allowed teachers to tailor support to individual students' needs and strengths and demonstrated that the faculty was serious about insuring students' successful completion of the assessments.
This dual focus on raising expectations and offering more support increased students' commitment to learning. They reported to representatives from the state of Maine:
In the past it didn’t matter if I learned the material, now it does.
The fact that they [the teachers] seem to care more makes me care.
The Southern Maine Partnership, CES' regional center, provided significant support to this school in developing the common course assessments and coming to consensus about using the Completion Labs to help students attain the expected results. Faculty participated in a series of intensive summer institutes focused on developing assessments. In addition, the CES coach worked closely with the school’s principal and teacher leaders to facilitate early meetings about developing the assessments and helping to create a more collaborative culture among faculty members.
The state of Maine places heavy emphasis on locally developed assessments as a tool for demonstrating student learning. (In fact, only a small portion of Maine's overall evaluation of schools relies on data from the Maine Education Assessment (MEA), a state-wide test.) All four of the Maine CES CSRD schools have made significant progress on designing and implementing common course assessments. In addition, CES CSRD schools have improved their performance on three MEA tests since 1999, the baseline year.
CES CSRD schools' performance on these tests is consistent with both the overall state average and with other Maine CSRD schools that received funding beginning in 1999-2000. On the 2001 Math test, there was no difference between the performances of the three groups. On the Reading and Writing tests, changes in performance by all three groups were consistent year to year. Scores declined in 2000, before rising in 2001 on the Reading tests. On the Writing tests, scores by all three groups improved year to year, and although the CES schools started well below the state average, they have made progress in closing the gap.
