National Study Critical of Dallas ISD Reforms, published 4-18-13

On 4-18-13 a national study was published that is very critical of many of the educational reforms that have been inflicted on Dallas ISD over the past year, often with great cost and pain. See http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bba-rhetoric-trumps-reality.pdf for a full copy of that study sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute.

Below are selected details from the study as time is available to study this report and double-check the statistics presented.

From page 39 in this report:

"Indeed, in Washington, D.C., teacher turnover was higher under Rhee and IMPACT than ever before, but apparently not due largely to the elimination of bad teachers, but rather to an increase in voluntary exits by experienced teachers as well as to their “excessing” and replacement by novices."

This is now happening in Dallas ISD under Mike Miles.
From page 70 in this report:

"Again, the highest-risk students have suffered the most from the upheavals reforms have produced. It is the students in under-resourced schools, who have lost literature and poetry to vocabulary drills and seen their curricula stripped of art, music, and physical education to make room for increased test preparation, who are most likely to see their schools shuttered when their test scores do not rise quickly enough. These children face longer and potentially more dangerous commutes to school, the loss of a neighborhood hub, and, sometimes, repeated disruptions of friendships and relationships with teachers" 

This process started years ago in Dallas ISD with the closing of 11 schools, mostly in poverty stricken areas of Dallas, without paying attention to national research on K-8 achievement patterns.  Transitions to K-8 schools could have saved some of those schools by more fully utilizing the buildings.  Changing K-5 schools into K-8 schools is shown by research to accelerate achievement, making them even more attractive competition for the expanding charter schools.  But no such efforts to avoid closing schools were considered in DISD.  Instead efforts were continued for the opening of charter schools in this target area. It appears such destructive transitions may be about to continue under Mike Miles.

This is a very painful report, especially for anyone who tries to keep up with what is happening within DISD, and notices how many methods documented as failures are now being used in DISD.

Parental Involvement Not Needed: Dallas ISD 2013-14 Action Plan

Missing from the “2013/14 District Action Plan” are any goals that would adequately build toward and reflect the primacy of parental involvement in the education of DISD children.

Goal #4 on page 2 of this Plan states: “PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT: Develop shared responsibility between parents/guardians and schools that foster academic success and self management of learning.”

While some may consider this goal “adequate,” the key action listed (page 3, copied below) so as to achieve this goal has almost no relationship to the goal: “Expand early intervention programs and programs to support early childhood education and support.” with an allocated cost of $5,000,000.

Page 3 of 2013/14 District Action Plan
(Right click and open link to enlarge and/or print.)

How is this listed “key action” any more related to parental involvement that any other educational program improvement? Parental involvement must be much more central, with direct attention given to it! It must have constant attention throughout all the years that a student attends DISD, especially during the middle and high school years, and not just the early childhood education years!

The goals listed do not mention either student or parental goals, or helping DISD parents or their children to better understand the potential in education so as to develop such personal goals. Without such goal development how will DISD generate parental involvement and student motivation?

Even if parental and student goals and concerns are ignored by DISD Central Office, they remain central to any successful education. The DISD Board must change the 2013/14 District Action Plan to include such goals by name.  The official copy of the 2013/14 District Action Plan presented on 4-11-13 is at http://sire.dallasisd.org/sirepub/cache/0/24dogu45dto4oq55knmqg2nb/40357904222013121708416.PDF

The relative apathy displayed toward parental and student goals in this plan from DISD Central Office reflects a management culture that's generating decisions with no more than a token acknowledgment of public or parental concerns.

Letter to DISD Teachers

Dear Teacher,

Unmotivated students with no focus on their own futures, and no plans, are a major agony for all teachers, especially in middle schools and high schools. Many methods have been used over the years to attack this common secondary school problem. The School Archive Project is a modification of one of those methods, students writing letter to themselves about their goals and dreams for reading again sometime in the future.

The difference is that instead of a shoe box or similar storage for letters, we use a centrally located 530-pound vault, similar to the one on the right. This photo is of the Quintanilla Middle School vault, now almost filled with letters.

With the addition of letters from parents, a golden connection with families is created. More conversations at home about goals and the future are certainly happening. While it has not been verified by formal research as to what has caused what, Quintanilla and Sunset have certainly improved.

The benefits seen to date, and anticipated, include the following:

1. Quintanilla now has among the lowest frequency of documented discipline problems in District 1.
2. The graduation rate at Sunset High School has doubled since 2006, and it is now ready to go up another 20% over the next 3 years!
3. The student pregnancy rate at Quintanilla has been cut in half.  Plus a new record has been set at Quintanilla, a 1,200 student, 95.7% poverty rate inner-city middle school.  This year there was only one student pregnancy!  Last year there had been only 2. 
4. With the increased family interactions from these letters, and the focus on the future, gangs are less attractive.
5. Quintanilla is the highest rated DISD south side non-magnet middle school in the 2013 Children at Risk school rating report: http://childrenatrisk.org/research/school-rankings/northtexas/ .
   
6. As students leave school for the last time, staff begin to say “See you in 10 Years!” - The message is different. School culture is changing.

It's certain teachers do not have extra time for additional work. This letter writing project should replace other Language Arts lesson plans. It should not require extra teacher time. Volunteers help teachers with the few mechanics involved to help the Archive Project work best. Would you be interested in helping this project thrive in your school?
The School Archive Project is an “open source” project.  Change it as you want to best meet the needs at your school.

Recommendations:

1. Each one of the two times letters are written at either a middle school or in a high school (beginning of 6^th or 9^th grade and the end of 8^th or 12^th grade) parents should be invited to write the first letters. They write a letter to their child about their dreams for them. They are encouraged to also document stories from family history that they would like their children to remember. Yes, it is hard to get letters from every parent. That does not always happen.  But when a child may begin to fail these letters become a much higher priority. The letter writing process can be used, as needed, to help engage parents, and their child to avoid failures.
2. Place the vault in a central location of the school to maximize the number of students who pass by it each day. They know their mother's letter is in the vault and what she wrote! That quiet presence may help many students study harder.
3. The first letters students and parents wrote upon a student entering your school should be returned as they prepare to write their final letter. That final letter is looking 10 years into the future and is written the final month a student is in your school. When the final letters are written before a child leaves your school, that letter should remains in the vault for 10 years.
4. The placement of the final letters into the vault should involve photos. Each Language Arts Class can pose in front of the vault holding their letters. Then they place the letters on the shelf for their class where they remain for a decade. They receive two copies of that photo, one for them and one for their parents. On the back of both photos are the dates for the 10-year class reunion with phone numbers to call for volunteer to help plan the reunion, or to update addresses.
5. Students are told the final letters will be returned to them at the 10-year class reunion when they also will be asked to speak with the then current students. They are told that at their reunion they will be requested to speak with current students about their recommendations for success. They are warned to be prepared for questions like:
   “What would you do differently if you were 13 again?”
6. Constantly learn from and modify this project. (Please also share what you learn with us.) The first reunions will start for Quintanilla Middle School in November of 2014. We will learn many things from these former students. We will continue to learn every year as students continue to return every November for the annual reunions. What better way to constantly improve our schools than to listen, along with our current students, to these former students who have lived a decade in the real world with the education we provided them?

Donors, including Lowe’s Home Improvement and A-1 Locksmith, have provided the first 7 vaults now installed in 7 DISD schools, as well as the funding for the next 6 vaults which will be installed in 6 more DISD schools, including South Oak Cliff High School and Atwell Middle School.

For more details please study the web pages at www.StudentMotivation.org or contact Bill Betzen at bbetzen@StudentMotivation.org or 214-957-9739. This is a volunteer project supported by the LULAC National Education Service Centers Inc., 345 S. Edgefield, Dallas, 75208, 214-943-2528.

Sunset Evidence of DISD Chaos

Monday evening, 4-8-13, I attended one of the most painful meetings I have attended in years.  It verified tragic rumors that were circulating Sunset High School. 

Mr. Tony Tovar, the Sunset Principal since July 2006 announced he had submitted his resignation out of frustration for the way DISD administration was micromanaging Sunset.  Frustrations from cancelled skating parties to delayed prom approvals were just the tip of the iceberg as to the specialized mistreatment Sunset was being selected out for.

Were there performance problems at Sunset?  Absolutely not!  There were no such issues, especially compared to the other 22 comprehensive high schools in DISD. The progress of the past 6 years has continued, and is projected into the future, placing Sunset in the wonderful place of being one of the most improved comprehensive high schools in all of DISD!  Then what is happening?

Here is one chart documenting the monumental progress at Sunset:



Tony Tovar Graduation Rate Miracle at Sunset High School, Dallas
Click on above image to enlarge.

The reasons for the mistreatment of Sunset by DISD central office cannot be identified.
After the meeting staff started an online petition to support Mr. Tovar and ask he reconsider his decision: http://www.change.org/petitions/dallas-isd-support-encourage-mr-anthony-tovar-to-remain-principal-at-sunset . Please join us and sign the petition to push the numbers well beyond the over 500 signatures now present.

Please clear your calendar for a rally planned for Thursday, 4-18-13, at 6:00 PM at Sunset for alumni, students, staff, and families to show support for Sunset and Mr. Tovar.

Middle School Chaos

With the current 2012/13 school year Dallas ISD has completed the 6 year transition process for all 6th grade classes to be moved from elementary schools and placed in middle schools.  In 2005, before the transfer started, it was normal for the number of disciplinary actions against students to increase about 10-30% between the 5th and 6th grade.  That percentage increase is now 441%!!!

Disciplinary actions against students by grade, Dallas ISD, 2012/13
Click on the above image to enlarge.



Now Dallas ISD has the questionable distinction of having all three middle school grades, 6th through 8th grades, as the grades with the most disciplinary problems. They are all three even worse than 9th grade, the previous grade with the highest number of disciplinary actions recorded. Is anybody watching?

Yes, parents are watching, and have been watching for some time!  Notice how the number of children being withdrawn from DISD after 5th grade has been increasing, especially since 2006 when the transfer of 6th grade into middle school started:

Students leaving Dallas ISD after 5th and 9th grade over past decade.
Click on above chart to enlarge.

This chart also shows the wonderful progress DISD has made with the transfer into high school and then from 9th grade to 10th grade.  We are now loosing less than half of the students we used to loose during this critical transfer. Our 10th grade enrollments are some of the largest in DISD history while the 9th grade enrollments are some of the lowest in decades due to the elimination of the "9th grade bulge."

 

Similar patterns relating to the discipline problems in middle schools have been documented across the nation.  Thousands of middle schools have closed over the past 20 years.  School districts have paid attention to mounting research that middle schools are damaging to children. (See a collection of such research at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/02/separate-middle-schools-vs-k-8.html .)

 

There are now over 4,000 more K-8 schools in the US as that alternative has been taken repeatedly.  Rosemont Elementary School in DISD is now in the process of that transition into being a K-8 school.  They will not be the last DISD school to make that transition!   As parents see the research they will demand change.  The damage in middle school is too obvious.

 

Children should not go through the puberty transition among strangers.  The years from age 11 to age 14 are a very delicate time that should be spent with teachers who have known the child for as many years as is possible. Discipline problems will not erupt with the monumental force they now do within DISD during the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, if those grades were in elementary schools.  That is well documented with 6th graders, and with all grades across the nation when you look at K-8 schools.

 

Addendum: In June 2013 the proposed 2013/14 budget was introduced with a decrease of teachers planned for middle schools, moving from 24/1 to 25/1 student/teacher ratios.  This move will only increase the damage to achievement happening in middle schools.

A letter to your child

A letter to your child can become the most valuable gift.

Especially as children advance to the teen years, they suffer more and more assaults on their potential to achieve. Parents worry about the many different things that may happen to their child, but achievement in school is usually central. How do you motivate your child?

A simple letter to your child can, over the years, evolve to be the most important message one human can give to another. It serves as evidence of the parental concern that helps secure and motivate a child.

In your letter tell your child of your dreams for them, what you hope they achieve in life. Include family history and stories you want your child to remember.   Remember, this letter may eventually be shared by them with their own children and grandchildren. It can help them better understand their roots, where and who they came from.  It represents that important connection to history.

Some schools have projects to encourage such letters.  They archive these priceless letters for a decade in a 500-pound, vault bolted to the floor in the school lobby, the school time-capsule. That is what the School Archive Project, covered on this blog, does.  But do not wait for such a project in your child's school to write your letter. Each child should always have such a letter from each parent in their scrap book or photo album.  Additional letters should be written every few years, even annually if possible.

Community leaders around the nation, including Mayor Mike Rawlings here in Dallas, are struggling with efforts to improve community mental health. The costs for failure in this area are monumental. But, for each person to write such a simple letter to each of their children is a major step in the direction of improving community mental health. The discussion of what really matters in life will happen more often. The simple writing of a letter, and the reading of it, will help increase the frequency of those priceless parent/child conversations about life. A child familiar with such a focus always does better in school. They can more easily deal with the challenges we all face in life. 

Bill Betzen
3-5-13

Saving Public Schools in 3 steps

Our nation's public schools have never been more directly assaulted in history! Yes, there are problems.  We must attack the problems, not the neighborhood school! We must return to the neighborhood K-8 school.

Three steps must happen in all public school districts. 

 

1) Transparency

The old cowboy insult of “all hat and no cattle” is an all too accurate description of educational history in the US over the past quarter century, especially here in Texas. Twelve years ago such misleading reporting became so bold that Houston actually claimed "zero dropout rates." The reality was that far less than 50% of any 9th grade enrollment were receiving diplomas within 4 years. The dropout rate was very far from zero, thus "no cattle!"

Fortunately many school districts are slowly moving away from such “all hat and no cattle” claims, but TEA recently made some of the boldest "all hat and no cattle" claims in the history of school accountability in Texas. TEA claimed graduation rates that amounted to placing Texas among the group of states having the 4th highest graduation rates in the nation! Fortunately business leaders in Texas, as well as academic leaders, were both vigilant and publically challenged these unrealistic graduation rates.

In spite of what TEA is trying to do, absolute transparency, especially when it is painful, is slowly being understood as the best alternative. Texas has led the way with the raw data about our schools and our students being placed online and annually updated at http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/adhocrpt/Standard_Reports.html. Almost all the reports posted in this blog come from that web site. Due to data available through such transparency it can be clearly documented that Dallas ISD is making more real progress than at any time in the past 20 years!

Admitting and sharing the painful truths in our public schools is the only way to have a strong foundation for progress.  That must be repeated: Admitting and sharing the painful truths in our public schools is the only way to have a strong foundation for progress.

The most accurate, easy to audit measurements for a credible transparency are the number of students who enroll each year in each grade, combined with the number who graduate annually, and how many of those annual graduates are ready for college. Simple spreadsheets for each school and school district should include enrollment by grade and year, covering 10 years or more of such annual enrollments. Each years numbers should include graduation numbers and percentages of those graduates who are college ready. It would quickly show if progress is happening.

Finally, such a TEA spreadsheet for all of Texas would be a powerful summary of what is REALLY happening in Texas education over time.

The Internet allows the accumulation and availablity of such data to explode. Dallas ISD is constantly taking advantage of that availability with results that are improving, and constantly need to improve. DISD does not yet have such a multi-year spreadsheet online and in a prominent place on the DISD web site. Such a spreadsheet could look like the chart at the end of the post at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/dallas-isd-one-of-most-improved.html.

Such a prominent spreadsheet on the DISD web site would make Dallas a national leader in educational transparency. No other major US City has such longitudinal, multi-year, transparency. DallasISD can lead the way!

Such a lack of more complete transparency also hides good news.

Significantly positive changes within DISD started 6 years ago, but received no publicity. Those positive changes happened when the 9th grade bubble began to disappear. The 9th grade bubble is caused when the 9th grade is larger than the 8th grade the year before. That is caused by large numbers of 9th grade students failing and repeating the 9th grade. Too many middle school students were not prepared for the 9th grade. As they fail the 9th grade enrollment grows due to students taking the 9th grade two or more times.

From 1996 through 2006 the average 9th grade enrollment in Dallas ISD was 33% larger than the 8th grade enrollment due to such failures. For the decade between 1996/1997 to 2005/2006 the average 8th grade enrollment was just over 11,025, and the average 9th grade enrollment was 14,727. That 33% 9th grade bubble began to disappear in 2006. It is now only a 9.3% bubble for the current 2011/2012 9th grade class!

The 9th grade shrinking means more students are passing on to the 10th grade. DISD now has the smallest 9th grade enrollment in over 15 years, and the largest 10th, 11th and 12th grade enrollments in over 15 years!! Fewer students are dropping out in the 9th grade! (See enrollment by grade numbers going back to 1996/97 at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/dallas-isd-one-of-most-improved.html)

Good things are happening in DISD. These DISD cultural changes must continue! They must be known! More complete transparency will expose all sides of DISD, the good and the bad.  Then we can celebrate the good and work with the bad.

2) Developmentally Appropriate Grade Configuration: change to K-8 schools
(Yes, that means closing middle schools!)    

Debates over grade configurations surrounding middle school have gone on for as long as middle schools have existed. But can DISD continue to ignore the fact that 6th grade discipline issues have gone up over 400 percentage points since moving 6th graders from elementary schools to middle schools? Yes, discipline issues normaly go up with each year, but usually less than 30%.  The first semester of the 2012/13 school year DISD had a total of 596 disciplinary actions against 5th graders, but that number jumped 440% to 3,230 for 6th graders!  Research has now pushed that issue well beyond the debate stage.

A July 2011 Harvard University study has emphasized the urgency of an improvement for our public schools that parents need to study. This detailed and extensive research concluded (page 23): "Taken as a whole, these results suggest that structural school transitions lower student achievement but that middle schools in particular have adverse consequences for American students." If parents agree, they must demand changes in grade configuration, especially here in Dallas due to the publicly acknowledged issues with our DISD middle schools.

The Harvard study showed that in virtually all subjects the scores on standardized test were lower in middle schools than in K-8 elementary schools. Parents and teachers familiar with both settings will rarely be surprised by these findings.

This past November a powerful editorial was published by CNN giving a simple message: "By all accounts, middle schools are a weak link in the chain of public education."

The K-8 response to this "weak link" is gaining momentum. The number of K-8 schools has almost doubled in the US since 2000 as over 1,000 middle schools have disappeared, or been re-purposed as K-8. Google news for K-8 and middle school. You will find reports of school districts closing middle schools and changing them to K-8 elementary schools with very few exceptions. The reason is as simple as the statement a decade ago by William Moloney, then the Education Commissioner of Colorado: "K-8s are the place where everybody knows your name."

What better place to endure the uncertainties of puberty? Instead DISD is now forcing students entering the changes of puberty to move to a strange school with hundreds of other students from other schools also struggling to regain their self image as they change. It is no wonder that we have behavioral issues! Student performance falls in DISD middle schools!

In April of 2012 the National Middle School Association changed it's name to the Association for Middle Level Education. They saw middle schools being closed in the US, and realized such separate institutions do not exist in the highest achieving school systems in the world, such as Finland. In such countries the elimination of the middle school transfer trauma appears to help in far exceeding US academic achievement while at the same time investing significantly fewer classroom hours. The name change reflected a more authentic focus on educating students ages 10 to 15. Will Texas public schools see what is happening? (See more links to articles on this issue here.)

Parents can study these factors and be the driving force behind helping DISD to slowly move to k-8 schools systemwide. That process has already happened in one school, Rosemont Elementary in DISD, which is leading the way. Parents studied the issues and demanded the change. More schools will follow as quickly as parents can study the issues and continue to demand the change.

Such change will also strengthen PTA memberships as parents will be with the same PTA for three more years. There will be more of an investment in each k-8 school. They must be the best schools for the sake of the neighborhood!

As to costs for these three changes, only the last one for a movement to k-8 configurations would involve any signficant costs due to potential building modifications. This process could go slowly, as quickly as parental groups form and request such changes. It could be worked into the normal building budget for DISD. Also, since Dallas County has seen a constant drop in birth numbers since 2007 there may not be the normal pressure for building new schools. Such k-8 transitions could happen more easily.
 

 3) Parental Involvement, sharing dreams for their child and family history, helps in
building a stronger sense of the "intergenerational self" in students.

Parental involvement is the foundation for any cultural change within any school. It happens more easily in a neighborhood school where as many as possible in the neighborhood attend the same school. This is one of the weaknesses of a system fragmented by private and charter Schools so that everyone in a neighborhood does not attend that same school. But it requires a strong neighborhood school.

A project that has evolved to center on parents, and to help develop a strong sense of the "intergenerational self" among their children, was started several years ago in one Dallas ISD middle school. This School Archive Project started as a focus by students on their own story and their own futures in letters they write to themselves for a time-capsule. Then in 2009 the most critical component was added: letters by parents to their child about their own history and dreams for their child. This priceless letter-writing process, four times from 6th to 12th grade, reinforces parental involvement as never before. The importance of parents is evolving as central. Such letter writing, and the storing of these letters in the School Archive due to their importance for the future, needs to become a normal part of school tradition.

Now entering middle school students start the year receiving a letter from their parents, and other adults in the child's life, about their dreams for the student. The letters can also include stories from their family history that the writers want the students to remember. These new students bring these letters to their Language Arts Class. They spend a week writing a letter to themselves about their history and goals for themselves in middle school. Then all letters are placed into a self-addressed envelope for each student and then into the 500-pound vault bolted to the floor in the school lobby.

This vault is in a prominent place and under spotlights. Students pass it several times a day. At times they may be reminded of what their parent's letter says that is inside the vault. Imagine the conversations that the writing of these letters may have provoked between parent and child. This helps to make such priceless, private conversations more common. It documents them and saves them for history. A strengthening sense of "intergenerational self" will evolve among our students due to these critical messages from parents.

The last month of middle school this then almost three year old letter is returned to students and to their parents. Everyone sees how things have changed since these letters were written. Parents and students write new letters, this time looking 10-years into the future. This time the letters are placed into the vault for the next decade. Photos are made on the day the letters are placed into the vault. Students and parents receive copies of those photos with details on the back for the 10-year class reunion. Everyone is reminded that at that 10-year reunion the returning students will be asked to speak with decade younger students in the school about their recommendations for success. They are warned to prepare for questions such as "What would you do differently if you were 13 again?"

This School Archive Project started in 2005. The graduation rate for Sunset High School, Class of 2006, was below 33%. Sunset received most of these students. Their graduation rate slowly started to rise both due to this project and due to the many other positive changes in the high school including a dynamic principal. In 2009 Sunset staff installed their own vault, and that same year the other middle school feeding into Sunset installed their own vault. The graduation rate (diplomas given out as an uncorrected percentage of the full 9th grade enrollment for that class) for the Class of 2011 was 62%. It was 65% for the Class of 2012, and near 70% for the Class of 2013. It should be 80% by the Class of 2016!  See this and other improvements at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2013/05/school-time-capsule-project-is-9-years.html

The many changes at Sunset made a very real difference. But Sunset is the only high school that has almost all incoming students already exposed to the School Archive Project before they arrive, and ready to do it again. That difference may be what has helped to make Sunset the most improved graduation rate high school in all of DISD for the past decade.



Sunset High School Progress in Dallas ISD
Right-click on above image to enlarge and/or print.

It is the power of personal letters focused on history and the future, placed in a secure location of respect usually reserved for diamonds, gold, and money. It's a message about the value of history, the passage of time, hard work, and planning for the future. See http://www.studentmotivation.org/ .

The value of the mentoring component is yet to be realized when the 10-year reunions start in November of 2014. The reunions will add to the cultural change. They may evolve into the largest single contributor to an ongoing, educationally focused, cultural change. The message former students bring back to decade younger students may become the most priceless factor in the improvement of our schools.

What would you do differently if you were 13 again?

This project starts with parents documenting their dreams for their children. This then helps their children, our students, to then focus on a more realistic future in a way that is easier to embrace, and change as needed. Such conversations need to be more common by parents and children.

The reason this project works so well is as simple as the following question that was in the Dallas Parade Magazine on 2-17-13:

When a team of psychologists measured children's resilience, they found that the kids who ________ were best able to handle stress.

1. Ate the same breakfast every day
2. Knew the most about their family's history
3. Played team sports
4. Attended regular religious services

The correct answer is "Knew the most about their family's history."

As explained in the article: "The more children know about their family's history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives and the higher their self-esteem. The reason: These children have a strong sense of "intergenerational self"—they understand that they belong to something bigger than themselves, and that families naturally experience both highs and lows."

The School Archive Project, also known as the School Time-Capsule Project, encourages such priceless sharing to happen.

-------------------------

These three ongoing changes within Dallas ISD, if accelerated and reinforced, will create an urban public school system that becomes the national model.  The third step is the only one that is truly unique to Dallas.  The other two steps are happening at different levels nationwide.  Many districts made the change to K-8 schools years ago, and the results have been researched and documented as solid.  We have work to do in Dallas ISD.  Things must change!