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Minding the Achievement Gap Q&A with Monte Moses, Superintendent Cherry Creek (CO) School District

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In his six years as superintendent of Cherry Creek (CO) School District, Monte Moses has butted heads with the likes of President George W. Bush and Colorado Governor Bill Owens. Moses' outspokenness, his efforts to stress character education for students, and success running one of the highest performing—and fastest growing—districts in Colorado recently earned him the title of National Superintendent of the Year from the American Association of School Administrators.

He has vociferously challenged aspects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), faulting the lack of funding and resources and what he considers draconian benchmarks for achievement. He has also questioned the validity of state school rankings promoted by Owens, whose child is a student in the Cherry Creek district.

Moses, 49, hails from a family of educators. His brother, Mike, was superintendent of Dallas schools and served as Texas education commissioner under then Governor Bush. Scholastic Administr@tor spoke to Moses about running the 47,000-student, 55-school district and his thoughts on being an administrator who speaks his mind.

Cherry Creek is a fast growing district. Where are your students coming from?
Over the past 10 years or so, we’ve grown by about 1,200 students per year. Our student population has grown from 15 percent non-Anglo 10 years ago to 31 percent today. We’re seeing quite a few students from Mexico and Latin America, Asian countries, and a pretty large number from Russia. So we’ve had to adapt to teaching students from many different cultures with different languages.

What do you think accounts for the achievement gap between white and minority students in your district, and what steps are you taking to erase that?
Some of the causes we know are related to socioeconomic conditions, and we routinely do regression analysis to see how much the variation applies to mobility, poverty, non-English-speaking status, and so on. A little less than half seems to apply to those factors. Then we’re left with the stark reality that the remainder has something to do with the race of the students and their cultural backgrounds. What we’re doing in schools may not be totally appropriate for what those youngsters need. Consequently, we’re trying to become more race sensitive, to talk about these important issues, and to look at our own racial biographies to see where we’re well versed and prepared and where we’re not.

Are you using a specific program to tackle the achievement gap?
We use the AVID program [advancement via individual determination] in our high schools to take students who wouldn’t normally think of themselves as college attendees and immerse them in student tutorial programs and study-habit programs and teach them everything from how to take notes to where to sit in class.

These programs tend to break down the differences we see in achievement between students of different ethnicities, because the students being helped become more school-wise and goal oriented and that seems to help them take better advantage of what’s being offered in school.

How do you help poorer students to keep pace academically with their more affluent classmates who have very involved parents and more opportunities?
There’s no doubt it helps when students come from families that have already equipped them with a robust vocabulary by age 5, and they come to school ready to learn. They’re going to have a leg up on students who don’t have those advantages. We try to take kids from where they are and then promote their growth to the furthest degree that we can, relative to their potential. But we’re also finding that we’re growing in the number of students in poverty, and if we apply equally robust strategies to those students in terms of language acquisition, strong vocabularies, and great access to rigorous curriculum, they too prosper and wind up achieving at very high levels. That’s not to say we’ve eradicated that achievement gap, because we haven’t, though we are making progress toward doing that.

Why have you been so critical of No Child Left Behind?
I think it’s all part of trying to make this a very workable piece of federal legislation. People call me a critic, but I call myself a constructive critic and also a person who wants to do a highly professional job of implementing this law, as well as our state accountability system. When it doesn’t meet a test of common sense, I think it’s important to speak out, to make sure we have an accountability system that doesn’t make people feel like it’s going to be impossible from the outset.

What do you think needs to be changed about NCLB?
There are four different things. First, the way schools and districts can meet adequate yearly progress [AYP] needs to be thought through better. In my opinion, it needs to be based on a preponderance of evidence rather than an all-or-nothing game. If a district misses one indicator and doesn’t make adequate yearly progress, despite what people at the federal level say—it’s translated into failure.

Second, I think we have to understand the size of this task. When we say “all students being proficient,” we’re essentially saying we’re going to defy the bell curve. I love that, but doing this is going to be a mammoth undertaking for this nation and I don’t think we’ve really faced up to that.

The third issue is the tone. The law reads like it was written with the belief that educators don’t want to do this. I believe the moral imperative of NCLB is absolutely right. And if we can agree about this foundation, then I know we can figure out how to have strong accountability built into it so people can say, “That’s fair, and if I make it I’m going to feel good, and if I don’t, I’m going to accept the consequences and the responsibility to do better.” But right now, since it’s so impossible, we kind of say, “Let’s just let the chips fall where they may.”

The fourth is the funding. To do something that defies the bell curve and says all students will achieve at a high level—and now taking that a notch further and saying every child should be ready for college—cannot be done without lots of resources.

What are your thoughts about the rigor and extent of student testing?
I believe we ought to do this testing. It’s part of a sound accountability system. In Colorado we test grades 3 to 11, and that includes the ACT statewide. That has improved instruction over the years and has given us better longitudinal data for students.

I do have a bit of a problem with the length of the exams that we give in our state. It’s about 10 hours over the course of a school year for students in virtually every grade. Ten hours takes a lot out of several school days. At the high school level, we have to stop the regular schedule to give the tests. But I would also acknowledge they’re rigorous, they’re meaningful, there are a lot of constructive responses on them with writing and essays, and we need that.

How can administrators ensure that students are learning rather than just being taught to the test?
You have to have very good standards and assessments so that you can’t teach to the test, but rather teach in a way that helps students master the standards and different types of contexts. Good tests do differentiate between students of different levels of mastery. That allows us to improve instruction, and I think good standards coupled with good assessments do prevent teaching to the test. If the test is good enough, some teaching to it is acceptable within reason. For example, essay writing—what’s wrong with giving kids very comparable prompts on what they’ll have to do on a test to promote good technical writing? Plus, the school district has to send a signal to teachers that the standards are preeminent, not the test scores. And if we’ve done a truly good job of teaching to the standards, we’ll accept how the scores come out.

 

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