Northview Partnership

Michigan's Northview Public Schools, serving 3,300 students in seven schools outside the Grand Rapids city limits, has defined its vision to prepare students for life's next step. Since 1998, the district has used the North Central Accreditation (NCA) Transitions model for school improvement. This model aims to ensure that schools are ready for children (as opposed to children being ready for school) and that students move smoothly from grade to grade, school to school, and school to college or into the work force.

When the Ball Foundation began its partnership with Northview in 2000, the two partners committed to building a more productive school system to better meet the needs of each individual student in the district. In 2001, the foundation and Northview Public Schools signed a 4-year partnership agreement based on the foundation's productivity characteristics, particularly focusing on data-driven adaptation.

Goals
The partners expect that 85% of Northview students will achieve mastery of core curriculum standards by 2005. By 2010, the partners expect that percentage to increase to 95%. In addition to these overarching goals, the partners identified the following purposes of the partnership:

• Provide teachers and staff with access to data and skills in data management, which will result in increased student achievement, effective career choices based on skills and aptitudes, and increased self-awareness as a pathway to career/education plans.
• Enable all staff to apply new knowledge generated by student data to change their delivery system to better meet the needs of students.
• Create a continuous improvement process for Northview Public Schools.
• Create a body of knowledge on the use of data as a tool for school improvement that will be used for dissemination.
• Deepen the understanding of change processes within a district educational setting.
• Demonstrate the relationship of partnerships and productive systems to student achievement.

Strategies
At the center of the Northview partnership is a focus on the use of data. Northview is in the process of creating an on-line data warehouse accessible to teachers and staff that will provide information on all K-12 students and measure their academic progress against state and district standards. Access to such information will enable teachers to tailor their instruction to meet individual students' needs; students and parents will also be able to retrieve their own (or their children's) records.

For a data warehouse to have an impact on student achievement, it must be aligned with curriculum and instructional practice. Northview staff have developed curriculum maps, which allow all teachers to know what is being taught at any given time across grades K-12. The maps are linked to state standards and are used by grade level teams to create daily lesson plans. The combination of curriculum maps and student data will help teachers be even more effective in helping students reach their full potential. The maps themselves are updated annually to reflect the ongoing work of K- 12 curriculum committees. (For more information about the data warehouse and curriculum maps, see a related article in the Fall 2001 issue of the Review newsletter.)

Professional development and continuous learning is another key strategy of the partnership. Teachers must not only have access to data, but be able to integrate it effectively into their practice. The district plans to recruit a training team to educate teachers and staff about database queries and data warehousing. The data warehouse will also facilitate the creation of Educational Development Plans (EDPs) for each student in the district. The partners plan to involve all stakeholders (including teachers, staff, parents, and students) in this process to ensure that all children are treated as individuals and that the EDPs accurately reflect the district's mission and goals.

A culture of communication and shared accountability is crucial to the entire school improvement process. The partners are engaging a representative group of teachers, staff, and the district's NCA team in the development of the data warehouse and EDP plans. Over the remaining term of the agreement, the partners will increase communication between the district and other key stakeholders, particularly parents and students.

Results
The agreement will result not only in improved student achievement and increased productivity, but will also create enduring, system-wide change throughout the district. The partners are committed to the continuous evaluation of their school improvement efforts, both to measure the effectiveness of their strategies and to improve them along the way. With the help of faculty members at Grand Rapids Community College, the partners at Northview have already begun a learning history as one way to capture knowledge around their work to date. Future research and evaluation will use external data, such as student performance indicators on state tests, to provide comparative analyses. Northview is sharing their experiences and knowledge with the county-wide Kent Intermediate School District (Kent ISD) as well as with the foundation's other partnerships through the Partnership Learning Network.