Lansing,MI : Michigan puts new twist on school turnaround efforts on October, Sunday 1st 2017

Ten character traits are pinned to a board inside every classroom at Eastpointe Middle School.

Words such as “reflective,” “open-minded,” “thinkers,” “balanced” and “risk-takers” appear in large black print to remind students it’s not business as usual at this Macomb County public school, which faced the threat of closure after years of chronically low student achievement.

This fall, the school rebranded itself as an International Baccalaureate Programme, which focuses on teaching children to think critically and challenge assumptions in local and global contexts.

The dramatic change is part of the district’s approach to turning around its lowest-performing school and is the impetus for reaching new academic growth goals it set in a three-year Partnership Agreement with the state to avoid closure in the future. The district is in the process of accreditation for the program, which also takes three years.

Eastpointe is one of nine Michigan school districts in Partnership Agreements with the state Department of Education. It is Michigan’s latest approach to turning around its bottom 5 percent of schools.

Each partnership plan contains specific growth and achievement goals and outlines partners the district will work with to achieve goals. The plans have minimal state intervention and include a state liaison for each district to cut through red tape in Lansing.

It’s an education reform model new to Michigan, which has a history of sending its state School Reform Office into a district to lead change, enforcing a consent agreement with a district or installing an emergency financial manager to take control from a superintendent and elected school board.

Eastpointe Schools Superintendent Ryan McLeod welcomes the new approach after battling the reform office in 2016 when it hired a CEO to oversee Eastpointe’s middle school and three other schools, which had been ranked in the bottom 5 percent statewide.

There was tremendous pushback in the school community, including a legal challenge by McLeod.

“Their plan was coming in and taking over. We felt the idea of state takeover had already been tried and failed in several situations, and we weren’t going to let that happen again in this district,” McLeod said.


The district has a lot of work to do. MSTEP scores from 2017 show only 6.1 percent of seventh-graders were proficient in math, compared to 34.2 percent of seventh-graders statewide. Proficiency rates for the two years prior in that grade and subject were less than 5 percent.

In the agreement, Eastpointe set targets such as increasing proficiency on the state assessment by 4 percent by the 2019-20 school year. They believe the baccalaureate curriculum, which focuses on character-building, will get their students there in three years.

Partnership agreements are also in place for the School District of the City of Pontiac, the Detroit Public School Community District, Benton Harbor Area Schools, River Rouge School District, the Bridgeport-Spaulding Community School District, and Kalamazoo Public Schools. The Saginaw City School District has two separate agreements in place: one for a high school and one for an elementary school.

They involve 37 of the lowest-performing schools in Michigan. Each agreement includes 18-month and 36-month timelines when districts will be evaluated on the progress toward their goals. The progress of each school will be monitored and given assistance when and where it’s needed, state Superintendent Brian Whiston said.


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Michigan puts new twist on school turnaround efforts