Mark Mansell has been superintendent of La Center School District for four years.
Mark Mansell, superintendent of La Center School District, is the author of the following guest blog post on the new CORE 24 high school graduation requirements. He is also a member of the State Board of Education’s CORE 24 Implementation Task Force. The next Task Force meeting is scheduled for Monday, March 15th (agenda).
Guest Blog: To CORE 24 or not to CORE 24? That is the question.
By Mark Mansell, Superintendent of La Center School District
La Center School District is a small (1,550 students) mostly rural district in southwest Washington. When the state legislature required a change in math requirements in order to receive a diploma, our school board and community began a process to change our high school graduation requirements. During this process, the State Board of Education (SBE) began to move toward increasing graduation requirements in other areas as well as math. The result is now known as CORE 24; twenty-four credits in total (previously only 19 credits was required). Because CORE 24 is only going to be instituted when and if state funding is provided, initially we didn’t include much about it in our thinking as school staff and administrators. It was simply hard for us to imagine how the state would ever pay for the additional credits. But soon that thinking would change and in a big way.
During this work to explore various proposals on possible new La Center graduation requirements that included the additional math credit, our school board and community stakeholders involved in the process kept comparing our proposals to what the SBE was proposing. They kept asking, “How does this proposal match up with CORE 24?” As superintendent, my answer to this question was probably very typical. I would state, “CORE 24 has not been funded by the state and we are all very aware that the state doesn’t even fund what they expect us to do now.” We would then return to the work of focusing on simply adding the additional math credit and making other adjustments to address what our students needed to achieve. But the questions about CORE 24 kept occurring in one form or another. Each time I would provide a different variation of the same answer revolving around funding or the need for additional organizational capacities, that well, involves additional funding. Round and round we went for I don’t know how many meetings.
What makes this community discussion about CORE 24 more interesting is that I was at the time of this work (and still am) a member of the Implementation Task Force (ITF) working to develop recommendations for the SBE regarding implementing CORE 24. I was in the middle of all this effort on CORE 24 at the state level with more than twenty other practitioners from across the state, all working to ultimately develop recommendations on how to move these proposed new state graduation requirements from concept to reality. Yet all I could come up with in my own community was to provide some answer about lack of funding or the needed additional system capacities. Please don’t get me wrong. Funding is absolutely essential to successfully providing the types of learning experiences students need to prepare them for the world they are expected to live, work and most importantly learn in throughout their lives. So before you go to the place where you decide I must be some kind of Kool-aid drinking ideologue that believes schools can be operated on bake sales and you are wasting your time reading this, please hang with me.
Our high school operates on a six-period schedule and our old graduation requirements were set at 23 credits. With 24 credits possible (6 credits per year for four years), each student had, for lack of a better description one “Do Over Credit”. Even with this one extra credit, we believed we were already asking our students to work at their capacity. Honestly, we felt there wasn’t much more we could ask of them without additional funding to provide more teacher contact time. Even then, how many students would want to go to school longer? But then everything changed for us was when we stumbled onto a question that we simply could not answer. As they say in sports, it was a game changer. The question was, “What do our students actually achieve in terms of credits and courses right now when they graduate and how does that align with CORE 24?” I was stumped! I had no answer and could not find a logical way to link it back to funding. I had never thought of that before as I had always considered CORE 24 relative to our graduation requirements and not what students were actually doing/achieving. Looking back on it now I think, “Well that is a no-brainer”. But it simply never dawned on me to think about this issue from this new perspective. To get at an answer to this question, we completed a transcript study of our most recent graduating class. Our goal was to determine exactly what our students were accomplishing compared to the minimum graduation requirements we expected. What we found changed our thinking about what was possible.
What we learned was that 100% of our graduates met CORE 24 in English and Social Studies. 73% of our students achieved the credits necessary in Math and 53% met CORE 24 standards in science. Furthermore, 60% of our graduates earned 24 or more credits, even though we only required 23. In fact, without ever changing a thing to our graduation requirements, 45% of these students actually met all the requirements of CORE 24 without even knowing they did so. It became instantly clear to us that we were limiting ourselves by using funding as the barrier for seeing how we could align our graduation requirements with CORE 24. But you might be thinking, “Hey, what about the other half who didn’t meet CORE 24?” This is the part that really knocked me for a loop. We then looked deeper at the transcripts of these students and found many examples where students had either a short senior year schedule, had TA (teacher assistants) credits on their transcript or simply needed only a few course changes (credit substitutions) in order to meet CORE 24 requirements. In short, there were numerous examples where it appeared as though students “coasted” through their senior year given that they didn’t need to use their “Do Over Credit”.
Without question, we had an estimated 10-15% of our students who probably would have been between a rock and hard place to meet CORE 24 for various reasons given the current structure. But given four years (the class of 2008 didn’t know they were aiming to meet CORE 24 standards) and a clear awareness that the “bar” is raised, we decided it was entirely possible to align our new graduation requirements with CORE 24 beginning with the class of 2013 (incoming freshmen in 2009). We have now begun learning how to provide the necessary supports for those potentially struggling students. For us, thinking about ways to support the 10% to 15% of our students who need to be supported differently is a much more doable endeavor than operating from the perspective that 100% of our students need to be supported differently. Quite frankly, aligning to CORE 24 standards was simply a way for us to catch up to what most of our students were already achieving.
So you might be thinking about now, “I am glad that it is working for you guys in La Center, but our district is different.” I have served in several districts around the state over my career, so I am not naïve to the fact that every district, school and community is different. What has worked for us in La Center may not work for your district. However, I believe that funding may not be the issue we are all making it out to be relative to CORE 24 implementation. As stated above, I firmly believe that the state of Washington needs to fulfill its constitutional requirements to amply fund public education. But on the other hand it is our opportunity to use the funding we have garnered to provide what students need as best we can. Let’s face it, raising expectations both for our students and for ourselves is a good thing not only because we are absolutely capable of it but also because it’s what is needed. To tackle this challenge, we must not limit our thinking nor overlook data that can truly define the barriers before us.
In La Center, completing a transcript study allowed us to think differently and to see more clearly the possibilities before us. I would encourage every district in the state to consider doing the same and then decide from there what they can and can’t do without more funding. To quote Albert Einstein, “The ultimate form of insanity is to do the same things over and over again and expect different results.” This not only applies to our actions, but also needs to apply to our thinking. I wish you the best as your district works through (and hopefully thinks differently about) this important and essential endeavor.
