Clinometers

Over the summer I received a gift from a family member that knew about my appreciation for nautical items. The gift was a ship's clinometer and it sits on a bookshelf on my office. I set it there as something neat to look at and thought that this would be the extent of its use. Little did I know that in the wake of hurricane Florence, this antique would become a metaphor for how our school would progress in the weeks and months after our return.

Most people do not know what a clinometer's purpose is. On a ship, it measures the incline or depression that the ship takes on the water. On rough seas, it measures the chop of the waves as the ship rises and falls and on calm seas, it can measure how balanced the load on a ship is distributed. If the ship is loaded incorrectly in the front, the ship must plow through more water while the rear of the ship rides much more smoothly, yet inefficiently.

The week and a half of school days lost due to the storm and impassable roads have placed a large weight on the front of our ship. Our fall semester has fewer days and getting material covered, grand challenges presented, certifications earned, benchmarks completed and exams prepped will be a challenge. The front of our ship will have to plow through a great deal of water and along the way, there will be waves. There will be good weeks and tough ones that tip our clinometer back and forth. But while we ride the waves on or unbalanced ship, it's important to note that the ship pushes on. It does not sink and it does not sit still.

The next three months will present us challenges, but rest assured that our crew has the expertise and experience to weather the journey. Your leadership in your classroom and beyond will be called upon to get our precious cargo to their destination. Everyone must play their role. And while the clinometer of our school may be out of balance, it is no match for the will of our school, our staff, our students and our community. Steady as she goes.

Seeing Growth

This year starts my sixth year as principal at Greene Central. During that time, I have seen the state's accountability system change quite a bit. Some of it I can agree with and other parts I personally think are ridiculous. We have seen Common Core math rise and fall along with new standards in every core subject area. Those that taught outside of the core area tested subjects saw a couple of years of portfolios, graded by fellow teachers, first outside our district then within it, only to see it disappear as quickly as it arrived. In North Carolina, we seem to continue to struggle with how to measure teacher and school success versus failure. Our current system, despite the simple letter grades, can be very deceiving. While grades for a student measure degrees of accuracy or mastery of the content, our measure for schools is not quite that simple. No matter how students do or do not perform statewide, our system will always have a group designated as high growth, meeting growth and not meeting growth. Rather than measuring student knowledge against the standards, we measure teachers against one another. If you have the most teachers at the top of that list, your school wins.

Over the past five years, Greene Central has had years of being a D school and then we grew to a C. There were years where we met growth and years where we did not. Sometimes I think I can predict it well, only to find out that I'm not that good. I'll be honest and admit that I did not see us reaching the high growth mark that was announced this week. Our Math 1 teachers were still perfecting a new way of teaching. We had almost all new teachers on the English 2 team, and Biology was experimenting with new benchmark tests and determining how much time to devote to which standards. When I learned that we not only made high growth but were among the top 10% of all schools in the state, I was blown away. When those results were made public, I can tell you that seeing it in print felt great.

While the whole school is designated with the high growth status, there are actually just a few people in our school that are directly responsible for that portion of our school's grade. The teachers that teach the EOC subjects face a greater sense of pressure in determining not only their own personal growth but also in knowing that that number will also reflect the school as a whole. That often means longer conversations with administrators, more meetings, more assessments and more visits to their classrooms. While the state and the community sees a high growth status and the accolades that we enjoy, they do not see the countless hours of work that went into out-performing almost every other group of teachers in the state. This is the case for high levels of success for almost every field. To be among the best, you have to out-work, out-last and out-think everyone else. Doing just one thing well, will not get you there.

This year I asked that we celebrate being a teacher and the millions of victories that come with our jobs every day. This week we not only have little victories to celebrate but also have a pretty big one. And while achievement can fall just as quickly as it rises, this week we need to pause to celebrate the very skills that we all work to teach our students. Perseverance, grit, determination, and dedication brought us here. A great big thanks goes out to each of you that played a role in that.