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LOUISIANA’S COMPREHENSIVE

LEARNING SUPPORTS SYSTEM

04/19/23

A hard look at ourselves…

“…schools fail because the challenges they face are substantial; because they themselves are dysfunctional; and because the system of which they are part is not responsive to the needs of the high-poverty student populations they tend to serve”

Mass Insight, Education and Research Institute

304/19/23

Spring 2007….

• We were challenged to build a world-class Department of Education

• Each office in the Department was challenged to build a world-class Office within the Department by finding world- class assistance

• Office of School and Community Support found The Center at UCLA with support from Scholastic

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What Happened Next?

• UCLA, Scholastic and DOE met in Fall 2008

• Superintendent gave us the charge to develop a plan for the state on how to integrate a system of support into the school improvement process

• We established a Design Team made up of a cross-section of DOE

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Louisiana’s Rankings

• #1 in Accountability

• #1 in policies for improving Teacher Quality

• Close to top for Content Standards, GLEs and Curriculum

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More Rankings

• Near top on:

• Poverty

• Childhood obesity

• Juvenile crime

• Adolescent drug abuse

• Teenage pregnancy

• Near bottom in student

achievement

• Near bottom on children’s

health

• Very low adult literacy levels

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What is our plan for improvement?

To accomplish the essential public education goal of enabling all students to have an equal opportunity for success at school, research indicates the need for developing a comprehensive, multifaceted, and cohesive system of learning supports.

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Learning Supports:

The resources, strategies, and practices that provide physical, social, emotional, and intellectual supports to directly address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students.

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A Definition…

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Barriers to Learning and School Improvement

There are many barriers that interfere with ensuring that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed at school.

All these barriers contribute to large numbers of disconnected students who need learning supports to address barriers to learning and teaching and help them re-engage in the learning environment .

A Definition…

Comprehensive Learning Supports System

This system provides supportive interventions in the classroom and school-wide and is fully integrated with the efforts to improve instruction and management at the school.

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How Are We Currently Addressing Barriers to Learning?

04/19/23

Fragmented

Policy

Fragmented

Practices

Traditional School Improvement Components in Education

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1404/19/23

Escaping Old Ways of Thinking

The foundation for rethinking school improvement involves adopting a three-component conceptual framework to guide development of a comprehensive system at every school in Louisiana for enabling/supporting learning:

1.An Instructional Component that provides guidance for best practices for effective instruction.

2.A Management Component that guides best practices for site management and administrative capacity.

3.A Comprehensive Learning Supports Component that guides the coalescing of resources to address barriers to student engagement in the classroom.

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Examples of programs, services, and initiatives:• Positive behavioral supports • Programs for safe and drug free schools • Full service community schools & Family

Resource Centers• Safe Schools/Healthy Students • School Based Health Center movement• Coordinated School Health Program• Bi-lingual, cultural, and other diversity programs• Re-engaging disengaged students• Compensatory education programs• Special education programs• Mandates stemming from the No Child Left Behind Act• And many more activities by student support staff

A Unifying Concept to Address Barriers to Learning and Teaching

Comprehensive Learning Supports Component: Designed to enable learning by addressing factors that interfere with learning and teaching

What a Comprehensive Learning Supports System Is Not…

• A case-by-case approach that focuses only on individual students with problems and is unable to meet the needs of many students.

• A fragmented set of student and family services.

• A marginalized and highly restrictive set of student and family services and crisis responses.

• An approach that mostly focuses on using outside providers.

• An approach that is unable to meet the needs of most students even with capacity building.

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1704/19/23

What a Comprehensive Learning Supports System Is Not…

What a Comprehensive Learning Supports System Is…

• A resource-oriented approach that uses aggregated school and student data and maps and analyzes resources to clarify what learning supports a school needs.

• An operational infrastructure at a school designed to recommend priorities for alignment and redeployment of resources to develop a comprehensive system of learning supports.

• A continuum of interventions that encompasses prevention and early intervention and is fully integrated into school improvement.

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What a Comprehensive Learning Supports System Is… Continued

• A system that emphasizes both school-wide and classroom supports, learns from best practices in our High Poverty/High Success schools, and seeks to weave in community supports.

• A system that can benefit from regional and state-level capacity building.

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2004/19/23

What a Comprehensive Learning Supports System Is… Continued

Benefits of a Comprehensive Learning Supports System

• Reducing student dropout rates • Reducing teacher dropout rates• Re‑engaging many disconnected students in classroom learning• Narrowing the achievement gap • Countering the plateau effect related to student achievement• Reducing the growing list of schools designated as low performing

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Some Schools Get It!

High Poverty / High Performing Schools

Initiative

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The Turnaround Challenge, Mass Insight

How High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools Do it

Reengagement of students

Operational Infrastructure

Analysis of resources and how they are utilized

Capacity building and support from district and state

Meeting the Challenge…

• Reframe current student/learning support programs

• Redeploy resources

• Develop in-classroom and school-wide approaches, including learning supports found effective in our High Poverty/High Achieving schools

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Continued…

• Develop the capacity to implement learning supports through leadership training

• Revamp infrastructures at the school, district, and state levels

• Develop and implement accountability indicators directly related to the Learning Supports System and fully integrate it into school improvement accountability

2504/19/23

A Message From Superintendent Paul Pastorek

• Teacher Tube Address

2604/19/23

A final thought….

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

Thirty-fifth President of the USA

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