Overview

The Springfield Collaboration for Change (SCC) is a partnership between Springfield Education Association (SEA), Springfield Public Schools (SPS), and a growing number of community groups, including the United Way of Pioneer Valley, the Davis Foundation and the Pioneer Valley Project, to raise academic achievement for all students while eliminating achievement gaps among Latino/Hispanic, African American and low income students.

 In the first year of funding from the NEA Foundation the partnership will focus on six schools, to be selected competitively based on need and readiness to undertake improvement measures. The initiative’s strategies focuses on professional development, parent engagement, and collaboration.

The Center for Education Policy in the UMass Amherst School of Education will provide evaluation services for this project.

Key Strategies

Professional Development: District professional development offerings will respond to curricular and instructional needs of teachers, and will also include training on collaborative decision making for the school level teams, distributive leadership skills for principals, and meeting facilitation skills for teachers. Training on data fluency and the role of data in refining instructional practice and strategies at the level of the individual teacher and among various groupings of teachers will also be provided to participating school teams.

Professional Learning Communities: Participating schools will partner with their respective two-member coaching teams (retired principal, retired master teacher) to plan and execute innovations in a professional learning community. The professional learning community model will be adapted to include not only student performance and growth data, but teacher satisfaction data and perceptions about curriculum, instruction, and leadership.

Instructional Leadership Specialists: Specialists will be placed in each participating school to provide coaching in content, data analysis and classroom management (according to the needs of the teachers as determined by the school team and teachers' self identified needs).

Parent Engagement: A Parent Teacher Home Visit Project will be expanded in all participating schools. Teachers will be trained in relationship building, visit protocols, overcoming assumptions, conducting open discussions with students and families, and communication skills that will build trust. They will conduct two yearly homes visits, for at least one hour per meeting.

Springfield Public Schools Demographics and Achievement Gaps

Enrollment: 25,726
Student Poverty: 78.5%
Diversity: 76%
Black: 30.5%
Hispanic: 41.1%

Graduation rate: 54.4 percent (state average rate is 81.2 percent). 44.9 percent of Hispanics graduated within their 4-year cohort in 2008, compared to 58.9 percent for African Americans and 66.8 percent for white students.

English Language Arts (ELA) test:  34 percent of district students scored at proficient or above (state average was 64 percent). 31 percent of Hispanics scored proficient or above, compared to 40 percent for African Americans and 55 percent for white students.

Math: 26 percent of students in the district scored at proficient or above (state average was 55 percent). 19 percent of Hispanics scored proficient or above, compared to 25 percent for African Americans and 43 percent for white students.

Related Resources

Parent/Teacher Home Visits: Creating a bridge between parents and teachers as co-educators in Springfield, MA, and Seattle, WA, Nov. 2011

Home visits provide bridge for schools, The Springfield Republican, (El Pueblo Latino blog), Jan. 6, 2011

Editorial: Springfield teachers reach out with home visits, The Springfield Republican, Dec. 14, 2010

Innovation in education: It starts in classrooms and communities, Education Week, Oct. 14, 2010

Springfield schools win $1.2 million NEA grant,  The Springfield Republican, Feb. 5, 2010