Troy Mariage
-- Project PREPARE Prompts Teachers to Collaborate and Students to Achieve

It is hard to describe Troy Mariage’s work with the Bangor Public Schools as anything other than remarkable. In the span of a five-year state Department of Education grant project, Mariage helped transform the culture of the rural west Michigan school district and in so doing dramatically improved the achievement of its students.

Mariage’s goal was simple: Help Bangor Public Schools improve student learning in mathematics and reading and writing at the elementary school level. The district needed the help. Of 37 west Michigan school districts, Bangor was last in both mathematics and reading scores.

In every analysis he and his colleague on the project, Arthur Garmon of Western Michigan University, conducted, the results were stark. One figure made it clear to them what the realities were for the district: More than 80 percent of its fourth-graders were not passing the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) reading test.

It was clear to everyone involved that things needed to change, and for Mariage it was essential that the teachers and administrators be part of the change process. Without their buy-in, Project PREPARE, as it came to be known, would likely fail.

So Mariage and Garmon first established a planning committee that included the superintendent, principals, and some of the teachers and counselors. The group conducted a yearlong analysis of the district’s needs, meeting with every grade-level team and honing in on what was working and what wasn’t. As they analyzed data and heard from various stakeholders, Mariage became convinced that it was essential to make some changes quickly to build momentum.

“What we found was that there simply weren’t enough places and spaces for teachers to collaborate, and we know that if there isn’t time in the school day to allow for this kind of collaboration that change is going to be very difficult,” Mariage said. “One of the things we did very early on was to carve out a 50-minute common grade level planning period each day. That way all six or seven kindergarten teachers, for example, would have their students go to specialists for the 50 minutes and those teachers could then work together on issues of curriculum.”

Mariage and Garmon also established biweekly teacher study groups that the educators could join voluntarily. It was an effort to further promote collaboration and build momentum for change. It also became obvious to the researchers and the others that if Bangor students were going to catch up to grade level, they needed more instructional time. Mariage developed a summer school program and got the district to adopt it.

At end of the first year, the group could look back on a number of initiatives that had engendered excitement and met needs of teachers and students. But Mariage knew those changes alone would not lead to increased student learning.

The planning process revealed, among other things, that the district had no common curriculum in subject areas across the grades, there were no curriculum standards or outcomes (the only form of assessment collected by the district was the MEAP and the data were not being used to inform changes in teaching practices), and there was no shared vision for change.

The findings produced a consensus on the need to put in place a common curriculum, and Mariage and Garmon helped the educators adopt one that allowed for individuation, or the ability to tailor instruction to the wide variety of achievement levels teachers faced in their classrooms. “If we don’t impact the inner core of teaching, which is the curriculum that all the teachers are utilizing, then it’s going to be much more difficult to have an affect on student achievement,” Mariage said.

The new curriculum was just one part of a detailed plan of action that addressed the issues facing the district through a combination of voluntary and mandatory structures. All of the changes were organized around student learning. Mariage and Garmon, for instance, helped the district put in place a system of professional development to support the teachers in implementing the new curriculum, and a process of data collection to provide the educators with accurate information about student learning.

Each year, various parts of the plan were implemented, and Mariage and Garmon were active in organizing professional development and gauging results in terms of student learning.

For Mariage and the Project PREPARE team, the numbers speak for themselves.

In mathematics, 26 percent of the district’s fourth graders were scoring satisfactorily in mathematics in the planning year. In the last year of the project, 55.9 percent of students were passing the MEAP math test. In reading, the scores have jumped from 17.8 percent to 51 percent. It was the highest percentage of students to pass the test in the district’s history, and only five percentage points off the state average.

Even more important for Mariage is what the project has done to help the lowest achieving students. In the first year of the project, 48 percent of the students scored in the lowest category of the MEAP reading test. By the end of the project, only 24 percent were scoring that low. In math, 49 percent were at the lowest category, and that is now down to 14 percent.

Mariage is the first to point out that the effort has not been easy. It has required a substantial commitment from the district, school board, and the administrators and teachers, and even though scores have improved, there remain many students who need help.

Nonetheless, Mariage is convinced that there are elements of what has been done in Bangor that can help other districts struggling with reform and student achievement. And a year after the project was completed, he and an MSU colleague, Linda Patriarca, are conducting a follow up study examining the sustainability of change at the district.

“Bangor is a different place now, and the faculty has told us it is a different place,” Mariage said. “This project supports the research that has shown us again and again and again that teachers matter. What we are still learning is how to create schools as learning organizations. We know a lot about professional development. We know a lot about systemic reform. We know a lot about curriculum development.

“What we have not done well is rethink schools as learning organizations that yield results in terms of student achievement. We think our project helps shed some light in that area because student achievement was always the bottom line for us.”

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