District leader offers new idea

Chuck Hinman, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s assistant superintendent of secondary education, pitched a new program to the school board on Monday — and he was quick to stress that it wouldn’t be abandoned next year.

That program was professional learning communities, in which teachers determine how best to help students learn by comparing test scores and other data. Hinman, who helped to implement professional learning communities in his previous job as principal of San Clemente High School, said Newport-Mesa district schools were implementing the practice by leaps and bounds.

So in a district already laden with No Child Left Behind, the Academic Performance Index, Adequate Yearly Progress, Whatever It Takes, Project Success and more, was there room for another program with a fancy name? Hinman and Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard argued that yes, there is — and that it is working.

“We’ve endured so many reforms over the years,” Hubbard said. “What’s appealing about this is that it’s not a dogmatic, prescriptive approach.”

Professional learning communities, Hinman said, took their cue not from administrators but from teachers, who coordinate weekly or even daily to measure students’ progress. He noted that during his time at San Clemente High, some teachers even gathered to grade photocopies of the same student’s test to ensure that they used the same criteria.

Newport-Mesa schools, Hinman pointed out after the meeting, had already been implementing some of the methods of professional learning communities by having teachers coordinate outside of class. Each school in the district, he said, was busy assembling its student data from the last three years to have a baseline for the fall.

“In a professional learning community,” he said, “failure is not an option.”