New Data Show T.C. Williams Students See Improvement in Their School, but Challenges Remain

Students at T.C. Williams High School rate their teachers average to slightly above average compared to other high schools around the country that have completed a survey helmed by Harvard University education expert Ron Ferguson.

Ferguson, who is also an economist, stopped by Alexandria’s Minnie Howard campus on Monday night to unveil and discuss results of new T.C. Williams data.

T.C. Williams administration this past year has been focusing on issues surrounding discipline, redoing poorly done assignments, consistency in grading standards and caring, said Ferguson who was introduced by ACPS Superintendent Morton Sherman.

In his opening remarks, Sherman noted that "Ferguson has been one of my teachers for a long time."

T.C. Williams survey results indicate improvement from 2010 to 2011, according to Ferguson. He has spent a large part of his career studying achievement gaps, particularly the gap between racial groups who parents have about the same amount of education.

His study, part of the Tripod Project for School Improvement, shows that there has been improvement in T.C. student attitudes about learning over the past year.

The Tripod method looks at a classroom’s “seven Cs”: to care, control, clarify, challenge, captivate, confer and consolidate. About 3,000 classrooms around the United States are using a camera capable of catching 365 degrees of a room and the images are sent to a center where people have been trained how to watch and code the video to measure teaching and student success.

For T.C. Williams, the data show that homework completion rates have not changed but students are spending 20 percent less time on their homework than they were in 2010.

Hypothesis could be that students are getting more tutorial support or perhaps they’re being assigned less homework, he said.

Additionally, in response to the question whether students believe that teachers want to know what students think about things, students agree less this year than last year. The leading hypothesis for that finding is that there’s been a crackdown at the school over the last year “where adults are more assertive about the climate of the school” and are stronger disciplinarians, according to Ferguson.

Sixty-seven percent of students last year did not believe administration handled discipline effectively but this year only 36 percent said they held that view. Ferguson noted that’s not where the school should be, but it’s an improvement.

The researchers are in the 11th generation of the survey, which about two and a half years ago received large grant support from the Gates Foundation.