Bellevue district's Cudeiro tackles oft-overlooked achievement gap

Students in a Tyee Middle School class paid scant attention to the woman who came into their classroom one Friday morning before school was out for the summer.

Clipboard tucked under her arm, Amalia Cudeiro moved among clusters of desks, peering over students' shoulders, asking questions. Her tone was conversational, but her words were probing and laser-sharp.

"Why do you think this is important?" she asked two boys, picking up a worksheet on graphing. "This stuff you're learning about graphing — is it easy for you? Are you ready for the test?"

Three days a week while school is in session, the new Bellevue superintendent shuttles from one school to the next, taking the measure of the classrooms, the teachers and the principals.

The first-time superintendent is engaged in a bold move to change the teaching culture in a district that has already gained a reputation for excellence, with all five of its high schools regularly winning national acclaim.

But it's that very reputation, the school board believes, that has masked an important failure: reaching students at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in a district that's far more diverse than many may realize.

Cudeiro believes a philosophy she honed over eight years of consulting work could close the divide.

Her predecessor created a standardized curriculum, making sure that all schools were teaching the same material, to try to close the academic divide. Cudeiro is moving the district's 27 schools in a slightly different direction; she wants to open up the classroom, giving teachers a chance to learn from one another, and to give them the freedom to deviate from the standard curriculum if a different lesson will work better.

An important part of her philosophy is getting teachers to use "differentiated instruction" — a kind of classroom juggling act in which a teacher uses different methods to reach students who are struggling, while also challenging the brightest.

In previous years, "teachers went to high-quality training, but the focus was on improving the individual," Cudeiro said. "We are not wanting islands of excellence. Let's open up the classroom practice, so everybody's seeing good models."

A year ago, Bellevue lured the 53-year-old educator away from her California-based consulting business to head the 17,000-student school system. Cudeiro has a doctorate from Harvard University and lectured at that school's Urban Superintendents Program, and worked as a deputy superintendent at Boston Public Schools.

But she had never held the top job at a school district and says she doesn't expect to again.

Bellevue is a kind of perfect laboratory for Cudeiro's ideas, said former school-board president Peter Bentley. "If you can close the achievement gap anywhere, you should be able to do it in Bellevue," he said.

Cudeiro's critics

But Cudeiro is not without critics.

Privately, some teachers have complained about her continued role as president of Targeted Leadership Consulting; she's allowed to retain her role as owner under the terms of her contract. (Her husband, Jeff Nelsen, runs the company.)

An anonymous tipster asked the Washington State Auditor's Office to investigate Cudeiro's hiring of a colleague to work as an educational consultant, but auditors found no conflict with the arrangement.

And in a time of extreme budget tightening, some have argued the district shouldn't be spending money on strategies that have not been nationally tested and proved. The Bellevue Schools Foundation, which supports Cudeiro's ideas, has kicked in some of the money she's needed for training and staff support.

School-board members, who will review Cudeiro's contract and $225,100 salary this week, say she is demonstrating a new way to address underachievement by training teachers to think differently about their jobs.

Cudeiro also says she wants to develop a new way of evaluating teachers, which would include a merit-pay system to give the best teachers more money. She talks frankly of easing poor teachers out of the classroom.

"She has a very good, focused view on what she wants to accomplish," said board member Paul Mills. "I think we made an excellent choice."

Tyee Middle School teacher Benjamin Evans served last year on a school leadership team and came away believing Cudeiro's ideas can make a difference.

"You get a lot of references to drinking the Kool-Aid" from other teachers, Evans said. "And I understand that — teachers are a pretty independent bunch."

But Cudeiro's methods are "the strongest, most organized and pointed initiative I've seen," the eight-year teaching veteran said. "This is a process I see as helping me."

Last year, as part of the process, Evans — a Spanish teacher — shared ideas with a language-arts teacher and, based on her methods, decided to do a "vocabulary inventory," informally testing his second-year students to see if they knew the definitions of common words and grammatical terms. To his surprise, they stumbled over common words.

So Evans began emphasizing the meanings of common words in class, and did a "word wall" that outlined important words and their uses. The idea also fit into an overarching goal at Tyee to help students learn "academic vocabulary" — key terms they need to know in any subject in order to gain a deeper understanding of the content.

Before last year, Evans and the language-arts teacher had never had any formal planning time together. "The idea is you go talk to teachers you don't normally visit with. I ended up with a pretty cool idea," he said.

New leader, new tactics

Cudeiro's methods are a shift in philosophy from that of former superintendent Mike Riley, who took charge of Bellevue in 1996 and led the district for 11 years.

Riley tried to tackle the achievement gap by creating a Web-based common curriculum for six core subjects. But the standardized curriculum may have helped push a dissatisfied teaching staff to go on strike in 2008, a year after Riley left.

"Don't be boxed in by the common curriculum," Cudeiro tells principals and teachers, encouraging them to use their own lesson ideas instead, or come up with new ones.

Bellevue's schools have long marched in unison to ideas developed in the central office, so for some teachers, the formation of school-based leadership teams is welcome.

"It's a system that recognizes not all schools in the district are the same," said Barbara Velategui, a 40-year teaching veteran who teaches health and AIDS education at Newport High, and serves on the school's new leadership team.

"The concept is very exciting to me," she said. "It's been a very long time since the expertise of the staff has been recognized."

Cudeiro's use of leadership teams and classroom observations are nothing new in the education world; many districts have tried variations on these themes for years. What is different, teachers say, is the way it's organized.

Cudeiro believes the Bellevue district's well-educated workforce and strong community support for public schools make it an especially good place to try out her ideas.

But after Bellevue? Cudeiro doesn't want to move up. She sees this as the first and only district she will ever lead.

"I want to do one district well," she said. "And then I want to go back to my consulting business."

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com