President Bill Clinton and Secretary of Education
Richard Riley visit
Long Beach Unified

As the former Assistant Superintendent of the Middle and K-8 Schools Office and Deputy Superintendent of Long Beach Unified School District, Ms. Harper has spent the last five years overseeing middle and K-8 school reform. In both roles, she was responsible for evaluating principals, coordinating professional development for principals, monitoring and holding schools accountable for the implementation of school improvement plans, and providing oversight of the Eighth Grade Educational Improvement Initiative to end social promotion in the LBUSD. In this capacity, Ms. Harper has facilitated program improvement initiatives and interventions that resulted in 91% of middle and K-8 schools meeting their state API target.

Ms. Harper was responsible for over 13 district offices and programs in the district, where her roles included: promoting collaboration on district initiatives with external and internal partners (e.g., Long Beach Education Foundation, Long Beach K-16 Seamless Education Project, Long Beach and Signal Hill Collaboration); providing leadership and oversight to the comprehensive network of student support services that include psychologists, nurses, social workers, crisis-response teams, student intervention specialists, attendance counselors, and alternative education programs; administering and supervising Long Beach Head Start and Child Development Center programs; managing all grant and magnet programs; coordinating $2,891,431 LEA Medi-CAL and $748,311 MAA Billing programs; and providing leadership and direction to the development of practices and policies to address current fiscal crisis facing California school districts. In her leadership roles at the district, she was also responsible for budget development and programmatic implementation of federal and state programs, including restructuring categorical programs to support school building reform.

In addition to her extensive work helping schools implement reform as a central office administrator, her experience supervising and evaluating staff as a school administrator is vast. She has spent over 21 years working as a practitioner within school walls, including 9 years as a middle school/junior high principal or assistant principal; 5 years as a high school assistant principal; 3 years as a high school teacher; and 4 years as a junior high counselor and master teacher. All of the schools she worked in as a practitioner were traditionally low-performing and would most likely have qualified as Decile 1-5 at that time. Those schools no longer exist in their prior incarnation: three of the four have been converted from junior high schools to middle or K-8 schools; the fourth, Lakewood High School was considered a Decile 5 school in 2002. Her work leading the Middle School and K-8 Office has led to extensive work with middle and K-8 schools of all levels, including Decile 1-5.

As a master science teacher and science curriculum consultant, she also has first-hand knowledge of how to make challenging curriculum instructionally feasible, and how to train and support teachers to implement rigorous curriculum. She has played a key role in facilitating dialogue and bringing people together around challenging issues, as demonstrated by her role as a high school assistant principal in coordinating a schoolwide human relations initiative addressing the implementation of a voluntary desegregation program.

Other accomplishments in Ms. Harper’s distinguished career include:
• Restructured ESEA, Chapter I to implement total flexibility for schoolwide projects
• Facilitated the selection of Accelerated Schools, Comer Project, and Coalition of Essential Schools Restructuring Model
• Restructured the delivery of instructional services for bilingual students
• Implemented comprehensive staff development programs to support early literacy
• Organized a network of district and community agencies in support of school-linked health services
• Coordinated the openings of two K-8 multi-track year-round schools
• Facilitated the implementation of the Eighth Grade Initiative and other district improvement measures, including the 3rd and 5th grade initiatives
• Coordinated transition of five schools to year round multi-track configurations

Dr. Lynn Winters, Assistant Superintendent, Research, Planning and Evaluation, has an Ed.D. in Learning and Instruction from UCLA and holds a Lecturer position in the UCLA Graduate School of Education in Social Research Methods, where she teaches courses on educational measurement and assessment, Instructional Analysis, Evaluation of Teaching and Learning, and Instructional Product Development. Prior to coming to Long Beach, she served as Director of Research and Evaluation in a suburban district, and before that taught high school social studies in Los Angeles Unified School District and Centinela Valley Union High School District. She has taught in and worked with schools from every decile in her many years as a teacher and a district administrator.

She has served as a member of the California State Ad Hoc Committee on Accountability and testified in front of the National Research Council Panel on Title I Accountability Systems. She served as Director of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Social Studies Assessment at UCLA/CRESST; served on a Research Committee for the National Council for the Social Studies; and worked with Los Alamos Laboratory’s Science Education Unit. She has co-authored two books with Joan Herman of UCLA/CRESST, “A Practical Guide to Alternative Assessment, “ (ASCD) and “Tracking Your School’s Success” (Corwin Press), and is a reviewer for Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation (PARE). She has conducted training sessions for the California Educational Research Association on Performance Assessments, and has worked as a test development consultant at the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

Dr. Winters shares her vast expertise in assessment with schools almost weekly, with school visits to review data. She has designed a comprehensive set of assessments – district wide – to track student proficiency in the content standards. Dr. Winters is well-known by principals and teachers throughout the LBUSD district for “preaching the standards,” or emphasizing the importance of addressing the standards not only in terms of content coverage, but in how integral the assessment component is in standards-based instruction. She is the most ardent advocate in the district for ensuring that all assessments used are standards-driven.

Dr. Winters has instilled in the LBUSD district a culture of data-driven decision-making. More than most large, urban districts in the country, schools have – under Ms. Winters’ direction – been provided with extensive school-level, classroom-level, and student-level data reports. The LBUSD assessment system implemented by Dr. Winters promotes the regular use of student assessment data to systematically inform and improve teaching and student learning through many mechanisms. Most reports from State and District testing programs are now provided to school administrators online, through the district intranet. This way, administrators have school-level and classroom-level data reports at their fingertips anytime they need them, and can download copies of reports to use for data review sessions. The research office has also built an online data collection system for those assessments that are more periodic and diagnostic, such as the Reading Benchmarks and the Basic Math Facts assessments. This online system provides teachers with ready access to the data they input themselves, allowing them the flexibility to define report formats and parameters so that the data they get is in the form that they need to make instructional decisions and to monitor student progress adequately. With this system, teachers can track specific skill and content areas where their students are struggling on the district assessments.

Dr. Winters is highly pro-active in getting assessment data into the hands of all principals and teachers, personally. She works with schools directly to help them make sense of the myriad data points that they are faced with interpreting. Every summer she meets with principals at all levels to review the newest release of data and to help them interpret these results. She has spearheaded multiple workshops and documents to “unpack” the standards for the benefit of teachers struggling with how to operationalize the content standards in the classroom. She has created countless presentations for principals and teachers about how classroom assessments must be integrally linked to the standards. Using these philosophies, she has worked with individual schools throughout the district to assist in the unpacking of the standards, and the unpacking of the content standards tests. Dr. Winters is nearing her retirement date, when she will have ample time and enthusiasm for working with low-performing schools to facilitate deep change and improve teaching and learning through the strategic use of standards-based curriculum and assessment.

She has worked closely elementary, middle, K-8 and high schools in guiding the evaluation and assessment pieces of their standard-based professional development efforts, Baldrige initiatives, schoolwide literacy plans, and Algebra 1 requirements. In recent years, she has targeted some of these efforts at one of LBUSD’s High Priority Schools Grant schools, Cabrillo High School. Cabrillo opened in 1996 with only grades 9 and 10 and 1000 students. As of 2002-03, enrollment was almost 2,000 with all 4 grades up and running. The school has had a rocky start, but much of the work that Dr. Winters has done on emphasizing the standards with teachers, has begun to show in student test scores, most noteably the California High School Exit Examination and the Adequate Yearly Progress indicators.