Building Systems for Coherence and Rigor: The On Track Program Journey
One of the big gaps that we see over and over again is that students are not consistently exposed to grade-level appropriate material nor are they expected to perform at grade level. This not only compounds their chances of failure throughout high school, it also dramatically reduces their opportunities after they leave. Students who do not take and pass (with a C or better) rigorous coursework are effectively shut out of promising college and career pathways.
It’s tempting to jump straight to a fix: just raise the bar.
But as our partner districts know, if we jump to fixing that problem without setting up other systems that help students reach the rigor of grade-level standards, then we increase the failure rates students experience and further harm their potential opportunities.
California Education Partners’ On Track Collaboration is a multiyear journey that supports district teams as they take on this challenge and build systems through the fundamentals of clear expectations, capacity building, effective practices and monitoring results.
We work with district improvement teams to deepen their understanding and implementation of standards:
- How do we know what mastery of this standard really looks like?
- What gaps are we seeing in student work right now?
- How do we embed higher-level tasks into every course to meet the rigor of the standards?
In parallel, district team members test, refine, and then help spread effective practices by establishing systems for student learning and growth, including:
- Ensuring grading practices include opportunities for students to retake assessments as they deepen their learning over time
- Allocating time to embed strategic reteaching and providing more actionable feedback and instructional support within the class period
The On Track Collaboration gives district teams the opportunity to create and use shared pacing guides, higher-demand tasks, and assessments to ensure they are aligned and are supporting student grade level learning. This ensures every student not only gets a rigorous course, it also creates more coherence as they move up from 8th to 9th grade.
In Practice: The Burbank Story
Does this approach work? Just ask Burbank Unified School District.
As part of the original On-Track collaboration, Burbank focused on math across 8th and 9th grade and was able to significantly increase the number of students passing math courses, removing one major barrier to eligibility for college and other postsecondary opportunities.
Burbank and Ed Partners focused on Building Capacity, one of four Ed Partners fundamentals, using the Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) structure Burbank already had in place. They trained PLC leads, provided substitutes to create dedicated collaboration time, and even held PLCs on how to run better PLCs. The district office built the capacity of instructional leaders – both site administrators and teachers – to deepen and expand efforts over time and support all teachers to use evidence of student learning to shift their practices.
The Burbank team rethought their assessments, moving from longer unit tests that were absent of feedback to frequent, smaller formative checks. This allowed teachers to monitor progress weekly and use that data to make real-time instructional moves.
They scaled what worked. Starting with two improvement teams, Burbank has now expanded these efforts to all its middle and high schools, building a powerful, coherent system of math and English instruction. The results speak for themselves: strong outcomes, a significant reduction in D and F rates, and a district-wide culture of collaboration. Burbank’s approach focused both on structural changes (collaboration, leadership, capacity-building) and instructional strategies (assessment, grading, feedback), with a gradual but sustained execution, enabling the program to spread successfully throughout the district.