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 The Eight Schools

While similar in their achievements, these eight award-winning schools represent a wide range of locations, sizes, and student characteristics. Whatever your particular school setting, aspects of one or more of these schools are likely to sound familiar. Perhaps the most salient thing suggested by these winners of the National Awards Program for Model Professional Development is that school demographics need not foreclose school success.

At the surface level, these exemplary schools are diverse. They are scattered across the country, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, to Manhattan, Kansas, to El Paso, Texas. Students range from kindergarten age to 21-year-olds. In some schools the vast majority of students are Latino; in others they are white, or African American, or Navajo. In one school fewer than 3 percent of the students receive free or reduced-price lunch, while in some others the percentage is over 80. The largest school runs year-round and has 860 students; the smallest schools serve fewer than 300 children.

As award recipients, however, these schools do share one easily discernable characteristic: their students have all made important academic gains. Teacher learning has paid off in measurable success for students. The table, "Overview of Eight Award-Winning Schools," provides a quick look at the most basic information about these schools, as well as at the ways each has measured success. Below, each school is also introduced with a few broad strokes – snapshots to differentiate one school from another. (In Appendix A, profiles of the eight schools introduce each school and its distinctive professional development effort in more detail.)

Ganado Intermediate School is on a Navajo reservation in Ganado, Arizona. Most students are English language learners and receive free or reduced-price lunch. A professional development focus on literacy and Navajo language and culture has raised student test scores and, at the same time, narrowed the male-female achievement gap. Another success has been an increase in the number of Navajo teachers.

H.D. Hilley Elementary School sits just across the Texas border from Mexico, and the vast majority of its students are poor and Latino. Demographics might predict low student achievement, but at Hilley, impressive gains in state assessment scores led to the school's recognition as a 1997 Texas Successful School.

Hungerford School, P.S. 721R in Staten Island, serves a special education population of 12- to 21-year-olds. In focusing on how to increase students’ independent functioning, Hungerford staff have been able to increase students’ inclusion in general education classes, the achievement of goals in students’ Individual Education Plans (IEPs), and the number of students placed in jobs.

International High School at LaGuardia Community College serves a student population made up of immigrants and English language learners. Students speak 37 different languages, but the staff has been able to narrow the achievement gap for students whose home language is not English, as well as increase students’ attendance, graduation, and college acceptance rates.

Mason Elementary School, with an urban student population that is 71 percent African American, doubled its enrollment over a five-year period, moving from the 79th most-chosen to the 12th most-chosen school in its Boston district. Standardized test gains were almost double those districtwide after the first three years of a focused professional development effort.

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cover: Teachers Who Learn, Kids Who Achieve

45% Latino

3% Free/Reduced Price Lunch

100% Special Needs

99% Navajo

44% Free/Reduced Price Lunch

71% African American

100% English Language Learners

90% White

88% Free/Reduced Price Lunch

30% Asian

126% Student Transiency

 

 

 

Whatever your particular school setting, aspects of one or more of these schools are likely to sound familiar.


 

 


Montview Elementary School has close to 900 students and a transciency rate of 126 percent. Professional development embedded in a schoolwide literacy program helped the staff take students' reading and math scores from below the district average to the top of the district range, while virtually eliminating the performance gap between white and non-white students.

Shallowford Falls Elementary School is a suburban school with almost no English language learners and almost no students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. Ninety percent of its students are white. With no demographic challenges, but dissatisfied with students’ achievement, the staff plunged into the Georgia Pay for Performance program, becoming one of only ten schools in the state to receive a merit pay grant in 1994 and winning a second grant in 1998.

Woodrow Wilson Elementary School shares a pleasant college town with Kansas State University and has made the most of that proximity. When a new state math assessment left Wilson students in the dust, the staff involved the university and looked to professional development to turn things around. Starting out with a focus on math problem solving, and then adding literacy, they were able to increase student performance across the board.

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