Getting Young Lives In Line
While the nation still struggles to fulfill the promise of Brown , these schools are proving that high achievement can also be colorblind
Some would say Gregory dodged a bullet. According to Department of Education data, only 44 percent of Latino fourth graders read at a basic level or better, with just 15 percent reading at a proficient or advanced level. In contrast, 75 percent of white fourth graders read at a basic level or better, with 41 percent proficient or advanced. Researchers offer an overwhelming number of reasons--English is many kids' second language, Latino children are disproportionately poor, their parents expect them to contribute to the family income as adolescents, and so on. But the result is clear: With weak basic skills, just 13 percent of Latinos go on to college. And schools in low-income areas are usually the least capable of turning these statistics around.
But with the right approach, those hurdles can be surmounted, say the educators at Beulah Heights. The terrible test scores had shaken Pueblo school board members into action: They hired a new superintendent, hashed out a set of academic and social standards for which they could hold teachers and students accountable, and invested in the Lindamood-Bell Learning System, a sophisticated literacy program that helps teachers identify and treat reading problems.
Data driven. Now, all of Beulah Heights' students take eight diagnostic reading tests when they arrive at the school, and they're retested at the end of the year. The tests show which, if any, of a child's literacy skills--word recognition, say, or the ability to visualize images suggested by words--are weak. Along with data from quarterly district skills tests, they enable teachers to design an individual plan similar to the one that helped Gregory Saccomano. Educators say that since the kids are eager to learn how to read, there is no stigma attached to the extra training. "I've had kids ask, `Ms. Gallegos, when are you going to take me?' " laughs Gina Gallegos, the school's literacy coach.
Since Beulah Heights embarked on this program four years ago, the reading abilities of its students, as measured on the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP), have improved dramatically. For example, 86 percent of Beulah Heights' fourth graders read at the proficient or advanced level versus only 63 percent of all fourth graders statewide. In fact, students at all grade levels have consistently beaten the state and district averages on all Colorado assessments for the past three years. And between 1998 and 2003, the achievement gap between Latino and white third graders in Pueblo as a whole shrank by almost half.
Beulah Heights teachers say that the abundant professional development they have received since their school started using the new system has taken the sting out of shifting gears. And when they discovered that the data could help them, they got excited about the change. "Ten years ago when I was teaching first grade, I felt that I always had high expectations for my kids," says second-grade teacher Jeanine Takaki, who has been at Beulah Heights since 1987. "But nobody told me where the bar was. Now I have a bar, and it is, indeed, way higher than it was before, because [back then] I didn't have the specifics of what kids needed." She adds, "In all my years here, it's never mattered whether the children were Hispanic or where they fell socioeconomically. But we become really blind to that when we're focusing on data and who needs the most help. We just go at it, no matter what."
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