ROGERS — Changing the culture at Grace Hill Elementary School required teachers to work off of the same playbook, using the same strategies for solving problems and the same teaching tools from one grade level to the next.
“We really had to try to make learning easier for children,” Principal Jennie Rehl said.
Those changes contributed to the Rogers school closing achievement gaps between its white and Hispanic pupils.
Its progress caught the attention of education policy researchers at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, who featured the school among five grade schools in a “Spotlight on Success” report over the summer.
More recently, the researchers ranked the school among the Arkansas’ highperforming, “high-poverty” primary schools in a report on the state’s high-achieving schools for 2011.
Schools are considered high-poverty if two-thirds of its enrollment qualifies for free or reduced-price lunchprograms, said Gary Ritter, director of the UA’s Office of Education Policy.
Most high-poverty schools perform below the state average on state exams, Ritter said.
Hill’s enrollment is 55 percent Hispanic and 41 percent white. It is 87 percent lowincome. On the 2011 Augmented Benchmark Exam, 93 percent of its third- through fifth-graders earned at least a grade-level score in math, and 88 percent earned at least a grade level score in literacy.
Children are considered at grade level if they score “proficient” or “advanced” on the exam. The state average for grade-level scores was 77 percent in math and 75 percent in literacy.
Scores for Hispanic and white pupils have not yet been released for 2011, Ritter said.
Hill has the highest percentage of “economically disadvantaged students” in the Rogers School District, Rehl said.
“Research sometimes shows it’s harder to be successful with these children,” she said, adding that at Hill, the belief is that every child can learn.
Daria Hill, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, a nonpartisan organization that advocates on behalf of low-income students and minority-group students, said these students are “growing far more rapidly in our K-12 population than are any other segment of our population.
“It is absolutely critical we educate them to high levels,” Hill said. “We need them to participate in our society, our democracy and our economy.”
The trust receives significant funding from the Walton Family Foundation in Bentonville, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, and the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
CLOSING THE GAP
On a national level, Hispanic and low-income students historically have been at an educational disadvantage, Hill said.
They more often attend schools with less funding and had less access to the strongest teachers and challenging curricula, she said.
The decade-old federal No Child Left Behind Act requires all public school students to be proficient in math and literacy by 2013-14, regardless of a student’s ethnicity or race, income level, language barrier or handicapping condition.
The Arkansas Department of Education announced Oct. 10 that it will apply for relief in early 2012 from the federal law, using guidelines issued last month by the U.S. Department of Education.
In Tasha Simpson’s second-grade classroom at Hill, pupils of all races and ethnic backgrounds consider themselves mathematicians, they said.
“As mathematicians, we can tell people how we made the answer,” said Caden Callahan, 7, during a class discussion on how to solve a math problem.
The problem was this: A girl named Rylee fed her horse some carrots then gave the horse four more in the afternoon, for a total of eight for the day.
The children had to find out how many carrots Rylee fed the horse that morning. They discussed how to solve the question.
After one arrived at 12 as the answer, her peers helped her understand how to determine the correct answer: four.
One pupil wrote numbers one through eight on a number line and counted up from four. Another counted backward. Others drew cubes or relied on math rules they have memorized, such as “doubles facts” and “place value.”
For the “Spotlights on Success” report, researchers in the university’s Office of Education Policy evaluated results of Augmented Benchmark exams from 2008-10.
At Hill, slightly more Hispanics than whites earned proficient or advanced scores in math for each of those three years, according to the report. In 2010, for example, 94 percent of Hispanics were proficient or advanced in math, compared with 90 percent of whites.
In literacy, slightly fewer Hispanic pupils earned proficient or advanced scores than their white counterparts in 2008 and 2009. But in 2010, they reversed the trend, outperforming whites, 87 percent to 78 percent, according to the report.
The report states, “Even as their school has seen an increase in poverty, their achievement has continued to match or exceed expectations in both math and reading within schools across the state.”
FOLLOWING A PLAN
Six years ago, Hill experienced a wake-up call when the state put the school on alert status, Rehl said.
The alert status involved two significant pupil populations, the overall enrollment and low-income children, because too few pupils were proficient on the state’s benchmark exams, Rehl said.
The alert status lasted just one school year, 2005-06.
“We were devastated, feeling we were not meeting the needs of our children,” Rehl said. “We had our own ‘pity party,’ then pulled together and decided we had to make whatever changes were necessary to get our students to proficiency.”
Teachers now give clear instructions to their charges, Rehl said, following a simple, schoolwide plan for solving problems in every subject.
The “Understand, Plan, Solve, Check” method begins with the children reading directions and then underlining key points, making a plan for the problem, solving it and checking the answer, Rehl said.
“Whatever you’re trying to do, if you use this good plan, it will help you,” Rehl said. “It will help you in first grade through college. We use the same language in first grade and fifth grade.”
Teachers from different grade levels developed similar vocabulary and teaching tools so they could focus on content.
Previously, teachers used different teaching tools, colors and words for the same topic. Due to the inconsistency, Amy Smallwood had to teach her fifth-grade classhow to use the tool before she could teach them about writing, she said.
For example, one standard tool at Hill is called a “graphic organizer.” Younger grades use the organizer for writing paragraphs, while the older grades use it to compose five-paragraph essays, Smallwood said.
The graphic organizer for writing is a worksheet with five horizontal blocks stacked on top of one another. In fifth grade, the top block is the introduction and the bottom block represents the conclusion, she said.
Three blocks in the middle represent the beginning, middle and ending paragraphs.
Now, because her pupils work with the graphic organizer from an early age, they are familiar with it by the time they get to Smallwood’s class, she said.
This allows Smallwood to focus on teaching writing without having to show her pupils how to use the tool.
“It becomes automatic,” she said.
Teaching at Hill is tailored to each pupil based on their individual progress, said literacy specialist Anne Saullo.
In planning meetingswithin grade-level teams of teachers, discussions focus on the students, Saullo said. Teachers aren’t defensive when someone suggests they try a different teaching technique, she said.
Teachers track student progress through the year on homework assignments, classroom tests, observations and students’ scores on a variety of exams, including the Augmented Benchmark Exam and quarterly exams in writing, literacy and math, staff members said.
The faculty had used tests and other information to guide their instruction, but they mainly tracked pupils’ progress as a group, said Simpson, the second-grade teacher.
So teachers had to learn how to use this information for the benefit of each student, she said.
“I just realized more about where they were and where they needed to go,” Simpson said.
Smallwood has a poster in her room depicting Bloom’s Taxonomy, a pyramid that shows the level of thinking required for a particular question.
The most basic level is knowledge, and in ascendance are comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
Smallwood often refers her pupils to the chart.
“We want to be in the top half of the triangle,” she said. “We want them to ask questions on the top end. That helps them understand more.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 10/30/2011