Van Esselt Elementary School in Washington State has become a NCLB "success story," despite the challenges posed by a student body with 80% below the poverty line, and most of which speak English as a second language. Principal Hajara Rahim has struggled for nine years to help raise the educational quality of the school, and she seems to have done a great job of it:
Van Asselt is the kind of school that educators call "challenging."
More than 80 percent of its 385 students qualify for federal meal subsidies, which are based on family poverty levels. Many of the students, and more of the parents, are immigrants. A sizable percentage of students speak English as a second language, with their first language Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, Somali, Tagalog, Samoan or any of a dozen others. Three-fifths of the students are identified as Asian or Pacific Islander, another fifth are black and most of the rest are Hispanic.
Rahim set out to dispel the prevailing pessimism at the school. "I tried to work on the morale and spirit of the staff, " she said.
Among the teachers, she fostered "an atmosphere of connectiveness throughout the school rather than having people going into their rooms and closing the door," she said. She organized schoolwide activities and scheduled faculty meetings at each grade level, "making the team responsible for certain things rather than just the teacher."
Rahim also worked to integrate the curriculum vertically, so that kindergarteners are specifically prepared to handle what they'll be taught in first grade, and so on, through grade five...
As part of the improvement effort, Rahim said, the school also began tracking its students more carefully, assessing their skills with tests at the beginning of the school year, in the middle and at the end, which allows teachers to tailor lessons more effectively...They coordinated the after-school program to reinforce the school-day instruction. They emphasized homework, in some cases recruiting members of the community to help students whose parents are illiterate in English.
The result? Math proficiency scores at Van Asselt, as measured by the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), have nearly doubled in just two years. Just amazing.
Posted by kswygert at September 30, 2003 10:58 AM