Reaching the
goals of “No Child Left Behind” isn’t as easy for Yakima School District as for
most districts, and it may take a little longer, but the progress the district
is making is so phenomenal that Supt. Benjamin Soria has been selected
Washington State's 2006 Superintendent of the Year and was one of the top four
candidates for National Superintendent of the Year.
Soria, who became superintendent of Yakima schools in 2000, was one of the featured speakers at this year’s LEAP (Latino/a Educational Achievement Project) Conference in Olympia and is chairman of LEAP’s advisory board.
Since he took over in Yakima, fourth-graders passing the state WASL exam has increased from 39.7 percent to 66 percent in reading, from 16.2 percent to 49.6 percent in writing, and from 16.4 percent to 38.9 percent in math. Similar improvements are occurring for seventh-graders and 10th-graders, who are also required to take the WASL test.
These improvements have been made despite major academic and financial challenges.
“Our biggest concern is time,” says Soria. “As I told the school board, we’re going to finish the race, but we’re just not going to finish it at the same time as some other schools.”
In Yakima School District, 59 percent of the students are Hispanic and 33 percent Anglo. But more to the point, while across the state 35.9 percent of all children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, in Yakima more than twice that percentage – 72.1 percent – qualify. While statewide 7.1 percent of all students are considered transitional bilingual -- still wrestling with learning English as their second language -- in Yakima it’s quadruple that percentage, 28.3. And while 1.5 percent of the students statewide are classified migrant, in Yakima the percentage is 16 times greater. Nearly a quarter of the students – 23.9 percent – are migrant.
Such demographics represent a lot of obstacles for students to overcome -- poverty, poor English skills, changing of schools -- in reaching required academic standards. Even if the district’s academic program were perfect, having students migrate in and out of the district would make achieving the required No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards difficult.
The problem of having a high proportion of English language learners is highlighted by district data that shows that Hispanic non-ESL (English as a Second Language) fourth-graders have now nearly caught up to Anglo students and to the rising NCLB requirements.
The
“state uniform bar” for fourth-graders required just over 60 percent to pass the
WASL reading test. Anglo students reached 80 percent; non-ESL Hispanic students
reached about 75 percent; but the ESL students could only manage about 42
percent.
The district has put prime emphasis on improving students’ reading skills.
“That basically is the foundation of all learning – even writing and mathematics,” says Soria. “Our most important goal we set is that all students would be reading at grade level by fourth grade.”
To help accomplish this, the school board had to fund programs not covered by state or federal funds. One such reform was full-day kindergarten.
Children entering kindergarten are expected to have a working vocabulary of 6,000 words, but many of Yakima’s students don’t even have half of that, says the superintendent.
“A large portion of our students enter kindergarten two years behind developmentally,” Soria says. “That’s a huge gap to make up.”
The district has also increased its pre-kindergarten program to about 400 students.
The district also hired and trained 23 reading coaches (one per school) and provided additional training to teachers, para-educators and substitute teachers.
In writing, no uniform bar was set, but non-ESL Hispanic students tied the Anglo fourth-graders, with about 60 percent passing the WASL test. But only about 37 percent of the ESL students could pass the test.
And in math, the
uniform bar stair-stepped up from 30 percent in 2004 to about 48 percent in
2005. So while the non-ESL Hispanic students had surpassed the bar with about 38
percent the previous year, they fell short of the raised bar this year with
about 41 percent. About 55 percent of the Anglo students passed the WASL math
test, and, again, the ESL students pulled the average down, with only about 19
percent passing the state test.
The impact of poor English skills seems clear, although correlating challenges may share the blame. Many of the ESL students are also migrant students who frequently miss classes and change schools. And some may have arrived recently from a country where they did not have the opportunity to attend school.
Despite making remarkable progress, the district lost over $7 million in federal funding over a three-year period when it could not reach higher standards as quickly as the federal government demanded.
That made reform even more difficult, but the district pushed ahead.
Other reforms include getting the principals to become more involved in academic leadership.
“We expect principals to be in classrooms at least 15 hours per week,” Soria explains. “They have to be observing instruction because that’s the only way they can make a difference.”
The district also follows up better with individual assessments and evaluations.
‘We’re much more on target with our intervention,” Soria says.
Students who are behind in any of their basic skills are placed in additional remedial classes. A child would typically have 90 minutes a day of reading instruction, but if behind, he would receive an additional 90 minutes, for example. Before- and after-school programs, Saturday school and summer school are also available to help students catch up, the superintendent explains.
Dual-language immersion and content ESL have been introduced as programs shown to help English language learners (ELLs) simultaneously learn English and content, he says.
Adults and younger English language learners are both benefiting from an online K-12 curriculum, called CONEVyT, created in Spanish by the government of Mexico.
“This is a very promising program, especially for students who are still struggling to learn English,” Soria says. “We are able to allow students to complete classes in Spanish while they are still learning English.”
The state paid to have the curriculum aligned with state standards so the online courses could be counted toward graduation. The curriculum is also used as a tutorial tool for ESL students taking classes in English, and by Spanish-speaking parents trying to improve their education.
Police pick up truants and return them to school, and 670 students too old for high school have been enticed back into the classroom to work on their GED diploma, even though NCLB rules count GED students against the district.
“We make it very hard for students to drop out,” Soria says.
Research has also shown that parental involvement has a high correlation with student success. Therefore the district has put a lot of emphasis on engaging families.
Printing all school publications in both English and Spanish, recruiting parent representatives to participate on each school’s leadership team, establishing a call-in radio show and providing night classes for adults are among the strategies the district has implemented.
Since hiring a full-time parent and community involvement director, the district has been attracting over 1,000 parents to its community forums.
Soria says previously the district lacked instructional focus, consistency of instruction, consistency of classroom materials, consistency of ELL delivery models, student classroom assessments, and use of data to drive instruction.
Soria credits the district’s rapid improvements to establishing clear policy direction on closing the achievement gap, creating a systemic school reform approach, focusing on leadership and instruction, establishing full-day kindergarten, correlating a K-12 reading/literacy curriculum, developing an improved ELL program, establishing an internal accountability system, correlating its K-8 math curriculum, expanding its efforts to keep students from dropping out or to get them to return to school, and engaging parents and the community in the educational process.