Schools build ‘cultures of excellence’ – City schools bring home better report cards

Experts say bold, systematic leadership is key to success.

Confronting achievement gaps and opportunity gaps is not optional at Los Altos High School in Hacienda Heights, Calif. Last year, Principal William Roberts posted some stark numbers over the copy machine, showing that Latinos made up 63 percent of the 2,000-plus student body but only 19 percent of Advanced Placement classes. He posed the question to the entire staff: What are we going to do about this?

For one, they started talking to Hispanic parents and students, and found they had absorbed a lot of limiting messages. "When you hear kids say, ‘Well, those classes are for the Asian kids,’ that’s painful," Mr. Roberts says, "but those realities have to surface … to really address the issue."

By adding extra AP classes and providing support for any student who wanted to attend them, Los Altos boosted the Latino AP participation rate to 33 percent in one year. The change is requiring a lot of meetings with parents, Roberts says, both to make sure new AP students are committed and to assure those used to the old system that the curriculum isn’t being watered down. He and his staff are committed to staying on the tough road to equity, he says.

By Stacy A. Teicher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1208/p14s02-legn.html?s=hns

***

City schools bring home better report cards

By Stacy A. Teicher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Urban education often gets a bad rap. But since 2003, a number of large city school districts have outpaced the national average when it comes to improving their students’ math and reading skills.

A snapshot of fourth- and eighth-graders released last week featured 11 districts that volunteered for a city-level comparison of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Prior to 2002, the scores were released only on the state and national levels.

The news isn’t all good, but the results give cities new tools in their quest to improve public education.

"It helps us track what reforms seem to be working in these systems," says Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition that lobbied for this measurement, known as the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA).

Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1208/p17s01-legn.html?s=hns