SACRAMENTO, CA - Listen to the finger-pointing comments of many public school officials and one would think that it’s impossible for poor, minority students to perform well academically. Limited parental involvement, limited English ability, low parental education, and a litany of other excuses supposedly absolve public schools of responsibility for low student achievement. A new report by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), however, explodes these myths by highlighting high-performing, high-poverty public schools in California.

Titled They Have Overcome, the PRI report profiles eight California public elementary schools that attained a ranking of at least a 7 on the state’s 1-to-10-scale Academic Performance Index, had 80 percent or more of students on government subsidized lunch programs, and sizeable percentages of African American or Hispanic students. Despite challenging demographics, these schools excelled by raising the bar of expectations.

Dr. Norma Baker, principal at Hudnall Elementary School in working-class Inglewood, says “if you set high expectations for children and communicate that to children, then they in turn will work hard to meet those expectations.” Sue Wong, until recently the principal at Lane Elementary in Los Angeles, observes: “You get what you expect. The classrooms and the teachers that do well are those that have high expectations.”

Those high expectations mean meeting the state’s rigorous academic content standards. Dr. Baker says, “Everything we have here is content-standards driven. Some schools require the standards to be implanted in teachers’ lesson plans, while others post standards charts in classrooms. Many schools also devote teachers’ professional development days to creating standards-aligned classroom activities.”

If meeting the state standards is the goal, empirically proven curricula and teaching methods are the means. All the schools profiled in the PRI report use the highly structured Open Court phonics-based reading curriculum. After adopting the Open Court reading curriculum at her school, Sue Wong said, “We saw growth, we saw improvement, we saw more commitment.” There was greater diversity in the math curriculum used at the schools, but several schools used the Saxon curriculum, oriented to computational skills, which has proved very successful in raising student performance.

The schools also eschewed popular teaching methods that put students in charge of their own learning. According to Dr. Baker, “students need structure first of all,” and if a student is supposed to learn something “and the major input is from the student, how do students determine what their needs are?” Instead, the schools favored teacher-centered direct instruction, which education expert Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, has said operates “from detailed scripts, tells kids what they need to know, rather than letting
them discover it for themselves, as ed schools advise.”

To ensure that students meet the standards and that teachers perform well, the schools embrace testing. Debbie Tate, principal of Payne Elementary School in Inglewood, notes that without assessment, you would not know “that Johnny needs help with spelling” or “that Johnny is not decoding right.” Sue Wong says that teachers at her school use test scores “to do an individual analysis of how well they did” so they can see “if there is improvement, what kind of change did they effect, were they successful.”

These schools prove that there is a formula for success for poor, minority students. The challenge is to get school officials and policymakers to use this success formula to raise the performance of all underachieving schools in California.

Lance Izumi is a Senior Fellow in California Studies at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He can be reached via email at lizumi@pacificresearch.org.