Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Closing the Achievement Gap in El Paso:A Collaboration for K-16 Renewal

1999; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 80; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-6487

M. Susana Navarro, Diana S. Natalicio,

Diverse Educational Innovations Studies

The authors describe the goals and action agenda of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, a key player in that city's move toward high-quality education for all. AS THE SCHOOL bell rings, 683 students file into classrooms at Hilley Elementary School in El Paso. They have bid farewell, often in Spanish, to the parents walking them to the school door, and they enter their classrooms continuing to speak with friends in Spanish or having switched effortlessly into English. Their enthusiasm and readiness for the day are evident, as are their energy and confidence of purpose. The school's pride in their work is evident, as well, in the displays of students' stories, poems, reports, and mathematics papers that adorn the walls of the classrooms and hallways. As the morning gets under way, it is clear that everyone knows that important work is the order of the day. Students walk into their classrooms and move quickly toward the location of the first activity. There is a sense of purpose throughout the room, and little time is lost or wasted. Classroom after classroom is filled with engaged students and teachers who seem happy to be there. As a visitor moves into the center for a prepared presentation, the children, not the adults, take the lead. Every bit of the technology show is conducted by students from the PowerPoint presentation to the demonstration of digital cameras and it all works perfectly. Later, in the faculty meeting room, where an assortment of education literature helps set the professional atmosphere, several teacher interns from the university's college of education discuss their continuous learning in the context of a school that is constantly working to improve the quality of education for all students and is always asking how things could be better. The drive to be the best has led Hilley to receive a National Award for Professional Development from the U.S. Department of Education and to be designated as a Texas Recognized School, despite a student population that in other communities would have been thought of as too poor and too poorly versed in English to succeed. Hilley Elementary, while exceptional in many ways, is not too different from other schools in El Paso, a city of more than 700,000 residents. In the three largest school districts El Paso, Ysleta, and Socorro Independent School Districts more than 135,000 students are enrolled in public schools. The vast majority, about two-thirds, are low income, and about half enter first grade with limited proficiency in English.1 These students come from homes in the fifth-poorest congressional district in the U.S., in which one in three workers earns minimum wage and more than half of the households report Spanish as the language of preference in the home.2 And yet, these students are achieving at high levels, and their schools and school districts have time and again been recognized as among the best in the state and, indeed, the nation. In the next few pages, we will outline the key components of the remarkable turnaround in achievement patterns that has occurred in El Paso. We will also look at the creation and work of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, a key player in this city's move toward high-quality education for all. Recognizing the Need In late 1991 a review of achievement data for El Paso students standardized test scores, high school course enrollments and pass rates, high school dropout rates, and college and university graduation rates revealed academic achievement levels that were unacceptably low.3 A closer look at the data showed that, while the level of all students' achievement could be better, a large gap existed between the achievement of ethnic minority or poor students and that of Anglo or more affluent students. At the same time, there seemed to be a far too pervasive sense that little could be done to alter the situation. Although some El Pasoans believed that improvement was possible, there was no clear sense of how to achieve it. …