Springboard News

New Report Reveals 3 Secrets to Helping Low-Income, English-Language and Minority Students Succeed

Despite poverty, language barriers, and fewer resources, ten “challenged” high schools in California beat the odds

SAN FRANCISCO — Springboard Schools, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research organization focused on education reform, released today a new report that identifies California’s highest achieving, challenged high schools — schools with large numbers of students challenged by poverty, English as a second language, fewer resources and lower expectations. More importantly, the vanguard report reveals the three secrets to their success.    

According to the report, Challenged Schools, Remarkable Results:Three Lessons from California’s Highest Achieving High Schools, these model schools share three secrets to success: use of consistent curricula coupled with frequent diagnostic tests, adoption of best practices, and investment in teacher improvement. The three practices resulted in dramatic gains for these California high schools serving large populations of low-income, minority, and English-language learners.

“These strategies sound simple, but they are challenging and even revolutionary because they call into question many commonly held beliefs about teaching and about how high schools work,” said Merrill Vargo, executive director of Springboard Schools.

The report identifies 10 high-performing California high schools, which serve a large number of at least one of the following populations:  English-language learners, low-income, or minority students.  These high performers include Central Union High School (Central Union High School District), Southwest High School (Central Union High School District), Cleveland High School (Los Angeles Unified School District) and El Monte High School (El Monte Union High School District), four schools previously on the state’s improvement list, all of which have since made dramatic turnarounds. 

At Bolsa Grande High School - a school with high populations of English-language learners and low-income students - 57.4% of all students scored at the proficient or advanced-proficient level for English Language Arts and math this year - more than 2-1/2 times better than the 2005 AYP target established under NCLB. Almost 66% of the school’s students are low-income, and for those students the difference is also impressive: 55.8% of these especially challenged students scored proficient or advanced-proficient on English and math, which is more than 1-3/4 times the number of students that met the AYP target in demographically similar schools.

The most challenged students require both better teaching and better programs. Denise Jay, principal of Bolsa Grande High School, explained, “By expanding the concept of best practices we are putting new emphasis on professional development and planning in our school, which supports the students who struggle the most.”

Unlike average high schools with similar demographics, the report finds that California’s high-performing, challenged high schools invest their resources in providing teachers with access to new ideas and time to collaborate with peers to implement them. In addition, they hire coaches to help teachers teach and administrators lead. 

The report also reveals that meeting the needs of the lowest performing groups of students requires not just classroom-level changes, but also school- and district office-level strategies, programs, and interventions. This finding reveals that the definition of “best practices” —  which traditionally meant classroom-level practices or programs —  needs to be dramatically expanded to include every aspect of administration, teaching, and testing,  at every level.

“This report shows that thinking beyond the classroom is essential to long-term success,” said Sheri Hart, assistant superintendent of Central Union High School District. “We need to think at the district level of ways to support teachers and administrators on how they are best meeting the needs of the lowest-performing students. It is our job to provide teachers with the right tools and to allow them the time and opportunity to raise student achievement scores.”

“The private sector has repeatedly demonstrated the power of “benchmarking” — identifying and investigating the highest performers and using their ideas to fuel improvement. This approach is now possible in education,” said Vargo. “What we find when we use it is not silver bullets, but strategies that take hard, careful work. Yet what is most encouraging is not only that we are discovering strategies for improving our high schools, but we are finding them right here in our own backyards.”

Other high-performing, challenged high schools identified in the report are: Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies (Los Angeles Unified School District), Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (Los Angeles Unified School District), Selma High School (Selma Unified School District), Southwest High School (Central Union High School District), Middle College High School (West Contra Costa Unified School District), and Lincoln High School (San Jose Unified School District).     

The full report, Challenged Schools, Remarkable Results:Three Lessons from California’s Highest Achieving High Schools,is available on the Springboard Schools Web site: www.SpringboardSchools.org.

About Springboard Schools

Springboard Schools is a nonprofit network of educators committed to raising student achievement and narrowing the achievement gap. To accomplish this, Springboard Schools functions both as a research organization and a provider of support for schools. Springboard was founded in 1995 as the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC).  In 2001, researchers based at Stanford University’s Center for Research on the Context of Teaching found that achievement in Springboard client schools rose at a faster rate than in a carefully-matched comparison group of schools, and that those schools that implemented the program with most fidelity made the greatest gains. www.SpringboardSchools.org.