Making the Grade
Sanders school celebrates passing AYP

Students in Molly Ferriter's class raise their hands in response to a question Thursday while reading together at Sanders Elementary School in Arizona. For the first time in several years the students and staff passed all of the required tests and benchmarks to meet the state and federally mandated Adequate Yearly Progress. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

Victor Caballero, principal of Sanders Elementary School, sits at his desk with a copy of the academic standards for second grade students in Arizona public schools in front of him as he talks about all of the different standards that are imposed by the state and the federal governments. The school celebrated meeting all of the required guidelines and achieving satisfactory AYP during the previous academic year. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

SANDERS, Ariz. — A week ago to the day, Sanders Elementary School staff were busy making final preparations for the day’s celebration. But inside Nicole Bodie’s classroom, the lights were dimmed and her five second-graders were leaning intently over their books at a low table that curved around their teachers.

“Can anyone tell me the first letter of the word ‘go?’” Bodie asked.

“G-o,” replied one of her over-eager charges.

It might not sound like much. But for these five at-risk pupils, it’s progress — and a telling example of the gains the school has made in the past year. For the first time since the No Child Left Behind Act started grading schools from coast to coast, and on the verge of a state takeover, Sanders Elementary made adequate yearly progress last spring. It’s an important milestone, made all the more impressive by taking place while the federal education law gets tougher and schools all around it continue to fall short. Across the state line, in McKinley County, not one of the more than 30 public schools made AYP last spring.

But don’t ask Victor Caballero about NCLB.

“I can’t say that word,” the Sanders Elementary principal said. “Accountability is good; I just don’t like the education part.”

High-stakes testing
What Caballero means by “the education part” is the high-stakes testing the government uses to determine if schools are meeting their targets. And it doesn’t help that those targets keep moving. The federal education law tacks on additional conditions for making AYP every year. Ultimately, it requires schools to have all their pupils proficient in reading and math by 2014.

But for all his hard feelings toward the law, Caballero, an energetic man with alert eyes and an aversion to sitting still, has managed to make it work. Between spring ‘04 and spring ‘06, the number of third-graders performing at grade level in reading, writing and math actually fell. That’s when Caballero stepped in. By the end of the 2007 school year, all three figures were higher than they’d ever been, hitting 52, 81 and 66 percent respectively.

Bodie has seen the same kind of progress among her small class of second-graders.

“They were my lowest group, but they’re really coming along,” she said proudly.

Since the start of the school year, they’ve moved from Level A to Level B. Counterintuitively, that’s actually a good thing, Bodie explained. It means the difference between reading books with one word per page to reading books with several lines per page.

“Those are pretty gigantic gains,” she said.

Bodie attributes most of that success to a new “guided reading” program the school instituted since Caballero’s arrival that groups pupils by their ability, allowing for more targeted instruction. But there’s been plenty more afoot at Sanders Elementary in the past few years.

It’s aligned its curriculum closer to state standards, started breaking down progress reports by the pupil, and begun offering $3,000 signing bonuses to recruit hard-to-find math, science and special education teachers. But what Caballero seems most proud of are the “intervention” classes implemented this fall: Five at a time, grouped by grade and subject, the school’s lowest performing pupils meet with a designated teacher to target their weaknesses. The teachers design lesson plans for each, and evaluate them on a long list of “benchmarks” four times a year. A private consultant arrives twice a month to help the teachers with their reading instruction and lesson plans.

Bodie, one of the school’s six intervention teachers, prefers the model over the larger classes she used to teach.

“It was hard to give (pupils) individual attention because there were so many children in the classroom,” she said.

Bucking the trend
Though Caballero agrees with the common refrain about NCLB pressuring schools into “teaching to the test,” he says Sanders Elementary has managed to buck the trend by bringing back art, gym, language and music classes. He’s even been laying grass around the building and started up the school’s first sports teams.

Still, Bodie believes the school has cost pupils something in its dogged pursuit of higher test scores. The moments Bodie remembers most from her own elementary school days happened when the books were closed, when she and her classmates had a chance to get their hands dirty and feel their way through an activity. Some pupils learn better that way. But in the days of NCLB, she said, that kind of “creative” teaching has fallen largely by the wayside.

“Everyone’s focused on taking the test,” she said. “I do appreciate some of the structure, but I think they’ve gone overboard.”

Even so, the school is savoring the moment. It set a side half of last Thursday for an afternoon of outdoor activities to celebrate its achievement. A banner reading “Congratulations SES! We did it — AYP” lined the northern fence. Anchored balloons swayed in the wind to the tune of “Last Train to Clarksville” while pupils grabbed plates of food.

“It’s a real morale booster,” Bodie said of making AYP, “but there’s till a lot of pressure to do it again.”

Indeed, Sanders Elementary may have made the grade this year, but it will stay on the state’s watch list until it makes AYP two years in a row. Meanwhile, NCLB is making it ever harder to do so. A school might score high enough on the test to make AYP, for example, but miss the coveted designation because it failed to test enough of its pupils in a given category.

Caballero still shakes his head at something he heard during a meeting of the Arizona School Board Association in Phoenix last month. With some 200 separate standards for schools to meet, he recalled, “they said by the year 2013 nobody will make AYP ... so it’s just incredible what they’re putting on a school.”

Facing those kinds of odds, Caballero has little advice for other schools still searching for the right formula. He talks of staff collaboration, curricular consistency and a student-by-student approach to achieving goals.

As for what he’d like to change about NCLB if he had that kind of power, well, Caballero won’t even go there.