90% of AfAmAcademy Classes passes WASL = 2 best schools in Seattle Area?!

["Arthur Hu" <arthurhu@comcast.net>]

90% OF AFRICAN ACADEMY CLASS PASSES ALL 4 WASL SECTION (?!)
z70\clip\2003\09\afrwasl.txt
September 04, 2003 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
African American Academy sees payoff in WASL scores
By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter
On this year's Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), 18 of
Pinchback's 20 looped fourth-grade students ? all of them African
American and most of them from low-income households ? passed all four
sections: reading, writing, math and listening. Few teachers in the
state matched that achievement with poor and minority students.
[Only Bellevue's Challenge = 90.2 and Seattle's Lowell 93.0 were this
high - sounds very suspicious. Schoolwide was only 33.9. AG Bell
went from 40 to 70 passing in math, but my kid got schoolwork that
looked like answer keys to unreleased live WASL problems despite a
letter from the Superintendent saying there was absolutely no
relationship to leaking live test problems. A couple of other Lake
Wash elementary schools showed similar incongruous "gains".]

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Teacher Anitra Pinchback helps Deion
Emerson yesterday with a reading exercise at African American Academy.
The plan is for Pinchback to teach Deion and his classmates next year,
too.

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In the elusive quest to raise poor students' achievement, Anitra Pinchback
is bearing out the notion that face time counts.

Yesterday, after lunch, after her class of 20 third-grade "scholars"
walked single file into Room 114, and after they took their "learning
positions," Pinchback showed a visitor to Seattle's African American
Academy how much the students, most of them boys, already had absorbed
on their first day of school.

"Education!" she boomed.

"Is the key to my future!" her students chimed back.

"Your mind ... "

"Is a terrible thing to waste!"

"The more you study ... "

"The smarter I get!"

These kids likely won't have to waste time next year learning their
teacher's rules and expectations. The plan is for them to have
Pinchback again as their fourth-grade teacher ? a practice called
"looping," in which a teacher is assigned to the same group of
students for two or more years.

And looping may give them an edge over their peers in the state's
standards test.

On this year's Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), 18 of
Pinchback's 20 looped fourth-grade students ? all of them African
American and most of them from low-income households ? passed all four
sections: reading, writing, math and listening. Few teachers in the
state matched that achievement with poor and minority students.

Seattle's African American Academy was created more than a decade ago
to help reduce the racial gap in academic achievement, but has
struggled with low test scores, particularly on the WASL.

This year, however, the school had the biggest jump in pass rates
among all Seattle fourth-graders on the math and writing sections of
the test. And 63 percent of the academy's fourth-graders passed the
reading section, the highest achievement level among Seattle
elementary schools with similarly poor student populations.

People in high places sat up and took notice, not just of Pinchback,
but of her assignment to a looped class.

"We don't track that, but now I think we will," June Rimmer, Seattle
schools' chief academic officer, said of looped classes and their
measure of achievement. "We want to identify the successful strategies
and share them with others so they can be replicated."

Experts like Rimmer say looping works best when students have strong
teachers like Pinchback. But despite looping's popularity among many
educators as an inexpensive, effective reform, there's no reliable
data on how common it is. And only now are some districts taking
notice.

Looping spreads


ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES The WASL success of her previous class
turned attention to African American Academy teacher Anitra Pinchback
and a system in which she teaches the same students for two years.

"If you don't change anything in your class but this, you'll still get
better results," said Karen Dickinson, assistant director of curriculum and
instruction at Federal Way schools.

With the same class for two years, teachers gain almost two months of
extra teaching time because they know the students well and have
established routines with them and their parents, she said.

For the first time, all school levels in Federal Way this fall will
have looped two-year classes ending at grades four, seven and 10 ? the
same grades that take the WASL.

"It wasn't even something we had to persuade people to do," Dickinson
said.

Fourth-grade teacher Katherine Berg, who has a looped class at Bailey
Gatzert Elementary in Seattle, said she normally would have less than
four months to prepare her students for the WASL. Yesterday, she was
entering her second year with 21 students ? half of whom don't speak
English at home.

"It didn't really feel like the first day of school," Berg said. "It
felt like we picked up from last June."

Counting on parents

Last year Pinchback also was picking up where she left off with many
of her most challenging students during summer school. The Rainier
Beach High School graduate grew up down the street.


ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES A student in Pinchback's third-grade
class concentrates yesterday on a reading exercise.

While she attended the University of Washington, Pinchback said, she found
herself "spiritually led" to teach inner-city children. She completed her
master's degree at City University of New York and returned to Seattle,
where she has taught for three years.

She worked hard to learn the state's content standards for the WASL.
She read whatever she could find on effective teaching, and served on
a state education panel that evaluated reading-improvement plans.

During her two years with the same students, Pinchback said, she
focused on ensuring that every child had a solid foundation in phonics
and vocabulary. With this, she figured, they would be free to think
critically while reading, and the words in their math and science
problems would be understandable.

After spending much of the first year building bridges with the
students' parents, she enlisted their help to conquer the WASL. She
invited parents of each struggling student to help shape the child's
education plan, taught them how to review material with flash cards
and won their enthusiasm for ensuring homework got done.

"I wouldn't have been able to make the gains I had without the
parental support I had," Pinchback said.

Then she got laid off.

The district needed to reduce its staff because of a tight budget.

But in late July, after a frenzied housecleaning and the breaking open
of its cash reserves, Seattle Public Schools asked her and many others
to come back.

Like everyone else, Pinchback got the good news about her former
fourth-graders' WASL scores last week.

Still, some, like Rimmer, caution that in addition to looping, factors
such as curriculum and teaching techniques could have influenced the
success of Pinchback's fourth-graders.

Compounding the mystery is the lack of reliable data on the prevalence
of looping in U.S. public schools, according to Staff Development for
Educators, a New Hampshire firm that sponsors a conference on looping.


Medgar Wells, principal of African American Academy, said it can be
difficult to start looped classes when schools with the highest
percentage of low-

income students also have the highest percentage of inexperienced
teachers. Turnover can disrupt even the best plans. In any case, Wells
said, he intends to expand looping to all grades starting with this
year's students.

"Ms. Pinchback is an example that works," he said. "It allows you to
build a relationship with kids, and most importantly, the parents."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com