Pursuing Standards
Pays Off

California’s Imperial High School took the state standards to heart when they were introduced in the 1990s, and began reshaping its curriculum and instructional strategies. The school now posts strong scores overall and in subgroups of students.
Included: One school’s approach to meeting standards..

Courtesy of The Achievement Alliance

The combination of Imperial (California) High School’s steady improvement and its narrowing of achievement gaps commands attention in part because few high schools in the state or even the country have improved to that degree, particularly schools where the majority of students are from minority groups and about one-third of the students are considered low income.

Share Your NCLB Strategies
Education World’s Turnaround Tales feature highlights schools or districts with stories to share about how they are implementing requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. If you have a Turnaround Tale to share, send an e-mail to Ellen Delisio.

Imperial High School in the top third of the state in terms of student achievement, and while the overall index score has gone up, so have the index scores of all the major groups in the school.

The starting point for Imperial’s improvement came in the late 1990s, when California adopted its standards, and soon after, when it began administering state assessments tied to those standards.

Imperial’s steady improvement has been the result, the principal said, of carefully aligning instruction with California’s standards, studying individual achievement data, establishing a positive school climate, and all the while improving and refining classroom instruction.

SOURCE: The Achievement Alliance

To read the full story, see It’s Being Done: Imperial High School, Imperial Valley, California

04/16/2008