Editorial: Improving learning one kid at a time

Rising state and federal education standards are putting schools under more pressure than ever to ramp up learning and narrow the achievement gap.

In Minnesota, the learning gap is substantial. Known for educational excellence, the state has one of the highest overall high school graduation rates in the nation -- and simultaneously the highest dropout rates for some lower-income students of color.

To bridge that chasm, some local educators are using test scores and other assessment data to determine exactly which children need the most help. Then they use the information to monitor students and direct additional teaching and tutoring to those students.

It's a smart strategy that should be adopted by more schools. By breaking down the data to individual kids instead of districtwide statistics, the challenges become more manageable.

In St. Paul, for example, educators are working to raise student proficiency levels by at least 10 percentage points this year. After examining the data, they know the goal can be reached if they improve scores for only 1,500 students out of 37,000.

For individual schools, the goal seems even more achievable. At North End elementary school, for example, the staff knows it needs to work intensively with just 14 out of 310 kids to raise their proficiency levels. And it understands that targeting kids works; using that strategy helped the inner-city school boost its math performance by 12 percentage points last year. Using similar methods, educators in the Anoka-Hennepin district have determined that they need to bring about 400 elementary students up to proficiency within a 39,000 student body.

As one official there said, overall percentages don't mean much to classroom teachers. But narrowing those big numbers down to individual classrooms and kids makes the scope of the challenge easier to grasp and address.

Still, some educators have reservations about the approach. They worry about a return to the "bad old days" of tracking that singled out and stigmatized kids. Others are concerned that selecting some students for additional help means denying instructional time to other kids. And they wonder how they can focus more time on select students when many districts are cutting budgets and reducing staff.

But there are a variety of creative ways to wrap extra instructional help around kids. Some schools work with colleges, volunteer tutors or AmeriCorps and VISTA to get more adult help into classrooms.

Using its existing teacher force, Anoka-Hennepin groups students, sometimes from different grades, based on the skills they need to improve. Teacher teams check student progress every two weeks, then move students from group to group as they master certain concepts in reading and math.