Revive Sagging AYP With These 7 Secret-To-Success Tips

If, despite your best efforts, your students continue to lag behind state standards, you are not alone in searching for performance-boosting remedies.

Answer: Learn from others' successes. Take these seven field-tested tips from Long Beach Unified School District, thrice recognized by the Broad Foundation in recent years for across-the-board gains in student achievement, to ramp up your school's AYP growth.

Tip #1: Intervene Immediately And Individually

Your intervention program should focus on two objectives: assessing students individually to pinpoint their deficiencies and taking appropriate action quickly. Here's how:

In the classroom: Employ differentiated instruction as the everyday norm, instead of as a reaction to poor test scores. Individualized instruction has done wonders for students at Edison Elementary School in Long Beach, a Title I school that boasts an 84-percent proficiency rate on state exams.

Example: During group lessons, teachers should monitor each student's participation. If a teacher realizes that three students are not able to respond appropriately or model her example, she pulls them aside to do a targeted re-teaching of the lesson with that small group, says Edison Principal Matty Zamora.

Tip #2: Don't Promote Students Prematurely

If you advance students who haven't cleared academic hurdles you're bound to see little improvement. Instead, design a plan for each student to get the added instructional support he requires.

District-wide: At the critical junctures before sixth and ninth grades, a Long Beach district team assesses every student that is below grade level in reading, says Superintendent Chris Steinhauser. The students are placed into differentiated reading classes based on their particular deficits, such as trouble hearing sounds, difficulty decoding or comprehension struggles.

To read the rest of the tips pick up NCLB Compliance Alert, Volume 4, Number 7, page 50, July 2007. For subscription information call 800-451-0948.