This Guest Opinion appears online only and not in the Tucson Citizen’s print edition.

I recently ran a study that identified all schools that had at least 200 English language learners in 2003 to see what percentage of them passed all three AIMS tests (in English) two years later in 2005.

The range was instructive: from a low of 9 percent to a high of 84 percent.

The 84 percent was achieved by Gallegos “Basic” Elementary School in the Sunnyside Unified District in Tucson, a back-to-basic school with uniforms, significant homework, etc.

The distinctions between schools that did well and those that did not didn’t appear to be influenced by the amount of money available, but rather the leadership of the schools.

The most stunning data came from Nogales – the district of the plaintiff in the Flores ligation over English language instruction in Arizona.

It has special problems because it is on the border. Yet in 2005, five schools in the Nogales Unified District had 60 to 78 percent of their 2003 English language learners pass all three AIMS tests.

I called the man responsible for this miracle, Kelt Cooper, superintendent of Nogales from 2000 and 2005, and asked what he did to achieve these spectacular results.

Here are the seven most important things he did:

● Eliminate social promotion: When he arrived, social promotion was chronic. With a majority of the school board backing him, he eliminated it. Students who did not pass were held back.

This met fierce resistance from some principals and teachers. They are taught in education colleges that students should not be held back because it hurts their feelings.

But social promotion creates a schoolwide atmosphere where actions have no consequences, students progress whether they do any work or not and academic achievement plummets.

● Summer remediation: With social promotion, there was no need for intervention or summer remediation. Once they started holding students back, there was a need to intervene so the students could catch up.

● Advanced programs: He enacted programs for advanced students, for example, in science and math for grades four through eight.

● Class size: He reduced class size from an average of 40 students to 22 in early grades.

● Eliminate aides: He focused on hiring and supporting highly qualified teachers for every classroom. By eliminating aides, he was able to raise teachers’ salaries.

● Eliminate bilingual and emphasize English immersion: He adopted a program called SIOP, in which the teacher posts a language objective and content objective for every lesson, with a list of immersion strategies to use.

● Eliminate interdisciplinary courses: Shocked to learn that math was taught as a separate subject only 1 1/2 hours a week, he increased that to one hour a day. Reasonable amounts of time were established for each category of coursework.

If Cooper could accomplish these results in a border district, everyone can do it if he or she adopts Cooper’s leadership strategies.

Tom Horne is superintendent of public instruction for the Arizona.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Opinion. Tags for this post: Columnist/Guest, Crime/Safety, Opinion-Crime/Safety, Opinion-Crime/Safety-Columnist/Guest, Tom Horne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.