West Jasper Elementary School

            On the other side of the railroad tracks from the mostly well-off schools in Jasper, Alabama, is a little elementary school where 80 percent of the children are poor. Tucked into a hilly neighborhood where many of the houses are older wooden bungalows, West Jasper Elementary was the traditionally low-performing school of Jasper City. Many still think it isn’t possible for the children in West Jasper to achieve at the same level as the other children in Jasper. But West Jasper is proving them wrong – its students meet state reading and math standards at more or less the same rate as students in the rest of Jasper and at much higher rates than the rest of Alabama. For example, 82 percent of its students – 77 percent of its African-American students and 86 percent of its poor students – meet or exceed state math standards, compared to 72 percent, 59 percent, and 61 percent, respectively, in Alabama. For the most part its median scores on the norm-referenced SAT 10 test are above national norms – a substantial change from the past, when students at West Jasper scored well below national norms.

            West Jasper has transformed from being a school where very few children were reading in the 1990s to one in which almost all the children are reading.

            In most places, that transformation would simply stand on its own. It would be yet another example of the possibility of making sure that all children learn, but without much of an effect on the surrounding schools.
But Alabama is doing something very unusual – it is deliberately trying to replicate what could be considered the educational DNA of West Jasper and 19 other “best-practice” schools in the state by identifying what elements have combined to improve those schools and then carefully and deliberately teaching other principals and school leaders what those elements of success are. In this way Alabama is attempting to make all of its elementary schools at least as successful as West Jasper.

            This replication process has attracted national attention because it is a systematic and conscious attempt to change the entrenched organizational structure of schools that for generations has been built on working in isolation and the singular, idiosyncratic practices of individual teachers and principals.

To read the rest of the story about West Jasper, go to http://www.achievementalliance.org/files/westjasper.pdf.