Lapwai Elementary School

Up through the 1990s, Lapwai Elementary School was stuck. Only 20 to 30 percent of its students could read or do math well enough to meet state standards, and no matter how hard the teachers worked, no matter how much they cared, nothing seemed to change those numbers, year after year. It sometimes seemed as though the students at Lapwai were doomed to perform at low levels.
            Lapwai Elementary is in the northern neck of Idaho not far from the Washington border. It is on the western part of the large Nez Perce reservation. Although more than 80 percent of the students are American Indian, it is not a tribal school – it is a regular public school on tribal land. And for years it mirrored the achievement levels of many schools that serve poor children and American Indian children.
            “We were in the pits,” is the way the superintendent, Harold Ott, puts it.
            The teachers were keenly aware that low performance in elementary school meant that most of their students would face low performance in secondary school and very limited choices in their futures after that. But they couldn’t seem to make a difference.
            Teri Wagner, who was then a teacher at Lapwai, says, “We were committed, we cared, but our tradition of low performance continued.”
            Then, in 1999, a delegation of teachers went to a conference where they heard predictions of how vital a good education would be for children who would need ever-more complex and sophisticated knowledge and skills as they entered the 21st century.
            Flying back home in a puddle-jumper, the teachers held hands and pledged to each other that they would do whatever it took to make sure their students wouldn’t be left behind by the future.
            That dramatic moment was followed by years of difficult slogging – adopting a coherent curriculum, reorganizing the school day, learning to use individual student data to drive instruction, and learning to work together as teachers and with the larger community, and all the time learning about the research that should underlie instruction. But all that work paid off when roughly 80 percent of the school’s 280 students met state standards.
            The strongest performance is consistently turned in by the fourth grade – for example, 100 percent of the fourth-graders were considered proficient or above on the state’s math standards in 2004; 94 percent on state reading standards; and 92 percent on state language usage standards. In the third, fifth, and sixth grades, the percentage of students who were proficient was closer to 75, but even that considerably outpaces the rest of Idaho, where only about two-thirds of American Indian students are considered proficient and above.
            That doesn’t mean the staff is satisfied. They worry about the approximately 20 percent of students who don’t meet state standards. They study their scores, work with them individually, and fret about what else they need to do to make sure that that they read and do math well. Staff members are concerned that scores seem to have leveled off and occasionally even dropped a little in the last year or so. But every once in a while, says Wagner, “I slap my hand on the table and say, ‘We’re worried about 20 percent!’ We used to worry about 80 percent.”
            To learn how Lapwai achieved the success it has, click here Up through the 1990s, Lapwai Elementary School was stuck. Only 20 to 30 percent of its students could read or do math well enough to meet state standards, and no matter how hard the teachers worked, no matter how much they cared, nothing seemed to change those numbers, year after year. It sometimes seemed as though the students at Lapwai were doomed to perform at low levels.
            Lapwai Elementary is the northern neck of Idaho not far from the Washington border. It is on the western part of the large Nez Perce reservation. Although more than 80 percent of the students are American Indian, it is not a tribal school – it is a regular public school on tribal land. And for years it mirrored the achievement levels of many schools that serve poor children and American Indian children.
            “We were in the pits,” is the way the superintendent, Harold Ott, puts it.
            The teachers were keenly aware that low performance in elementary school meant that most of their students would face low performance in secondary school and very limited choices in their futures after that. But they couldn’t seem to make a difference.
            Teri Wagner, who was then a teacher at Lapwai, says, “We were committed, we cared, but our tradition of low performance continued.”
            Then, in 1999, a delegation of teachers went to a conference where they heard predictions of how vital a good education would be for children who would need ever-more complex and sophisticated knowledge and skills as they entered the 21st century.
            Flying back home in a puddle-jumper, the teachers held hands and pledged to each other that they would do whatever it took to make sure their students wouldn’t be left behind by the future.
            That dramatic moment was followed by years of difficult slogging – adopting a coherent curriculum, reorganizing the school day, learning to use individual student data to drive instruction, and learning to work together as teachers and with the larger community, and all the time learning about the research that should underlie instruction. But all that work paid off when roughly 80 percent of the school’s 280 students met state standards.
            The strongest performance is consistently turned in by the fourth grade – for example, 100 percent of the fourth-graders were considered proficient or above on the state’s math standards in 2004; 94 percent on state reading standards; and 92 percent on state language usage standards. In the third, fifth, and sixth grades, the percentage of students who were proficient was closer to 75, but even that considerably outpaces the rest of Idaho, where only about two-thirds of American Indian students are considered proficient and above.
            That doesn’t mean the staff is satisfied. They worry about the approximately 20 percent of students who don’t meet state standards. They study their scores, work with them individually, and fret about what else they need to do to make sure that they read and do math well. Staff members are concerned that scores seem to have leveled off and occasionally even dropped a little in the last year or so. But every once in a while, says Wagner, “I slap my hand on the table and say, ‘We’re worried about 20 percent!’ We used to worry about 80 percent.”

To learn how Lapwai achieved the success it has, click here http://www.achievementalliance.org/files/Lapwai.pdf