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 A Story of Success
You know a school is doing something right when they get praised in not one, but two news bureaus for being spectacular! DeQueen Elementary, a school we have been partnering with since the 1990's, is getting a lot of well-deserved attention for their success in educating their children.
Student achievement at DeQueen is high ranking, with better than 93 percent of the students scoring as proficient and advanced on the Arkansas math and literacy exams back in the spring of 2012. Even more impressive, when those spring of 2012 test results are broken down by student demographics, including white, Hispanic, English-language learners and economically disadvantaged, there are almost no differences.
Says the school's literay facilitator, Gayla Morphew, "We have closed the gap. When we looked at test scores last year ... we looked at the Hispanic subgroup versus the Caucasians, and there was no disparity. That's when we knew we had done the right thing. You are really unable to tell statistically which group you are talking about when you look at the numbers."
Thanks to these results, DeQueen Elementary is a recipient of this year's Dispelling the Myth Award, given by The Education Trust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
The teachers at DeQueen follow a system implemented by JP Associates, called Direct Instruction, which is a step-by-step script for teachers. The results of this program are hard to argue with - unheard of success!
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