(Vol. 2, No. 2 - Spring 1998)

Rogers faces challenges of its own

The principals and faculty at Hamilton and Rogers middle schools have something in common --they all puzzle over how to help the low-achieving student. But the advantages are mostly on Rogers' side.

"It should be easier for us," says Rogers Middle School principal Linda Moore. Rogers is a school with an experienced faculty, strong leadership, a high degree of parent involvement, and a mix of kids that might not be envied in the suburbs, but is considered highly desirable in urban Los Angeles County. Many of Rogers' students are in accelerated programs. Rogers' test scores are good enough to rank it among the top six or seven middle schools in the district.

Still, as Moore is quick to admit, 25-30 percent of Roger's students are low achievers, and another 20 percent have not reached the district's definition of "proficient" in English and math. "These are the students that are the most difficult to reach," Moore says. "Every school has them. They are the reason we are trying to learn to do our job better."

In the nearly three years since Moore arrived, she has challenged her faculty not to let the success of Rogers' top tier of students create a sense of complacency. "If we're not moving those kids at the bottom, we can't say we're doing the whole job we're expected to do," she says.

After experimenting with several strategies, the Rogers faculty spent time last year researching
the best ways to attack the problems of its underachievers. When the school became eligible for federal Title I funds this year, teachers used the money to implement their three-pronged action plan-frequent parent contacts, mentoring, and a focus on basic skills.

"When we started looking for ways to help our lowest achieving kids, we really started from scratch," says Megan Stanton, a language arts teacher who coordinates the school's Target Assisted Students program. "We had to figure out what was needed by the kids, and we found out it was a lot of different things.

"We have reading programs, we have homework center, we have one-teacher-to-six-students tutoring, we have anything else we could come up with. We tried to find all the needs and now we're trying to see if tailoring what we do to the kids' needs is going to help them improve in all the content areas," she says.

Moore says teachers who worked before and after school in the TAS program "got frustrated early on. I think they thought that in those small-ratio situations, they could make a lot of progress in a hurry. But they're seeing how tough the work is, even for experienced teachers. The want to solve all the problems in a few weeks, but I tell them that it took a lot longer than that for the kids to get where they are."

Moore says some members of Rogers' faculty "are still not on the standards bandwagon-they still aren't convinced that all of our kids can meet standards, maybe not at the same time but eventually."

The biggest stumbling block to high standards, Moore says, are weak basic skills-skills kids should have picked up before 6th grade. But with the district's third-grade reading initiative and Rogers' growing emphasis on literacy skills, Moore expects more students to be able to read and write at grade level, and more teachers to believe that high standards are possible for all kids.

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