High poverty, high test scores: Auburn school is a shouting success

Placing students into smaller groups with peers of similar learning ability allows schools to allocate resources to struggling or underprivileged students. The Peterson Elementary School in Kalispell, Montana, has begun to close the achievement gap for students of lower income families by creating three tiers of educational development. Teachers then tailor curricula around the needs of each peer group.

Small rural schools in New Hampshire achieved some of the state's highest reading scores by leveraging their size to create multi-grade classrooms, provide individualized support to all students, and build long-term student-teacher relationships. In result, these lower-income districts have outperformed expectations by the widest margins in the state.

In many countries, a lack of teachers leads to a common challenge - one teacher instructs students at multiple grade levels all at once. In the rural Rishi Valley region of India, instructors are straying from the traditional lecturing pedagogy to embrace a new "multigrade multilevel" learning philosophy: students follow "subject-specific 'learning ladders,'" with each lesson requiring varying levels of assistance from teachers. The method allows for a "personalized education that one usually associates with very developed economies" and "makes that affordable for low-resource environments."

Cherokee Point Elementary School in San Diego became a trauma-informed school in 2015, and since then suspensions have fallen to zero (and remained that way since) and they no longer need a campus police officer. The school's approach includes revised disciplinary practices, social-emotional instruction, free breakfast, school-wide training about trauma, strong parental engagement, and intensive individual support. They even partner with community organizations that all them to create and offer a wider variety of services than the school could on its own.

Lake Canyon Elementary School in California takes a strength-based approach to instruction - teachers identify students' natural talents and create personalized lessons to encourage the development of these skills. "Focusing on the traits and skills kids don't have can lead them to become disengaged, while focusing on strengths produces greater levels of happiness and engagement at school and higher levels of academic achievement," one psychology professor explains. Teachers discipline by highlighting "a surplus of something good, not a deficiency." Can the expensive, time-intensive model succeed elsewhere?

Deer Isle, Maine, struggled to keep students in school; many students felt that a diploma was unnecessary, since they could drop out and join the lobster fishing industry. But the local high school found a creative solution to keep students engaged and ensure more opportunities in what can be a volatile industry. They redesigned courses to suit the interests of students, moving to project-based learning that explores traditional academic topics through fishing and marine themes, such as studying geometry through boat building. The approach has helped increase graduation rates by more than 30 percent.

To improve its consistently high truancy rates, last academic year Española Valley High School implemented a new truancy and dropout prevention program aimed at shaping up poor attendance. The results are yet to be determined — but debate still rages within the school about the best method for battling truancy.

The Highline school district in Washington implemented a radical strategy to break the school-to-prison pipeline based on mounting data that suspensions push students into a cycle of violence and delinquency. However, theories of replacing punitive measures with counseling and academic triage have proven difficult to translate from idea to practice, and teachers have resigned over fear for their safety. But one teacher at Pacific Middle School found a way to make the approach work, and the district is promising to scale his model, determined to meet their original objectives and reach kids that need help.

The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools, and is now producing some of the highest graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and average test scores in public schools in the nation.

Students with low-income that attend public schools can find themselves locked in a system that prevents them from getting into the best colleges, from being unable to afford tuition, to not having the ambition, to not knowing a school that would welcome them. Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA targets high-performing low-income students. The college provides outreach to high school students in poor communities, financial aid to low-income families, summer workshops, and on-site advising and academic support.