Preservation Hall: Warren East High School

When your school is used as a shelter and your students have no homes, achieving 96% graduation and only 1% dropout would be impossible. But Warren Easton High School is not interested in the impossible. They are only interested in how to help every student succeed, and when they do that, 96% suddenly becomes more than possible--it becomes a reality.

100% Graduation in Baltimore

College and Career Readiness

Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore, Maryland, has done it--100% graduation and 100% passing rates on every standardized test. They didn't do it by lowering the standards, and they didn't fire every teacher and replace them with "experts." But what they did do was to provide more opportunities for the students and focused professional development for teachers.

This video is not about PD 360. It's not about School Improvement Network. It's about students who succeeded and teachers who knew they could. (You can see the video on YouTube here.)

The Seedling

As a quiet little seedling
      Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
      And this is what it said:

"I am not so very robust,
     But I'll do the best I can;"
And the seedling from that moment
     Its work of life began.

So it pushed a little leaflet
     Up into the light of day,
To examine the surroundings
      And show the rest the way.

The leaflet liked the prospect,
      So it called its brother, Stem;
Then two other leaflets heard it,
      And quickly followed them.

To be sure, the haste and hurry
     Made the seedling sweat and pant;
But almost before it knew it
     It found itself a plant.

The sunshine poured upon it,
     And the clouds they gave a shower;
And the little plant kept growing
     Till it found itself a flower.

Little folks, be like the seedling,
     Always do the best you can;
Every child must share life's labor
      Just as well as every man.

And the sun and showers will help you
     Through the lonesome, struggling hours,
Till you raise to light and beauty
     Virtue's fair, unfading flowers.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

From the Source: A High School Student Speaks Out

High school senior Haylee Wilkes of Brighton High School, Utah, joined the content department here at School Improvement Network in a job shadowing event this morning. While she was here, she wrote a blog post for you, dear readers. I'll be honest--I was impressed with how quickly she understood and applied the principles my colleague and I gave her. She seemed like an astute young lady with a bright future.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read her post. Though not vindictive (despite a rather provocative title), Haylee's post spells out the failure she felt as she confesses to having received (or earned?) a 22 on the ACT. "Average" and "mediocre" were how she described herself. I remember well the days that my own perception of a person was largely--and wrongly--dependent on their GPA and ACT. My perception changed when I found out that my wife, a person much more intelligent than I am, has an ACT score 8 points below mine. But we don't all have the benefit of such a changed perspective.

Did Haylee earn a 22, or did she receive it? We talk about college and career ready, but do we help our students feel college and career capable? And though education is not about "feeling good," what obligation do we have to help students build a self-perception and self-confidence to do what they can obviously do well?

Haylee is a bright young lady, though her standardized test scores don't reflect her view of "smart." Learn more over on our Common Core 360 blog where Haylee posted her experience.