School Case Studies
CASE 1: Springfield Public Schools
As the third largest city in Massachusetts, Springfield has many of the same challenges that other urban districts face: 14% of the students have limited English and 76% come from low-income families. The district’s MCAS results show a high percentage of students failing or in the needs improvement categories.
In January 2008, The Writers’ Express and Springfield School District kicked off a 4-month pilot collaboration to train and implement the WEX curriculum with approximately 90 classroom teachers (including, Sped and ELL teachers) in grades 3-5 and Literacy coaches in eighteen schools across the city.
The following results show the dramatic progress students made in just 4 months.
Download The Results Here.
CASE 2: South Bronx Preparatory
Living in one of the toughest neighborhoods in New York, the students at South Bronx Preparatory (SBP) face a particularly difficult set of challenges. Death rates from drugs, homicide, AIDS and diabetes are four times the city average; almost twenty percent of children suffer from a learning disability; and more than half the adult population lacks a high school degree. Once characterized as the “most dangerous school in New York,” SBP has historically ranked lowest in its district on the citywide exams of mathematics and language arts.
Backed by funding from the Gates Foundation, The College Board took over SBP in the fall of 2004 and began searching for a professional development program that could transform student performance. After a nationwide search, the College Board chose The Writers’ Express to pilot an intensive program with 75 SBP students and their teachers.
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In comparison to the other 10 middle schools in its district, SBP's 6th graders went from the lowest to the highest ranking in the New York City ELA exam. To put these results in perspective: the same period of time led to no gains in SBP's rankings in any of the other subjects assessed.
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CASE 3: Boston Renaissance Charter School
One of the largest charter schools in the country, Renaissance serves 1,280 students, 96% of whom are Black and Hispanic. After successfully piloting a program for 200 fourth-graders, The Writers’ Express was hired to provide training in data-driven instruction for all of the school’s 2nd through 6th grade teachers.
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Sample of Student Growth
The following pre- and post- tests illustrate a single 4th grader’s performance gain over a duration of a 7-month study.
Prompt: Pick something you did in the last week that was hard for you. Use details to describe what happened.
Pre-test
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Post-test
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At home when I was playing in the park it was hard to do the glider and I was on the platform and I jumped of and I banged by nose on the platform I started to bleed then I started to cry that’s because my nose hurted that’s and I went to my house my mom and dad saw me bleeding through my nose and my mom gave me a cloth to put on my nose to make it stop bleeding and I felt painful when I fell and I felt better when mom took care of me. That’s what happened to me and that’s how I felt. That’s what happened last week. It was really hard. |
The time I had to do something hard was when I learned how to play basketball. The hard part was to shoot the ball in the hoop. My sister said that when you shoot in a hoop you bend your knees a little and hold ball and shoot. I was sweating like an ice cream cone sitting in the sun melting. I kept practicing and practicing until my arms fall off and my legs break. One day after practicing I tryed again and I shot it for the first time. I was so happy it felt like if I got a headmasters award. I told my brother and sister that I made it in but they didn’t believe me so I said “I will prove it to you.” So we went to the court and I made it in again. I got really good at it and that’s how I know how to shoot it in the hoop. That’s the time I did something hard. |
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CASE 4: Dearborn Middle School
The Dudley Square neighborhood in Boston is one of the poorest in the city—with almost all of its students eligible for free lunch programs. Prior to working with The Writers’ Express, Dearborn students tied for third lowest in the state on their MCAS exams.
Over a three-month period, The Writers’ Express piloted a professional development program that focused on a single teacher who had consistently received “unsatisfactory” evaluations of her teaching. In the year prior to working with WEX, this teacher was able to help only 33% of her students make progress on their Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) scores. After participating in the WEX program, she led 87% of her students to increase their reading scores.
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CASE 5: English High School
The oldest public high school in America and the most diverse in Boston, English High School hosts the largest bilingual program in the city. After receiving their students’ results on Massachusetts’s MCAS exam, the school hired The Writers’ Express to boost student achievement and enhance their literacy program.
The 10th grade was randomly divided into two cohorts of five teachers and 125 students. The Writers’ Express worked with one cohort–coaching four teachers of different disciplines to integrate writing into the curriculum. At the end of the year, 40% of the students in The WEX cohort scored proficient or better on the ELA section of the MCAS. In the control group, only 22% of the students scored proficient or better.
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