Olmos Elementary School in the North East Independent School District saw a 16 percentage point increase in reading scores on State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) tests in 2023, according to an analysis by the nonprofit City Education Partners.
According to the same report, IDEA Monterrey Park College Preparatory, a charter school, saw a 45 percentage point increase in students meeting grade level in math.
Those improvements stand out in the report, which showed that citywide, students performed worse overall on standardized tests in subjects including math, reading, and social studies, as districts grapple with many issues, including staff turnover, chronic absenteeism and endless distractions.
Despite serving a population of students that is more economically disadvantaged than the city as a whole, teachers and administrators at those schools and a handful of others have found strategies that defy the odds.
Interviews with staff, administrators, and teachers at the two campuses reveal that parent engagement, teacher loyalty, staff retention, and highly qualified teachers contributed to the results, which could provide some insight for other schools looking to increase student achievement in the coming years.
There is a caveat to the scores, which were gathered using a test with modified questions and scoring and were given entirely online for the first time. But the benchmark is still a valuable tool to spark the conversation, according to Dalia Flores Contreras, the nonprofit’s CEO, which released a citywide report analyzing a second year of data in 2023.
“We call them bright spots,” she said of schools like Olmos. “They prove what is possible, and also we can lean in and learn what they are doing that we should be considering.”
Holding onto teachers
Teacher recruitment and retention have been among the most prominent challenges for school districts and public charter schools in recent years, with more teachers leaving and fewer entering the workforce following the disruptive pandemic era.
But the value of maintaining a staff that is all on the same page is evident at Olmos Elementary School, which had an enrollment of 526 as of last year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.
“I absolutely feel the greatest success of this campus is because I’m able to keep my staff year after year after year, and we don’t have an interruption,” Olmos Principal Gaila Booth told the San Antonio Report. “In the system itself, very small amounts of energy has to go into a new team member. I only lose teachers, if they’re maybe getting married and moving away.”
Laura Schroeder-Juarez, an instructional coach at the school, said that consistency provides a framework that allows teaching to become standardized across the campus.
“We have very similar strategies of how to teach the students,” she said. “We’re using the same vocabulary, we’re using the same teaching techniques, all the way through.”
“That’s really important with learners because they already know what to expect in every classroom as they go on through,” she added.
Instructional coaches help teachers with lessons and professional development and also act as mentors to teachers.
Booth said that with less time spent resetting classroom rules and expectations, teachers can devote more time to teaching.
The small campus has managed to maintain teachers with a family-like work environment, but with the rate of turnover seen at many campuses, the replication of the strategy could prove difficult.
New approaches to learning
Olmos and other schools that saw achievement growth in recent years, including Bonham Academy in the San Antonio Independent School District, have used the expertise on campus to innovate new ways to teach students how to read and learn.
Both Olmos and Bonham feature dual language programs that have yielded successful results. So, in recent years, teachers have been trading notes, using techniques to teach emergent bilingual students to speak English, and using them to teach native English speakers the same concepts.
Christopher Herrera, Bonham’s principal, said this has been successful on an anecdotal basis and that there are plans to increase and study the practice.
One example is a strategy called El Dictado, or dictation, where the teacher will read a paragraph or a passage, and the students will copy down what they hear.
“It’s all auditory,” Herrera said. “Then afterward, the teacher will write the little statement or the paragraph, and then the students check their work against it to make corrections.”
Another strategy called Lota Lara, where students read the exact text over several days while working on different speech skills, has also been used in monolingual classrooms after being tested in dual language classrooms.
The shared resources also help teachers and students share cultural perspectives when learning.
Another instructional coach at Olmos, Vanessa Sigler, said that monolingual and bilingual teachers often plan lessons together.
“So the different strategies that dual language uses,… those monolingual teachers are … applying those strategies,” she said.
Setting rigorous expectations
In addition to the growth in math, IDEA Monterrey Park College Prep saw an increase of 19 percentage points between 2022 and 2023 in students scoring on grade level in reading.
Lane Emery, an assistant principal at the school, said that the pressure to excel starts at the top for the charter school, with more than 90% of students moving into the second year of college after graduating last year.
“We all put pressure on ourselves, and then it flows down all the way to the students,” he said. “That is something I always say to any student who walks in this building or is thinking about signing up for school: ‘It is going to be hard, but it is going to be worth it.'”
Last year, the 72-person graduating class at the school earned about $13.5 million in scholarships and funds due to their hard work, Emery said.
While there has been turnover at the school, Principal Riyadh Al Obaidy said there has been an expectation set for every teacher.
“I always tell my teachers there is a huge difference between an educator and a teacher,” he said. “All the educators here in this building … make sure that all students performed well in this job.”
There is also a particular focus on building close relationships between teachers and students to facilitate learning at a higher level, Emery said.
“The teachers, every single one of them, push to build relationships with their students,” he said. “They have to respect you, they have to see you as somebody who cares about them.”
Student and parent engagement key
Daniel Alvarez, a senior who previously attended a private school, said those relationships were crucial for a deeper understanding of the content he has learned. He also said the teachers at IDEA approached topics differently, such as explaining how a question is formatted instead of just how to answer it.
“I genuinely understood the information, and … knowing the question structure allowed me to ace the test, but also genuinely understand the knowledge that I was getting,” he said.
Maysaa Hasan, who has two sons who attend IDEA, told The Report that the level of teacher interaction has increased since she transferred from an NEISD school.
“I’m here to help you; I’m here to support you,” she said she heard as soon as her son started ninth grade. “They communicate with us every single day.”
The parents can also be critical supports in helping close gaps that appear in certain subjects, Emery said.
“Anytime a teacher notices a student is behind or falling behind, immediately they’re reaching out to parents and giving them extra things, going through things in different ways,” he said. “Because sometimes you just need to hear and receive something different to be able to comprehend.”
Action needed
Contreras, the CEO of City Education Partners, hopes that conversations about what is working and a continued examination of what is not will spur change across San Antonio to address poor educational outcomes, including low literacy rates, while allowing for celebration of successful schools.
CEP released the first report calling for action at the beginning of 2023, visualizing how standardized test results reflect the historical economic, investment and education disparities between San Antonio’s more affluent North Side and other parts of the city.
Those trends continued, with gaps widening in some parts, according to the most recent report.
In San Antonio City Council District 5 on the West Side, for example, students met or exceeded grade-level standards 20% of the time in grades 3-8 for reading, math, science, and social studies, representing a two percentage point decrease since the spring of 2022.
Similar to last year, districts 8, 9 and 10 — all on the North Side — had the highest percentage of passing scores. In District 9, 72% of students were reading proficiently, according to the analysis, and 60% were proficient in math.
Earlier this year, Contreras said that issues that have historically impacted San Antonio’s lower-income residents, from lack of transportation to lack of economic development, are vital to the conversation.
“We cannot keep looking at education and saying, ‘OK, educators, you fix that, and we’re gonna fix this other thing,'” Contreras said in February. “This is so entrenched. One of the most powerful ways to deal with issues of equity in issues of systemic oppression, or systemic racism … is to have a cross-sector approach.”
She hopes city leaders and others in the public and private sectors follow up on the data by visiting schools and that school leaders will follow the lead of campuses that showed improvement.
“I’m not gonna say that things aren’t happening,” she said in September. “Things are happening. I think nobody would argue that what’s happening is getting us there.”
As the year ends, she sees the stagnant numbers adding urgency to that call to action.
“I keep asking myself, what is it going to take?” she said. “How bad does it have to get for us to work?
“How do we start a revolution?” she added.
