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| Plainfield, New Jersey |
| District Solution |
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| "H," kindergarten teacher Victoria Rios said slowly, sounding out the oversized letter she showed to her bilingual kindergarten class at Emerson Elementary School in Plainfield, New Jersey, a high-poverty, predominantly African American and Hispanic New York City suburb. |
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| "H," Rios's students responded in unison, as they excitedly scanned their cards in the hopes of finding the consonant and covering it with a checker during a tense game of alphabet bingo, one of the many ways that Rios teaches phonics during a daily "skills" session. The skills work is a central feature of the America's Choice School Design -- and has helped Emerson's reading scores soar in recent years. |
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| When "Bingo" rang out, Rios had the winning student pronounce the letters on her card. Rios and the rest of the class repeated the sounds. And then, to the students' delight, they played again. |
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| Plainfield is one of several school systems that has built a strong district-level relationship with America's Choice. In the late 1990s, the New Jersey courts required Plainfield and other low-wealth districts in the state to adopt a comprehensive school-improvement program as part of a ruling in a long-running school finance case. After attending a state-sponsored "school design fair," six of the town's 10 struggling elementary schools and its two middle schools adopted the America's Choice design and the school system's central office organized to play a key role in the reform effort. |
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| Plainfield's director of curriculum and instruction, Linnea Weiland, had her staff learn the America's Choice design alongside teachers and principals, organized regular monthly meetings for the principals and "design coaches" of the America's Choice schools (at a recent session they analyzed state testing data), and helped America's Choice work closely with the Plainfield teachers' union. District staff also attended America's Choice school leadership team meetings and participated in school visits that are part of the America's Choice design, sending a clear signal to teachers and principals about the importance of their work with the America's Choice design. |
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| "We didn't want just one or two schools to be stars," Weiland said recently. "We wanted district-level reform." That is what Plainfield got. Nine of its elementary schools now use the America's Choice program and 69 percent of their students are passing New Jersey's key 4th- grade reading test, up from 31 percent in 1999, the year before the first Plainfield schools adopted the America's Choice design. |
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| One reason for the surge in test scores is the quality of the literacy training that America's Choice gives to Spanish-speakers like Rios's kindergartners. Emerson's four classes of English language learners take part in the wide range of activities -- partner reading, journal writing, phonics games, book discussion groups, and much more -- that take place during the America's Choice daily literacy block. Students complete these activities in Spanish as they transition into English. The America's Choice literacy program can be adapted to transitional, bilingual, ELS, or other language models. |
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| Says Nilda Maccarelli, a world language teacher and Emerson's ELL literacy coach: "Students read a lot more in the America's Choice program. They write a lot more. It doesn't matter the language." The result, she says, is the best sort of transition to English -- a rapid one. |
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