Summerville Middle School Summerville, Georgia State Solution In 2000, the Georgia Department of Education needed help in turning around schools where students were not meeting Georgia standards. The legislature had just passed a sweeping education-reform act that required the department to identify low-performing schools and provide them with intensive help. But the department did not have enough staff to do that on the scale required. As a result, it conducted a national search and selected the America's Choice School Design to help 161 of the state's schools under what became known as the Georgia's Choice program. When Kathy Cox became the state's new superintendent of schools early in 2003, she evaluated the America's Choice program and decided to extend Georgia's relationship with America's Choice. She did so because of the results in schools like Summerville Middle School in Summerville, Georgia, a town of 4,600 near the Alabama border where over half the adult population lacks high school diplomas and where work usually means 12-hour shifts at local textile mills. The school had a long history of low expectations and poor test scores. But there is little trace of the school's uninspiring past in Terry Haney's 8th-grade algebra class, where students were graphing equations during a recent visit. In groups of four, they figured out the solutions to 2x-y=11, as Haney moved around the room, asking and answering questions. Then the lights went down and a student, with red felt pen in hand, worked through the problem on a transparency, explaining each step along the way, as an overhead projector cast her work on a wall. Afterwards, students asked questions that forced her to justify her reasoning in a lively but relaxed give and take. Then they regrouped to tackle the next problem. Such student presentations are common in America's Choice classrooms. The teaching ensures that students learn math concepts as well as math facts, and students understand math and learn to apply it, rather than merely memorize it. "The America's Choice teaching strategies go so much deeper than just isolated skills," says 15-year-veteran Haney, who, like other America's Choice teachers, is a specialist. He teaches only math. "We're constantly asking, 'Why?' and 'How do you get to your answers?' They understand what they are doing, as opposed to just mimicking me." Every America's Choice school teaches math for at least one hour a day and struggling students get an additional 45 minutes of instruction daily (often after school) as part of an America's Choice "safety-net" program that analyzes test results to identify standards that students have not mastered and helps underachieving students catch up. "I've never seen our students produce work of this quality and rigor," said Debbie Downer, the school's principal, of the America's Choice math strategies. In 2003, Georgia had America's Choice begin training a dozen state staffers as certified experts in the America's Choice School Design in order to implement the model in more Georgia schools. That same year, Mississippi became the second state to recommend the America's Choice School Design to its low-performing schools. Back to Results