Community Checkup

Think the educational system for low-income ethnic minority children is hopeless? Then check out some of the research on 90-90-90 schools. This work shows that schools successfully educating such students do exist and the data points to some of the contributing factors. 90-90-90 schools are schools identified with the following characteristics:

• More than 90 percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced lunch, a commonly used surrogate for low-income families.
• More than 90 percent of the students are from ethnic minorities.
• More than 90 percent of the students met or achieved high academic standards, according to independently conducted tests of academic achievement.

There definitely is no silver bullet to accomplishing high achievement in such schools since they sometimes have very different needs and very different resources to meet those needs. There can never be a one size-fits-all solution. However, these schools show that it is possible and suggest some general qualities that contribute to success. Some common features of 90/90/90 schools:

• A focus on academic achievement
• Clear curriculum choices
• Frequent assessment of student progress and multiple opportunities for improvement
• An emphasis on nonfiction writing
• Collaborative scoring of student work

Learn more here.