This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The rural town of Hill — population 1,100 — has few of the attributes typically associated with top-performing public schools. The community’s median household income is $82,000, just 26% of adults have a college degree and roughly half of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch.
But students at Hill’s elementary school had the second best reading standardized test scores in the state last year, when adjusted for their socioeconomic status. The finding, part of a Concord Monitor analysis, came as somewhat of a surprise to even the school’s principal.
A small district in a relatively low-income community, Hill is emblematic of the schools that topped this list. Because educational performance is highly correlated with familial income, the analysis uses a linear regression to examine the extent to which districts outperformed expectations. Free and reduced lunch eligibility served as a proxy for districts’ socioeconomic status.
As Gov. Kelly Ayotte tasks the Department of Education with examining the factors driving successful literacy education at the highest-performing schools, the Monitor’s analysis could offer some hints as to what the department will find.
Eight of the 10 districts that topped the Monitor’s list had fewer than 100 test takers on last year’s state standardized test. Many were located in rural, low- and medium-income parts of the state.
All but one of the top 10 districts surpassed the statewide average proficiency rate. The district ranged in free and reduced lunch eligibility from 4% to 64%.
Interviews with more than a dozen superintendents, principals, classroom teachers and other specialists at five of the top districts on the list revealed several common characteristics that link them.
Some of the similarities educators credited with their success were unsurprising: The districts had all adopted a phonics-based pedagogical approach based on the science of reading; they had low educator turnover, with many elementary school teachers having worked in the same role for decades; the districts relied heavily on data to identify students who were struggling; and they enjoyed strong community support, with budgets that got passed and communities that valued reading.
But the other major commonality — small size — was less intuitive. Small, rural schools are known to contend with a host of challenges that their larger, more urban counterparts don’t face, including struggles with staffing, transportation and internet access. Some research, however, does suggest that performance gaps are smaller between affluent and low-income students in rural areas.
The small-school effect
Hill’s elementary school, Jennie D. Blake, has 63 students from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade and nine full-time employees.
The school is so small — there are just three kindergarteners and five sixth-graders — that some classrooms combine two grades. That arrangement, teachers said, is incredibly beneficial because it creates less of a learning curve each year for educators and more classroom continuity for students.
“It takes a lot of time to just establish those routines, so when you have that group the second time, they are already modeling that for the new students,” said fifth- and sixth-grade teacher Megan Kwapiszeski.
The educators interviewed in all five districts stressed that identifying students who are struggling is key to promoting their success. While they all rely on regular testing in the elementary grades as the basis for this identification, teachers said there was nothing more valuable than the familiarity that comes with knowing students over a long period of time.
“Getting to know them really well helps, because someone could have not so great performance on something, but they just had a bad day, so you look at it overall, not in isolation,” Kwapiszeski said.
In many of the high-performing schools, the familiarity between educators and students starts in pre-K. Hill is one of two elementary schools in the state with a free, full-day pre-K option for all residents, according to teacher Aimee Moriarty.
The pre-K room is fully integrated into Hill’s school, right in the middle of its various classrooms. Students get a head start on the routines of a typical school day before kindergarten begins.
Small schools also allow for more individualization, school leaders said.
At Mason Elementary School, the highest-performing district on the income-adjusted list, each of the 99 students is eligible to receive specialized services, even if they don’t have an individualized education program.
“Every kid has access to everything here, whether they’re identified or not,” Superintendent and Principal Kristen Kivela said. “If they need OT, they get OT. If they need speech, they get speech.”
At Jennie D. Blake, class sizes range from 12 to 15 students this year. At Mason, they range from 8 to 20.
One may think that small schools with low student-teacher ratios cost more money, but that doesn’t seem to be universally true. Of the eight schools that topped the Monitor’s list with fewer than 100 test takers last year, five of them — including Mason — had a lower per-pupil cost than the $22,700 statewide average.
The top-performing schools did include districts with large budgets, too. The White Mountains town of Jackson, for example, had the highest per-pupil expenditure in the state last year at $50,300.
A targeted plan
When students in the nine school districts led by Superintendent Kyla Welch returned to classrooms in the fall 2020, educators began to recognize their approach to literacy had to change.
Test scores in the Pemigewasset Valley region SAU, the largest by area in the state, were growing “stagnant,” Welch said. Too many students were in the at-risk range.
“We needed to come up with a plan,” Welch said.
In the last five years, the SAU has overhauled its reading education program, standardizing the curriculum across its seven elementary schools, placing an intense emphasis on professional development, changing its intervention model and making a variety of tweaks at its high school.
“We’ve made a conscious decision to put all of our time and resources and money into this initiative,” Welch said.
The results are showing: Two of the SAU’s districts — Holderness and Pemi-Baker, its high school — are in the top 10 in the Monitor’s list. While still relatively small, they are the two largest schools in the top 10 besides Dresden in Hanover, one of the most affluent districts in the state.
Before the SAU embarked on its reading program revamp, its seven K-8 schools relied upon a hodgepodge of curricula and approaches to assessment. The SAU elected to buy a new curriculum for about $60,000 and standardized its approach to assessing students.
It devoted a year to professional development — “It was exhausting how much professional development we did!” Welch said — and developed a more targeted approach to intervention for students who were identified as needing additional support.
“If it’s fluency, they’re only getting intervention on fluency,” Welch said. “If it’s comprehension, it’s on comprehension. They don’t get this reading class of all-encompassing” topics.
Other observations
The other four districts didn’t describe a specific targeted plan like the one Welch’s district undertook. Here are some additional observations on their other commonalities:
Curriculum: Though all districts used a science-of-reading-based curriculum, there did not appear to be a specific magic bullet. Curricula ran the gamut.
Wonders from McGraw Hill and Fundations from Wilson were popular options. School leaders stressed that teachers had agency to make professional decisions on how they used the curriculum materials available to them.
“There’s a lot of junk in those programs that aren’t necessary for every class,” Kivela said.
Frequent assessments and early intervention: As with curriculum, schools use a range of assessment tools, but all test elementary students regularly in a variety of ways.
Kristen Reed, the principal of the 270-student Grantham Village School, said testing frequency is perhaps the biggest key behind the Upper Valley school’s strong academic performance.
“Our reading specialists do a great job going into classrooms and working with teachers in classrooms to really target kids in the lower ages, so that those gaps that perhaps they have get decreased before they get up into the reading to learn stage,” Reed said.
Culture: School leaders attributed a significant portion of their success to the intangible elements of school climate.
“People just assume that teachers have good relationships with all students, but it takes effort,” said Crystal Martin, the principal of Lakeway Elementary School in Littleton.
Some school leaders described specifically how they celebrate reading. Grantham Village School has a book vending machine near the entrance of the building. Many schools have partnerships between older and younger students that center on reading books together.
Educators also stressed that they felt like they had buy-in from families for what they were doing. Some of that sense, they said, came through the passage of budgets and new teacher contracts.
The nine school districts in Welch’s SAU span a wide range of socio-economic statuses, but the superintendent said she feels support from all of them.
“Every single board has passed their budget without much of an issue and provided the resources for us,” she said. “Without the community stakeholders, we wouldn’t be in this position today.”
