Section 1: Academic Achievement - National Center for School ...

much to do everything right the first time that I was blocked from seeing the assumptions that
I was making about my students and their learning. I was also afraid that uncovering those
assumptions might thwart my project. However, knowing their importance, I pushed on.
Forming my own participatory group
My staff proved to be incredibly insightful and supportive. Ruth, a third grade bilingual
teacher, asked me how I knew that math lab wasn’t meaningful for my H/HM students.
Ouch! That was true. I hadn’t even considered that the program may already be meeting the
needs of those students. Maria, a second grade bilingual teacher from Mexico, asked me to
consider why meaningful was important. She reasoned that students were here to learn and
their families expected them to behave and learn regardless of whether they found the content
meaningful. Finally, Julie a fourth grade teacher, wanted to know if I considered how to test
for meaningful. Were students even taught to be reflective about this in terms of identifying
“meaningful?” Even though I respected my colleagues before I asked for their help, the depth
of their responses facilitated the collaborative school culture I was missing from the lack of a
strong principal. Furthermore, it helped me build relationships with my colleagues. I valued
their opinions’ and they were honored to be included in the project and asked for their
opinions.
As I thought about their questions, I devised a plan for finding answers to my question. Data
collection would involve my journal, student assessments both formal and informal, and some
kind of affective data about their mood with respect to learning math. Once students were
given a baseline test to see if they qualified for Title Math services, I would need to identify
the students who were homeless and/or highly mobile and also qualified for Title Math. This
data was frustratingly difficult to compile given the misunderstanding of FERPA (Family
Education Rights Protection Act) regulations by district personnel. No one wanted to give me
the H/HM status out of fear of getting sued for giving away privileged information.
Furthermore, our district liaison for homeless students was out on maternity leave, and few
people understood this law. After contacting the state coordinator for Title X funds, as well
as the director of priority schools, who happened to be one of the women with whom I
worked in COPAR, I was granted access to the information. This process, which should have
taken at most a day, took six weeks of constant calls, visits, explanations, and effort. My
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