Back from the brink: stuck on NCLB's Needs Improvement list? Here's a primer for Swift and effective school reform.(Cover story)

Teachers at Oakwood Elementary School in Lakewood, Wash., outside of Seattle, watched TV at their first staff meeting last fall, and the dial was turned to the local news.

"They were talking about Oakwood being one of six Washington schools coming off the Needs Improvement list, while 100 more schools were going on it," remembers principal John Mitchell. "That was a cool way to start the year."

Further east in Wenatchee--a rural and largely agricultural community between Seattle and Spokane--Columbia Elementary School also had just left Needs Improvement, a status imposed by the No Child Left Behind Law on schools whose student test scores have missed any of their states' Adequate Yearly Progress targets for two years in a row. Those targets require an increasingly high percentage of students--ranging from different racial subgroups to those in ESL and special education--to meet state standards in reading and math.

Based on state assessment data, 26 percent of schools nationwide did not meet AYP in 2004-2005 and 14 percent wound up in the Needs Improvement category. And those percentages will likely increase as AYP targets get steeper every year on their way to the 100 percent proficiency required by 2014.

Getting off Needs Improvement, and away from its escalating sanctions, requires meeting AYP in all target areas for two successive years. And the impressive turnarounds of both Washington elementary schools--as well as the recent success stories of other schools from Minnesota to Maryland--are offering a primer for swift and effective school reform in the high-pressure and high-stakes era of NCLB.

Looming Penalties

When Fay Crawford arrived as Columbia's principal in the fall of 2002, she found her new school teetering on a dangerous brink. "We had just tumbled into Needs Improvement, and the school district came to me with the news," she explains. "We had to go into public school choice. We had to send a letter home and have a family meeting explaining the options. And if we didn't come out of the second year of Needs Improvement, the next step would have been disastrous."

Columbia had missed the Washington Assessment of Student Learning reading targets for its Hispanic population, which comprises 68 percent of the student body. As a Title I school receiving federal funds, Columbia had to foot the transportation bill for any students who had chosen to transfer to other elementary schools, and Crawford knew that missing AYP again would mean paying for supplementary instruction, including the often pricey tutoring programs offered by private vendors.

In a series of faculty meetings, she tried to reassure her teachers. "My biggest concern was to communicate to them that this was not a failing building and that they were not failing," she says.

From there, Crawford had plenty of work to do, although she notes that being new to the school helped her usher in reforms. She launched a three-pronged strategy including a new approach to reading instruction, a…