Case History 1
Alana, a second grade teacher, expected an exciting, but exhausting school year. First, during
the summer the school board "redistricted" the boundaries for each of the district's
elementary schools. Over the past decade new apartment complexes and housing
developments transformed the formerly rural school district into an upscale, suburban
district. Alana's school, Mitchell Elementary School, always had a much higher percentage of
students of lower socio-economic status (SES) students than the other schools in the district.
With the redistricting, the school's new population would much more closely represent the
district as a whole.
Second, the elementary schools were adopting a new language arts program. Reading and
writing, speaking and listening would no longer be taught as isolated sets of skills. Instead,
these skills would be learned through thematic, literature-based activities that required the
use of multiple sets of skills (for example, writing a response to a speech). There was an
orientation meeting at Mitchell for the new language arts program. The representative of the
textbook publisher that produces the program proudly announced that a study revealed a
statistically significant increase in standardized reading scores compared to all other
competing programs.
In order to measure the effectiveness of the new program, the district would compare the
results of this year's standardized tests with the results of the previous year's results. The
comparison of scores would be published in the local newspaper.