Lead Mine Elementary School
Raleigh, North Carolina
(Pearson Digital Learning SuccessMaker)

“A great many factors have been central to the success of our program: hard work, dedicated teachers, an outstanding curriculum design, data-driven decision making, intelligent use of objective data, constant monitoring, and people open to new ideas.”

— Dr. Greg Decker, Principal, Lead Mine Elementary School

• Named School of Academic Distinction with Exemplary Growth for two years running with an average 88 percent of the population successfully completing end-of-grade exams. This award is given by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for academic achievement and academic growth for all children.

 
• From September 2001 through March 2002, students from kindergarten through grade five have demonstrated gains of over a year in reading and math. 

School/District Profile
Lead Mine Elementary School is located in Wake County, an urban area of Raleigh, North Carolina. The school was constructed in 1990 and enrolls 600 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Lead Mine’s ethnic population consists of 50 percent Caucasian, 28 percent African-American, 14 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent other minorities. Thirty-seven percent of the students at Lead Mine receive free and reduced lunches. The elementary school is part of the Wake County Public School System that serves 103,000 students.
 

Challenge
Lead Mine Elementary wanted to improve the success of all of its students, but needed to accomplish this with minimal financial resources. The school was also challenged with a required transition from developmental-based grading to standards-based grading.
 

Solution
Lead Mine Elementary School implemented Pearson Digital Learning SuccessMaker courseware in 1998 and has used Pearson Digital Learning benchmarking capabilities to complete their curriculum structure. The development program, entitled “Lead Mine Elementary School Curriculum Design,” is based on President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which provides accountability and testing, flexibility and local control, funding for what works, and expanded parental options. The implementation for this program was an ongoing process, with participants working 6.5 hours per day for 180 days.

In each grade, teachers listed the skills students must demonstrate. In third grade language arts, students learn 19 reading skills and 18 writing and speaking skills. The reading skills include decoding words using phonics, meaning, and word structure, including prefixes and suffixes; daily independent reading; explaining the purpose for selections of text; and checking for understanding by paraphrasing. In addition to language arts, the third grade map includes instructional areas of math, science, social studies, physical education, music, art education, media, and Spanish.

After aligning the school’s curriculum with the state requirements, teachers scheduled the map’s skills across the four quarters of the school year.

Lead Mine’s program has recently transformed itself into a full building implementation for the 2001-2002 year, with all students participating. The program uses data to identify student needs, and helps manage performance on high-stakes tests. Both human and technical resources are used to meet these needs. 

Once the curriculum was aligned with state requirements and instructional themes were mapped out over the course of the year, teachers developed testing to determine what students were learning and established quarterly goals to meet the full year’s planned instruction.

Parents learn about all 16 objectives in an open house at the beginning of the year. At the end of the first quarter, the parents are informed of which of the 16 objectives the child knows. After receiving feedback, parents are then informed as to whether or not the child is working at grade level in reading, math, and writing.

Lead Mine students use SuccessMaker to strengthen skills while providing teachers with up-to-date assessments of student skills. Each student uses SuccessMaker for 30 minutes three times a week.

“SuccessMaker aligns with the core curriculum of studies and gives parents and teachers very accurate data on where their child is in language arts,” says Dr. Greg Decker, Principal of Lead Mine. “It breaks it down to their phonetic skills, comprehension skills, word attack, paragraph understanding.” SuccessMaker provides comparable information for mathematics. “That feedback is used to write lesson plans and regroup students to differentiate our curriculum. The problem a lot of schools face is that the end-of-grade data comes after the children leave for summer. We need that data today.”
 

Results
Over the last several years, the staff at Lead Mine Elementary has built an education framework using SuccessMaker resulting in demonstrated academic growth for students.

From the time that SuccessMaker was implemented in 1998, students have gone from ratings of “Expected” and “Below” in reading and math to “Expected” and “Above” in reading and math in the 2000-2001 school year. Ratings are based on statistical data collected by the school.

Additional examples of student success include the following:

• A kindergarten student initially placed at 0.38 in math improved to 1.38 over the course of three quarters, equaling a full year’s improvement in math. 
• An ESL kindergarten student started with a 0.19 proficiency in math and improved to 1.14, from September 2001 through March 2002.
• A first grade student started at a 1.05 level in math and reached 2.22 over the course of just three quarters.
• In seven months time, a fifth grade student started at a reading level of 4.41 and ended at 5.47 (1.06 year gain), while another fifth grade student began at a reading level of 3.54 and ended at a 4.81 (a gain of 1.23 years).
• A second grade student came to Lead Mine speaking no English, and was placed at a reading level of 3.4 (that of a kindergartener). She could write few if any words in English in August 2001, and at the end of three quarters was reading at a level of 22/23, equating to a jump from level 1.60 to 2.99 in SuccessMaker (a 1.39 year gain). The student’s teacher says, “The student now understands and speaks fluent English and French, and can successfully communicate her thoughts and feelings.”
• In August 2001, a kindergarten class started with a Reading Readiness level of zero. Eight months later, the class averaged a 1.82 year gain:
  
  

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