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Teachers in Muscatine had become accustomed to low scores. About 40% of Franklin's students are from Hispanic families in which English is often not the main language spoken at home, and 66% of the school qualifies for free or subsidized lunches. Franklin is in the South End, a worn section of Muscatine where the smell wafts over from a factory that makes Heinz purple, green and "mystery" ketchup. Most of the parents work in local factories or service jobs. "We had a long-term problem here," says Jane Evans, curriculum director for the district. "The school's culture was, 'Our kids are different. They can't do it.'"
But partly out of fear and mostly out of pride, the teachers and students haltingly remodeled their school for the era of testing. Franklin came under a sort of efficiency audit more common to FORTUNE 500 companies. Reading in particular became a science. Teachers read much more nonfiction to kids, since that is a major focus of the test. Students began using computerized reading programs that administered regular quizzes. Just before February testing, kids on the borderline were pulled aside for daily test-taking strategy sessions. All children were assigned adult mentors, drawing on everyone from the principal to a custodian (who turned out to be among the best mentors at the school) to offer yearlong support, including test-prep talks. Teachers asked kids as young as 7 to sign forms to accept the challenge of raising their scores and reminded them to drink juice instead of soda to keep their stamina up on test mornings.
Teachers, meanwhile, added three to four hours to their workweeks, including two additional hours of training. The curriculum was standardized and shaped around the testing schedule. "We were amazed when we aligned our math curriculum--amazed at the things we weren't teaching prior to the test," says Jan Collinson, Franklin's principal since 2002. She also went after the no-show students. After three absences, parents began receiving letters. For kids with perfect attendance, there were parties every six weeks, featuring praise, cookies and the occasional magician.
Watching his fourth-graders take the test last year, Naber paced the aisles like a nervous parent. "When a wrong answer was put down, I just felt this tightening in my body, and I'd just walk away and think, 'Oh, no!'" he remembers.
A few weeks later, the test results came in, and the teachers happily swarmed Collinson's office to see the improved scores. But the triumph was complicated. "There are parts of [No Child Left Behind] that are positive and good," says Naber, "but there's a huge portion that's horrible." The casualties include social studies, creative writing and teacher autonomy. "They're not learning civics, history, geography--a lot of essential skills that they're going to need to be good democratic citizens," says fifth-grade teacher Shane Williams. The fourth grade used to spend a year on states' history, geography and capitals. They now cover the topic in six weeks. And while Williams used to ask his class to do 20 minutes of creative or expository writing a day, he now holds off until after February. "Their writing skills have certainly deteriorated," he says.