Defying the demographics,
​
closing the achievement gap

If you've heard of the movie, "Rocky," you've heard of Brockton, Massachusetts, although you may not realize it.  The original Rocky was undefeated boxer Rocky Marciano, whose impact on his city includes its motto, "City of Champions," and the mascot of the high school, the boxer bulldog.  This dog is truly a champion underdog.  Brockton is a poverty-stricken post-industrial urban wasteland with a school that's garnered national attention -- with a student body that has a 72% poverty rate and a minority population of 71%, we have nonetheless achieved honors which include being named one of the 1,500 best high schools in the country by U.S. News and World Report -- seven times!!

We made the front page of the New York Times!!  and it caused a media storm...

We were covered not only in The New York Times, but also by CBS Evening News, PBS, and WGBH Boston.  We were a cover story for the Boston University School of Education Magazine.  Our program for English Language learners, where I taught for nine years, was named the best in Massachusetts by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy (uploaded at the bottom of this page.)

My work at Brockton High School

At Brockton High, I taught the intermediate year of ESL in our three-year ESL and Transitional Bilingual Education language acquisition program.  I also taught ESL in the Literacy Strand, a special curricular program for students with limited or interrupted prior formal schooling.  I contributed to the turn-around by serving on a number of committees.  All in all, then, here's what I've done for the team:

☻    I introduced the idea of reading a complete work of literature to Intermediate ESL, and developed a curriculum to go with it.  This approach was later adopted in all ESL classes.  I helped write the new curriculum as a member of the Departmental Steering Committee during the year when the new curriculum was formalized.
☻    I was on the team of teachers that developed the special curriculum for students with interrupted prior formal schooling, that is, students with poor native language literacy.  
☻     I served on the Restructuring Committee, Brockton High School's general problem-solving think tank.
☻     I served on the Performance Improvement Mapping Committee, which analyzed detailed data on more than 4,000 students' test performance in order to target instruction throughout the school.
☻     I served on the Literacy Initiative Subcommittee, which developed a rubric to help teachers teach independent reading strategies for challenging text.  ​