After the first year, the school di

After the first year, the school did not see many gains, but it also had no funding for structured, explicit intervention. The school later hired several reading interventionists to work intensely with students. Some of them are teachers who are taking a break from full-time work to raise their children. "When we had the interventionists, we began to see improvement," King said.
Soon the staff started to see their efforts pay off. The percentage of students meeting goal on the state tests in reading/language arts in third grade grew from 72.73 percent in spring 2004 to 88.17 percent in spring 2008. Back in 2004, the school had 21 students receiving services for learning disabilities and at the end of 2008-09, only 13.
"This [system] drastically reduces number of students failing and identified as learning disabled," King said. "Now we know if a student is learning disabled, we know it is a processing problem. Before, I often suspected it was an instructional problem. The school also is providing intervention school-wide to students in the upper grades who continue to struggle with reading."
Margaret VanScoy, a second-grade teacher at Mountview for 16 years, said the reforms have changed the way she teaches. "All the data allowed us to see why some students were struggling and also look at ways to meet the needs of students who needed more challenges," VanScoy told Education World. "It was like drawing a map for each child."
The variety and amount of data allowed her to look at 24 students and know immediately where students needed help, VanScoy said. "I could see the problem -- whether it was phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency -- I could see what skills the kids needed. It really clarified the deficits students had and pushed me to see I needed to challenge certain students more who had reached the benchmark."