"Elephants!" calls out a ponytailed 14-year-old.
"Right, Olga. Good." World history teacher Kara Eifolla strides to the board and adds Hannibal and his 
battalion of wild beasts to a growing time line of ancient Rome. Leading Olga Lara and her classmates through the empire's rise and fall, Eifolla coaxes understanding from them with a carefully paced give-and-take that pulls in every student, even a fidgety cluster of boys striving for invisibility in the back of the room. Speaking in English, she guides her class of native Spanish speakers through difficult linguistic terrain cluttered with such knotty concepts as plebeians, patricians, and agricultural reform with a Q&A format that systematically reinforces oral language with written language: The student hears the word, sees it on the board, reads it in the text, writes it in her notebook. Eifolla questions, repeats, defines, clarifies, and questions again: What does "decline" mean? What is a "crisis"? What is a "reform"?
A few days into her second semester at a U.S. school, Olga--equipped with a considerable repertoire of English skills picked up from friends and TV in her native town of Ciudad Juarez just across the border--pays close attention to the time line taking shape on the chalkboard. It will form the basis of an upcoming assignment: a handmade book on the Roman Empire. When the bell rings, Olga gathers her belongings and blends into the throng of students hurrying to Second Period.
In many ways, Socorro, Texas, feels like an extension of Mexico, as though Ciudad Juarez had spilled across the Rio Grande. Much of Socorro has the thrown-together look of a town that is fast gobbling up the fields and open spaces that only a few years ago made it a rural outpost on the fringe of El Paso. Chain-link fences surround houses pieced together with brick, stucco, and concrete. Laundry flaps on clotheslines. Chickens roost in backyards.
Most of Socorro's residents trace their roots to Mexico. Many of them, like ninth-grader Olga Lara, are recent arrivals. Olga's parents moved the family across the border last summer in hopes of finding better jobs for themselves and ensuring better futures for their three teenagers. The Laras have put their educational hopes into the hands of the teachers and administrators at Socorro High School, whose 2,000 students come from the town's poorest neighborhoods. Some live without plumbing, heat, or electricity. Almost all qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
Socorro's student demographics--98 percent Hispanic, 90 percent poor--would suggest a cauldron of violence and gang activity. Yet Olga's parents chose Socorro High because it is relatively free of the Cholos gang members who plague other area schools. Neither graffiti nor vandalism mars the school, where custodians are always hard at work with paintbrushes and mops. A new wing at the school features vaulted ceilings, rock walls, and soaring windows that look more like something out of Architectural Digest than Educational Facility Planner.
The conventional wisdom on "risk factors"--characteristics such as ethnic minority heritage and low family income that can short-circuit academic success--would predict not only big discipline problems at Socorro but also low scores and high attrition. Yet the numbers defy the stereotypes. Fewer than 2 percent of Socorro's students drop out, and 85 percent of Socorro's 1995 graduates went on to technical school or college. Scores on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) are at or above state averages--in some cases, well above. Socorro's 1995 12th-grade class, for instance, scored 42 in reading compared with an average state score of 33. In writing, those same students scored a full 20 points higher than students statewide (71 versus 51). And in math, Socorro kids outscored other kids 43 to 35.
It wasn't that long ago that Socorro High was just another struggling border school with test scores bumping the floor. Today, it is a Blue Ribbon school that attracts educators from places as distant as Ontario, Oregon, in search of strategies to borrow. (See related story, Two Worlds in One Classsroom.) But trying to pinpoint the reason for the transformation is a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum. Ask the teachers, and they will point to Principal Michael Quatrini. Ask Quatrini, and he will point to the teachers. And everyone points to Dr. Jerry Barber, the district superintendent, who points back at the teachers and principal. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, for change at Socorro High bubbled up from the bottom at the same time it was filtering down from the top. In the blending and mixing of inspired teaching and enlightened administration, Socorro began to turn out students who could compete and succeed in a highly competitive global economy.
SECOND PERIOD "Eduardo dropped out of school," laments teacher Dennese Weber-Watts. She looks at the semicircle of students in front of her as though waiting for an explanation for this bad news. The students, too, seem sad and perplexed. It is clear, even to the casual observer, that kids at Socorro don't drift away unnoticed or unremarked. Here, dropouts aren't business as usual.
Second Period is speech, Olga's favorite class because, she says, she's eager to learn the linguistic skills she'll need when she becomes a lawyer. Today's lesson begins with the Greek and Latin roots of English words. The Greek word
What turned Socorro High School around was a radical change in thinking about how schools should be organized and managed. There was--to invoke a hot phrase from education's current reform lingo--a paradigm shift. Eight years ago when Jerry Barber (whom school staff describe as "open-minded" and "progressive") became superintendent of Socorro Independent School District, he put each school in charge of its own operations--and, by extension, made it accountable for its outcomes--by mandating site-based management. That mandate came several years before Texas required site-based management statewide.
Not everyone got on board.
"Some principals bought into site-based decisionmaking, and some did not," says Maria Arias, bilingual director for the district. "Some had a real difficult time letting go, being a facilitator, letting teachers come together and make decisions about how money would be spent and so forth."
Then came Quatrini. When he took the high school principal's post in 1992, he set out to make site-based management work at Socorro High School. "At first, teachers were doubtful," Arias recalls. "But little by little, he won their confidence, their faith, their trust, because he has proven that the teachers can run the school and he can facilitate."
Quatrini reorganized the freshmen and sophomores into blocks of 125 students who are assigned to five teachers for the entire year. The teachers in these blocks share a common daily conference period, and they meet weekly to plan thematic units and integrated lessons, devise strategies for struggling students, and confer with parents. A school-improvement team made up of staff, parents, and students meets monthly to keep the school moving toward its goals.
The terms "umbrella" and "net" pop up a lot in Quatrini's conversation--terms that suggest a sheltered environment where "slipping through the cracks" isn't something that happens to kids.
"We don't fail these students," Quatrini declares. "As long as there's support for them, they'll be successful."
One block, the English as a Second Language (ESL) program, has undergone its own radical reform, which began independently of the schoolwide change effort but then merged smoothly into the school's new shape. Olga is one of about 200 language-minority students at Socorro who take all of their academic classes from teachers who specialize in ESL or who, like Kara Eifolla in history or Denise Weber-Watts in speech and Latin, have earned or are working toward ESL endorsements and use ESL methods to teach academic subjects. ESL students read the same textbooks and learn the same material as their English-proficient counterparts. Only the style of delivery is different. After all, Quatrini points out, these kids "don't have a learning problem, they have a language problem."
Eighty teachers--nearly half of the school's faculty--have earned or are working toward an ESL endorsement. The district not only picks up tuition costs for teachers who earn ESL credits, it also awards them $1,000 annual stipends for teaching ESL sections and sends bilingual aides to college if they want to become teachers.
THIRD AND FOURTH PERIODS After art class, where Olga designs a ceramic house patterned on the Historic Revival style of architecture, she takes her place in Rosanne Loya Thompson's physical science class. Today's lesson in forces and motion centers on the formula for calculating speed. "Speed equals distance divided by time," Thompson says, rephrasing the formula several times, writing it on the board, checking often for understanding by asking for feedback from students. Building on last week's lesson on metric units of measure, the teacher-dressed comfortably in a neat pair of blue jeans--gets down on the floor and demonstrates how to apply the formula to a concrete problem: calculating the speed of a plastic wind-up car using a meter stick and a stopwatch. The students watch intently. The room is silent except for the car's raspy clatter.
"OK, what is the speed of a car that moves 914 meters in 200 seconds?" Thompson asks after the demo car lurches to a stop beside the meter stick and the class helps convert the distance from centimeters to meters. Olga scribbles in her notebook."Who has the answer? How fast was the car going? Olga?"
"Four-point-five-seven meters per second," Olga responds.
After working several sample problems for the class, Thompson breaks the students into groups and assigns them to collaborate on six trials with the mechanical cars. Olga and her group mates confer in Spanish as they time their trials and record their data.
Socorro High School was making do with two part-time ESL teachers until the enrollment began to balloon after the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The legislation granted legal residency to longtime seasonal agricultural laborers who could document their U.S. work history.
"That's when our program blew up," recalls Magda Maureira, one of the original ESL staffers. "By the summer of 1988 it was out of control. Schools were starting to burst with (language-minority) kids."
Help arrived in the form of a federal bilingual education grant under Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The almost $1 million flowing into the high school from 1990 through 1994 created five full-time ESL teaching slots, bought a roomful of Macintoshes and materials, and paid for a curriculum consultant. The reinvented ESL program bridges the "huge gaps from one class to another" that used to swallow kids up, says Maureira, who now heads Socorro High School's ESL department. Now, students like Olga have ESL-trained teachers all day, every day--teachers who collaborate to "provide a continuum in the curriculum," says Michael Quatrini. A recent unit on Romeo and Juliet, for instance, pulled together language arts (Shakespeare's play), history (15th-century Italy), science (the chemical makeup of poisons), and math (calculating dosages of substances). As a tie-in to a unit on Mexico, the home economics class baked a room-size cake in the shape of Mexico, decorating it to show states and topographical features. The cake was served to parents at a school-sponsored meeting on immigration issues, while students from the parenting class provided child care. In these ways, a lesson on baking became a unit on geography, and chemistry found its way into classic literature.
Besides integrating curriculum, Socorro's ESL teachers use tactics such as real-world context, active learning, cooperative grouping, and personal connections.
"We have built our program around whole-language concepts, not the worksheet approach," says Elvira Estrada, secondary ESL/bilingual teacher and teacher leader. "We don't want isolated skills."
FIFTH PERIOD Olga takes her seat in Martin Rede's algebra class, which begins with a story problem aimed at preparing the students for the TAAS, which all seniors must pass to graduate. A student reads the problem aloud, as Rede helps him with pronunciation: "Mary has three rectangular flower beds measuring one-point-five meters by five meters. She has decided to make a tulip border around four sides of each flower bed. If the tulips must be planted 50 centimeters apart, how many tulip bulbs will Mary need?"
As Rede leads the students through the problem and its solution, he checks constantly for understanding, going beyond the math concepts involved.
"What does rectangular mean?" he asks. "Is it spelled differently in English and Spanish?" Although he poses his questions in English, Rede allows the students to answer in Spanish. When the students seem stuck, he moves from English to Spanish, Spanish to English, to ensure comprehension.
"What is a tulip?" Rede asks the students. "What does it look like?" He draws a rough approximation of a tulip on the board, and writes the word, showing the similarity with the Spanish word tulipan. ("They're intimidated by the English," Rede confides later. "I try to show them they already know a lot of English by showing them that many Spanish words are similar to the English. Many of these kids do well in physical science and biology because of the Latin roots.")
"What's a bulb?" a student calls out.
"What kind of bulb are we talking about here?" Rede asks. "A
The state of Texas requires only that language-minority students take a yearly oral assessment of English proficiency. Socorro, though, also uses a battery of written tests in Spanish to measure academic and literacy skills such as writing ability and mastery of math concepts. Oral assessments by themselves are only minimally informative, Maureira says. That's ecause test anxiety can mask solid oral skills and because a student may have a mismatch of abilities: strong oral skills with weak academic skills or vice versa.
"Testing in Spanish makes a whole lot of sense," notes Maureira. "It tells you a whole lot more about where this kid has been and where he can go. The more literacy they bring in their native language, the quicker they go into a second language because they have a lot of transference."
Adds Maureira: "To learn is to learn is to learn. If you learn in one language, you basically learn in another."
The assessments determine where students start in ESL, from Level 1 for kids with low academic scores and no English to Level 4 for kids who are almost ready to join the mainstream. Olga entered Socorro High at Level 3 based on a solid foundation in English and outstanding scores on the written math and language arts assessments. Her dad Fernando, a salesman for a nut company, had plunked her down in front of English-language TV and videos from the time she was small in hopes of giving her a head start on success in America.
Other kids bring less to build on. One of Olga's schoolmates, whom we'll call Maria, had left school in her Mexican hometown of Chihuahua at age 11 or 12 to work in her mother's tortilla factory. The Immigration Reform and Control Act allowed her father, a longtime farmhand at a Texas ranch, to bring his family north to Socorro, where Maria started high school at 16 with scores hovering at fifth-grade levels. Her files show slow, steady progress and then a sudden burst of success in her third year, when her math score rocketed from 52 to 89 and her language-arts score from 41 to 80.
Whether, like Olga, they bring solid skills or, like Maria, they come with a smaller foundation, language-minority students get ongoing support and guidance. Each student is assigned to a committee of four--an assistant principal, a bilingual teacher, an ESL teacher, and a parent--which meets at least twice a year and oversees the student's progress. ESL kids get support in other ways, too. At the weekly "content day," ESL teachers help them work through trouble spots in their academic classes. And the ESL office, staffed by two bilingual paraprofessionals, offers all kinds of assistance, from clarifying homework assignments to arranging counseling appointments. From that office, the constantly humming hub of the program, Estrada and Maureira throw themselves headlong into keeping each and every student on track to graduation.
One day, for example, a student drops into the ESL office and complains that he doesn't understand an assignment given by a non-ESL-endorsed health teacher. While Maureira and Estrada set about getting the student reassigned to an ESL health class, they explain that hasty, verbal instructions are likely to be lost on kids with limited English skills. "Deliberate redundancy"--finding many ways to say the same thing--is one key strategy that characterizes ESL, they explain. "That kid needs to see the assignment on the board, he needs to have it expanded, he needs to have a copy of the prompt," Maureira says. "It's very simple.
"And," she adds, "it's good for all learners."
That kind of personal attention is why Olga's parents brought their children to Socorro.
"What I like here is that if a student has a problem, the teachers take care of it," says Olga's mom, also named Olga, who works as a cashier at a Good Time mini-market. "It doesn't matter if it's a big problem or a small one; they always call you. They always pay attention to the student."
Even parents who still live in Mexico want their kids to have what Socorro High School offers. "You will see cars with license plates from Juárez or Chihuahua dropping off their kids," says Arias, adding, "We're going to educate them. It's not like in California with Proposition 187 [the 1994 ballot measure denying K-12 public education to illegal-immigrant children]."
The school as a whole woos parents: A parent room staffed by two parent coordinators is the headquarters for parent volunteers who work in the classroom and the library. Counselors work at night to accommodate parents' work schedules. Information goes home in both English and Spanish. Parent meetings cover critical topics such as citizenship and residency, local services, and college opportunities. The high school hosts community-college classes for parents, and makes the school's library and computer equipment available to them.
Parents Night typically attracts 50 percent to 60 percent of parents, Quatrini reports.
"Parents do attend meetings," says Arias. "I get so upset when people say, 'Parents just don't care.' That's not true--it's just not true."
In the ESL program, strong teacher-student bonds earn parents' respect and participation.
Says Arias: "Because of the closeness of these kids to Magda and Elvira and the other teachers, they will go home and tell their parents, 'My teacher needs to talk to you,' or 'You need to go to this meeting.' And the parents show up because they know that the teachers are genuine."
SIXTH AND SEVENTH PERIODS Olga's final two classes, English and reading, form the ESL literacy unit that all of Socorro's language- minority students must take. Sixth period meets in the computer lab where Olga and her classmates--working on Macintoshes paid for with Title VII money--experiment with using ClarisWorks software to create decorative borders and ornamental lettering. Their assignment: to make posters out of yesterday's writing project, a list of three personal goals to achieve during the school year. Olga deftly manipulates her mouse, trying out various effects before choosing a delicate border and a bold typeface for her top three school goals: to get better grades, to behave better with her teachers, and to learn more English. By tomorrow, Olga's poster, printed on hot-pink paper, will hang with the other students' work on the classroom wall.
Magda Maureira begins her reading class with a discussion of Martin Luther King Jr. With the federal holiday marking King's birthday just days away, students had been asking about the civil rights leader and his significance in American history. As Olga and her classmates follow along, Maureira reads a passage about King, speaking slowly, enunciating every syllable with care, filling her voice with inflection. Then she questions the class: "What was the strategy behind the bus boycott? What was King's message for resolving conflict and righting social wrongs? What does "junior" mean? Where was King born? Can you find Atlanta on the map? What's coming up this summer in Atlanta?"
Finally, the lesson turns to
In 1987, Socorro Independent School District joined 12 other poor Texas districts in Edgewood vs. Kirby. The legal action is what Arias calls a "Robin Hood" suit, originally filed in San Antonio to equalize funding between low-income and affluent districts. Seven years later, the suit is pending. Meanwhile, economic conditions have not improved in the neighborhoods surrounding Socorro High School. Highway 10 slices through town like a razor. It is a '90s version of the "tracks" that once delineated the "good side" from the "bad side" of American cities. Comfortable families live on the north, struggling families--those whose kids attend Socorro High--live on the south. Sometimes, Arias says, "six, seven, eight people live in one room." They work in restaurants or gas stations or convenience stores, or in factories making boots or blue jeans. Some are migrants, picking cotton in the South, then moving north into the orchards of Oregon and Washington or the potato fields of Idaho.
But at Socorro High School, being poor doesn't justify poor performance. More than any other factor, high expectations in the face of economic hardship explain why the school works, asserts Superintendent Barber. "We do not accept failure," he says. "The faculty and the administration have the attitude that our kids can succeed, and that it's our job to help them achieve at the highest levels they can attain. The school will not accept excuses."
Even the poorest families--cooking with butane, drawing water from wells, sharing cramped quarters with aging grandparents, raising poultry to stretch food dollars--send their kids to Socorro High School with hope.
Reports Arias: "We always hear, 'We want our kids to have a better life than we did. We think that if they learn English, it's going to be better for them.'"
Photo credits: Photo #2--Olga works with fellow science students to calculate the speed of a wind-up car;
Photo #3--Ninth-grader Olga Lara visits her mother, also named Olga, at the Good Time mini-market where she works as a cashier.
Photos by Nohemy Gonzalez.
For information related to this article, see The Language Brokers.
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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