For more than 100 years, Knapp Elementary has served students in its Racine, WI neighborhood. Today, of its 465 students, 85% are considered economically disadvantaged. More than half of parents lack a high school credential and neighborhood violence is a challenge. Proficiency rates have hovered between 8% and 12%.
It has long been one of the district’s most challenged schools.
Six years ago, Rich Wytonick became principal of Knapp. He worked to strengthen the instructional team and bring in community partners. As a result, Knapp was the first community school in the district–partnering with The United Way to provide wraparound services for students.
“We were really bringing the right people in, changing the culture,” Wytonick explained. “We felt we were on the precipice of improvement. Then COVID hit.”
As with many other low-income communities of color, the Knapp school community felt disproportionate impacts from the pandemic. School preparedness declined from its already typically low levels. First graders didn’t know their alphabet, or have any early literacy skills to speak of.
Fortunately, at the same time that Knapp was dealing with these challenges, the district was rolling out its new early literacy initiative based on the practices of the world’s top education systems. Wytonick and assistant principal Melissa Damaschke worked with their instructional team to remake the school’s early literacy teaching practices. The primary strategies gleaned from high performing systems abroad included a laser-like focus on student level data, formative assessment and diagnostics, and new types of instructional differentiation and teacher collaboration to improve instruction.
“We took the approach of plan, study, act,” explains Damaschke. “We knew that almost everyone was below proficiency level, so instead of taking 3 kids to a small group for our weekly response to intervention blocks, we look at our data, move students to specific classrooms where teachers are teaching either well below grade level, below grade level or at grade level. We as leaders do classroom rounds twice a day. We talk about our data every week.”
Wytonick and his team were also able to marry the strengths of their community school’s system of support with the remaking of the work of teachers. Family engagement events incorporated early literacy elements, the school launched a Readers Make Leaders positive behavioral intervention program to celebrate students successes, and the use of interdisciplinary teams for student wellbeing meant a spirit of collaboration was already present in the school. That combination of access to needed social services and a professionalized approach to teaching are hallmarks of schools in high-performing systems like Finland and Singapore. The results for Knapp Elementary have been inspiring.
The class that had largely missed Kindergarten due to COVID ended first grade in the spring of 2022. Just 4 percent read on grade level. One year later, in the spring of 2023, the number of students on meeting benchmarks in reading had jumped to 42 percent, a better than tenfold increase. Kindergartners and K4 early childhood learners are making similarly impressive gains. The building is now buzzing with optimism–even teachers in upper grades.
“Everyone is excited about it—seeing the growth in the younger grades,” explained Wytonick. “Now my 4th and 5th grade teachers are saying, ‘Oh, wow, look what’s coming!’ Having half of your students on grade level instead of just a handful changes the way you can teach.”
The school plans to roll out the strategies schoolwide in the 2023-2024 school year, expanding monthly assessments and reading supports up through grade 5.
“We used to be at the bottom of the district.” noted Damaschke. “Now we’re pushing toward the top in some grade levels.”
As the Knapp Elementary work continues, Wytonick and his team are clear about the distance they have left to run to deliver fully for all students.
But the progress is impressive for the school and trajectory-altering for its students–not a small feat in early literacy, an area of learning that has long been fraught with frustration in U.S. education.
Wytonick and the Knapp ES team are making the kind of moves that are not just worth celebrating, but also learning from–deeply.
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