A Community's Story
Closing the Achievement Gap
Brownsville, Texas
Brownsville, Texas, is the poorest community in the United States with a population of more than 100,000. In 1996, a group of citizens from the community established Brownsville Reads to improve the reading achievement of the 42,000 students - 90% Hispanic - in the Brownsville Independent School District (BISD). Neuhaus Education Center provided 60 hours of professional development in Language Enrichment (LE) via video conferencing for 422 first- and second-grade regular education teachers.
After the first year of the initiative, a group of 522 second-grade students was identified. Half the students had been taught by teachers who had received the professional development; the other half had been taught by teachers who had not yet received the professional development. The achievement of the group on the state-mandated reading tests was followed from third- through fifth-grade. Students who had received LE instruction in second-grade performed at statistically significantly higher levels of proficiency on the third-grade test than students in the other half of the group.* Continued higher achievement of the students who had received LE in second-grade was documented in an analysis of the fifth-grade test.**
Elsa Cardenas-Hagan, Ed.D., educator and cofounder of Brownsville Reads, stated,
"We looked to the experts in reading instruction. As a result of our collaboration, BISD was awarded the Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2008, which offers $1 million in scholarships. Many BISD students will have the opportunity to go to college. We are closing the achievement gap among poor and minoity students. With Neuhaus, we changed lives."
