State officials say recent efforts to help 35 struggling public schools are yielding results. The students at these schools live in high-poverty areas and their test scores have been chronically low. New statewide accountability standards for all schools measure things like graduation rates and chronic absenteeism as well as test scores in language arts, math and science. The overall score for the 35 schools jumped nearly five-and-a-half percent last year. Regional school improvement teams from the Iowa Department of Education are going into the classrooms in these schools to observe teachers and a couple of weeks later they offer coaching to those teachers on new techniques to meet students’ needs. Twelve of the 35 schools getting this new level of attention are in Des Moines, three are in Waterloo, three are in Cedar Rapids and the other seven schools are in Davenport.
