Alabama’s students have gained a reputation for not being good at doing math. But don’t tell that to Cordova Elementary Principal Dianne Williams.
Williams leads the 400-student rural elementary school tucked into the hills of Walker County about 35 minutes northwest of Birmingham. Her school is one of Alabama’s “high flyers” – schools identified by AL.com that have a lot of students in poverty and not a lot of local tax support, yet have student achievement among the highest in the state.
Principal at the school for 11 years, Williams is proud of her students’ achievements in math. She is passionate and practical about students’ need to understand math.
“Math is about life,” she said. “Everything we do in life comes back to math.”
Math is where they really shine: More than 45% of students tested reached proficiency in math on tests for the 2020-21 school year. That’s more than double the state’s 22% proficiency rate.
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Half of Cordova’s students receive free or reduced-price meals; 38% of those students reached proficiency in math, more than three times the state’s 11% proficiency rate for students in poverty.
Williams said it’s important for students to get a strong foundation because math gets more difficult at earlier grades now. With Alabama’s new math standards, students can take algebra in the seventh grade.
“Now they’re having to make a decision about advanced math by the end of sixth grade,” she said. “When I was in high school, you didn’t even consider algebra till ninth grade.”
Test data shows Cordova Elementary has had the highest math proficiency levels among the county’s elementary schools for five years running, though proficiency levels were slightly down last spring.
Cordova Elementary exhibited a lot of the same practices, instructional and cultural, that other high flyers showed, including a strong emphasis on tracking how students’ achievement improves over time and a culture of high expectations for all students.
High flyers show strong academic success even when money is tight. During the 2019-20 school year, Cordova Elementary spent $9,475 per student, lower than the state average of $10,100 per student.
Of that total, $600 was from local funding. Across the state, Alabama schools spend an average of $1,800 per student from local taxes.
Across Walker County, median household income in 2020 was $45,833. In the small city of Cordova, the median household income is $21,900. Alabama’s median household income in 2020 was $52,035.
Tracking achievement
Williams and her teachers keep every student’s name written on a whiteboard in the data room to chart progress on different standards.
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Progress is tracked, color-coded red, yellow, blue and green. Grouping by grade helps create a team atmosphere among teachers, she said, where the team takes responsibility for improvement across all classrooms.
Students are assessed for progress three times a year. Teachers use that data to drive instruction. Williams meets with grade-level teams weekly to work through what the data shows students need.
Williams said she expects this year’s data to reflect the impact of COVID-19 on students’ lives.
“It’ll be another year and a half, two years before we actually get over that COVID effect on our students,” she said.
Teaching the standards
Williams expects teachers to adhere to teaching Alabama’s standards. And she makes sure teachers know not only their own grade level’s standards but that they know what the standards in the grade above and below are.
“It doesn’t start in third grade when they actually take the test,” she said.
Kindergarteners start learning important concepts early; during a recent class in May, kindergarten teacher Anna Palmer stood at the front of the class, behind a bin filled with water with an array of clear containers, all of which were different sizes.
“We’re learning a new word,” she said. “Our new word is capacity. Everybody say it. Ready?”
Palmer led the kindergarteners through the lesson, holding up two containers of visibly different sizes and asking which one will hold more and which one will hold less, working her way through all of the containers.
Stacia Chappell has been teaching third-grade math for 20 years, and 13 of those have been at Cordova Elementary. She teaches math and science to two of four sections of third-graders.
Chappell said her students are well prepared for third-grade math when they arrive in her class.
“When they come to me, they usually have a pretty good idea of the basics, and I don’t have that much catch-up work to do,” she said. “Throughout my career, that’s not always been the case. I would get children that would be a year or two behind in mathematics.”
On a typical day, she said, students work through two lessons. Multiple check-ins help Chappell know which students are struggling.
When discussing a new concept, Chappell checks in with students by asking for a thumbs-up to see if they understand.
“When they’re turning and talking (with each other), I’m listening to their conversations to hear if they sound like they’re on track,” she said.
If they aren’t, Chappell will step in to help. During intervention time, she’ll work one-on-one with struggling students or supervise students who use computer programs that push them on to more difficult problems.
Candace Brown also teaches third-grade math and science. She’s taught third grade for five of her 12 years as an educator.
In her classroom, students worked through problems in subtraction, addition, multiplication, geometry and area and perimeter on individual computers.
One student showed how she calculated the area of a rectangle. “The width is 3 meters, the length is 4 meters, and 2 meters were added to the length. I know that six times three equals 18,” she exclaimed.
“They want to do better,” Brown said, “and we really work with them on knowing what they’re learning and knowing where they are and knowing what they need to work on.”
Chappell said the state’s shift to a new way of learning math beyond rote memorization and formulas is a good one. Children finding multiple ways to solve problems means more children learn more math, she said.
“Every day is not going to be a failure. And when they finally get it? Then wow.”