By Raymond Simon, Little Rock, Ark

The most valuable fringe benefit of my job as Arkansas' chief state school officer is being able to witness excellence on a daily basis in our state's schools.

Typical of these successes is Boone Park Elementary School in the North Little Rock School District. Beginning in the fall of 1999, Boone Park, a high-poverty urban school, became a pilot site for a model classroom designed around a school-based literacy coach. The coach was a teacher, trained specifically to work with other teachers on reading and writing instruction, and was present in the classroom every day.

The model targeted first-grade students and followed them over three years, keeping them together from the second through fourth grades. Something else followed them as well: an insatiable hunger for reading. When children were asked about their favorite subject, typical answers such as "recess" and "lunch" were replaced by the exuberant responses of "reading" and "writing"!

Other evidence of the model's success were dramatic gains on both standardized and performance-based measures. By the spring of 2000, the average reading score of these first-graders on the Stanford Achievement Test was 79 percent.

"We've never seen test scores at Boone Park like this before!" said Esther Crawford, director of elementary education in the North Little Rock District. On performance-based reading assessments, all children from the model classrooms were reading at second-grade level or above.

What we saw at Boone Park was duplicated in 21 other pilot sites, where student achievement increased 20 percent or higher over previous years. From a total of 988 first-graders, 80 percent approached, met or exceeded the standard in reading during the 2000-01 school year.

By second grade, these same students continued to make gains, increasing to 87 percent those who were at or above proficient reading levels. For three continuous years, all sampled schools, where the average poverty rate was 80 percent, had 84 percent of their first-grade children meeting or exceeding proficiency levels in reading.

Our literacy coach model is just one component in a series of efforts to support Arkansas' comprehensive school reform plan. With a laser-like focus on high standards in reading, writing, mathematics and character-centered teaching, we launched the Smart Start Literacy Initiative in May 1998 to give unprecedented support to our teachers and administrators.

The initiative involved 10,000 K-4 educators and 60 full-time school-based literacy coaches statewide. Activities focused on the needs of classroom teachers, specialized training and support for schools in implementing comprehensive literacy services, including Reading Recovery and early literacy groups for struggling readers in kindergarten through third grade.

"Those who play semantic games or try to tinker with state numbers to lock out parents and the public stand in the way of progress and reform. They are the enemies of equal justice and equal opportunity. They are apologists for failure." -U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, in an October 23 letter to state school chiefs on implementing No Child Left Behind.

The Smart Start initiative, statewide staff development and literacy coach training-coupled with a persistent search for excellence among our teachers and principals-have resulted in the highest level of performance ever by Arkansas fourth-graders on reading and writing exams, according to spring 2002 scores.

Our work has truly been a collaborative effort among literacy specialists at the Arkansas Department of Education, the state's 15 education service cooperatives, and the Early Literacy Training Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Smart Start was launched with the following admonition: "Teaching is more for tomorrow than today. Unless all of us believe that all children can learn, we chart our future tethered to an anchor of mediocrity."

Today, however, we can truly say, "Anchors aweigh!"