What is a "High-Performing, High-Poverty School (HP2S)"?

High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (HP2S)

HP2S’ “foundational building block [is] an organized, comprehensive capacity to collect, analyze, and monitor data” (Barr & Parrett, 2007, p. 165). HP2S have demonstrated, both before and after the inception of NCLB, that marginalized students, often characterized as hard or impossible to teach, can achieve at high levels (Chenoweth, 2007).

HP2S do not focus on a narrow curriculum, but teach art, music, PE, science, history, have field trips, and conduct other myriad activities beyond teaching to the test. Principals have had to begin to look beyond SES for school-level characteristics that affect achievement (Chenoweth, 2007; Hoy, Tarter, & Woolfolk Hoy, 2006; Reeves, 2007). Increased achievement, decreased drop-out rates, and college attendance for marginalized populations seem to depend on a collaborative school-community environment, relationships between agents, high-expectations, attention to school structures and sociocultural capital, and efforts to build capacity within the school community including leadership capacity (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Fullan, 2006; Mulford & Moreno, 2006; Stinson, 2006).

Chenoweth (2007) identified HP2S with the following criteria: 1. A significant population of children living in poverty and/or a significant population of children of color; 2. Either very high rates of achievement or a very rapid improvement trajectory; 3. Relatively small gaps in student achievement in comparison with achievement gaps statewide; 4. At least two years’ worth of data; 5. In the case of high schools, high graduation rates and higher-than-state-average promoting power index; 6. Adequate Yearly Progress; 7. Open enrollment for neighborhood children—that is, no magnet schools, no exam schools, no charter schools.