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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the promising early results of California’s Quality Education Investment Act of 2006. QEIA established a grant program that will put nearly $3 billion over seven years into just under 500 low-performing schools serving nearly 500,000 students (low-performing defined as scoring in the bottom two deciles on state tests). It reaches a largely disadvantaged population - 84 percent of students at these schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, 79 percent are Hispanic and 41 percent are English learners.

Each QEIA school developed its own improvement plan focused on evidence-based reforms including reducing class sizes, hiring more school counselors and providing high-quality professional development and time for teacher collaboration. As state Superintendent of Public Instruction-elect Tom Torlakson (who wrote the law) put it, “The Quality Education Investment Act puts the emphasis where it should be – on the classroom and on teaching.” And the California Teachers Association (CTA, an affiliate of the National Education Association) has been deeply involved in working with QEIA schools, helping design the program and offering training to school staff on both the law and implementing school change.

I must have burned the ears of the CTA. Yesterday they unveiled a new report on QEIA, conducted by Vital Research, LLC (and funded by the CTA), that compared QEIA schools to similar lower-performing schools. Findings include:

• QEIA schools averaged 21.2 points of growth on the API scale (Academic Performance Index, a California measure of school performance based on standardized test scores), 6.8 more points - 47.2 percent higher - than similar non-QEIA schools for the 2009-2010 school year
• Since QEIA funding began in 2007, QEIA schools averaged a growth of 62.7 points in API growth, compared to 49.3 points in similar non-QEIA schools
• Growth for Hispanic students at QEIA schools averaged 64.3 points, compared to 51 points in comparable non-QEIA schools, with growth for English Learners 61.9 points compared to 49.6 at non-QEIA schools
• Growth for socioeconomically disadvantaged students averaged 63.6 points, compared to 50.4 points in non-QEIA schools

This program has had a huge impact on individual schools. Just ask Teresa Pitta, a teacher at Merced’s John Muir Elementary. She recently shared the story of John Muir’s transformation from the lowest performing elementary school in the district to one of the highest, thanks in part to QEIA.

Of course, QEIA is quite expensive. And with the tight budgets most states and districts face today, it is unlikely that this project will be replicated exactly in many other places. But we can learn quite a bit from it, including that:

• Higher growth schools had more focused professional development in core content areas
• Higher growth schools used student data to guide professional development decisions
• Higher growth schools engaged in more teacher collaboration to develop lesson plans, create common assessments and analyze student data

Perhaps we can take these lessons and use them to make ongoing reform efforts at other schools in other places more efficient; for example, by ensuring that professional development dollars are put to the best possible use.

And a broader finding: The reforms that educators advocate most strongly for – not governance reforms, but classroom level changes – can have a great impact on the performance of some of our most vulnerable students. So perhaps it is time that we listened to those in the schools a little more closely.