ABSTRACT
The population is 75 percent Hispanic, but only about 15 percent of those Hispanic students actually speak Spanish, and a very small percentage of those learned English as a second language. The district’s biggest concerns were the achievement gaps that existed between white and Hispanic students and the overall mentality of underachievement. Teaching is just as much about taking risks as learning is. A teacher has to take a chance on students and trust them enough to be independent learners. That can’t happen if the teacher is uncomfortable about tailoring the curriculum to multiple levels of student performance. Students will face multitudes of obstacles they will have to overcome in order to be successful; they cannot afford to wimp out at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, too many students do not recover from failure, as demonstrated in the 2003 statistics from the American College Testing (ACT) report called Reading between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College Readiness.
