Teaching by Example
UT Elementary, a charter school in East Austin, takes the best in teaching research and applies it to real classrooms—with stunning results.

Deep in the heart of East Austin, a part of town that’s had as many failing schools as successful ones, an eight-year project is underway proving without question that we have answers for many of our state’s most pressing education problems.
The project is UT Elementary, an open-enrollment charter school for kids in kindergarten through fifth grade that serves the surrounding, largely poor, area. Unlike lab schools, which try new but unproven methods, UT Elementary is a demonstration school, meaning it employs only teaching methods scientifically proven to work.
A stroll through the compact campus, with its brightly painted portables filled with 93 percent minority students, reveals an unlikely academic wonderland. Students wearing burnt-orange and white uniforms behave, look adults in the eye, and treat others with respect. They appear both happy and acutely aware that they are part of some big and important project, and that how they perform matters. To a visitor, it feels like a school from either 50 years ago or 50 years ahead.
“The students here carry themselves in a way that is substantially different from schools in this region,” says Benjamin Kramer, the school’s principal. “They show that it’s possible for more schools to deliver on the message that public school is for everyone.”
UT Elementary was dreamed up almost a decade ago, just as standardized testing first revealed a troubling statewide achievement gap emerging: suburban students were far outperforming inner-city and minority students from as early as pre-K.
By the time many of those struggling students were in third grade, in some of the worst-performing communities only about 30 percent were passing the state’s standardized reading test. When education administrators and policymakers went looking for examples that defied the trend, that could provide proven methods for success, they came up empty.
“We needed models,” says Melissa Chavez, UT Elementary’s executive director, who under the charter model is the equivalent of a superintendent. “But we couldn’t find an urban school that was doing well. So we decided to build one.”
Even though exclusive university lab schools have been a fixture in America since the late 1800s, few universities had ever tried a public demonstration school to target a particular community with particularly high needs. Certainly none in Texas ever had. Some in the administration and at the state harbored reservations about whether it really fit within the University’s scope. They feared the project could blow up in their faces if it didn’t work or drained resources. It was a risk.
“We started the school right after the dot-com bust, during a period when we had serious resource pressure,” says then-UT president Larry Faulkner, “and there were questions about whether this was an appropriate place to put our resources.”
Nevertheless, the idea fit with the University’s commitment to take a more active role in improving K-12 education in the state, so administrators forged ahead. “It was completely natural for us to develop it,” Faulkner says.
What was envisioned was a place that bridged academia, where teachers are trained, and real-world classrooms, where they actually teach. Since its founding in 2003, the school has done just that. UT researchers observe and gather data from actual classrooms. The teachers at UT Elementary have enormous professional development resources at their fingertips. And College of Education students have a training ground in a community facing many of the same challenges as our state’s most beleaguered school districts.

Most importantly, the results show the project is working—that even students from historically underperforming areas can, with proven methods, perform just as well as suburban kids. In the five years that UT Elementary students have taken TAKS, 100 percent have passed the third-grade reading test. In 2009, the school beat every state average by six percentage points or more on the TAKS math, reading, and writing tests for grades three through five. It also earned its third Exemplary rating from the state.
“The numbers show that what we’re doing is working,” Chavez says. “With this scenario, with our kids and our methods, we’re making a difference.”
Just what is the scenario, who are the kids, and what are the methods? Those are the million-dollar questions for educators wondering whether what’s working at UT Elementary can transfer to their districts and produce similar results.
“Our role has never been to just have a cute little school,” says founding principal Ramona Treviño, now the chief academic officer of Austin Independent School District. “We were started as a demonstration school to support school districts around the state, and to reach full fruition the connection needs to be seamless.”
UT Elementary has developed two particular methods that make it distinctive, one academic and one behavioral. The first is a strategic-intervention teaching system, called Response to Intervention, with three levels, or tiers. Tier 1 is the classroom pace, where all students ideally are. Those who fall behind are sent into Tier 2, where they get additional instruction in a more intimate setting, with the goal of returning them to Tier 1. Students who fall way behind go to Tier 3, the most intensive environment, where they get one-on-one instruction from a specialist.
Developed by Sharon Vaughn at UT’s Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, the system was originally designed to tailor reading instruction to a student’s individual needs. It worked so well that it’s now used in almost every subject. All of UT Elementary’s teachers are trained in it.
“The nice thing about UT Elementary is that it’s research-to-practice,” Treviño says. “Professors lead in all content areas. It’s not, ‘This is the math book,’ it’s, ‘This is the math program designed by Rose Tran.’”
Social and Emotional Learning is the behavioral system at UT Elementary. It teaches students how to recognize their own feelings in day-to-day situations, like encountering a bully or fighting over a toy. They’re taught coping skills, such as sharing, conflict resolution, and teamwork, so that feelings of fear, anger, or resentment don’t govern their behavior. At its core, the system teaches students how to resolve their own problems.
These two systems work so well in part because they’re woven into the fabric of the school, which has just 260 students, almost all of whom are East Austin residents enrolled via a lottery system (7 percent of students are children of UT Elementary teachers or administrators). The students, teachers, and parents all know how the systems work, so when a teacher urges a student to use his conflict-resolution skills in a school setting, the boy’s parents know how to do the same at home.
“It’s like a big, happy family,” says Lulu Cardoza, whose son graduated last year from UT Elementary after attending from first grade through fifth. “There’s no bullying. My son has emotional problems, and everyone was there for him. Everybody knows everybody and gets together to talk when we are concerned about a student.”
There are 13 classroom teachers at UT Elementary, plus four support specialists, five subject-area specialists (art, music, P.E., Spanish), two assistant teachers, and a librarian—all of them first-rate. On average they have 17 years of experience, and many are working on their master’s degrees or PhDs at UT. Positions at the school are highly sought-after. Chavez, who is also working on her PhD at UT, received 90 applications for an opening for a second-grade teacher, and she requires all finalists to teach an actual class while she observes.

The school follows AISD’s pay scale, which is based on experience, so UT Elementary teachers are paid basically the same as teachers anywhere else. The school does give stipends for extra certifications, such as $2,000 a year for special ed or Spanish. Teachers also get paid extra for work done outside school hours or on holidays. And because it’s part of UT, teachers are eligible for merit-pay bonuses that reward those who go above and beyond.
The school has a modest turnover rate, which seems to be increasing. Last year, Chavez says she lost six teachers—four left to take higher-paying administrative positions, and two enrolled in PhD programs full-time. “I have lots of Type As here,” Chavez says. “Everything has to be perfect.”
Aside from top-notch teachers, the school has one more enormous advantage—its affiliation with The University of Texas. Principal Kramer calls it the single most distinctive and consequential factor in the school’s success. Having at the doorstep a major university with a multitude of resources offers a huge edge, he says. (That includes a small financial benefit—UT supplies UT Elementary with 5 percent of its budget.)
That UT plays such a big part in UT Elementary’s success is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in that the kids at UT Elementary feel like little Longhorns, and almost all intend to go to college someday. The curse is, for a school that’s meant to export its mojo to districts across the state, how helpful can it be if its best asset is something unique to Austin and UT Elementary?
The school’s early efforts at exporting its methods have met with varied success. School districts across the state are experimenting with versions of the tiered teaching system. While easily replicable and fairly straightforward, the tiered system relies on teachers knowing how to use it and having support staff and instructional specialists to get students caught up when they fall behind. All across the state, budget cuts are forcing school districts to eliminate many of those specialists and support staff. Kramer worries that a tiered teaching system without the resources to back it up won’t produce the same results.
“The question is whether you have the staffing to accommodate it,” Kramer says. “Things can become buzzwords and not have the rich meaning they once had. It’s easy for good ideas to become just slogans or clichés.”
UT Elementary has had better results exporting the social and emotional learning model. Two years ago at nearby Govalle Elementary, the school’s principal, overwhelmed with disciplinary problems, approached Chavez for help. Chavez sent staff to teach the administrators and teachers at Govalle the social and emotional learning system, and, last year, the number of disciplinary referrals dropped from 170 to six.
The school has also partnered with the College of Education and AISD to create an Urban Education Pilot program that trains future teachers specifically for inner-city schools. They are the only UT students trained in Response to Intervention and Social and Emotional Learning.
In November, UT Elementary published a best-practices book featuring essays by UT experts and UT Elementary staffers who designed various parts of the school’s curriculum. It is in phase one of a $22 million capital campaign to build a kitchen, cafeteria, gym, and library (students currently have even P.E. class in a portable, which they call cottages). And there are open discussions about establishing a UT Middle School.
For elementary-school educators across the state, Chavez says there’s something they can take from UT Elementary and apply to their own situation. There may be small differences, and techniques may need some tweaking, but if nothing else, she says, the school is clearly demonstrating proven methods.
“As far as creating and implementing a system that works,” Chavez says, “it’s all here.”
Photo by Caleb Bryant Miller