The purpose of the district’s Promising Practices Project (PPP for short) is to identify, describe and disseminate what is working across the Saint Paul Public Schools today.  This inaugural edition of the series attempts to capture some of the strategies being used at twenty-two elementary schools and two elementary/junior high schools at which at least one grade level and/or student subgroup showed more rapid progress than similar groups of students elsewhere in the district on the 2004 administration of the Stanford Achievement Test, tenth edition (SAT10).  In contrast to the accountability provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), which compares the performance of successive — and often very different — cohorts of students, the measure used to identify schools for inclusion in this report tracks the progress of the same students from one year to the next.

It is important to note that a school’s inclusion in this edition of Promising Practices be placed into perspective and context.  While it indicates that the school's students achieved high growth between 2003 and 2004 on the SAT10 exam, it does not mean that the school has generated similar levels of growth over multiple years.  To evaluate those longer-term trends, a future edition of Promising Practices will analyze the strategies being used in schools that have sustained high rates of growth in student achievement over three years or more.