Of course, we love to see articles like this, but we’re not surprised. This is what happens when dedicated, talented educators use the Core Knowledge curriculum to inspire their students to achieve great things. Congratulations to Traut Elementary and Liberty Common faculty and students for outstanding accomplishments! Reprinted with permission from The Coloradoan.

Two schools log perfect scores

Few in state scored better than Traut and Liberty

By Taylour Nelson

Two of the city's Core Knowledge schools racked up seven perfect scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests.

All third-, eighth- and ninth-graders at Liberty Common School were rated proficient or advanced on the state reading exam, according to results released Tuesday. All the school's seventh-graders scored at or above grade level on the writing test.

At Traut Elementary School, all third- and sixth-graders scored at proficient or advanced in reading, as did all sixth-graders in writing.

"We have just a great population of teachers, students and families that support the students, and that makes life a lot easier," said Russ Spicer, headmaster at Liberty, a charter school that houses kindergarten through ninth grade. "We also are finding some good things that work."

He said the phonics-based reading program and the Core Knowledge curriculum are two areas that seem to work well for Liberty Common students.

Traut, a kindergarten through sixth-grade public school, also uses the Core Knowledge curriculum, which focuses on a specific, shared curriculum that establishes strong knowledge foundations grade by grade.

Traut's principal, Mark Wertheimer, said much of the school's success can be attributed to the Core Knowledge curriculum, in which students are reading different subjects such as science and history regularly and are building a base for when new information comes their way.

"It provides the intellectual capital for them," he said. "They have domain-specific information about the topics already, and it gives them a base for when new knowledge comes at them. When they hit the CSAP, they have so much domain-specific information, they might already know the answers in the reading section before they finish it."

Parent involvement at Traut, where parents have a hand in the governance of the school, was also a key factor in seeing the students succeed.
"There are a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons is the incredible parent support," Wertheimer said.

The 100 percent performance on any test is a rarity at Colorado schools.

Among all Colorado campuses with more than 20 students in a grade, only 25 schools had 100 percent rates on at least one test in this year's CSAP.

Only two schools in Colorado — Challenge School in Cherry Creek and Aurora Quest, both magnet schools for gifted and talented students — had more perfect scores than Liberty Common's four and Traut's three.