July 2, 2010

TiZA is proud to announce that its charter school partners who received TiZA assistance and best-practices guidelines as part of a Department of Education “dissemination grant” have achieved significant increases in the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) scores.

The dissemination grant was awarded to TiZA for its high-quality programs and achievements, TiZA worked with partner charter schools to disseminate its best practices. TiZA’s nationally recognized model included strategies for improving reading comprehension; guides to data-driven student learning; and action plans for creating successful leadership and management practices.

After partnering with TiZA, Rochester Math and Science Academy and Lighthouse Academy of Nations saw reading scores jump more than 20 percent. On the state’s math test, Lighthouse Academy saw a more than 20 percent gain and Rochester’s students saw a 10 percent increase. The other participating schools also showed modest gains of a few percentage points.Four of five schools had achieved “adequate yearly progress,” a designation required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

“We are happy to have made a contribution in helping our partner charter schools see such amazing improvements in their test scores,” said Asad Zaman, TiZA’s executive director.

“The majority of students in our partner schools, as many as 80 to 90 percent, live below the poverty line,” says Zaman. “They have many family issues and often are children of immigrants.”

Partners included charter schools serving minority students in some of Minnesota’s poorest neighborhoods. They included two largely African American schools, Harvest Prep Academy and Best Academy, both in Minneapolis, and the Rochester Math and Science Academy, which has a mainly Somali student body. New Millennium Academy attracts primarily Hmong students, and Lighthouse Academy of Nations serves a multi-cultural student body ranging from ages 13 to 21.

“This program was successful because successful partnerships were created,” said Magdy Rabeaa, the assistant campus director at TiZA’s Inver Grove Heights campus.

“The teachers of other schools came and visited our school and observed our teachers and met with school administration and how we use the data to better accommodate students. Our teachers visited the schools and provided them with feedback on how to map curriculum to state benchmarks and accommodate student’s individual differences. These are the things that are important at TiZA, and we are grateful for the opportunity to help other schools.”

TiZA is a nationally recognized charter school in student achievement. In 2009, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) honored TiZA with the Growth Achievement Award, which ranked TiZA first in the nation in student achievement based on the school’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessments.