Districts Make Strides With Common Vision

With the help of outside partners, two rural school systems in California's Central Valley have improved their instruction and raised scores.

Reedley, Calif.

Fog settles thickly in the morning over the orange groves and grape vineyards of the Central San Joaquin Valley, making the small towns dotting this vast agricultural area appear even more remote.

This seems an unlikely place for a San Francisco-based school improvement organization that originally focused on the reform challenges of large urban districts to direct its efforts to reduce achievement gaps. But that is what Springboard Schools has done.

In some ways, the needs are greater in these isolated California districts, which serve a large proportion of children from poor, migrant farmworking families, many of...