In 1993, a state compliance team learned that Ichinaga's school was in violation of the state's bilingual mandates and threatened to withdraw the school's Title I funding. After three years of filing for exemptions, Ichinaga finally received a waiver based on her school's high test scores and the English fluency of her students. Without interruption, Tongan, Thai, and Spanish language students have been taught exclusively in English at Bennett-Kew and accelerated based on their individual abilities. California's recently passed Proposition 227 has lifted the bilingual constraint allowing the practice at Bennett-Kew to be the norm. For years, Bennett-Kew students have also been district leaders in math.
All students learn math concepts that are typically well above their grade level.
All math instruction rigorously follows a monthly schedule that is enforced through regular unit tests. The results of these tests allow teachers to regroup and re-teach the students based on their individual mastery of the concepts. Ichinaga believes that grade-level team teaching is one of the keys to their success. In this way, the teachers work together to improve each other's skills, and master teachers are close at hand to refine a younger teacher's implementation of the curriculum. We talk about the details of implementation all the time.