As the date of the DRP approached, Mautschke and her teachers bore down with remarkable concentration. Every week the school's administrators met in a supply depository off the gym. These meetings were substantially devoted to test-prep matters. At the final staff meeting before the day of the test Mautschke outlined a program of concentrated memory drills on certain vocabulary words thought likely to appear on the test. Mautschke asked her evenly.
Prayer works well.
The third-graders did their vocabulary drills. The school's scores are now above the average for all New York City public schools. Of course, the score increase is a product of test prep, but not only that. Last May the school was taken off the state registration-review list. The Chancellor's District as a whole registered by far the largest rise in scores on the new reading test of any district in the city.