Albuquerque Public Schools
How One TOPS School Made Big Gains in Reading, Math
It's all about building community, East San Jose Elementary's principal says.
At East San Jose Elementary, Principal Eder Ortiz has one rule for teachers during the first two weeks of school: No teaching.
Instead, he asks teachers to get to know their students, going beyond their birthdays to find out how many brothers and sisters they have, who their parents are, and whether they live with grandparents or aunts.
“I want to know where they came from. I want to know what languages they speak. I want to know about their hobbies and interests,” Ortiz says. “Once you know all that then you can start developing lessons to meet the needs of those students.”
The approach may be unorthodox, but Ortiz says it’s helped fuel the academic growth East San Jose students achieved in short-cycle assessments last school year. Third- through fifth-grade reading scores at the TOPS school increased by 19.1 percentage points, and math scores increased by 19.7 percentage points.
On the state exam, the school nearly doubled its English Language Arts proficiency rate from 2022 to 2024, jumping from 15% proficient to 29.7%. It's math proficiency rate increased from 9.4% to 16.9% during that same period. East San Jose saw modest year over year gains from 2023 to 2024.
Ortiz, who was born in Mexico but grew up in Los Angeles, is a firm believer that before instruction can happen, “there has to be that sense of welcoming, that sense of care, that sense of love for our students and our community because once students and families feel as though you do care about them, then the engagement comes easily. The learning comes a lot easier because they feel that sense of belonging.”
Failed by the system
It’s a lesson Ortiz learned during his own elementary school days in Los Angeles.
“I never felt welcome in the classroom,” he says. “My language was viewed as a deficiency.”
He says no one took the time to understand who he was. He remembers being told his parents didn’t know how to spell and that his first name should actually be Edgar instead of Eder. He can still feel the sting of the ruler whacks on his hands a teacher would deliver when he spoke Spanish because she didn’t know if he was speaking badly about her.
So he began speaking badly about her and rebelling in other ways: he would throw chairs, throw tantrums, and get paddled.
“I behaved that way because I just didn’t feel welcome in my environment,” he says, explaining that he felt education had failed him.
“I never want any student to feel how I felt going through elementary school, and that’s where that idea came to me,” Eder says. “Let’s create that sense of belonging for our families and our students.”
Finding his calling
So how did a kid who felt failed by the education system end up as principal of East San Jose?
Ortiz says he was lucky to graduate high school with a 2.1 grade point average, the first person in his family to complete high school.
“When I finished high school, I was like, ‘Now what?’”
He got a job as a cook and hated it, and then he met a friend who was a teacher's assistant. The friend told him it was an easy job.
“You just hang out in the workroom and you don’t do anything because the teachers don’t want you there, so they just send us to the workroom, and we just hang out and listen to music,” Ortiz remembers the friend telling him. So he applied and became a teacher’s assistant expecting to spend his days in the workroom listening to music.
Ms. Ackel had other ideas.
The first-grade teacher asked Ortiz if he spoke Spanish, handed him a book, and told him to teach English to the five Spanish-speaking students in the class.
He took one look at those students and quickly saw a reflection of himself in the first grade.
“They looked lost,” Ortiz said. “At that moment, I said I’m going to make them feel good about themselves because I know how they feel right now. So I had fun with them and I didn’t know I was teaching them.”
A few months later, Ortiz walked into work and Ms. Ackel and her first-graders were lining the hallway looking at him. Ortiz thought he was in trouble, but Ms. Ackel handed him a piece of paper.
“Look at what you did!” she told him. “… Look at how much these students have improved.”
He recalls Ms. Ackel grabbing him by the shoulders and asking him why he never smiled.
“Don’t you realize how you’ve helped these students,” she asked.
“And for the first time in my life, someone believed in me and gave me hope that I could be someone important,” an emotional Ortiz says, “and she told me, ‘You need to be a teacher.’”
The rest is history.
Building trust
Ortiz is now in his seventh year as principal at East San Jose.
When one of his teachers went on medical leave for two months for hip surgery, Ortiz stepped in and taught the class. He worked with his teachers to prepare, and while teaching, he invited the school’s faculty to evaluate his performance.
He has gone to great lengths to build community at the Barelas neighborhood school with an enrollment of about 330 students.
He believes in shared leadership and authentic collaboration. He and his staff use data to figure out next steps. His teachers evaluate and learn from one another.
The TOPS Model, which has increased both staff and instructional time, has been a big factor in the school’s success because it has allowed teachers to collaborate with one another, figure out what’s working and what’s not working, and to pivot quickly.
Milagro Tognoni, a bilingual reading interventionist at the school, praised the current environment at East San Jose. She said everyone is open to new ideas and there’s a sense of trust among staff that allows them to engage in hard conversations about what’s working and what isn’t.
Rachel Baucom, a first grade teacher at the school, agrees. Like Ortiz, she feels strongly that you can’t teach kids with whom you have no relationship.
Tognoni and Baucom are proud of the gains East San Jose has made in recent years, but Baucom warns that “systems are fragile so we have to continue to be committed to them.”
And Tognoni will be the first to tell you that what’s working at East San Jose may not work at other schools.
“It’s not about replicating what’s here but about finding what works for that school,” she says.
Q&A With Eder Ortiz
Third- through fifth-grade reading scores on short cycle assessments at East San Jose increased by 19.1 percentage points, and math scores increased by 19.7 percentage points. What do you attribute that success to?
It’s really a buildup of what our philosophy is here at East San Jose about shared leadership and shared collaboration. I view myself as a team player. It’s not necessarily me telling everyone what to do. It’s about being open to new ideas and getting everybody’s input and seeing what’s best. Our collaboration is authentic. It’s based on data and based on how we can improve as a school.
It sounds like you're going the extra mile to build community and make students feel welcome.
Yes. That’s the No. 1 priority. I don’t want quiet classrooms. If it’s a welcoming environment, kids should be talking to one another. The first two weeks, I want to see teachers having fun with their students, getting to know them, making them feel as though their classroom is a special place where they want to come to school every single day. How can you teach if you don’t know who you’re teaching? Instruction can come later. What’s important is developing that sense of community and sense of family in the classroom. If a student knows that you care about them, they will give you their best.
Give me an example of the innovative work happening at your school.
When we started taking our assessments more serious, a teacher brought up the idea we need to create better testing environments. We create the environment where they’re going to be successful. For example, we have a student who has a problem sitting down. So we created an environment for him to take the test where he was able to walk around and not distract others and once he was ready to sit down and answer a couple of questions, great. Because we’ve taken the time to understand our students, we’re able to create a better environment for them. The students don’t adjust to us. We adjust to them.
What three things have you done that have improved things at East San Jose?
Mutual respect, being open minded, and valuing the voice of others.
How do you use assessments?
We’re driven by data. We look at assessments but we don’t just look at the end result. We reflect on how it started. (Chief Academic Officer) Sheri Jett came down when she was my principal support and taught us about task analysis. That really made us rethink the work we were giving students by asking ourselves whether that work is going to meet our objective. Once we started reflecting on that, we started to realize we were not giving them the work that was going to meet the objective.
How do you and your staff hold yourselves accountable?
As part of our 90-day plan, every teacher goes and observes another teacher and provides authentic feedback. There was a teacher who went into a classroom and saw how the work the students were doing actually was going to meet the objective, and the teacher came back and said, “That’s what I should be doing.” That’s more powerful than me telling them what to do, or an administrator saying you need to improve on your literacy foundational skills. 'Here, read this book and get better.' That’s useless. The teacher on teacher observations are really important because you get to observe an actual lesson with students that are ours and then they can take it back into their classrooms.
How has being a TOPS school impacted what you've been able to do?
It gave us the opportunity to meet and collaborate. Our morning meetings are all teacher-guided. We developed interest groups, so teachers come up with ideas, they share them with the staff and work with colleagues who are interested in the work. They come up with a theory of action and they implement it with students. Then they do a share out about their results and discuss whether it should be implemented throughout the school. It gives us that extra hour in the day without students to really get together and plan everything out.
TOPS schools also have Genius Hour, right? Has that been successful?
We love it because that’s created that sense of community as well. We’ve developed our
Genius Hour where it’s all about what the students want. When we were starting our genius hour, we sent out surveys to students saying what is it you would like. Last year a lot of students wanted cheerleading. And even though no one here had cheerleading experience, we’re going to do it because that’s what students want. It’s not about us, what we feel comfortable with, it’s about what students want. We mix all our grade levels so you may have fifth-graders with a kinder student and that has really helped us because now when you walk in our hallways or in recess time, you’ll see a fifth-grader fist bumping a kindergartner saying, `Hey, how are you?’ We used that to our advantage saying this kinder student knows you so you’ve got to be the role model, which helps us with our overall behavior issues as well.
Do you have different topics for genius hour?
I think we have 20 different options for our students. Every staff member participates in it, including our EAs. We try to offer as many options as possible so the classes can be small so students can really enjoy the activity they’re doing. For example, we have soccer, arts and crafts, clay creations, yoga, baile folklorico, Zumba, meditation, esports, and volleyball. Kids were asking for volleyball last year, so, OK. Let’s get a volleyball net and let’s have volleyball. We do it on six-week rotations.
Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to share?
We’ve implemented a lot of systems. For example, right now we have two teachers on medical leave and right away our interventionists created a schedule to go in and teach that class so those students are receiving the same level of instruction than just a longterm sub. We’ve developed these systems where if someone goes out for any reason, someone is ready to jump in and maintain those high expectations. The instruction is through interventionists.
I know schools across the country are struggling with high absentee rates. What's your approach to students who are chronically absent?
We try to create the best welcoming environment to have students here, but for the most part, I always say stop worrying about why the student is absent. When they’re here, what is it you’re going to do to make sure you get the most out of them while they’re here?