After unapologetically teaching to the ACT, this tiny Wisconsin district now ranks among the state’s best

Samantha West:

“We had all the pieces we needed for success,” said Bruggink, who first came to Oostburg as a student teacher and worked his way up to superintendent. “So was there a way we could harness that, that we could bring all that together?”

He turned to his teachers for ideas. Together, and with the assistance of a two-year transformation program, they rethought the whole business of education at Oostburg, and they settled on some surprising conclusions:

  • Teachers should have more power to figure out how to teach their own students.

  • Students needed to be encouraged to be more ambitious at an earlier age — whether their plans included a four-year college, a two-year tech school or heading straight into the workforce.

  • And Oostburg’s schools really should teach to the test — often viewed cynically as a sign of systemic wrongheadedness — because the test had the same goals as the schools did. But not quite in the way you’d think.

Seven years later, the results are hard to argue with.


Fast Lane Literacy by sedso