From Equal Access to Equal Outcomes

Over the past three years, the Riverside County Office of Education's County Achievement Team, as a recipient of a California Department of Education (CDE) grant, has worked with eight pilot schools and districts in the state to bring about systems change with equitable attention and results for each subgroup. The project, Riverside County Achievement Teams, otherwise known as RCAT Plus, has targeted urban, suburban and rural districts in Northern and Southern California that were invited to participate by the CDE on the basis of their historically low performance, specifically their ratings on key performance indicators for students in the special education subgroup. These were schools performing in the lowest quartile of the evaluation system for special education. This article describes the processes involved in the implementation of RCAT Plus and also describes how RCAT Plus has successfully raised student achievement.