SALT LAKE CITY -- The Salt Lake City School District is one of the few urban districts in the country with no schools failing the No Child Left Behind requirements. Administrators say it's all thanks to a lot of hard work.

Edison Elementary School Principal Tracy Vandeventer used a strategy to turn around one elementary school and is hoping to do the same at her current school.

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Fewer Utah schools need improvement under No Child Left Behind

More Utah schools met testing goals this year under federal No Child Left Behind standards than last year. However, eight Utah school still aren't making the grade.

"Data has really become the basis of everything. We set up a data wall that allows us to track every student in literacy and math," Vandeventer explained.

The data walls look can be low-tech white boards with sticky notes -- like the one at Mountain View Elementary School -- where principals track every student's progress.

"If they weren't making the gains we needed them to make, kind of stepping back and saying: ‘What's wrong? What's missing here?'" Vandeventer said.

Salt Lake District's data teams provide the information and help teachers teach to the data. They say that's key.

"I think if there is anything that I would really wish to replicate in other places, [it] would be this data format, this data team," Vandeventer said.

The results are encouraging. Few urban districts where more than 80 languages are spoken can claim that every school is meeting federal No Child Left Behind standards.

"It was a great year where the stars aligned between the hard work of the teachers and where those schools were in their progress on that data," said McKell Withers, superintendent of the Salt Lake District.

"It makes me proud and makes me celebrate for all the hard work that teachers have done," Vandeventer said.

On Tuesday, Salt Lake District will hold its "Data Days," which is sort of a back-to-school orientation for principals.

E-mail: dwimmer@ksl.com

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