Wellford Academy of Science and Technology sits in the western edge of rural Spartanburg County in the piedmont of South Carolina. This elementary school is easy to miss by car in the nexus of a web of small country roads, but once inside, anyone would know within minutes that this is an inviting and successful school.
You don't need data, and you don't need anyone to christen the school a "miracle."
SC uses a formula to identify the Poverty Index (PI) of schools across our impoverished state (SC ranks historically in the bottom quartile of affluence in the U.S.), and Wellford Academy receives a PI of 80 (out of 100), ranking about in the middle of elementary schools in the state, just at the cusp of a PI that tends to overwhelm schools here.
On SC's report card, Wellford Academy fairs extremely well (2011), but when I visited the school recently, neither the school's Title I status nor its success on the SC state report card factored into my conclusion that here sits a school that education reformers should visit in order to understand why everything we are currently doing in the accountability era is wrong—wrong for public education, wrong for the teaching profession, and wrong for the children of our free nation.
Beyond Data, No Miracles
Writing about the challenge of defining science fiction, Booker and Thomas (2009) conclude