After-school sessions aimed at improving students' test scores

Though the Illinois State Achievement Tests may be months away, you wouldn't know it from the level of focus in Phillis Peete's Thomas Paine Elementary School classroom after school on a Tuesday in December.

There, more than a dozen students work on page-long essays, responses to a reading assignment about a girl moving to Oregon in pioneer times. Jamaal Mosley reads aloud from his essay, using some of the words he's learned in his after-school reading class: confident, nervous, trustworthy, grouchy.

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