By 2010, the percentage had leapt to 43 percent. The district plastered a new slogan on bulletin boards across the district: "We're cooking!"
The improvement is impressive, but a large gap in proficiency still exists between Soledad's fourth-graders and the statewide average. Soledad lags behind the rest of the state by 20 percentage points. At the current rate, it will take Soledad's students at least another decade to catch up.
In many ways, Soledad's struggles mirror those of the state as a whole, which has one of the nation's biggest gaps in reading performance between Hispanics and whites.
