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As her 7th-grade students bury their noses in the book “Parrot in the Oven,” teacher Elizabeth Carrillo asks a comprehension question that is written in two languages on an overhead projector.

“What happened before, that made [one of the characters] think that?” Carrillo asks. “¿Qué pasó antes en el libro?”Carrillo, who’s teaching a lesson on inferences, has written the definition of the word on the overhead, with a formula—in English and Spanish—for drawing inferences by combining what the text states with their prior knowledge.

The marquee outside of Beidler Elementary School in East Garfield Park makes the bold statement: We are off of probation.

But when parents trucked into the school last week to pick up first-quarter report cards, they got some sobering news from the district’s colorful new school progress report: Beidler is categorized as a mid-level school in terms of performance on state tests, but less than a quarter of students scored at or above grade level on a different, more rigorous test and only 7.5 percent of 8th-graders met college readiness benchmarks.

On the first day of school at Ashe Elementary, kindergarten teacher Monica Hamilton had 14 students for a full-day class—small enough to give each child plenty of attention and, according to research, make a significant impact on learning. But that was about to change.

Nearly two-thirds of the children who would end up in Hamilton’s class had yet to show up for school. As they did, she quickly found herself struggling to corral about 40 kindergarteners.