I taught in CA for 15 years before moving here. My first year, and most of the next, class had 34 fifth graders. 25 were at some sort of English Language Acquisition level, 10 had IEPs. It was hard, but we did it. I don't get how Maine isn't knocking it out of the park, I really don't. My class this year has 18 kids, no ELA students and 3 IEPs. HOW in the heck do CA kids outperform ours? OR...why are our kids not outperforming theirs by a massive amount? I don't get it...