In crosshairs of accountability, urgency takes hold
Pinellas and Hillsborough school leaders are attacking the achievement gap with teacher training and smaller, more targeted classes.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN and MELANIE AVE
Published May 18, 2004
[Times photos: Kinfay Moroti]
"Sound it out. You can do it," Woodlawn Elementary teaching assistant O'Dell Newton tells "Read 180" participant Cassandra Owa.
While his mom, Kimberly Cornelius, folds laundry, Cervonte Cornelius does homework. Cervonte's grades have improved since he was assigned to the "Read 180" program.
Becky Buruge, left, Beverley Jarrett, center, and Lynn Roca are among the Gaither High teachers taking part in a new voluntary training program that encourages teachers to expect the most from every student.
Woodlawn "Read 180" teacher Tina Angles encourages fifth-grader Jarome Lee. Angles says her students' progress has amazed her. "We're like, 'Did somebody trade bodies with these kids?'" she said.
With four minutes left before the final bell at Woodlawn Elementary School in St. Petersburg, Tina Angles could see her students drifting.
She shut the window, silencing the PE class outside. She drew the blinds, erasing the mid afternoon sun.
"Remember, this is still my time," she told them.
The fourth- and fifth-graders in her intensive reading class - half of them black - snapped back into focus for four more minutes of plot discussion.
"You cannot sacrifice a minute," the second-year teacher said later. "Not one."
Time is a big enemy as school districts strain to deal with a glaring achievement gap between black and white students. Each year, thousands of black students across the Tampa Bay area and Florida fall farther behind their white classmates in almost every academic category.
Educators have tinkered with closing the gap for decades. But ineffective programs, slow bureaucracies and a lack of focus have left them humbled.
As new government accountability programs place unprecedented demands on districts to narrow the gap or face penalties, schools are starting to muster the same sense of urgency that Angles carries into the waning moments of her daily lessons.
The new push follows two events last year that stunned educators in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.
Last spring, Florida's school accountability program for the first time required districts to retain third-graders if they failed FCAT reading, even by a point. In Pinellas, 43 percent of them were black - far out of proportion to their enrollment.
"It's incumbent on us to do what we can do about that," said Carol Thomas, an assistant superintendent in charge of Pinellas elementary schools.
The second big surprise was the U.S. government's first-time report on schools that did not make "adequate yearly progress." Nearly 90 percent of Florida schools failed that federal standard, which requires students from all ethnic groups to show learning gains.
Years of emphasis on other issues have allowed the gap to endure, educators acknowledge.
"I can remember doing school improvement plans where we talked about the gardens, the color of the paint and having after-school clubs," said Thomas, who is white. "Now it's, "What are we going to do to ensure this child can read at grade level?' "
Districts did not emphasize the gap until they began to see racial differences in Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores, said Hillsborough schools superintendent Earl Lennard. "I'm not sure it was given the same level of attention and focus that it is getting today," he said.
Lennard negotiated a contract in December that rewards him for chipping away at the gap. For every percentage point increase in black students' reading scores in third, eighth and 10th grades, Lennard, who is white, will receive $750. He will be paid $500 for a jump in blacks students' math scores.
The renewed energy has caused some to wonder what took so long.
"People are saying, "You're asking for too much too fast,' " said Mary Brown, the Pinellas School Board member whose frequent comments about closing the gap have worn thin on fellow board members and administrators who say they are working as hard as they can.
"At the rate they're going, it'll be never," said Brown, who is black. "The point is, we've waited long enough."
"A teacher's dream'
Something seems to be working in Tina Angles' class at Woodlawn Elementary.
She teaches "Read 180," a federally funded program that attempts what the name suggests: A 180-degree turn that transforms struggling readers into book lovers. A disproportionate number of students in the program are black.
In September, Angles could see why her students needed help.
"I notice that they have no excitement about reading," she said. "They don't know what they're supposed to be thinking. They miss the whole meanings of words and they don't enjoy it."
Three months later, she was struck by how many were doing better. "We're like, "Did somebody trade bodies with these kids?' "
The program takes the school's worst readers, separates them into classes of 15, then divides them further into groups of five. "A teacher's dream," said Angles, 32, who is white and two years out of the University of South Florida.
During a 90-minute daily class, each group rotates from interactive computer lessons to solitary reading in comfortable chairs to one-on-five reading groups with Angles. The hope is each student will connect with at least one of those methods.
O'Dell Newton, a 50-year-old black man with a calming presence and 22 years of experience as a teaching assistant, offers help in the quiet reading corner.
The computer lessons feature black adults giving encouragement from the screen. One is named "Sister Science." Another is a young black man who says after a correct answer, "That's what I like to see."
The program appears to have sparked something in 11-year-old Cervonte Cornelius, a black fifth-grader at Woodlawn who goes home each day to his working mother and teenage brother in a small apartment in St. Petersburg.
Last year, Cervonte was reading at a third-grade level. He scored poorly on the FCAT. He earned C's and D's on his report card and he played class clown. Teachers graded his work habits and behavior as "N," for "needs improvement."
This year, at the end of the first semester, he nearly made Woodlawn's honor roll. He showed significant improvement in tests that predict how students will do on the FCAT. His reading began to enhance his performance in other classes. He got more serious about school.
Two days before the start of winter break, he smiled when Angles called him aside and showed him the numbers. She let him color a bar chart showing his progress.
"Cervonte, I just can't even tell you how proud I am of you," she told him. "You are doing fantastic."
How much can one reading program matter to a child's education?
Angles isn't sure.
"If they get this type of reading activity (elsewhere) it could break the cycle," she says. "But you just don't know when you let them go." The program is part of a varied approach to tackling the gap.
Across Pinellas and Hillsborough, many schools have started Read 180 and other programs that focus on their struggling readers.
Principals are conducting frequent inspections, or "walk throughs," to get a better handle on what's happening behind classroom doors, though some teachers have complained, calling the practice an intrusion.
Hillsborough administrators are trying to pair their best teachers with their lowest performing students.
Pinellas teachers are being urged to try methods that will engage more kids: less lecturing, more talking by students, less prizing of silence in the classroom.
They also are being asked to concentrate on "essential learnings" - material that students "need to know" for the FCAT, not the "good to know" or "nice to know" subjects. The effort is focused on elementary grades, where the gap begins.
When assessments show a student hasn't learned something, teachers are being asked to go at it again a different way.
"I always think of it like a conveyor belt," said Thomas, the assistant superintendent in Pinellas. "You don't wait 'til the car gets to the end to say, "We've got a flawed product.' We're going to stop the conveyor belt, take (the student) off, do remediation, put him back on and keep him going."
Both districts are developing new computerized assessment systems that would enable teachers and principals to check each student's progress more frequently and in ways that better predict their success on the FCAT.
More frequently, principals are rounding up teachers for brainstorming sessions to talk about what does and doesn't work with low-performing black students.
Administrators say the elusive formula for solving the gap may lie somewhere in the minds of front-line educators.
In addition, guidance counselors are pressing capable black students to take more challenging courses. Top administrators say it is better for them to get a C or D in an honors class and be exposed to high-level work than to coast to an A in a regular class.
Jason Mims, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, has spent two years trying to get black male students in Hillsborough County enrolled in rigorous courses. His goal: more black students in the nation's top universities.
He volunteered when his son, now a junior at New York University, was being inducted into the National Junior Honor Society as a middle schooler. "There were the same number of black males being inducted as when I was in it 30 years before," he said. "That was the first red flag."
He recently spoke to students at Dowdell Middle School in Tampa, including a predominantly black class of seventh-graders who were behind a grade and trying to catch up.
"Nobody is going to tell you to go and win," Mims told them. "You either have to be smart enough to do this or smart enough to be willing to do the hard work."
Teaching the teachers
Marie Whelan admits she was wrong.
More than once, the student intervention specialist at Tampa's Gaither High School has groaned when a low-performing student showed up for help.
It embarrasses her now. "What kind of sign is that sending to the student?" said Whelan, who is white.
Whelan and about 20 teachers at Gaither are part of a new voluntary training program in Hillsborough that encourages teachers to expect the most from every student. The program is based on research that shows teachers are more likely to interact with high-achieving students, and that black students often receive less positive attention.
A teacher's encouragement is more important to black students than it is to white students, according to a noted 2001 survey of 34,000 students across 15 districts in 10 states.
The Gaither teachers - all white and female except for two - began their five-month training in January, led by Whelan in the school's library.
Too often, within the first few days of the school year, teachers already have picked the high and low achievers. "The cycle just continues and continues," Whelan said. "Teacher behavior, we know, impacts student experiences."
But such training is done on too small a scale, said Roy Kaplan, Tampa Bay director of the National Conference for Community and Justice. The group conducts diversity training for Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco schools.
"At the very time the schools are becoming more diverse, there's a greater need for activities to help break down the stereotypes, and we're going the opposite direction with the emphasis on standardized testing," said Kaplan, who is white. Diversity training should be mandated for teachers, he said.
In 1998, as part of its "no excuses" approach to the gap, diversity training was No. 1 on the list of initiatives the Pinellas school district would undertake to improve black student achievement.
The district staged a three-day conference with national experts that celebrated diversity. Over three years, more than 7,500 Pinellas employees were trained in cultural awareness through the district's Office of Community Services and Human Relations. "It was voluntary, but it was strongly encouraged," said Sheila Keller, who heads the office.
Now that effort is on life support.
Trainers ran into resistance from many teachers who said they didn't need the training or objected to the idea that society treats whites and blacks differently. Keller's office has since been gutted due to budget cuts. Of the 52,000 district employees who completed training of some sort last school year, fewer than 1,700 were trained in cultural awareness.
A St. Petersburg group, Concerned Organizations for Quality Education for All Students, has criticized Pinellas schools superintendent Howard Hinesley for presiding over the demise of the program.
"When you talk about a school population that's 18 percent African-American but only 8 percent of the teachers are African-American, and we know that there's not a lot of interaction between blacks and whites, then something has to be done in order to bring those white teachers up to snuff in understanding the cultural differences," said Gwendolyn Reece, a member of the group.
Hinesley, who is white, said training money is limited in these tight financial times. He said he is under pressure from all sides on how to spend it.
"I don't mind the criticism," he said, "but you only can do what you can do. What is, is."
"Time for action, action, action."
Are local school districts working hard enough and smart enough on the gap?
That's a matter of perspective.
At least in the Tampa Bay area, the white executives who run the school systems say they're trying. Black civic leaders say they expected more progress after decades of desegregated schools.
Hillsborough schools are moving in the right direction, said Lennard, the superintendent. "Obviously we haven't moved as far as I would like to," he said. "We've narrowed it but we haven't closed it."
Something more is needed, said Sam Horton, president of the Hillsborough County branch of the NAACP. At a recent news conference, he called for a "universal summit" of black civic leaders, church groups, parents and school officials to discuss the gap.
"It's time for us to be successful," he said. "It's time for action, action, action."
In Pinellas, black and white students generally are achieving better after 14 years under Hinesley.
"What you have to look at is the growth of the students," the superintendent said. "That's what I'm more interested in."
Indeed, black students have improved, but not at the pace of whites.
In the 1999-2000 school year, 14 percent of black Pinellas fifth-graders passed the FCAT in math. Last year's figure: 17 percent.
At the same time, the pass rate for white fifth-graders improved from 51 percent to 58 percent. The Pinellas gap has grown only wider in many categories.
"We're not concerned about the improvement," said Watson Haynes, a black civic leader in St. Petersburg. "We're concerned about the gap."
Asked about his efforts over the years to tackle the gap, Hinesley harkened to 1990, when he was hired. He said he felt the district needed "systemic change" that would pay off in the long run. He set up a "collaborative bargaining" system with the teachers union that was designed to improve morale. He began work on a computerized system to better track each student's academic progress.
The Pinellas Instructional Assessment Plan, commonly known as "PIAP," was born. Pinellas parents see it noted on report cards.
"All that took a lot of time and effort," Hinesley said.
By the late 1990s, the district saw that many black students still were performing poorly.
"We came up with the idea, "Look, let's just make it clear we're not going to have any excuses,' " Hinesley said. "There are tons of children in this world over time that came from the same kind of (poor environment) and they've been successful. So let's don't use any excuses for why we can't do better."
The district convened a bi-racial group of more than 60 people to come up with ideas. The result was a 1998 document that came to be known as a "plan to plan." Among other things, it said the district would do a better job of targeting struggling readers and training teachers - but only to a point.
Hinesley said the district must help lower-performing students without taking resources from students who are doing well.
The school system has to balance many constituencies, not all of which list closing the gap as their top priority, said Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association.
"You have parents out there who are expecting their school to get their A's every year and they're expecting their schools to be safe and their class sizes small," he said.
"If the FCAT standard tomorrow for five years from now was that every child in Pinellas County had to speak Sanskrit, we could make that happen. We just couldn't do everything else."
Five years after Hinesley's "plan to plan," the achievement gap is as wide as ever. The PIAP has been found to be a flawed predictor of success on the FCAT and a pain for teachers. The district will test a new system this fall in a handful of schools.
Hinesley said he doesn't expect the Pinellas gap to close for many years.
"It takes an ongoing commitment," he said. "And you've got to be consistent and you can't get off message. And I have attempted to try to do that."
To some, the passing of years with no improvement looks like foot dragging.
"We just keep starting over and starting over and getting nowhere," said Adelle Jemison, a retired Pinellas administrator who is black and who served on the panel that hatched the 1998 plan.
In part, the problem may be one of size. Urban school districts in Florida are huge institutions that tend to respond slowly to change. It is one thing, for example, to tell teachers to change their practices. It is another to get all 8,000 of them to faithfully comply.
"It's a gradual thing," said Kaplan, the white diversity trainer.
"We've been working at it for years. We're still not where we need to be."
