 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Lessons from Boston
By SARAH SCHWEITZER © St. Petersburg Times, published November 12, 2000 BOSTON -- Five years ago, the news came. It might as well have been delivered with black armbands. Boston's Jeremiah E. Burke High School, with broken furniture, no clean drinking water, one guidance counselor and no discernible mission, had been stripped of its accreditation. No school in Massachusetts' history had lost accreditation, a move that jeopardized scholarships and financial aid at the predominantly black school. Talk swirled of converting the hulking brick structure into condominiums. Eight years after federal courts ended supervision of Boston's tumultuous desegregation efforts, it had come to this. The three elite, largely white schools where exams determine entrance remained among the best in the city's 64,000-student, 85 percent minority school district. Yet schools like Burke failed. Outraged parents filed a federal civil rights complaint claiming no white school would have suffered such indignities. With the drumbeat of standardized testing bearing down, Boston school officials decided change could wait no longer. So was born Whole-School Improvement. At its core, the reform focused like a laser on learning. Classes would be taught from bell to bell. Principals would concentrate on classroom oversight. Teachers would meet nearly every day to talk about student progress. Burke was among the first schools to embrace Whole-School Improvement, a move eased by an infusion of funding from downtown officials smarting from the school's loss of accreditation. Today, Burke's student-teacher ratio is low. Floors gleam and wooden doorways are painted candy reds and emerald greens. Gangs no longer claim turf in restrooms. Test scores are inching up. Accreditation has been restored. Yet Whole-School Improvement has yet to bridge the gulf in performance between schools like Burke and its white counterparts, offering a cautionary tale for districts like Hillsborough, where the School Board on Tuesday will vote whether to adopt a variation of the model as part of its plan to end busing. Pinellas' recently approved desegregation plan includes a similar component aimed at ensuring educational equality. Hillsborough school officials say the plan to implement the reform is a response to black parents' fear that they lack the clout needed to ensure that their neighborhood schools are equal to those in white neighborhoods. The reform, school officials say, will ensure equality across racial lines. School Board members describe it as visionary. Sam Horton, president of the Hillsborough NAACP, calls it "gobbledygook." Boston parents have another view on the matter. A visit to a Burke High School parent council meeting on a November evening finds 22 parents listening politely as a new treasurer is selected. But spines straighten and heads snap to attention as Debra Wilson, the council president, outlines signs of what she says is trouble ahead: creeping student enrollment, no matched increase in funding. "I don't feel like we're all on the same team with the school district," says Wilson, her eyes lit up, her arms waving as a flurry of knowing nods and approving clucks ripple across the classroom. "There has been change at this school, but it's not all good change." If Boston's reform model was going to take root anywhere, it was at Burke High School. No school needed reform more badly; no school was a more perfect blank slate. A classic art deco building, Burke opened in 1934 as an all-girls school dominated by Jewish and Irish students. Carved oak paneling lined the office walls, a statue of Abraham Lincoln graced the second floor corridor. Many considered it among the best in the city. In the 1950s, demographics started to shift in the Dorchester neighborhood, south of Boston's center. Whites, financially flush in the postwar years, departed for the leafier, farther-flung suburbs. Blacks, many of whom had seen their homes in nearby neighborhoods fall to the bulldozer of urban renewal, snapped up Victorians and triple deckers on the hilly streets surrounding the school. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, rioters decimated the neighborhood. Hundreds descended on the school, burning an American flag flying at half staff. Merchants fled and poverty took hold. By the early 1980s, gangs named Castlegate and Intervale had risen to power. Busing would bring some students from the white enclave of South Boston, but many transferred out, worried about safety. The school began a slide into dysfunction, rebounding in the mid '80s, but then plummeting again in the early '90s when the school's budget was slashed -- a factor many say led to Burke's loss of accreditation and, ultimately, the civil rights complaint. In the aftermath, change came fast and furious. Funding ballooned, a cap on enrollment dropped student numbers from 1,250 to 670, administrators were pushed out and new ones hired, including the politically nimble Steven Leonard as headmaster, as high school principals are called in Boston. "The day I walked into this building, there was smoke in the corridors, the Coke machine was cracked and its fluorescent lights were flashing like a penny arcade," says Leonard. "Teachers would stand in hallways grabbing kids they thought were salvageable and slam their doors." Leonard began his stint by informing the staff that everyone would be expected to work -- really work. More than half departed, freeing Leonard to hire young teachers open to the reform that would take hold the next year. Whole-School Improvement was a clunky title for a simple concept: Improve test scores. Unlike Hillsborough, Boston's reform was not enacted as part of its switch from mandatory busing to a school choice plan much like those of Hillsborough and Pinellas. But like Florida, Massachusetts was soon to begin statewide testing. Boston officials feared the inevitable comparisons to the well-heeled, largely white suburban districts. Hence the Whole-School Improvement model. The idea was at once radical and incremental. Principals were expected to shed their disciplinarian-in-chief role and focus on curriculum and teacher oversight. Teachers would share a pool of students and meet regularly to talk about them. Teacher training would no longer be contained to one day, but sprinkled throughout the year and intensified. Literacy would be a primary focus, with reading coaches placed in schools. The concept was phased in over four years, with 27 schools beginning the process in 1996. The undertaking is expensive. Each school receives an average of $50,000, partially underwritten by the Annenberg Foundation. (Hillsborough's proposal includes barely a sliver of that amount, although it too hopes for Annenberg money.) Data have yet to show a turnaround. Across the district, scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Test have improved slightly, but remain some of the lowest in the state. Moreover, 67 percent of Boston's black and Latino students failed the math portion of the 1999 exam -- twice the rate of white and Asian students. In English the gap was about 20 to 25 percentage points. "It has been no panacea, at least in terms of test scores," said John Mudd, policy director of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, a children's rights organization. Moreover, latecomers to the reform are showing signs of resistance, particularly high schools. "Some schools are dragging their heels, " said Superintendent Thomas Payzant. "The high schools are the hardest to change. They are larger, more departmentalized." Burke was among the exceptions. "It was easier to make people understand that change had to happen," said Carol Moore, an assistant headmaster at Burke. "We had the advantage of starting from zero." Hallways at Burke are eerily quiet, save exhortations piped through the public address system reminding students to be in seats at the start of class and ready to work. Bulletin boards display no announcements of after-school clubs or football team triumphs. They are plastered with samples of student writing. There is an austerity to the place, which Leonard says the reform requires to guarantee maximum academic absorption. Burke students had their first dance in five years last year -- off-campus to avoid gang clashes. "To have a dance takes a lot of energy to ensure safety," Leonard said. "I made a decision: whatever energy we have will be used to produce learning." For students, Whole-School Improvement can be summed up in two words: No fun. "This school is so worried about getting it all straight that they made it all strict," said Estefani Dos Santos, 17, a senior council member. Melissa Thompson, a fellow senior council member, chimed in, "You can't do all work and have no rewards." But Leonard says there simply is not time for both. Teachers agree that time is indeed stretched thin. Periods once used for grading now are given over to meetings to discuss student progress. There is some grumbling. Indeed, on a sunny afternoon, rustling papers could be heard as teachers graded students' work with red pens during such a meeting. But teachers, particularly younger ones, say the meetings reduce isolation. "It's very gratifying, especially when a teacher can give a head's up that a kid is having a bad day or a good day," said Ernest Coakley, 31, a biology teacher. Senior teachers echo the praise. "The meetings give us a support system that we didn't have before when we were just floating out there," said Joan Duane, a special education teacher. More frequent training, she said, has also helped. "It's revitalized me," Duane said. Yet despite the cultural evolution at Burke, palpable change is less evident. Test scores remain clustered in failing zones. The dropout rate hovers at 16 percent, attendance at 87 percent. "We are the best failures," quipped John Young, a retired carpenter whose son was one of a handful of white students who attended Burke last year. Young and other parents agreed that Burke had shown improvement. But few were willing to credit Whole-School Improvement. "Without the civil rights complaint, Whole-School Improvement would have had no impact," said Michelle Brooks, one of the parents who filed the civil rights complaint in 1995. Parents are once again growing suspicious of the district, wondering if the worst thing to happen to Burke was the return of legitimacy. "Once we regained accreditation, all bets were off," said Wilson. "Enrollment started going up, funding didn't. It might be a good time to revisit the Office of Civil Rights." Ultimately, Young said, reform efforts are only as good as the money a district puts behind them. And history, he said, suggests that money follows political clout -- something lacking in his rebounding but still struggling Dorchester neighborhood. "The philosophy is good, but to get them to do it is another thing," he said. "'The neighborhoods with the better politicians will always have the better school."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
|
