The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools
By DAVID L. KIRP
WHAT
would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that
our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only
solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly
immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the
public schools we have.
Union
City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community
with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average.
Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A
quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.
Public
schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This
used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that
state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From
third grade through high school, students’ achievement scores now approximate
the statewide average. What’s more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school
graduation rate of 89.5 percent — roughly 10 percentage points higher than the
national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in
college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.
As
someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I’ve never seen the
likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe
its transformation offers a nationwide strategy.
Ask
school officials to explain Union City’s success and they start with
prekindergarten, which enrolls almost every 3- and 4-year-old. There’s abundant
research showing the lifetime benefits of early education. Here, seeing is
believing.
One
December morning the lesson is making latkes, the potato pancakes that are a
Hanukkah staple. Everything that transpires during these 90 minutes could be
called a “teachable moment” — describing the smell of an onion (“Strong or
light? Strong — duro. Will it smell differently when we cook it? We’ll have to
find out.”); pronouncing the “p” in pepper and pimento; getting the hang of a
food processor (“When I put all the ingredients in, what will happen?”).
Cognitive
and noncognitive, thinking and feeling; here, this line vanishes. The good
teacher is always on the lookout for both kinds of lessons, always aiming to
reach both head and heart. “My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my
own children,” the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. “It’s all about exposure to
concepts — wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different
countries. ‘Let’s do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.’ I don’t
ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 — I could teach a monkey to count.”
From
pre-K to high school, the make-or-break factor is what the Harvard education
professor Richard Elmore calls the “instructional core” — the skills of the
teacher, the engagement of the students and the rigor of the curriculum. To
succeed, students must become thinkers, not just test-takers.
When
Alina Bossbaly greets her third grade students, ethics are on her mind. “Room
210 is a pie — un pie — and each of us is a slice of that pie.” The pie offers a
down-to-earth way of talking about a community where everyone has a place.
Building character and getting students to think is her mission. From Day 1, her
kids are writing in their journals, sifting out the meaning of stories and
solving math problems. Every day, Ms. Bossbaly is figuring out what’s best for
each child, rather than batch-processing them.
Though
Ms. Bossbaly is a star, her philosophy pervades the district. Wherever I went,
these schools felt less like impersonal institutions than the simulacrum of an
extended family.
UNTIL
recently, Union City High bore the scarlet-letter label, “school in need of
improvement.” It has taken strong leadership from its principal, John Bennetti,
to turn things around — to instill the belief that education can be a ticket out
of poverty.
On
Day 1, the principal lays out the house rules. Everything is tied to a single
theme — pride and respect in “our house” — that resonates with the community
culture of family, unity and respect. “Cursing doesn’t showcase our talents.
Breaking the dress code means we’re setting a tone that unity isn’t important,
coming in late means missing opportunities to learn.” Bullying is high on his
list of nonnegotiables: “We are about caring and supporting.”
These
students sometimes behave like college freshmen, as in a seminar where they’re
parsing Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” They can be boisterously jokey with their
teachers. But there’s none of the note-swapping, gum-chewing, wisecracking,
talking-back rudeness you’d anticipate if your opinions about high school had
been shaped by movies like “Dangerous Minds.”
And
the principal is persuading teachers to raise their expectations. “There should
be more courses that prepare students for college, not simply more work but
higher-quality work,” he tells me. This approach is paying off big time: Last
year, in a study of 22,000 American high schools, U.S. News & World Report
and the American Institutes for Research ranked Union City High in the top 22
percent.
What
makes Union City remarkable is, paradoxically, the absence of pizazz. It hasn’t
followed the herd by closing “underperforming” schools or giving the boot to
hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and
there are no charter schools.
A
quarter-century ago, fear of a state takeover catalyzed a transformation. The
district’s best educators were asked to design a curriculum based on evidence,
not hunch. Learning by doing replaced learning by rote. Kids who came to school
speaking only Spanish became truly bilingual, taught how to read and write in
their native tongue before tackling English. Parents were enlisted in the cause.
Teachers were urged to work together, the superstars mentoring the stragglers
and coaches recruited to add expertise. Principals were expected to become
educational leaders, not just disciplinarians and paper-shufflers.
From
a loose confederacy, the schools gradually morphed into a coherent system that
marries high expectations with a “we can do it” attitude. “The real story of
Union City is that it didn’t fall back,” says Fred Carrigg, a key architect of
the reform. “It stabilized and has continued to improve.”
To
any educator with a pulse, this game plan sounds so old-school obvious that it
verges on platitude. That these schools are generously financed clearly makes a
difference — not every community will decide to pay for two years of
prekindergarten — but too many districts squander their resources.
School
officials flock to Union City and other districts that have beaten the odds,
eager for a quick fix. But they’re on a fool’s errand. These places — and there
are a host of them, largely unsung — didn’t become exemplars by behaving like
magpies, taking shiny bits and pieces and gluing them together. Instead, each
devised a long-term strategy reaching from preschool to high school. Each keeps
learning from experience and tinkering with its model. Nationwide, there’s no
reason school districts — big or small; predominantly white, Latino or black —
cannot construct a system that, like the schools of Union City, bends the arc of
children’s lives.
