From Charter Vocational High School
Public education in America is a mess. Too often, parents are absent or indifferent; teachers don't know their own subjects; administrators are powerless to fire the worst and hire the best. Daunting problems, yes. But a number of schools have quietly launched experiments that seem to be working. This article, the first in a series, looks at two schools with a common belief: Even the hardest-to-reach student can be inspired to learn.Just two years ago, Aaron Segura was adrift, and slowly sinking. The 15-year-old was a standout golfer at West Mesa High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but his studies were another matter. Aaron was "just shuffling through the chapters" in courses like chemistry, his grades were low, and he was close to dropping out. It's not that Aaron didn't have ambition; it simply wasn't being tapped in his large, impersonal public high school.
Then his mother heard about Albuquerque's Charter Vocational High School, a place where students get plenty of one-on-one attention. Something else intrigued Aaron even more. His one passionate goal was to go into architecture, and Charter Vocational had just the thing for him: an architectural CAD (computer-aided drafting) program.
Aaron enrolled at the beginning of his junior year and, for the first time, found himself excited about learning. By the following summer, he had landed a job as a draftsman for an architectural firm. His plan now is to take up drafting professionally after he graduates this spring.
If Aaron has anyone to thank for his change of fortune, it's 56-year-old Danny Moon. A longtime industrial-arts teacher, Moon ran a vocational shadowing and apprenticeship program in the mid-1990s, until the Albuquerque school district couldn't pay for it any longer.
But two years later, in 2000, Moon's phone rang. The state had recently passed a charter school law, and a district official wondered if Moon might be interested in opening a vocational charter school.
Easy answer. With this sort of instruction, Moon knew he could target students like Aaron, who might have a tough time keeping their heads above water in traditional high schools. He'd also be filling a surging demand across New Mexico for skilled labor. "There's been a mind-set that we needed to be training everyone in high school to go to college," says Jim Folkman, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico and a founding member of the school's board. "As a result, there was a huge void created for the trades -- not just construction, but auto mechanics, computer trades, and so on."
What Moon came up with was a school day consisting of four two-and-a-half-hour blocks of instruction. Each student would attend two of the blocks, one of them academic, the other vocational. A further twist was that, on the academic side, Moon didn't want teachers getting up and lecturing. Instead, students would learn from online coursework provided by a computer program called Novanet, while teachers circulated through the classrooms to work one-on-one with students having problems.
Academic Sense
One of Novanet's major advantages over traditional classwork is that the program requires scores of 80 percent or higher on each of its lessons before you can move on. So much for "social promotion."When Charter Vocational first opened its doors in August 2002, it had 300 students and 15 faculty members. At the time, its only vocational classes were architectural CAD, automotive theory (and introduction to auto repair), and light construction trades (like building sheds). Since then, the school has added such subjects as PC repair and desktop publishing. It now employs a faculty of more than 30 and has about 650 students. Not that Moon is stopping there. He's finalizing plans for a second vocational charter specializing in heavy trades like home construction and forklift operation.
Daphne Orner, a mechanical engineer turned math teacher -- and the first instructor Moon hired at Charter Vocational -- is typical of the school's true believers. "What we can do with kids here, we can't do anywhere else," she says. Orner points out that, since the kids work individually with their teachers, they can progress at their own pace. "The beauty of this is that if a student finishes [a course] in November, he can start the second semester the next day. If they finish in February, well, okay, they start in February."
Does that make academic sense? Well, last year roughly 75 of 80 seniors graduated (the others are finishing coursework).
The successes on the vocational side have been no less impressive, mostly due to first-rate faculty. Moon says that Charter Vocational is "one of the only schools going that's bringing in top-level expertise. I have an architect on staff, a custom home designer." In 2004, Moon entered some of his students in the State Skills USA Contest, a statewide vocational competition. They took first and third place in architectural CAD, and the top three spots in PC repair and networking.
Results like these are raising eyebrows in the New Mexico business community and across the country. Mick Rich, the owner of a local construction company and another Charter Vocational board member, belongs to a national organization of builders called the Jack Miller Network, which meets twice each year. "One of the things we talk about is how do we find young people to go into construction?" Rich says. "When I bring up the vocational high school, [the response is] 'What did you do? How do we get this started?' "
Maybe the better question, in communities everywhere, is: "Who can be our Danny Moon?"
East Side Elementary
Four years ago, Emily Baker was at wit's end. The principal at East Side Elementary in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was struggling to hire and retain enough teachers to just keep the doors open. Small wonder. The school's inner-city kids brought huge problems with them. Many came from unstable homes and it wasn't unusual for children to arrive at school hungry or in dirty clothes. At the same time, too many were woefully unprepared for the classroom. Kindergartners routinely didn't know the alphabet or how to count, and they had trouble catching up to grade level as they grew older. Not surprisingly, standardized test scores for the East Side students were among the worst in the state.The newest teachers, especially, felt overwhelmed. And that gave Baker her biggest problem: Every year, about 20 percent of her faculty either transferred or resigned. "We were pretty much labeled as a bad school with bad children," says Baker, now in her eighth year as East Side's principal.
Fast-forward to today. Teacher turnover at East Side is now down to five percent. And test scores are rising steadily. Last year, East Side students outgained the statewide average by about 30 percent on reading and math tests.
What triggered the turnaround? Go back to a day in 1999. Jesse Register, superintendent of Hamilton County schools, was staring at a new education report, and he was furious. Nine of his elementary schools in inner-city Chattanooga had been listed among the state's worst performers. Register immediately called a meeting of his top elementary school officials. "He was waving papers and ranting and raving," says Ray Swoffard, now an associate superintendent for the school district. Register was holding test data that showed a huge gap in performance between the county's urban and suburban schools. Swoffard remembers Register's exact words: "If I don't have the folks on board to close the gap, I'll get the folks."
His first step was to use federal funds already in hand, along with foundation grant money, to hire a consulting teacher and two assistant principals for each school. The former would train teachers in ways to instruct kids who often lacked discipline and self-control. The assistant principals, among other things, would monitor the classrooms, ensuring that teachers established control in the first critical weeks, and also quickly pre-empt student confrontations at the first signs of trouble.
Better Teachers
Another key reform was made possible when federal funds and money from the Community Education Alliance paid for bonuses for teachers and principals who demonstrated excellence, as gauged by student test scores and other assessments. For teachers whose average wage was just under $36,000, those bonuses were a powerful incentive.Beyond these changes, Register wanted to rid the nine failing schools of subpar teachers. But tenure made it extremely difficult to fire them. So he turned to a state law that allowed superintendents to reassign teachers.
Identify your worst teachers, he told the principals at the nine schools. Then Register made an appeal to the principals at the suburban schools: Would each of them be willing to take on just one of those subpar teachers? He was confident, he said, that the suburban schools wouldn't suffer. The principals agreed to his plan.
In the end, 55 lackluster teachers went off to the suburban schools, while East Side and the other inner-city schools got new instructors in exchange, and hired still others. As Register predicted, none of the suburban schools suffered from taking on an underperforming teacher. Those reassigned teachers either improved at their new schools or, after poor evaluations, faced ongoing scrutiny from district officials. Many inferior teachers wound up resigning.
Over at East Side, the reforms kept coming. From her first year as a third-grade teacher, in 1998, Amanda McKinney discovered that some of her kids couldn't read at all or read very poorly. The challenge was meeting their very different needs. With money from the Benwood Foundation, East Side paid for retired teachers to meet with small groups of students and give them up to 90 minutes of additional reading instruction each day. This tutelage goes on until students finally catch up to grade level.
The school's consulting teacher also suggested a way to improve reading skills: Ask the kids to relate what they read to experiences in their own lives. "Anytime they can make connections, they hold on to information much longer," says Baker. The method is called "text to self" comprehension, and now all of East Side's teachers get trained in it. For the results she's produced, McKinney is one of the teachers who've received bonuses of $5,000 per year over three years.
The bottom line for East Side? "The students are more excited now," says Emily Baker. "They come to school ready to learn." To her, the best evidence is a simple thing: "They love to hold a new book in their hands."