From Building Civic Pride
In the push to improve education, test scores get most of the attention. That, many educators say, obscures other ways in which children can be inspired to learn. Here is a report card on the innovative methods three schools use to ensure students make the grade.The school. Fairview Elementary School sits smack in the gang-infested south side of Modesto, California, where the spicy scent of taquerias mixes with a slaughterhouse's stench.
Fairview, with some 1,000 students from kindergarten through sixth grade (about 80 percent of them Latino), has long suffered from discipline problems, poor test scores, and a near total lack of parental involvement. The difficulties aren't surprising given that many of the parents -- immigrants who work on farms or in factories -- speak little or no English.
The strategy. Since 2002, Fairview Elementary School has been a First Amendment School, one of 97 developed across the country by the nonpartisan First Amendment Center. The idea behind the five-year-old program: To keep America strong, children must be trained to respect many points of view, weigh complex issues, and understand the five freedoms (speech, religion, press, assembly, petition) guaranteed by the Constitution's First Amendment. As students learn good citizenship, the theory goes, they'll develop the skills and attitude to excel academically.
The program has no set curriculum; participating schools commit to adding hands-on lessons in civics and community building to their usual academic fare. The only money involved: modest grants -- $12,000 a year in Fairview's case. Teachers participate in conferences to learn how to incorporate debate and critical thinking into their normal class routine.
Fairview students enjoy democratic "freedoms" other kids might envy (they voted to banish school uniforms, for example). But the children don't just exercise rights. They also accept such responsibilities as speaking up during class discussions, and keeping the school clean and safe (Fairview is rated the cleanest of 33 schools in its district). In one departure from tradition, there's no hand-raising in class. "Instead," says teacher Deborah Supnet, "we teach them to listen for when the other child stops talking." Call it an exercise in respect.
Signs of success. Last year, the number of students deemed proficient or advanced in math doubled, from 15 to 30 percent. Suspension rates dropped 50 percent. And Fairview graduates in their first middle-school trimester averaged B grades; 96 percent passed all subjects. Particularly encouraging to principal Rob Williams, the school now has an active parents' group, Padres con Voz (Parents With a Voice). One of those parents, Laura Malagon, credits the program for convincing her to play a more active role in her children's school life. First Amendment seminars, she says, "opened my brain like a cork from a bottle."
Connecting the Dots
The school. D. R. Gaul Middle School is in Union, Maine, a blueberry-farming town where the summer fair finds kids competing in pig scrambles and pie-eating contests.
Gaul, with about 170 seventh- and eighth-graders, has its own history of sub-par academic achievement. One likely reason: Education beyond the basics hasn't always been a top priority for families who've worked the same land for generations. Here, few adults have college degrees, and outsiders (teachers included) are often kept at a respectful distance.
The strategy. Since 2000, Gaul's students have been divided into four classes, each of them taught almost every subject by two teachers. The goal: To find common threads across disciplines to help students create a big picture that gives fresh meaning and context to their classwork -- and sparks excitement for learning.
Working within state guidelines, each team crafts its own schedules and lesson plans, incorporating non-textbook literature, hands-on lab work and field trips. If students are covering the Civil War in social studies, they're reading The Red Badge of Courage or some other period literature in English class. In science, they study the viruses and bacteria that accounted for many of the war dead.
Team teaching isn't unusual. About 77 percent of middle schools now employ some form of it, says John Lounsbury, consulting editor for the National Middle School Association. But most schools use four- or five-person teams, which Gaul tried before deeming two-person teams more effective. Gaul bolsters the team concept by "looping" classes so that the same two teachers stick with the same teens through seventh and eighth grades. Combining teams and looping creates an extremely strong bond between teacher and student. It also, says teacher Beth Ahlholm, "allows us to build a fabulous relationship with parents."
Signs of success. Ahlholm and teammate Madelon Kelly tend to gauge success by how many glazed looks they see in the classroom, but they know 72 percent of their eighth-graders met Maine's reading standard last year -- double the statewide average. Only 31 percent met the math standard, still better than the state average (21 percent). Their students also beat the state average in writing and science. And in 2004, Gaul was one of 47 schools in the state to see testing gains of at least 20 percent in four of the previous five years, coinciding roughly with team teaching's arrival.
Beat the Clock
The school. Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, draws its 360 students from a 270-square-mile rural swath of the state's southeast corner.In the early 1990s, teachers and students were demoralized. The culprit, says social studies teacher Deborah Burk, was the slavish adherence to the 19th-century concept of dividing the day into 42-minute periods (still common in many schools across the country), with each period counted as a credit toward graduation. Back then, Burk says, students focused more on the clock than on what she was saying. They weren't entirely to blame. The system, she felt, didn't let her do much beyond repeating the same lectures over and over: There wasn't time to challenge students to delve into details. "You couldn't analyze their progress -- or even think about it."
The strategy. In 1992, Dr. George H. Wood, an Ohio University education professor who'd never run a high school, was named principal. He grilled students for their ideas, organized visits to programs around the country, and met intensively with staff. The result: The clock went out the window. With some arm-twisting of superintendents and state lawmakers, Federal Hocking moved from the cumbersome credit system to a less-is-more schedule tied to four 80-minute classes. "We decided," Wood says, "to teach fewer things better." In American history, for example, the emphasis shifted from devoting equal time to every era to focusing on big events.
The school developed its own credit system based on core studies but added other requirements -- a senior portfolio, and a yearlong project created by the students that's not always linked directly to their coursework. Project topics range from writing a world-foods cookbook to the restoration of an antique tractor. Graduation based solely on racking up a set number of credits was no longer possible.
Other changes followed. The seven-minute daily homeroom period -- basically an attendance call -- was replaced by an hour-long advisory meeting every Wednesday morning. Each teacher advises the same 14 or 15 kids through high school. Wood, meanwhile, never lowered his strict academic standards. "Everybody here reads Shakespeare, Emerson and Thoreau," he says, "even kids who are going to be mechanics."
Teacher Tim Arnold says the schedule changes had an effect similar to the flipping of a switch: "Everything decompressed. Instead of looking at the clock, we could look at the students. On the first day we all went 'Wow! That was cool.'"
Signs of success. Between the 1995-96 and 2003-04 school years, the percentage of the school's ninth-graders that passed Ohio's math proficiency test rose from 50 percent to 85 percent. Passing grades in reading shot from 69 percent to 96 percent. And honors diplomas jumped from 8 percent to 20 percent. "We don't focus on test scores," Wood says, "but it's clear that if you pay attention to the overall culture of the school, the test scores will rise."