On the day Dante Hamilton came to Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary School on Milwaukee’s North Side, he was like most African-American children who enroll in urban school districts in the United States. He was already behind.
Never mind that he was barely 4 years old. White students across the country and in Milwaukee’s early kindergartens already had the upper hand.
The average black child starts kindergarten 21 points behind in math, according to the U.S. Department of Education. If the students are poor, the gap is even worse. The lowest socio-economic group begins school 60 points below the highest. And in Milwaukee, 48 percent of black children under age 5 live in poverty.
White kindergartners start with a lead. They better understand concepts needed for learning, such as “over” and “under,” “above” and “below,” and then sprint ahead.
But as Dante’s classmates sat ready to learn, he literally turned cartwheels on the carpet.
Had he been a typical poor black student in an average urban school, things would have gotten worse from there. By sixth grade, he might be like a lot of African-American boys in Milwaukee and drop out of school. Or maybe he’d wait until after eighth grade, when there’s another rush for the exits. When high school graduation rolled around, more than half of the boys like Dante would be gone.
Whether a child will graduate from high school is really determined years earlier. By examining test scores, absences and behavior at the end of third grade, it’s possible to predict which children will not graduate nine years later. That’s why our investigation focuses on elementary schools.
But much of the emphasis on closing the gap is on high schools. Milwaukee, for example, is spending $17 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create smaller and hopefully more effective high schools.
“The great American tragedy is the billions being spent on high school reform,” says former Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Spence Korte. It’s like “doing CPRon a dead man,” says the national education consultant, who left the district in 2002. Better, says Korte, to spend the money on children like Dante when they first start school.
Today, this black/white achievement gap – there is one between white and Hispanic kids as well, though it’s not as wide – remains the bedrock of discrimination in the United States. It keeps kids from ever becoming full players in society, from getting the education and jobs that will make them equals.
Nowhere is the gap wider than in Wisconsin. By fourth grade, the disparity between black and white students is the worst in the country in math. By eighth grade, the dubious distinction includes reading as well.
In 2003, 76 percent of Wisconsin’s black eighth-graders scored “below basic” in math and 60 percent in reading (for whites, it was 18 percent in math, 17 percent in reading).
“Wisconsin continues to have the biggest gap in the nation between black and white high school graduation rates,” says researcher Marcus A. Winters, co-author of the well-known Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s high school graduation study released in February.
According to the study, the graduation rate for black children in Wisconsin is 50 percent. The rate for white students is 91 percent. “That 41-point gap makes Wisconsin number one in the nation, followed by New York at 39 points,” says Winters.
The heart of the gap is in Milwaukee, where two-thirds of the state’s black students enroll in the country’s 29th largest school district, making up 60 percent of MPS’ 97,760 students.
So few MPSstudents graduate in four years that the district can’t calculate graduation rates the way the institute does, says Tim McElhatton, an MPSstatistician. How could it? “One in four MPSninth-graders is repeating ninth grade,” he says.
But even with the state and district’s more generous accounting, only 47 percent of MPS’ black males graduated in 2002-’03 (the most recent data available).
Fortunately for Dante, he had what the Chinese call the luck of time and place when his mother enrolled him at Hawthorne. Today, at age 10, he is a fourth-grader who reads at a sixth-grade level.
He no longer wears the special-education label once applied to him. And he’s aiming for higher things. He’s already made the honor roll and perfect-attendance roster.
There are a lot of success stories like Dante’s at Hawthorne.
Hawthorne’s poor black students – 92 percent of the student body is African American and 88 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches (a standard measure of poverty among school children) – frequently outperform the district’s white students on achievement tests.
But 16 blocks away at Thurston Woods Elementary School, the kids aren’t so lucky.
The schools have the same taxpayer support, identical union contracts, an equal percentage of poor kids and those in special education. But while Hawthorne’s kids regularly score higher than the district’s white students on achievement tests, Thurston’s students struggle to reach even the much lower average for the district’s African-American students.
Last year, 81 percent of Hawthorne’s black fourth-graders scored proficient or above in math and 79 percent proficient or above in reading, compared to 34 and 63 percent, respectively, at Thurston Woods.
Yet itwould be hard to find two schools more alike. That’s what provokes the question: How can two schools so similar be so different in achievement?
It is a touchy question for the school district and for underperforming schools like Thurston Woods.
Thurston Woods principal Willie Fuller chose not to give us access, citing “problems” she was having with some veteran teachers who, she said, “think they’re smarter than me and ready to take over.”
Yet Hawthorne’s school governance committee opened its doors. “I am proud of what our students and staff are accomplishing,” says principal Bettye Washington.
Experienced educators say you can tell a lot about a school merely by walking inside and spending a little time there. We visited Thurston Woods on four occasions and interviewed a total of seven present and former staffers. Then we talked to a half-dozen local educators familiar with the school.
The approach isn’t ideal, but it revealed some stunning differences that should alter the way we think about closing the gap. In the past, it’s been popular to blame teachers for the achievement gap, berate stingy taxpayers, irresponsible parents, even the kids.
But Hawthorne and Thurston show that closing the gap takes more than finger pointing.
The Gap
We’ve known about the black/white achievement gap since World War I. Today, more than ever, it is a problem with wide-ranging implications.
“It isn’t just an education issue anymore,” Elizabeth Burmeister, state superintendent of schools, told 1,300 attendees in January at a conference she organized on “Closing the Gap.” “It’s a moral and economic one.”
In fact, Wisconsin’s chief economic adviser, Terry Ludeman, says, “There is nothing more important” to the state’s future “than addressing the educational attainment levels of African-American males.”
Two things have created a new sense of urgency: the demographics behind the Social Security crisis and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
The first may seem unrelated, but as Willard Daggett, president of the International Center for Leadership in Education, told the “Closing the Gap” audience: “If you think there’s this God-given right that you’re going to get teacher’s retirement and social security, you are goddamn naïve. Three people are retiring for every new entrant into the workforce, and 53 percent of those people we baby boomers want to work to provide our retirement will be minorities who have had little success in the American educational system, and these people have to face global competition for jobs,” he said.
Until now, people have avoided focusing on the achievement gap, says Kaleem Caire, who commissioned the first Manhattan Institute achievement gap study in 2001 as president of the national Black Alliance for Educational Options. “It wasn’t just white politicians. A lot of black people were afraid of how people would use it… afraid they’d say black children are genetically inferior.”
Studies have shown that’s not the case. Poverty explains the majority of the pre-school gap, though things like low birth weights, single-parent homes, very young mothers, frequent moves, fewer books and lead paint exposure may all play a role.
The kids at Hawthorne and Thurston Woods know these things firsthand.Many have never seen their birth parents. Some parents are in jail, others addicted to alcohol or drugs. A lot of the kids are being raised by their grandparents, great-grandparents and other relatives. Some are in foster homes. Others have no homes and live in temporary shelters, says Hawthorne social worker Donna Simmons.
One Hawthorne student lived in an empty warehouse with a 2-year-old for five weeks until McDonald’s staff saw him scavenging for food in the dumpster.
“Most of these kids were not born alcohol or cocaine addicted. I came with that assumption, but it’s not true,” says Simmons. “A lot of these kids are raising themselves. The parents aren’t negligent; they’re working and trying to survive, for the most part.”
Long-term goals like an education seem remote and irrelevant, says Tyrone Dumas, vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Alliance of Black School Educators. How do we make it relevant and close the gap?
Until recently, education has been more art than science, says Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a pioneer in achievement gap research. “It’s where medicine was in 1899. We’re still doing the equivalent of leeches.… We’ve been slow to adopt best practices, but it’s starting to matter now whether you teach kids how to read.”
That’s because the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) now holds districts, schools and teachers accountable for seeing that all students make adequate yearly progress toward the goal of having every child – minority, special education and even non-English-speaking students – at grade level in math and reading by the 2013-’14 school year.
In Wisconsin, if there are 40 or more kids in any one of those groups in a school or district, the law applies, and a school that fails repeatedly to make progress winds up on the list of schools that need improvement.
If the school receives federal Title 1 money for poor students, as most Milwaukee schools do, the law requires parents to be notified and schools and districts to take costly corrective action. If after five years all of that fails, the school is shut down.
NCLB offers no carrots to reward success, and the real “stick” is the media labeling “schools in need of improvement” as “failures,” says Mike Thompson, federal policy adviser for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. “No one wants to be on the list of failing schools.”
In Wisconsin, 51 schools are currently on the failing list, including 43 in MPS. The law helped focus attention on the gap, and some cities, including Houston and Boston, have had amazing success.
“It all goes back to school leadership and a management style that brings people together to focus on the goal,” says Nancy Noeske, president of Milwaukee-based PROACTSearch Inc., which helps school boards across the country hire superintendents. “Closing the gap is not rocket science.”
Milwaukee made strides the first year after NCLB was passed, too. But while its fourth-grade gap narrowed, the math gap at eighth and 10th grades widened substantially. The reading gap in the upper grades remained unchanged.
We already know some of the ingredients needed to close the gap: high expectations, an emphasis on learning and the use of a rigorous curriculum focused on basic skills like reading and math. Controlling behavior and keeping kids on task and engaged in academics is another part of it. “It sounds like common sense, I know,” says Loveless of Brookings Institution.
It also takes parental involvement, frequent testing and help for kids having difficulty. When it comes to poor and minority kids, a teacher-student ratio of 1:15 or lower makes a big difference.
“Closing the Gap” speaker Daggett, who has studied successful schools in every state and 29 nations, says the secret is the “Four Rs”: rigor, relevance, relationships and reflective thought. The last consists of “guiding principals,” best taught in kindergarten – values like responsibility, initiative, perseverance and respect.
Beyond that, things get tricky. All of the above won’t necessarily turn a bad school into a good one, Loveless cautions, because “you have to have the teachers on board.”
And “you don’t get good results in a school without a serious partnership between the principal and the teachers. They won’t ‘own’ the kids and their achievement,” says Korte, a veteran of three decades in education.
So job number one is conveying a vision and winning the confidence of the school community.That’s where Hawthorne’s Bettye Washington began.
Hawthorne
In 1989, MPS assigned the then-39-year-old Bettye Washington to Hawthorne Elementary School at 6945 N. 41st St. The school’s previous principal had been on an extended sick leave, and rudderless, Hawthorne had drifted into a state of anarchy. Children swore and shouted angry invectives at teachers. “Parents were coming into class in the middle of the day cursing, accusing teachers of being incompetent, insensitive racists and threatening them,” Washington remembers.
The possibility of physical violence became so convincing that one teacher refused to come to work without a teachers’ union escort. “There were some serious safety issues,” recalls Washington, who approached the parents first. She formed a “school climate committee” and got parents involved. Then she separated her staff into two groups, those who loved teaching and those for whom it was merely a job. She counseled the latter to leave the profession.
Washington nurtured the others, matching their skills to jobs that suited them best, she says. She set three priorities: “Focus on instruction. Make the climate amenable to success. Make parents feel welcome.” Hawthorne’s transformation had begun.
Today, the school has a warm, open, caring environment. It isn’t just the big sign outside welcoming parents and visitors or the cheerful greetings once you’re inside. Teacher turnover is rare, and kids often cry when they graduate. “This is one of the most bonded, collegial schools I’ve ever seen,” says Sandra Martin, a veteran educator who coaches schools on classroom discipline for MPS.
“You have to have a real solid relationship with people if you’re going to handle tough problems together,” says Washington. As a new principal, she’d go into her office, shut the door and do her work. “I didn’t realize how important it is for the staff to get to know each other and have fun together.”
She’s refined her management style since then. Celebrations are almost a regular part of the curriculum now, as are team-building activities ranging from a staff outing at a trust-building ropes course to the Friday potluck get-together.
Like Lee Iacocca at Chrysler in the 1980s, Washington keeps Hawthorne in a continuous state of improvement, and nowadays she is seldom in her office during the school day. She’s down the hall talking to teachers, huddling with individual kids, dispensing hugs or planning strategies like “double dosing” all of the kindergartners with a second daily reading lesson so that by the time they get to first grade, they’ll be a year ahead.
“This is not a place where you come in and close your door,” she tells new teachers. “We work together here.”
She has also cultivated at least a half-dozen emerging leaders in the school who help carry her vision forward.
“Student peacemakers” and “hard workers” are heralded on the bulletin board outside of her office, alongside the honor roll and those with perfect attendance.
It doesn’t take newcomers long to realize there’s something special about Hawthorne. “I felt like hugging people at the end of my first week,” says special-education teacher Kim Anderson, who moved from Chicago in 2003. “This is the first job I ever had where I love getting up in the morning.”
“I think our kids know we truly love them,” adds kindergarten instructor Laura Sockett, Dante Hamilton’s first teacher at Hawthorne. But love isn’t enough, says Washington. “It’s setting a child in the right direction so they can have a decent future.” And there, Hawthorne has one clear vision: Every child will learn, and it is everyone’s job to find a way to teach them.
Teachers and assistants are expected to hone their craft, and Washington provides a steady stream of coaching and advice from experts. Each teacher is also assigned a buddy, and if any of a teacher’s students are struggling, it’s the grade-level committee of their peers and the school learning team’s responsibility to step in and help.
With literacy coach Carolyn Wesley (twin daughter of TVweatherman Paul Joseph) and math specialist Annette Perry, Washington studies the tests students take after every five lessons to identify any child who hasn’t mastered 80 percent of the material, then gets them help.
Speedy intervention is crucial. If a child falls behind and has to repeat a grade, their chances of graduating from high school drop dramatically. Being held back once increases the dropout risk 40 to 50 percent; a second time increases it 90 percent.
Hawthorne’s efforts are paying off. Last year, 93 percent of the school’s African-American fifth-graders scored at or above proficiency in math – 48 percentage points higher than the district average for African-American students and 16 points higher than the average for white students.
Hawthorne’s black fourth-graders scored at 80 percent proficiency or better in every subject area, beating the district average for black students by as much as 36 percentage points. Ninety-eight percent of the school’s black third-graders scored proficient in reading.
“I don’t want you to think we’re perfect. We’re not,” says Washington, fretting that some fifth-graders are struggling with math.
Since the early 1980s, people have been thinking up new things for schools to teach. Hawthorne’s students once made items to sell as part of the school-to-work program. But Hawthorne jettisoned the frills to focus on the basics, especially reading.
Says former Superintendent Korte: “The more we learn about why kids drop out, the more it gets back to they couldn’t read.”
Washington believed it was important to teach all kids to read, and she became one of the first principals to mainstream special-education students. Feeling they’d been “truly isolated and segregated,” she told staffers that if they didn’t like it, they could leave. She brought in experts to ease the transition and to explain how inclusion would work to students, staff and parents – with extra teachers’ aides and roving special-ed teachers.
“We didn’t have people say it’s not my job,” she says.
Washington wasn’t thinking only of the kids. Most special-education teachers don’t last more than five years. They burn out “because they don’t get the support they need,” she says. With inclusion, they did.
Still, in the mid-’90s, many of Hawthorne’s mainly poor and black students had not overcome their initial disadvantage.
At the end of first grade, Dante’s speech problem had improved, but his reading was still a year behind. Most schools would have held him back a year. Instead, Hawthorne’s literacy staff, his teacher and his mother arranged for extra coaching. Between first and second grade, Dante blossomed.
But a disturbing 30 percent of the school’s first-graders were below grade level when they were promoted to second grade. Washington heard about a program that had kids reading before they left kindergarten. Her teachers were interested, but she didn’t have money to implement it school-wide. So she focused on kindergarten.
The district wasn’t wild about starting academics so early, but Washington did an end run and convinced the School Board to expand Hawthorne’s kindergarten to a full day and include the new program.
In fall 1998, Hawthorne began its first experiment with a controversial teaching tool known as Direct Instruction. More than 25 years of research show that DIworks, especially with disadvantaged children. It is one of only two reading programs that can make that claim, yet it remains controversial.
At the state’s “Closing the Gap” conference, it was possible to hear DIdescribed as both the best thing since the McGuffy Reader and a dangerous cult (the enthusiasm of true believers who’ve seen its results can be off-putting).
DIprovides teachers with detailed scripted lesson plans heavy on drilling and repetition that emphasize phonics. “All students, if properly taught, will learn” is its mantra.
For more than 20 years, colleges de-emphasized phonics in favor of softer, fuzzier, “more interesting” whole language; teachers educated during the period complain that DIstifles creativity because it’s scripted.
But the curriculum doesn’t stop at phonics. Last winter, some Hawthorne fifth-graders analyzed which of several weight loss techniques worked best and converted meters, grams and liters to kilometers, centigrams and milliliters. Others reviewed vocabulary words: crestfallen, indifferent and ghastly, then underlined adverbs and circled verbs. Second-graders wrote directions for how to play basketball, while 8-year-olds graphed the size of city parks to find the largest.
“DI is far more complex than it looks, and teachers must know why they do things one way instead of another,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison special-education professor Sara Tarver, who edits a DInewsletter. “There are important strategies and behavior management techniques to learn.”
Hawthorne discovered that the hard way. A year after implementing DI, only 40 percent of students tested proficient in reading. “If you don’t have coaching, if the teachers don’t buy in and it’s not reinforced by getting the test data to the teachers, it’s not going to work,” says literacy coach Wesley.
Hawthorne won a grant from the state and hired a DIcoach. Soon, teacher Laura Sockett was telling her peers how much her kindergartners “just loved getting smart.”
Hasaan Love, a kindergartner with a severe language delay, became a DIposter child. He barely spoke 10 words, and all of the teachers were stymied. Was he autistic? But Hasaan took to the DIdrills. He brought vocabulary words home to practice. “Now, he won’t shut up,” says his grandmother, Bridget Rainey, who is such a Hawthorne fan that she became a full-time volunteer.
On the strength of stories like Hasaan’s, Hawthorne implemented DIthroughout the K-5 school.
A well-executed DI curriculum cuts down on special-education referrals, transforms rowdy classrooms into models of decorum and allows students and teachers to spend more time on academics. We witnessed that on repeated visits to Lila Lyles’ third-grade classroom. As she reviewed multiplication tables, her students sat attentively. And though she never raised her voice, she commanded the room. Students repeated the multiplication drills out loud, quickly and enthusiastically. No one acted up.
Walking around the room, Lyles called one child “sweetheart” and gave hugs to several others. Her class of 17 includes five emotionally and behaviorally disturbed boys and another who is cognitively disabled, but it was impossible to pick them out.
Every morning, Hawthorne’s teachers teach DIreading at the same time, making it easier to group kids by ability since they can move down a level to catch something they’ve missed or ahead when they are ready. There are eight different ability groups in first grade alone.
Having reading classes spread throughout the day would make it easier for a DI coach to work with more teachers, but Hawthorne isn’t about making school more convenient for adults. It’s about making it work better for kids.
“If there is something we need to help our kids succeed, Ms. Washington will find a way to get it for us,” says veteran third-grade teacher Ruby Sanders. With aid from the school governance committee, Washington hired a teacher’s aide to help an overwhelmed kindergarten teacher with a class of 35 4-year-olds.
But such interventions are difficult financially. Ninety-five percent of the money spent per student in the district is now allocated to the school, but after Washington totals the portion that goes to pay teachers’ salaries (average pay in the district is $50,000, plus the cost of benefits – 63 percent of salary or an average of $36,500), there won’t be much left, says Washington.
She talks of “the glory days” when Hawthorne had both an assistant principal, an implementer to plan activities and a half-time guidance counselor. All three are gone, and she doesn’t know how long she can keep the school’s specialists who teach computer lab, art, music and physical education.
Despite the difficulties, Hawthorne hasn’t stopped improving student achievement. That’s because some of its staff are remarkable job jugglers. Educational assistant Sonya Bullock, the only staffer remaining from the “old” Hawthorne, runs the library, helps with the before- and after-school programs and oversees parent-teacher events.
Hawthorne doesn’t stop there in elevating student achievement. It uses every trick in the book:
• Four years ago, the school began encouraging voluntary school uniforms, white shirts and blue pants, which “cut down on behavior problems, put-downs and teasing,” says Sanders.
• Hawthorne’s Brothers of Unity, a group of six male teachers, mentors 24 male students. On Thursdays, they wear the school uniform and red ties and eat together in the cafeteria. Sisters of Destiny counts 15 mentors and 30 female students. Membership is by invitation and made to older kids who need a little extra guidance. Parents must approve. Meeting topics include things like “how to avoid bad influences,” says teacher-mentor Kelly James.
• Camp Hawthorne offers before- and after-school care from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. “We have a lot of these kids for more of the day than their families do,” says camp co-coordinator Nadine Duke.
• In 2001, Hawthorne adopted a year-round calendar. The staff and students meet 180 school days, as do other MPSschools, but it’s spread throughout the year so kids forget less. Two-week intersessions include math and reading drills, storytellers and field trips. The fee is just $5.
Hawthorne has come a long way, says Debra Hamilton, Dante’s mother, who now chairs the school governance committee. Parents never complain that their children aren’t respected now, she says. “The staff teaches everyone that you need to show respect to get respect.”
Thurston Woods
Like Hawthorne, Thurston Woods School is located on the city’s North Side, at 5966 N. 35th St., in an area of small, single-family homes. Ninety-four percent of its students are African American and 88 percent received free or reduced-cost lunches.
Each school is headed by a female African American who’s worked for the district for more than 25 years. Each has been principal at her school for at least nine years. Both use the DIcurriculum.
Yet last year, Thurston’s black third-graders scored below the district average for African-American students in math and 34 points below the white student average. Its black fifth-graders fared no better. They remained below the district average for African-American students and below its white students in math and reading by 39 and 25 percentage points, respectively.
What explains the difference?
Experienced educators say you can tell a lot by the friendliness, the way you are welcomed at a school. Thurston Woods was not a welcoming place.
“Almost every school that’s in trouble reveals itself, even before you start looking at test scores,” says Korte. “If the principal is hiding in her office instead of being visible and larger than life, you know. If the teachers are hiding in their classrooms with the doors closed, you know,” he says. “If the principal doesn’t value and support the teachers, the magic doesn’t happen.”
Korte’s description was so insightful that it was as if he knew the school. He does. Thurston has been “a known disaster area” to district officials for years, he says.
The year after Korte left the district, Thurston’s faculty gave principal Willie Fuller the equivalent of a no-confidence vote. It was 2003 and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association had hired the Public Policy Forum to oversee a survey that asked MPSteachers about their principals.
Thurston’s faculty was over six times more likely than the average elementary school staff to say “the principal makes decisions with little or no input from staff.”
The seven present and former staffers interviewed referred to Fuller either as a “dictator” or “drill sergeant” who rarely leaves her office and who rules by intimidation.
But Fuller says, “I want to make sure teachers are teaching and children are learning. If that’s called ‘ruling with an iron fist,’ I’m guilty.”
When we asked staff what was the most important thing at the school, they didn’t say “learning,” as Hawthorne’s teachers had. Invariably, they said, “This is Ms. Fuller’s school; nothing happens without her permission.” And “if something’s not [her] idea or one of her ‘favorites,’ it’s a bad idea.”
Jesse Brown, who teaches a combined sixth- and seventh-grade class there, recounted how a group of black male teachers wanted to form a mentoring group to teach “manners, respect, personal hygiene and etiquette” to “some of the African-American kids we know that don’t have dads in their lives and hardly see their mothers. Kids who are angry all the time,” he says. Because it wasn’t the principal or her supporters’ idea, “it got shoved out,” says Brown, who is leaving to start a charter school.
In fact, the seven Thurston staffers to whom we spoke believe that industry and initiative are actually punished at Thurston.
Several teachers told us about an incident involving the school’s physical education teacher. A veteran teacher relatively new to the school, she had taken it upon herself to include special-education students in a regular physical education class. The district’s own guidelines recommend exactly that, but when Fuller found out, she dressed down the teacher in front of the kids and her colleagues. With the teacher close to tears, Fuller uttered one of her infamous lines, say staffers: “Do you get that?”
“She talked to the teacher like she was her child,” says Jade Cottrell, a special-education teacher now working at another MPSschool. “It was just heartless.”
Several months after assistant teacher Francesca Gabriel came to the school last fall, she joined the “Sunshine Club” and began organizing a staff Christmas party. “Everyone was so happy because they never had one before Christmas,” she says. “People told me, ‘Good luck,’ but nearly everyone signed up.” When Fuller found out, Gabriel says, “She was furious. She said, ‘Don’t do anything around here without my permission.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m new.’ But I asked her, ‘Will you come?’ And she said, ‘No. I don’t have time.’ ” It was a long way from Hawthorne’s team-building celebrations.
“To survive at Thurston, you have to go into your room, shut the door and never talk to anyone,” says Brown. After her encounter, the physical education teacher did just that.
“No one felt their opinions were received, much less respected,” adds Cottrell. “Being at a different school now, I see why Thurston Woods’ teachers had no motivation.”
Some, however, were motivated to leave. A perennial problem in closing the gap is the inability to keep experienced teachers. “We don’t have a shortage of good teachers – it’s a turnover problem. And it’s not money that’s the big thing,” says Christine Anderson, who, as executive director of the Milwaukee Partnership Academy, has helped MPSimplement learning targets, literacy coaches, school learning teams and other crucial changes.
“If teachers don’t feel they are being supported or that their voice is being heard, they leave,” says Anderson.
Last fall, a study by the Center for American Progress identified four top reasons teachers leave urban education. Leading the list were the Thurston teachers’ complaints: inadequate support from school administration and limited faculty input into school decision-making. The others were student discipline problems and too many intrusions on classroom teaching time.
MPSdoesn’t track turnover by school, but Thurston’s teachers average 5.7 years in the district compared to 8.3 years at Hawthorne, a number closer to the district average.
“Good Thurston teachers have been leaving for years, and the kids suffer,” says Gabriel. “Black males, the ones these kids need the most for role models… those are the ones she drives out.… So you’re left with the burnt-out people who dance to her tune or new people who don’t know anything.”
Researchers who study school culture look for stories that help explain how things work in an organization. Six of the seven teachers we talked to recounted the following:
The staff was meeting for a presentation on the importance of a positive school culture. At the end, the outside expert prodded Thurston’s teachers, asking why they didn’t have any questions or comments.
Finally, a young first-grade teacher blurted out, “Maybe it’s because people feel that if they speak up, action will be taken against them,” recalls Cottrell.
“Ms. Fuller just went after her,” he says. “But the teacher said, ‘This is exactly what I mean.’ And Ms. Fuller said, ‘We’re not going to talk about this now,’ and she left.”
Fuller claimed only a vague recollection of the incident and none involving the phy ed teacher. She said that when she has to “talk to” staff, she always pulls them aside.
In the Public Policy Forum’s study, Thurston’s faculty gave Fuller “Ds” on motivating staff, positively influencing morale and meaningfully engaging both staff and parents in the school. A spaghetti dinner that drew 200 parents to Hawthorne attracted just 80 at Thurston.
But it wasn’t just Fuller’s autocratic style; she scored below the district average for elementary principals on every measure.
Fuller says she was “shocked” by the results. “I thought I was doing all of those things. But… being a principal… I’m not just going to do things people like.”
“Every school district in America has one-third of the staff that says ‘over my dead body’ you’ll do anything that messes up my nicely laminated 1970s lesson plan,” says Daggett. Resistance to change is part of the turf. But “you’ve got to convince them they need to change because if you try to mandate change, they will eat you up,” he says.
It’s hard to say whether it was animosity toward the principal, insufficient training or resistance to change, but some Thurston teachers did not really “buy into” DI.
Clearly, the two schools’ learning teams functioned differently. While Hawthorne spends its time digesting data, sharing it with teachers and devising strategies, Thurston scheduled lunch and recess duties, according to the teachers. Even then, they only had an inkling of what the team did. “They write up two sentences about what they talked about; the rest is private,” says one teacher.
“I heard a rumor that my kids didn’t do very well on a test last December. We asked to see the data – again and again. But we could never get it,” says the teacher.
For DIto work well, data must guide classroom teaching, identifying which lessons need to be repeated and spotting kids who need help.
Both Fuller and MPS DIspecialist Doris Bisek insist that all Thurston teachers have access to testing information. In fact, Bisek says, Thurston is “off to a better start implementing DI” than Hawthorne was at the same point, and she attributes the entire difference in achievement to the fact that Hawthorne has been using DIfor six years, while Thurston has used it for four.
But UW’s Tarver, the state’s DIguru, says a positive school culture is essential. “The appropriate teacher support and the right classroom technique aren’t going to happen if your teachers and principal are pulling against each other.”
Regardless of which curriculum a school uses, “you don’t get good results without a serious partnership between the principal and teachers. They won’t own the kids and their achievement,” says Korte.
Actions speak louder than words, but what gets posted on the bulletin board in a school’s entry also says a lot about what’s valued. At Thurston Woods, there is sheet after sheet containing the names of students with good attendance, but no honor roll is posted.
Thurston’s vision statement is also prominently displayed. It reads: “Academic excellence will be achieved through the development of high self-esteem and respect in a positive environment.”
If it sounds like a throwback to the now discredited self-esteem movement, it is, and it is the opposite of what happens at Hawthorne. There, self-esteem and respect come from academic achievement.
Ironically, for all of the importance given the word respect – and it is a big deal among poor black parents that their children be respected – a significant number of Thurston teachers, and its principal, don’t feel respected or willing to give respect to the other.
Teachers describe an environment of such intrigue and vindictiveness that you wonder whether some of it is paranoia. But there was remarkable consistency.
Every teacher interviewed referred to the principal’s “favorites,” saying, “They run the school,” including the learning team and even the copy machine. Teachers must request copies 48 hours in advance; if they fail to order enough, some students won’t get handouts.
The woman behind the edict, Willie Fuller, looks like a corporate executive in her white blouse and black pinstriped suit, until you see her white ankle socks and gym shoes. Unlike Bettye Washington, she’s also a full-time disciplinarian, with students waiting outside her office.
Last winter, that included a small-framed black boy about Dante Hamilton’s age who had pulled the chair out from under his teacher as she was sitting down, causing her to fall. The boy blamed the incident on a foot malfunction, but several teachers say he now lives in a foster home because his grandmother couldn’t handle him. They described him as a hard-core behavior problem who has been “retained at least twice.”
At Hawthorne, that would have set off the alarm bells and rallied a team to intervene, but not at Thurston. In fact, at Fuller’s insistence, Thurston maintains a largely segregated special-education classroom of 13 cognitively disabled and emotionally disturbed male students.
Teachers have protested that the class is unmanageable (it’s twice the size the state recommends given the severity of the behavior problems, says one). They’ve complained, too, that it’s not fair to the kids, that there’s no time for planning because at least some kids are always there. The oldest students verbally abuse the youngest, set a bad example, and it’s hard for anyone to learn.
Thurston, unlike Hawthorne, does have an assistant principal and an implementer, but they do not relieve this class’s teacher.
In 2003, when two teachers got the district special-education director to okay splitting the class by age, Fuller nixed the plan. “She said it was too late in the school year,” says Cottrell, one of the teachers involved. It was only October, but “she said, ‘No, let’s wait until next year.’ ”
By then, she’d gotten rid of Cottrell, telling him another teacher with more seniority wanted his spot. It wasn’t true – she’d posted the job.
Another special-education teacher came and went, and now the class is taught by a full-time substitute teacher without a special-education license, other staffers say.
The last licensed special-ed teacher took the class to last fall’s all-school orientation, but Fuller had the students sent back to their room. “It just represented the attitude at that school. They wanted nothing to do with those kids.… You don’t want to make them feel they’re not a part of the school,” says Nancy Verhunce, a special-ed teacher who left Thurston after two months.
“Room 207 became a dumping ground for anyone in special ed, instead of looking at what was best for the child,” she says.
Verhunce had come from a school where she had “the total support of the principal and staff,” and she has that now at another school. “But that wasn’t true at Thurston Woods,” she says.
Had Dante and Hasaan been enrolled at Thurston Woods, this might have been their destiny.
Mixed Messages
“We’ve really worked hard on putting an emphasis on closing the achievement gap,” says MPS District Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, who claimed to have never before heard that Thurston Woods was “a problem school.”
After nearly three years at the helm, he’s instituting a standards-based evaluation of principals. Five years ago, an internal study identified principal quality, or lack of it, as the district’s number-one problem.
Now, bad principals will be reassigned and given intense coaching. Those who fail to improve will be counseled out of the profession, says Sue Apps, MPS director of Leadership Support.
Last fall, at a meeting of his school principals, Andrekopoulos read the names of the district’s “high achievement, high added value” schools. He had their principals stand, and everyone applauded.
A second list circulated containing the names of 14 schools that had “closed the black/white achievement gap,” and it appeared as part of a $2.5 million grant request the district sent to the National Education Association in hopes of getting funding to close the gap.
MPS does not have a history of celebrating excellence in its midst. For a long time, a culture of mediocrity prevented praising the exemplary for fear it might make the inferior feel bad. So the appearance of the lists and the congratulatory moment looked like an encouraging change.
But the district sent a mixed message. There were schools like Hawthorne that didn’t make the first list. Nor could they make the second, the “closing the gap” list, because a school had to have at least 10 percent white kids so that comparisons between the white and black kids could be made. It’s just as valid to compare a school’s black student achievement to the district’s white student average to see who’s closing the gap, as we did, but that wasn’t done.
The district’s second list may have looked like institutionalized discrimination against MPS’ 55 predominantly African-American elementary schools, but Deb Lindsey, director of MPS’Division of Research and Assessment, says it was all “a terrible mistake.”
“The original list was never meant to be used the way it was,” she says. “It was really just an internal document” two district employees put together to study schools closing the gap and identify best practices. “The 10 percent requirement was just a number they came up with,” says Lindsey.
Principal Bettye Washington watched quietly while her own efforts went unapplauded. It may be no accident that Washington feels “more isolated” and less supported by the district than ever before.
In fact, she’s preparing to call it quits and retire this year or next. “When I walk out of here, I want it so set up… everything will just keep going,” she says. “The success of Hawthorne School isn’t about me, it’s about strong veteran teachers, a stable staff of people who really want their school to succeed. It’s about people who aren’t afraid to take ownership of their children.”
Meanwhile, the district is preparing to send even more students and teachers Ms. Fuller’s way. It has spent $2.5 million on a new addition, and next year, Thurston will expand to grade eight.
That decision had “absolutely nothing to do with academic achievement,” says MPS Neighborhood School Director Acquine Jackson. It was to accommodate excess students in neighboring areas.
But a district needs a positive culture just like a school does. It needs to be open and discuss its problems with candor, then build a team to tackle them. It needs to encourage and reward good work and penalize poor performance.
What does it say about the district’s culture that a school’s performance wasn’t even considered before sending more students and teachers to it? Andrekopoulos says it doesn’t matter because “our goal is to improve the performance of all schools.”
In the 1980s, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca had a revolutionary idea that he could turn around a failing business by changing its culture. He hoped a more collaborative workplace would tap into the expertise not of his high-paid executives but of assembly line workers to produce cars that could compete with Japanese imports.
And indeed, Iacocca transformed not just a company but an entire industry, and it spilled over to all of American business. “We’re at exactly the same juncture today in education,” says MPS’ Apps.
But unlike a business, where the profit motive provides urgency for implementing best practices, the staff at a failing MPSschool will be paid the same as one that succeeds. In fact, Willie Fuller’s pay is about to go up because she’ll be running a larger school.m
Senior Editor Mary Van de Kamp Nohl is a Journalism Fellow in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland, a program funded by the Foundation for Child Development, which provided research support for this article. Julie Waldren is a former Milwaukee Magazine intern.
