Saving schools

Making education work can require radical steps. Here are five suggestions.

by Yvonne Abraham

These are hopeful times for Boston's 64,000 public-school students, who have been shortchanged on their educations for so long. Thomas Payzant has been superintendent for almost three years now, and with the mayor's continued commitment to his cause, some of his initiatives are starting to stick.

This year, scores on standardized tests made slight improvements across the system over last year's results. Uniform curricula have been established in all the major subjects. An ambitious new promotion policy promises to put an end to the tradition of passing students up through the grades without regard to their competence; this alone, if successful, will transform the schools. Private partnerships, and grants from foundations, have poured money and expertise into the system. And greater accountability, especially for principals, has become a ubiquitous catch phrase.

But the state of Boston's schools, particularly the high schools, is still dismal. When results from the first statewide tests are released after the election, our students will almost certainly emerge as victims of years of neglect, shortsighted policies, and political bickering, many of them demonstrating little or no mastery of even basic age-appropriate skills and knowledge.

In 2003, the students who are now in seventh grade will have to pass a statewide exam to qualify for their high-school diplomas. To make it, they're going to need much more than they're getting now. Big things have to change. Some of these changes would require plenty of money as well as huge shifts in thinking -- on the parts of the unions and administrators, for example. Some, though, are simpler and less expensive.

The Phoenix talked to people in and around the classrooms -- teachers, principals, members of watchdog groups, and those who support the schools -- to propose radical ways to change public education in Boston.

Here are five. There are many more.

1. Send administrators into schools

In 1995, Seattle made an unusual choice for its superintendent: rather than mine the ranks of professional educators and experienced schools chiefs, they went with John Henry Stanford, a retired army general who was once in charge of moving American forces into the Persian Gulf. Three years later, Stanford has been hailed as the savior of the city's schools.

Stanford made an interesting announcement soon after he took up his job: for one day each week, he said, all school-system administrators would work in the schools.

One of educators' most consistent complaints about Boston's public schools is that the edicts issued from the administrative offices at 26 Court Street betray little consciousness of what it's actually like to be in a school these days. Pilot schools, for example, are supposed to be free of normal union and administrative constraints, allowing them to work on innovations that can be carried into the rest of the system. In fact, they're bound up by red tape as much as the other schools, and teachers say the bureaucracy gets in the way of educating kids.

One way to bridge the gap between administrators and the schools they serve is to bring them together physically.

"Strip the administrative office out of there," says Loretta Roach, head of the Citywide Educational Coalition, a grassroots organization of parents and teachers. "I don't think anybody should be able to sit in an office for 20 years, or even one year. Every one of them should be told, `You have to visit schools.' It would bring parity between those people who are policymakers downtown and those that have to implement the policies."

At the very least, administrators should do regular tours of duty in schools. A more extreme solution would be to relocate entire administrative departments into the schools. What we're proposing here is a shift of Copernican proportions: the machinery of education would be made to revolve around the schools themselves, rather than the schools revolving around Court Street. Sure, different parts of the administration would have to work harder to connect with each other. But it would be worth it, especially if the superintendent's oft-repeated aim of devolving power onto the schools themselves is to have any credibility.

2. First things first

Schools are a great deal more fun now than they used to be. Gone is the Mr. Chips era of rote learning and pop quizzes. Now schools take a far freer, more interdisciplinary approach. Kids can learn about ancient Greece in history, English, and science classes, for example. And they can show what they've learned in many ways, visually and verbally, through writing and performance. Modern educational practice has focused on skills and process as well as content. That is as it should be.

But in the push to make education more fun for children, something has been lost: a clear, shared focus and, according to some critics, content. Inventive types of learning may appeal to students at all achievement levels, but some students need serious help with the fundamentals.

The back-to-basics philosophy is almost a cliché, but that doesn't mean it gets put into practice. For years, kids have been promoted through the early grades without being very good at reading and writing, and that has hamstrung them for the rest of their educations.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Education's Commission on Time and Learning found in 1994 that students spend less than half of their classroom time on academics. This doesn't hurt kids who'll get the basics anyway -- kids whose parents can reinforce their lessons, or who are pushed to read and write at home. But an alarmingly large proportion of students, many of them from black and Hispanic families, cannot count on that reinforcement. They simply don't have the cultural and intellectual capital with which other students walk into school. Education theorist E.D. Hirsch calls this disparity the new civil rights frontier.

Sure, focusing on the basics -- and testing students on them before they're promoted -- gives teachers and students less freedom. But, as one principal says, "no surprises, no excuses." It's much easier to push the advanced students to more-challenging work than it is to make up the ground disadvantaged students have lost through years of benign neglect. Both groups of children deserve a break. And sticking to the basics doesn't necessarily mean kids will be bored: teachers can be as adventurous as they wish in how they teach those skills.

Schools must make sure, says state board of education chairman John Silber, "that by the time children get to the third grade, they will be reading at grade level. That will do more to reduce the dropout rate and to increase the interest and performance of children at school than any other initiative." Superintendent Thomas Payzant's focus on early literacy, establishing intensive programs in 30 elementary schools, is an important first step. Without it, the rest of his reforms will be for naught.

3. Hire teachers based on merit, not seniority

Superintendent Payzant has made principals accountable for turning their schools around: deliver or you're out, he told them. He's also making students accountable by introducing a rigorous assessment system. The drive for accountability must now focus on the teachers, a group that has taken quite the public beating of late.

In theory, teachers have become more accountable since the latest union contract was agreed to (they're marginally easier to fire now, for example). But an important limit to their liability remains: seniority. In mainstream Boston public schools, principals still are not completely free to choose their own teachers. Vacancies are supposed to be filled by the most senior teacher handy, rather than by the most qualified teacher available.

This means that bad teachers can cycle through the system pretty much indefinitely. Ask any principal in the city's pilot schools why those schools work and, to a person, they cite their ability to choose whomever they want to teach their students. Mainstream schools do not have that luxury.

All the talk of placing stricter demands on already overworked teachers -- only a small proportion of whom are as bad as their publicity -- overlooks this simple solution. Hiring purely on merit would reward the best teachers, motivate others to improve, and eventually weed out the deadwood in the system. Principals would end up with teachers who understood their missions and fit in with the culture of their schools. In time, that would also raise the public reputation of teachers and perhaps even attract more bright young people into the profession.

4. Extend school hours

You're a 10th grader in the Boston public schools. Your alarm goes off at 6 a.m. You roll over and sleep for another 20 minutes. Then your mother pulls all the blankets off you. You hate that. You drag a comb through your hair, grab a Pop-Tart, and you're on the T at 6:50. Your first class is at 7:20. By 10 a.m. you're finally waking up, just as the chronically tardy kids are arriving. A few more hours and you're outta there. At 1:40, you're back on the T, the whole afternoon spread before you. What are you going to do?

The average Boston public-school student is in school for about six hours a day, 180 days a year. Most of those days start before 8 a.m., although some elementary schools begin at 8:30 or later. Judging by standardized-test results, those kids aren't learning everything they need to know during those hours.

That's mostly because of the quality of the education they're getting, but it's also because of the quantity. Our kids aren't in school long enough. Many of them need remedial instruction -- more instruction. That takes time. The Commission on Time and Learning recommended, in no uncertain terms, that longer days (and, in some cases, longer years) be devoted to schooling, and that more of that time be devoted to pure academics.

The founders of the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a Hyde Park charter school, modeled their own school on successful Asian education systems, which keep kids in class longer and produce high achievement levels in math and science. At the charter school, classes begin at 8:05 a.m. and end at 4:10 p.m., 210 days a year. "When you expect kids to learn more, it takes more time," says Stacey Boyd, the school's founding director. "The six-hour school day made sense 100 years ago, when kids went home and tilled the fields. But a lot of parents work now, and there are a lot of one-parent families. It makes more sense to have kids in school, where they're learning in a structured environment, rather than watching TV."

Extending the school day isn't just about academic performance; it's also about giving kids the kind of supervision many of them lack in the fallow hours between the end of classes and the return of their parents from work, if they're lucky enough to have parents with jobs. Half of all juvenile crime is committed in those four hours of the afternoon. Mayor Menino has just launched his much-ballyhooed 2:00-to-6:00 Program, designed to cut such crime by giving students structured activities after school. That's a good idea, but longer school days would reduce the need for such programs by providing educational supervision for students in their own schools all afternoon, with teachers and pupils they know.

"Kids have nothing to do all afternoon," says Mike Mayo, a teacher at the Nativity Prep School, in Roxbury. "Keep them busy with fun things at their schools. Those citywide after-school programs are fine, but if you can get the kids involved with a small group of people, consistently, they will build a community. They will become known as individuals. That's key."

Failing that, it would help simply to start the school day later, especially in high schools. That might offset students' alarming levels of tardiness and provide them with supervision in the high-risk afternoons, and it would require no net increase in teaching time.

5. Get parents involved

Parental involvement is vital to children's educational success. A 1985 study found that whether a parent reads aloud to a child is integral to whether the child will become a successful reader. A 1997 Department of Education study found that children whose fathers participated in three or more school events in a year were more likely to get mostly A's and to participate in extracurricular activities than were children whose fathers did not participate. And the studies are reinforced by bucketloads of anecdotal evidence that the students who thrive are often the ones whose parents are involved in their schooling.

When parents take an interest in their kids' education -- providing them with a place to work away from the television, asking them if they've done their homework, talking to their teachers -- they reinforce what happens in school. And it's harder for kids to get away with stuff.

"Parents are experts at a lot of things schools need to know about their children, and teachers see things parents need to know," says Deborah Meier, an acclaimed New York educator who now heads the Mission Hill School, a pilot school. "It's important that kids see the two most important grownups in their lives as partners."

Getting parents involved is far harder than it seems. Often, schools are battling big social problems: family dysfunction, poverty, previous generations that feel ripped off by and suspicious of the education system. Sometimes they're fighting old-fashioned foes like laziness and apathy.

But some schools are managing it. At the McKay School, in East Boston, private partnerships allow the school to offer courses to parents so they can help their children with homework. There are also weekly breakfast meetings that bring teachers and parents together, building a sense of community. At Dorchester High, a group called Boston Creative Action recruited parents to participate in the day-to-day running of the school: working as aides in classrooms, writing a newsletter to keep other parents informed, interceding with the city to get a new fence built. Headmaster Robert Belle has credited the parents with turning the school around when it was on the brink of losing its accreditation. At the Mission Hill School, teachers send letters to parents every week and call them often. There are plenty of information sessions and potluck dinners with parents. And students stay with the same teacher for two years, giving parents a chance to know them better.

Sometimes the solutions are simple: at the Academy of the Pacific Rim, all homework assignments are put on voice-mail recordings every day, so parents can check to see what their kids are supposed to do. Improving parental involvement in some schools may be as basic as providing teachers with readier access to telephones so that they can contact parents -- and be reached by them -- when needed.

Family involvement in schools builds social bonds. To veteran education writer Gene Maeroff, the schools are vital to reconstructing neighborhoods ravaged by poverty and crime: he believes they can become the centers of new communities, one-stop shops for a range of support services. Perhaps it's not fair to expect schools to solve the plethora of social problems outside the classroom. But those problems permeate every corner of their students' lives and educations. If they don't do it, who will?

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.