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I've long been impressed by the accomplishments of Achievement First, the charter-school network that grew out of Amistad Academy, a middle school founded in 1999 in New Haven, Conn., by Doug McCurry, an educator, and Dacia Toll, then a recent graduate of Yale Law School.
Amistad has always served a low-income, high-minority population—a demographic that tends to do poorly in school and on standardized tests. And yet Amistad's results are consistently excellent. In 2007, the eighth-grade students at Amistad were neck and neck with the students at Worthington Hooker School for the highest state-test results in New Haven. Hooker is a well-respected public school in the city's East Rock neighborhood; some of its students have parents who are Yale professors or who are otherwise connected to Yale. Very few of Hooker's students—just 16 percent—are from low-income families, while at Amistad, that figure hovers around 80 percent. And yet Amistad's eighth-grade students beat out Hooker's eighth grade for the highest math score in New Haven, and they earned the second-highest reading and writing score in the city, right behind Hooker—a fairly stunning result.*
What impresses me just as much as Amistad's sterling test scores is the commitment of the school's founders to the broader issue of equity in education. Achievement First's leaders see their mission as not just to serve the 3,700 students enrolled in their schools in Connecticut and Brooklyn, but to create a national model for school success in low-income communities.
Two years ago, Amistad middle school expanded upward to include a high school as well. And so I was interested, and a little concerned, to read in the New Haven Register last month that students at the high school have been struggling.
Last year, 19 of the 56 students in Amistad's ninth grade—the same cohort that scored so well on the eighth-grade tests in 2007—failed at least one course. And 11 students, 20 percent of the grade, failed two courses, meaning that they did not move on to the tenth grade.
It's not quite clear just what this means. Last year, the 10th-grade students at Amistad once again did very well on the state achievement tests. So by outside measures, achievement at the school remains high. And yet many students are struggling to meet Amistad High's own standards, even after four or five years of Amistad education.
Amistad, to its credit, has launched an internal review of the middle school's methods to see what steps it can take to better prepare its students for high school. As the Register reported:
Amistad is now examining both the academic and non-academic structure of its middle school, adding more non-fiction reading, for example, and evaluating whether the institutional attitude of "we will not let kids fail" has in turn failed to teach students how to learn independently. "Independence is something you teach and develop and cultivate. We need to be more thoughtful and more intentional about doing that," said [Dacia] Toll.
My guess is that whatever difficulties Amistad's high-school students are now facing can be traced back to their experiences before reaching Amistad. As at most high-performing low-income middle schools, students generally have been arriving in fifth grade at Amistad performing well below grade level. Amistad's intensive methods are usually able to propel those students to grade level and above in just a few years. But it may be that the early academic deficits those students experienced have some lingering aftereffects that will make high levels of achievement a continuing challenge for them at every stage.
Given Amistad's track record, and Toll's willingness to face her school's problems directly and publicly, I imagine that she and her staff will figure out how to get most of those students to graduate from high school well-educated and prepared for college, even if it takes an extra year or two.
I would also hazard a guess that in a few years, things will start to get a lot easier at Amistad High. Achievement First has been assembling its own version of Geoffrey Canada's "conveyor belt"; this year, for the first time, one of the group's charter elementary schools began feeding students into one of their middle schools with four years of Achievement First education under their belts—arriving ahead of grade level instead of well behind it. It seems a safe bet that the experience those students have in ninth grade, a few years from now, will be a lot smoother than the experience of the kids now enrolled at Amistad High.
To me, the struggles at Amistad High point to the same two conclusions as do the attrition issues at the Bay Area KIPP schools: First, that the KIPP/Achievement First middle-school model can achieve truly remarkable levels of success among the kind of students—low-income, behind grade-level, a less-than-ideal home life—who just a few years ago were routinely written off altogether. And second, that if and when these middle schools are linked together with equally well-run elementary schools and high schools (and then, I hope, with high-quality prekindergartens, parenting programs, and community and family supports), they will be able to achieve much more: better and more consistent results from a broader selection of students. If that happens—and at Amistad, it may begin as soon as this year—what now seems miraculous will, I hope, come to seem downright routine.
* I'd like to provide a link to the New Haven Register story reporting those figures, but it's not easily available on line. The reference, should anyone want to Nexis it, is: Maria Garriga, "Charter school group ups the ante on scores," New Haven Register, Aug. 7, 2007.
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One potential problem with basing teacher compensation in part on test scores is that it gives teachers an incentive not just to "teach to the test," but to game the test completely. Because of strict accountability measures imposed in Texas in the 1990s by then-Gov. George W. Bush and Rod Paige, the Houston school superintendent, test scores rose sharply. A few years later, after the governor had become the president and the superintendent had become the federal secretary of education, the Dallas Morning News, in a series of investigative articles, revealed that at least part of those test-score gains were due to widespread cheating by teachers and administrators.
I don't want to overstate the prevalence or the impact of cheating on standardized tests—I think accountability measures are crucial, and I believe a well-run school system can find ways to all but eliminate cheating. But still, I thought I should share this story, which a reader of this blog, a young teacher in the New York City public schools, e-mailed to me recently:
I'm writing in response to your column on paying teachers more money for raising their students' test scores from the year before. When I first heard this proposal, a couple of years ago, I was excited. That should be a decent measure of a teacher's efficacy, I thought.
Until I got my class last year. As sixth graders, they were all new to my school and came from different elementary schools. And when it came to the test, every single one of them, without fail, had the same story.
During our first standardized test of the year, many hands went in the air. I shook my head at them, because according to the rules, I'm not allowed to talk to them during a test. They were outraged. "Why can't you help us?" they asked.
We had a class discussion after the exam was over. Every single one of them had received help on state standardized tests in their old school. For some of them, the teacher would explain the questions when they didn't understand something. Several students had teachers give them the correct answer. One of my students saw a teacher sit down with another student's test, erase all of his answers, and write all new ones in.
If there are bonuses tied to test scores, even more cheating will take place. What can school districts do to ensure this doesn't happen?
It's a good question, without a simple answer. I do think school systems have the tools to stop cheating. But it's hard to do without first acknowledging that it's a problem. And superintendents (and mayors) have the same accountability pressures that principals and teachers and students do. Whatever level of the bureaucracy you inhabit, when your success depends on rising scores, it's hard to take steps that will serve only to lower those scores—whether that means blowing the whistle on a fellow teacher or launching an investigation of the whole system.
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The reason I think the Harlem Children's Zone is so important—the reason I wrote a whole book about the program—is that I think it's the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.
What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt—a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.
The second idea is a tipping-point notion—what Canada refers to as contamination. His theory is that in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood, if you offer social and educational supports to just a few of the kids who live there, their participation will always seem a bit oddball, and they won't have much of an effect on their peers. But if you get participation rates up to 40 percent or 50 percent or 60 percent, then taking part will come to seem normal, and some of the behaviors that used to seem commonplace in Harlem—teenage pregnancy, drug use, dropping out of school—will start to seem like the oddball path. The engaged kids will "contaminate" their friends with their behaviors and attitudes.
Canada's system isn't easy. It requires a lot of hard work just to keep it in motion. And in the years that I spent reporting in Harlem, Canada and his staff made lots of wrong turns and hit plenty of dead ends. In the book, I followed one class of parents through Baby College, and some of them, it seemed, faced such big deficits and such huge obstacles in life—they couldn't read, they had had other children taken away by Child Services, they had spent a couple of years in jail—that it seemed hard to believe they would ever be truly effective parents. In the middle school, the first couple of years were quite rocky, as Canada struggled to combine the ethos of a community organization with the accountability of a no-excuses charter school.
By the time I finished my reporting, though, the middle school was starting to find its footing, and the elementary schools, where some of the students had been with the Harlem Children's Zone since Baby College, were truly thriving. The third-grade test scores last spring were good—at one charter school, 97 percent of the third-grade class was on grade level in math, and in the other, 100 percent were. (The English scores were lower, but they were still quite good. At one school, they were 10 points above the state average, and at the other they were just a point or two below the state average.)
And perhaps more importantly, the elementary schools and the kids in them felt somehow ... normal. When I spent time in the classrooms, I got the strong feeling that when these kids got to middle school, they weren't going to need the kind of heroic interventions that Promise Academy and most charter middle schools need to employ today. They wouldn't need remediation and advanced character-building and constant test prep—they would just be competent, engaged students for the rest of their school careers. And these are kids who, for the most part, came from low-income, often difficult backgrounds, with a fair number of teenage parents and parents who didn't complete high school.
They were exactly the same kind of kids, in other words, who arrived in the sixth grade in the first year of Promise Academy middle school, the ones who showed up reading three and four years behind grade level, and whose subsequent middle school careers were a constant struggle. This new generation of kids had the good fortune to find a place on the Conveyor Belt, and that meant they faced a very different kind of future than most kids growing up in Harlem.