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something to consider - newton - 05-08-2009
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May 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Harlem Miracle
By DAVID BROOKS
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
Thatâs why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: âThe attached study has changed my life as a scientist.â
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Childrenâs Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Childrenâs Zone schools, but werenât selected.
They found that the Harlem Childrenâs Zone schools produced âenormousâ gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas â reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start â produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. Thatâs off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.
Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. âThe results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,â Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Childrenâs Zoneâs founder and president, has done is âthe equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. Itâs amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesnât matter if we stop there. We donât have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying â literally and figuratively.â
These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone canât produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Childrenâs Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who arenât even involved in the other programs the organization offers.
To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes donât have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.
To understand the culture in these schools, Iâd recommend âWhatever It Takes,â a gripping account of Harlem Childrenâs Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and âSweating the Small Stuff,â a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.
Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.
They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didnât return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?
Re: something to consider - Busboy - 05-10-2009
I have always believed that a large part of the success of charter schools, magnet schools and private schools lies in the fact that the parents of the kids enrolled have had to exert at least a little bit of effort to get their kids in, and are by definition involved in the kids education. For the same reason the kids that are more likely to cause problems ( as a result of being raised by bad parents) are absent from the classrooms. Teachers therefore spend little time on discipline and more time on education. My daughter has exactly one disruptive kid in her class and it has a big effect on classroom learning- make that 4 or 5 kids and very little would be accomplished.
I don't mean to dispute any of Newton's conclusions/observations- I'm just adding one that needs to be considered.
Re: something to consider - freedomisntfree - 05-10-2009
Busboy, I think they would agree with your points - "Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes donât have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values. ..... Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes." No excuses would include actually attending school in addition to behavior and attitude.
Re: something to consider - JazminH - 05-11-2009
that's busboys point. Familys who don't value those things wont bother to send a kid to a charter school. The kids who get sent to the charter school have someone at home who is willing to kick their ass when its needed.
Re: something to consider - Danno - 05-11-2009
JazminH Wrote:that's busboys point. Familys who don't value those things wont bother to send a kid to a charter school. The kids who get sent to the charter school have someone at home who is willing to kick their ass when its needed.Is that all it takes... kicking their ass? I had no idea it could be so easy and so much fun to be a good parent. :?
Re: something to consider - freedomisntfree - 05-11-2009
I may have read too much into the article. I thought that part of their point is that as the charter/academy schools expand and more students enter them, they would naturally bring more children with problems into their programs. Because of that they have become more and more "no excuses" schools. In other words they have been forced to deal with those issues and it has still not negatively affected the success of their programs.