Education Trust just awarded Dispelling the Myth trophies to four schools that prove, as the award name suggests, that you don't have to rehabilitate parents, clean up the neighborhood or solve society's problems before you can educate children.? The four schools are:
???? Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, New Orleans
???? Jack Britt High School, Fayetteville, N.C.
???? Griegos Elementary School, Albuquerque, N.M.
???? Morningside Elementary School, Brownsville, Texas
Bethune Elementary is in a neighborhood, reports Ed Trust, ?that suffered from urban blight even before Hurricane Katrina tore through it,? but thanks to what Principal Mary Haynes-Smith says is ?a careful system of monitoring achievement and individually targeting assistance,? all of Bethune's sixth-graders meet state reading standards, compared to 70 percent of sixth-graders in the state. And 62 percent of the school's sixth-graders read at an advanced level, compared to just 4 percent statewide.
At Bethune Elementary, reports Ed Trust, ?teachers rely on a simple yet demanding strategy that could work in any school: rigorous instruction in a caring environment created by a committed principal.?
Ed Trust finds similar secret sauce recipes at other award-winning schools: high expectations, rigorous assessments, strong leadership.
It's worth looking at past Dispelling award winners ? patterns do indeed emerge.
And over at the Center of Education Reform a new book by Samuel Casey Carter, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character, would seem to dispel similar myths. CER says the book?provides??a roadmap to success? by profiling twelve schools that have ?overcome significant obstacles? to improve achievement, apparently by applying serious character education to the question. Perhaps Casey, a senior fellow at CER, has an answer to the recent studies showing that character ed programs aren't doing much for academic achievement.?My guess is that the answer?is ?in implementation. ?(Carter's 2000 book No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools argued that it was more about doing the right things than about?throwing money at things.)
My sense is that what these many, against the odds, success stories prove is that it's not about scale or money or cracking codes, but about applying proven principles to local situations.? Anti-scale scale. ?But the emphasis is on ?applying.?? Magic bullet?? Hard work.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
