At struggling school, reform is in the script

Published in Chicago Journal
September 19, 2003

by Dan Weissmann

Elvis is alive and well on the Near West Side, and he looks like a nine year old. It’s not magic, it’s school reform. It could even work, although I wouldn’t recommend asking for an encore of “Burning Love.”

Welcome to Medill, a school trying to creep back from the brink, with help from the Chicago Teachers Union and the school board, part of an effort by management and labor to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya”—or maybe “Love Me Tender.”

Things weren’t always so harmonious. A year and a half ago, Arne Duncan made his first big waves as schools CEO when he announced that he was up and closing three low-performing schools for a year, to be replaced by newly-designed programs; these schools were so far gone, he said, that everybody would be better off with a fresh start.

And by the way, his people added, there were a couple-dozen or so more schools that were almost as bad off, and they might get the same treatment in a year’s time. Medill, which sits in the middle of the Chicago Housing Authority’s ABLA development, was one of them.

The union’s rookie president, Deborah Lynch, was furious. She had spent much of her first nine months in office building a relationship with Duncan and his team, but he hadn’t even bothered to give her a heads-up until the morning of the press conference. “So much for partnerships,” she told a reporter.

But she also leapt into can-do mode, making a fresh pitch: If the board had schools where it was thinking about hitting the “restart” button, why not give the Union a chance to come in and clean house at those schools first? Duncan and company said they’d consider the idea for spring 2003.

By last spring, they’d hammered out the details. The board and the union agreed on a list of approved school-improvement models, and each party agreed to put up some resources to make them work. Teachers at ten schools, including Medill, got letters saying that they had a choice: Pick one of the following programs to try, or vote “none of the above” and take their chances on being shut down.

At Medill, 21 out of 22 teachers voted to try a program called “Success for All,” designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Schools around the country have been using it for years, and Lynch is a fan. When she was teaching on the Southwest Side in the late 1990s, she lobbied successfully to get it adopted at her school, where she says it worked.

Success for All is a kind of school-reform-in-a-box, with scripted lessons to make it “teacher-proof,” and it requires only minimal start-up time. Medill Principal Frederic Metz and two other staff members got a week’s training over the summer, and the rest of the staff got three days of training in late August, just before school started. Then they opened up the box with the scripts in it, and they were off and running, almost from the first day of school. That was it. They didn’t even have to buy new textbooks: Success for All has scripts keyed to the reading textbooks from various major publishers, including the ones Medill was already using.

Under the board-union partnership agreement, the board chipped in $2 million to cover program costs at each of the ten “partnership” schools, and the union is providing staff support. Metz agreed to put in about $50,000, out of the school’s $400,000 in discretionary funds.

Here’s how the program works: Kids get tested, then put into groups by reading ability. For an hour and a half a day, everybody does a reading lesson in their group, and for every ability level, there’s a script for each day’s lesson. Then, every ten weeks, the kids get tested again, and anybody who’s ready to move up a level, moves up.

The lessons themselves look pretty familiar to anyone over the age of five: teachers reading to younger kids and asking questions, older kids working together in pairs to answer questions from workbooks. There’s nothing terribly new in any of the elements of these lessons, says Saungkt Akhu Richey, the union official who provides support to the partnership schools. “They’ve just been put together in a package that’s been organized and structured.”

Structured to down to the moment. Here’s how the teacher’s manual for level two instructs teachers to begin their first lesson. (“Use the text below as a guide,” it says, reminding them to “maintain a sense of enthusiasm.”):  Welcome to Reading Roots, class! I am your teacher, Ms. Smith. We’re going to have a lot of fun in this class as we learn together.

During each lesson, everyone gathers around to celebrate successes: Did you read all the way through your piece without stumbling? Here’s a sticker. Answer all the workbook questions correctly? Applause. Success for All has scripts for celebration too, of course, but some of them are playful and smart: Sometimes kids bark like seals, flapping their hands together. Sometimes they do a little clapping routine around the circle.

And sometimes they tug modestly on their shirt collars and give their best little late-Elvis impression: “Well, uh, thank you. Thank you very much.” It’s postmodern irony time for eight-year-olds at 10:00 a.m. Never mind that these kids weren’t born until Elvis was 20 years dead. The King lives on the Near West Side.

Lots of people, me included, are not completely comfortable with programs like Success for All. We remember the teachers who inspired us, and we know they weren’t reading from scripts. Even postmodern dead-Elvis type scripts. Some former Success for All teachers say they felt straight-jacketed by the program, and some have raised questions about the research that purports to show how effective the program is. Also, Success for All’s single-minded focus on raising kids’ reading scores, as opposed to, say, feeding their souls, leaves some people cold.

But the program’s creators and its proponents make a strong case. They have research and results on their side, but also some common sense: Basic literacy isn’t the only thing we want kids to learn in school necessarily, but it’s pretty much the first thing. Good luck teaching someone to write the great American novel if she can’t read “Where the Wild Things Are.” Routines aren’t bad if they work. And the routine of testing everybody frequently – when it’s intended to recognize success and let people move on, and to tweak what may need improvement, rather than to judge people as winners or losers—makes sense.

There’s also some room for maneuvering inside the Success for All scripts. Each day’s lesson offers teachers a choice of stories to use, and they’re encouraged to make their own embellishments, like making up their own celebration rituals, Metz says. Also, teachers have a choice about whether to do this or not; Success for All only works with schools where teachers vote the program in.

Of course at Medill, Success for All was one of a limited number of choices that teachers had—another of which was, Look for another job—but they did vote for it overwhelmingly, and Metz says that so far everyone is gung-ho. (That’s right on schedule with the researchers’ script, he says. They tell him to expect to hit a wall in late October, and then to expect to see a return to high morale after the first round of testing in week 10.)

The staff and kids at Medill have a tough job. The ALBA community is being literally torn apart and partially rebuilt around these kids’ ears, adding significant stress and chaos to lives that probably already have their share of challenges. Shutting down their school would be no favor to them, and letting them struggle on without extra support would be no kindness either.

If Elvis and company help this school work better, we should give the Medill staff, the union leadership, the school board and the designers of Success for All a big thank you. Thank you very much.