debbie m. price

Two schools seeking success out of failure

Two Baltimore schools are in deep trouble. Each has a determined principal who confronts the challenge of her career.

Each school is taking a very different path to reach the same goal: children who can read.

The stakes are high. Jobs are on the line, and so are children’s futures.

The state is watching. The interim city schools chief and his board, fired up with perform-or-perish standards, are breathing down their necks. Time is running out.

For too long, City Springs Elementary in East Baltimore and Lyndhurst Elementary in West Baltimore have been adrift. What has become a chronic failing across Maryland and the nation - and especially in big cities like Baltimore - has reached a crisis in these two schools.

Not one City Springs’ third-grader reached the satisfactory level on the state’s reading test in 1996. Only two third-graders at Lyndhurst did.

Lyndhurst Principal Elaine Davis knows that she could lose her school to a state takeover. In one breath, she wants to escape the pressure of scrutiny - from the state, from parents, from the public. In the next, she wants people to see what her school is up against - how hard it is to teach children to read when they won’t even sit in their seats. Then, maybe people will understand.

Across town at City Springs Elementary School, Principal Bernice Whelchel, too, has been operating under the threat of a state takeover since January 1996. That’s when 52 schools with terrible student performance on state tests - all but two of them in Baltimore - were put on a watch list.

Desperate to bring order to a school that had careened out of control, Whelchel has virtually turned over her building to the private Baltimore Curriculum Project, with its boot-camp-tough reading instruction. People from the National School Boards Association, from Washington and Annapolis and school headquarters on North Avenue are all over the place, eager to see whether the new program will work.

City Springs Elementary is trying something radically different. Lyndhurst remains in most ways the typical city school, redoubling its efforts but largely doing business the way it always has.

They have in common the seven hours of the school day, the 180 days of the school year. How the two schools use those finite minutes will make a difference - one way or another - for the children in their charge.

At school year’s end, the principals will know whether the new ways are any better than the old ways. What they learn promises lessons for all Baltimore schools.

But first, they ask themselves: How did things get so bad?

City Springs

Return to September 1995 at City Springs.

Down the hall, past the principal and out the door the boy ran.

“What was that?” Bernice Whelchel gasped. It was her first day as principal at City Springs, her first day as principal anywhere, for that matter. And children were running out of the school.

“That’s normal,” City Springs counselor Janet Cottman told Whelchel.

At the school, children ran the halls all day long, and when they felt like it, they ran out of the building and kept on going. Teachers called them the “hall runners” and were helpless to stop them. During bathroom breaks, big kids recruited little kids for that game, telling them what anyone with eyes could see: School was a joke.

Cottman, a petite woman with a halo of curly hair, was the designated chaser, the one whose background in psychology gave her a supposed edge in dealing with difficult children. What it really gave her was bruises. She wore her combat clothes - corduroys, pullovers and sneakers - never knowing when she would be knocked to the floor by a 9-year-old barreling down the hall.

“If you want to keep children in school,” Cottman told Whelchel. “You’re going to have to wear your sneakers.”

“That’s not normal, and I’m not wearing sneakers,” Whelchel snapped back. “Children will not be running out of this school.”

Whelchel, 49, had grown up in middle-class Baltimore, not far away on Madison Avenue, and she remembered “the springs,” a natural spring that bubbled up through the ground into a park where the school is now.

She had been a teacher and an assistant principal in the city school system for 24 years and had raised two daughters, but nothing prepared her for what she found when she arrived at City Springs.

The school was a dirty, dangerous mess, inside and out. Squat and ugly in an institutional way, its windows covered with iron grates, the school building was almost indistinguishable from the housing projects that surround it.

North of Little Italy, east of the Inner Harbor, west of Fells Point, the 31-year-old school building sits in an asphalt desert broken by small factories, derelict rowhouses and weedy vacant lots.

Almost all City Springs children live in two of Baltimore’s grimmest public housing projects. The best thing anyone can say about the 12-story high-rises of Flag House Courts is that they’re supposed to be torn down in a few years. The blocky red-brick “garden apartments” of Perkins Homes, built about 55 years ago to warehouse the poor, are not much better.

There are precious few trees here and no real places to play. Even a small public park next to the school is off-limits to City Springs children because of all the broken glass and the aimless men who have turned the benches into toilets.

The old City Springs Elementary grew out of this environment.

During a brief time in the 1980s, when a former City Springs principal brought to the school Success for All, a reading-rich program developed by the Johns Hopkins University, teachers beat back the educational blight. But the principal was promoted, and his successor was weak, and the school lapsed quickly into its old ways.

While some teachers cared and worked hard, many others had simply written off these children. The law said they had to be in class, but no one said they had to learn.

“We had wasted so much time in not getting the children to learn correctly,” Whelchel says. “We had to speed it up.”

She knew from the start that she was going to need help.

After a tortured first year, the principal in search of structure and discipline found the private Baltimore Curriculum Project, which was looking for schools to try out the structured and disciplined Direct Instruction program.

If regular classroom instruction is an unmade bed, Direct Instruction is hospital corners. Nothing is left to chance. The teacher’s every word is scripted, and each lesson builds upon the one before it. Teachers who don’t like being told what to do don’t like Direct Instruction.

Phonics - teaching children the sounds that make up words - is the foundation, and reading lessons come twice a day. Discipline, or “classroom management” as the Direct Instruction folks call it, is everything.

Direct Instruction had been used successfully to turn around other poor, inner-city schools and the Abell Foundation was ready to write a check for the roughly $200,000 that it would cost to start the program and run it the first year. The Baltimore Curriculum Project, a group of former teachers funded by the Abell Foundation to improve school lesson plans, would help them get it all together.

Whelchel knew she wanted this; the teachers would just have to get on board.

On her first visit to the school a year ago, Anayezuka Ahidiana, who would become the Baltimore Curriculum Project’s supervisor at City Springs, watched in horror as an irate parent threatened a teacher.

“Mrs. Whelchel was by herself. She walked the halls, trying to get the children back in class,” Ahidiana recalls. “You didn’t see teachers teaching. I was like, my God, this building is wild.”

Whelchel looked at Ahidiana and said, “This is the way it is. Do you still want to come?”

Even now, as the school year begins and Whelchel surveys the empty corridors buffed to a high gloss, the tidy classrooms and the walls freshly painted by parents, the memories of the hall runners and the terrible chaos they represented are always close.

And that is why when Whelchel takes to the public address system first thing every morning, there is an edgy determination in her voice that even first-graders do not miss.

“Remember, boys and girls,” Whelchel says - and she says this every day - “nothing, nothing, nothing will stop us from finding out how good we can be.”

Lyndhurst

It is December 1996 and Lyndhurst Elementary School has hit rock bottom.

Principal Elaine Davis sits alone in her office, crying. Spread out before her on the desk are her students’ scores on the state tests. It can’t be so, but it is.

The scores are even worse than the year before. What is she going to tell her teachers? They have worked so hard, and they were so sure that the children were prepared.

Davis can barely stand to touch the paper. A few hours earlier, she and principals from all over West Baltimore have gathered for the pep talk and the great passing out of scores. When she opened the envelope, she could hardly believe it.

Her face grew hot; everyone was watching. It was all she could do to get back to the privacy of her office before she broke down.

The tears come anew.

Since 1993, third-grade reading scores on the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) test have nose-dived from a not-so-hot 20 percent satisfactory rate to a miserable 2.7 percent. Each year, Davis has told her staff and herself that the test is simply unfair. Their students are smarter than that.

If children can’t read, well, that’s the parents’ fault for not reading storybooks to them. The kids aren’t ready to learn when they get to school.

Excuses, excuses.

Davis sits up straight. There will be no more excuses.

The school already faces the threat of state takeover. They have spent 12 months trying to improve. They are out of time. And she, Elaine Davis - 28 years in the city school system, seven years as principal at Lyndhurst - will have to draw on all her experience to change things and change them fast.

“We’re responsible for what these children do,” Davis will tell her teachers.

Once upon a time, Lyndhurst was a model school. Teachers and principals from across the state came to see it. William Donald Schaefer - Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor - learned to read here.

Back then, in the 1930s, Lyndhurst, with its Mediterranean stone facade, was new and the neighborhood was known as “mortgage hill” because practically everyone was working to pay off a mortgage. Most families were middle class and Catholic, but hardly anyone went to parochial school. Lyndhurst was better.

Nearby Edmondson Avenue had everything anyone needed - a grocer, a hardware store, a baker, a barber, one of the first shopping centers in the country. The avenue was not today’s sad strip of liquor stores and dingy secondhand dealers.

Decades ago, life in the city began to change, and Edmondson Village, the neighborhood around Lyndhurst, changed as well. Then came the riots of 1968. White flight. Block busting. Plummeting property values.

In many ways, the neighborhood still looks middle class, despite pockets of obvious decline. Most of the people living near the school own their homes. But many are grandparents raising grandchildren; more than two-thirds of the school’s children eat free lunches.

The school building itself - stately and manicured in front, graffiti-stained on the sides - reflects the contrasts. The halls are clean, bright, even pretty with children’s papers taped to the walls. The kindergartners last year put on a science fair. Second-graders wrote “persuasive arguments” in the form of letters to drug users, addressed to “Dear Misguided Person.”

Lyndhurst looks and feels like suburban schools where achievement and test scores are high.

Davis is proud of her school, of her children. But she is worried.

“I don’t know what we’ll do, what will happen here, if things don’t get better,” Davis says. Then rallying with her trademark optimism, she adds: “But we’re doing the right things. We just need to learn consistency.”

Even so, when the Baltimore Curriculum Project came to Lyndhurst with the same offer it made to City Springs, Davis turned it down. Parents and teachers didn’t like the idea of Direct Instruction with its rigid structure.

Instead, Davis and the teachers decided to rely on their own 114-page plan for improving the school. The plan tells them where they want to go and how they will get there.

The school will continue to teach Core Knowledge - another Abell Foundation-funded curriculum that stresses basic cultural literacy and that is also used at City Springs and a few other schools.

Teachers will get more training - even though that means they will have to send children home at noon on Wednesdays. Students will practice the kinds of questions found on the state test; art and gym teachers will be sacrificed for more reading and math specialists.

More parents will get involved. Children will wear uniforms; order will be maintained in classes.

Davis knows Lyndhurst teachers need a phonics curriculum to get new readers off to the right start, and she had planned to buy one. But when it came time to write the check, she didn’t have the $30,000 it would cost.

For now, Lyndhurst teachers will have to teach the same curriculum used in most other Baltimore public schools. First-graders will read about the three little pigs and Jack and Jill, but sounding out words isn’t part of the school’s formal curriculum.

All of these things go through Davis’ mind on the first day of school. The pressure is building, but she’s ready. The children will line up outside, by class, and they will march into the building, and everyone will see that they are off to the right start.

And then it begins to rain.

The rain sends Elaine Davis into a state.

Children must now be brought willy-nilly into the cafeteria and the gymnasium. Little ones are scattered everywhere, and they are loud. Teachers can’t hear themselves think, much less call roll.

“They’re not going to see their normal routine on the first day,” Davis says as she watches the confusion. Her eyes dart nervously behind gold-rimmed glasses. “We won’t get to do it right until tomorrow. We’ll have to push everything back.”

Davis loses two hours of the first day of school to the sorting of classes and cannot make her welcome announcement until after 10 a.m.

She frets. A half-day lost imposing order leads to a whole day of disrupted instruction. They are already a day behind, and the school year has just begun. The rained-out procession seems like a small problem. But at Lyndhurst, there is no such thing as a small problem. Anything that disrupts its plans is a setback. And setbacks can lead to failure.

Next: Two schools, two different ways of teaching reading.

About this series

Part of a long-term series of articles on the successes and failures in teaching children to read by third grade, or age 9.

To learn more

For more information about reading issues and the performance of individual schools in the Baltimore area, go to The Sun’s Web site, SunSpot, at www.sunspot.net/news/.

For reprints

A year’s subscription to “Reading by 9″ reprints, including this series, future stories and a binder, is available for $24.95. To order, call 410-332-6800.

Credit: SUN STAFF
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Abstract (Document Summary)

For too long, City Springs Elementary in East Baltimore and Lyndhurst Elementary in West Baltimore have been adrift. What has become a chronic failing across Maryland and the nation - and especially in big cities like Baltimore - has reached a crisis in these two schools.

Lyndhurst Principal Elaine Davis knows that she could lose her school to a state takeover. In one breath, she wants to escape the pressure of scrutiny - from the state, from parents, from the public. In the next, she wants people to see what her school is up against - how hard it is to teach children to read when they won’t even sit in their seats. Then, maybe people will understand.

Desperate to bring order to a school that had careened out of control, Whelchel has virtually turned over her building to the private Baltimore Curriculum Project, with its boot-camp-tough reading instruction. People from the National School Boards Association, from Washington and Annapolis and school headquarters on North Avenue are all over the place, eager to see whether the new program will work.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.