A Successful Elementary School

The Los Angeles Times has an article on how Bunche Elementary School in the Compton Unified School District is doing what many thought impossible:

Bunche students have responded with remarkable gains, defying the conventional wisdom that poor and minority students are virtually destined to land on the downside of the achievement gap. And Bunche did this without the help of the state’s two major intervention programs for low-performing schools….

At this school, the primary mover has been first-time Principal Mikara Solomon Davis, who arrived in mid-2000. Some would say she’s done the near impossible.

Bunche has blown past the target score of 800 on the state’s Academic Performance Index. Its 868 compares favorably to the scores at schools in Beverly Hills and San Marino. A school would score 875 if every student scored “proficient” on standardized tests.

Visually, the school sparkles as well, with clean, recently modernized classrooms, well-tended grass and rose bushes.

The campus sits in what looks to be a solidly middle-class minority neighborhood in the city of Carson. But a closer look suggests the classic profile of a school with poor achievement: The student body is about half black and half Latino, most of the students speak limited English, and the entire student body qualifies for free lunches. Some students come from the surrounding neighborhood, but most are bused from Compton.

In 1999, the first year of the state’s current testing and improvement regimen, the school ranked in the lowest 10% of schools statewide.

So starting in 1999, the school was where all Compton schools tend to be, at the lowest 10% of schools statewide. So what changed? The article continues:

With qualified, experienced principals in short supply, the school system hired a smart, hardworking prospect.

Solomon Davis, in her late 20s, had just earned a master’s degree in education at Columbia University, which followed three years of teaching in Compton. There she impressed her own principal as one of the most gifted teachers she’d ever supervised.

Tireless, idealistic, demanding and at the time single, Solomon Davis critiqued daily the individual lessons of her teachers, including the veteran ones to whom she made clear: “It’s not an 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. job. And you’re going to be asked to do a lot of work.”

Only two of 21 teachers remain from before her arrival. About eight departed, she said, because they disliked the new regimen. Another half dozen or so made a strong transition but have since retired. Solomon Davis’ hires tended to match her own profile: young, energetic and relatively inexperienced. There’s been substantial turnover in these ranks as well.

Several, including Solomon Davis, were affiliated with Teach for America, which places virtually untrained recent graduates from top colleges in urban classrooms.

So what does the Bunche example say about the widely accepted notion that it’s experience that matters most in teaching effectively?

Solomon Davis has kept the academic rise going by hiring carefully and by developing, in essence, her own monitoring and training system. Her ongoing accountability measures are the state standards for each grade level, which specify what students are supposed to know. Top grades for students, she said, have to equal mastery of these standards…

There’s a sense that the staff knows it’s playing catch-up. Solomon Davis recounted a recent discussion with the principal of Vista Grande Elementary in Rancho Palos Verdes — where parents assume and demand academic excellence.

“There ‘the machine’ pushes her,” said Solomon Davis. “Here, you have to push it.”

And that means pushing parents, who adjusted to a principal who in her first year issued more than 100 suspensions in a school of 467 students.

“There was such an issue with discipline that you couldn’t teach. Disrespect for teachers and adults was the norm,” said Solomon Davis. When parents confront her over a suspension, “I begin by saying, ‘Our goal is college for your child. We’re not here to punish,’ ” Solomon Davis said.

Charter schools and some remarkable schools like Bunche Elementary School continue to prove what voucher proponents have said all along: even in a bad neighborhood, with low income minority students, a school can do remarkable things. The full article can be found here.