Great Expectations

When Lorenzo Bradshaw took over this past summer as the new principal at Campus Elementary, his first priority was to recruit parents to help him tackle the challenges of educating students in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Grand Rapids, Mich. Teachers said he couldn’t do it, telling Bradshaw that their parent involvement efforts had never worked.

Undeterred, Bradshaw invited parents to meet-and-greets at the school. He made himself available for nine hours over three days in early August. “I had the cookies and the juice and the cool water set out,” he says, “and for three days the cookies remained untouched, the water remained plentiful, and the juice remained cold. The parents never showed up.”

That’s the way it is, the teachers told him. What did he expect? Bradshaw expected more, so, he recalls, he “went back to the drawing board and said, ‘If the parents don’t come to me, I will go to them.’”

Bradshaw knew he would never squelch the naysaying -- or raise expectations -- if he gave up before the first day of school, so he spent a week knocking on 210 doors. Weeks later, he received a congratulatory note from the superintendent and a copy of an e-mail from a parent he met on his rounds.

The woman wrote that she was thinking about transferring her two children to a charter school, but her faith in the district was restored after Bradshaw spent 30 minutes at her home. Her note proved that, in education, victories sometimes come in small doses.

Few victories are more important, however, than raising expectations. If school boards, administrators, teachers, parents, and community leaders don’t believe that poor and minority children can learn as well as those who have more advantages, it can be difficult -- if not impossible -- to convince students that education offers their best opportunity for a better life.

“It doesn’t take much effort to learn to have low expectations of poor people and people of color,” says Martin Haberman, founder of the Haberman Foundation in Houston, which helps high-poverty school districts hire good teachers and principals. “All you have to do is grow up in American society, and you’ve built them in.”

Taking a different approach

Even as educators work to raise expectations, demands on school districts are increasing. With many urban high schools struggling to graduate more than half their students, principals may regard the diplomas they pass out as major triumphs. But success in today’s global, technology-driv-en economy increasingly requires some level of postsecondary education.

Certainly, there are plenty of excuses not to expect much from urban schools. High faculty turnover, transient students, and ambivalent parents are just some of the reasons cited in the link between poverty and low test scores.

Yet in pockets across the country, persistent educators are breaking that connection by simply expecting more from a flawed society. And often they find parents and family members who want to help but don’t know how.

For Bradshaw, the looks of disbelief and the warm greetings -- one grandmother served him milk and cookies -- made his miles-long trek worthwhile.

“It was that shock that gave me the energy to keep on going,” he says. “The interesting part was that I didn’t have to bring up parental involvement. When I told them to call if they needed anything, they reciprocated by asking if there was anything I needed. When parents see that you have a true interest in their child and that you value them as parents, they will meet you halfway.

“All children have a right to dream,” he continues, “and to hold us accountable for making their dreams become a reality.”

It has been a promising start for Bradshaw, but permanently changing the culture of a school -- and therefore its expectations -- takes time. And sometimes those expectations literally get lost in translation.

In a 2000 study on why urban parents resist getting involved in their children’s elementary education, coauthors Julia Rothenberg and Peter McDermott were surprised to find that in separate interviews, both teachers and parents faulted each other for the rift.

“Here were two sides that said they don’t like each other, but they were saying exactly the same things,” says Rothenberg, professor of education at the Sage Colleges in upstate New York.

Teachers were frustrated by an increasing number of transient students -- it is not uncommon for half of the students in a given classroom to leave during a school year -- and difficulty getting parents to come to after-school conferences. Parents, on the other hand, complained that double work shifts and lack of transportation -- not lack of caring -- often kept them away. Those who spoke Spanish thought schools should provide more interpreters to help them communicate.

Faced with the same issues, many districts are starting to host parent meetings at apartment complexes, offer babysitting services, and serve free meals.
Nancy McDonald, former director of business education and partnerships for the Tulsa, Okla. school system, remembers trying to get a PTA started at an elementary school where there was no parent involvement. A nearby company that manufactured fishing rods allowed her to use its cafeteria for a recruitment meeting, where she served pizza. Seventy-five percent of the school’s parents showed up. Four months later, with half of them still attending, the PTA formed and moved its meetings onto school grounds.

“If you feed people, they will come,” McDonald says.

Learning different cultures

Urban districts often enroll a high number of foreign students, leaving administrators and staff to work with and around dozens of languages -- and language issues. School boards and administrators have the best chance of setting a high achievement bar if they encourage teachers to understand where their students are coming from and work from there.

Some integrate cultural customs into lessons about other countries, or become fluent in conversational styles and youthful lingo. Others go to much greater lengths to connect with students from different backgrounds.

For instance, one white teacher from Nebraska, after getting a job in a predominantly Latino section of Springfield, Mass., moved into the neighborhood, took Spanish courses, and attended community events to learn more about the culture, says Rushern L. Baker III, executive director of the Community Teachers Institute. The Washington, D.C.-based organization shows teachers how to connect with urban students -- a skill that has been called “cultural competence.”

“We found they were sympathizing with the fact that kids were coming from these impoverished backgrounds,” Baker says. “We try to liberate them from that.”

The weeklong professional development workshops draw educators from all ethnic backgrounds. “People question why African Americans have to learn how to teach urban kids,” adds Baker, who calls the declining number of minorities going into the teaching profession a national crisis. “But being African American doesn’t automatically make you understand these kids.”

Supporting new teachers

Teaching can be an isolating experience. And with urban schools as a whole hiring the least-experienced teachers in the field, school boards and administrators must find the funds to provide them with consistent support.

“If you look at the main reason why teachers leave teaching, it’s not the money -- it’s workplace conditions,” says Douglas E. Wood, executive director of the National Academy for Excellent Teaching at Columbia University in New York.

Nathaniel Thomas was an eager 22-year-old fresh out of college when he landed his first teaching job three years ago. Thomas was hired to work at a struggling, predominantly African-American middle school next door to the high school he had attended in Prince George’s County, Md.

The students lived in an area plagued by drug problems and a rising murder rate. But Thomas, who is black, felt that he could relate to the students -- and successfully challenge them -- because they came from the same community.

It wasn’t easy. He was put in charge of a seventh-grade special-education class with 37 students, without an assistant or mentor. Some of the students were three grade levels behind.

“When you’re not prepared for that, it really lowers your expectations,” he says. “Even though I was supposed to be teaching about ancient Mesopotamia, that wasn’t a priority as much as, ‘I just want you to read a map. Don’t tell me that you live in Canada.’ I was going back to the basics.”

Thomas left his middle-school post after the first year, moving on to teach government at a military high school in the same county. But that was another short-lived stint. Not long after taking a Community Teachers Institute workshop in 2004 -- where he rediscovered his passion for the job -- he accepted a position as director of new teacher initiatives for the organization.

Educators and the people who train them agree that teachers need more networking opportunities with peers both at their school and at others, as well as better training in how to deal with academically challenged children before they set foot in a classroom.

“There have been a lot of positive strides,” says Wood, particularly in large districts with dismal histories. “But we have to continue to keep a focus because obviously, if you look at the data, even though good progress was made, we certainly have a long way to go.”

Mentors are just as critical for students. After studying the Rochester City School District in upstate New York for 11 months, a task force headed by Rochester Institute of Technology President Albert Simone issued a “Call to Arms” report in August 2005. Among the key recommendations: Recruiting 10,000 volunteers from the region over the next decade to mentor the city’s 34,000 schoolchildren.

The report begins with a charge to set high expectations, stating that students “must want to live up to these expectations. They must believe they can achieve them.”

A National Research Council report in 2003 concluded that students learn better when schools encourage caring and supportive relationships, but that a focus on high expectations is equally important.

Partnering with college

A fledgling reform movement rapidly gaining speed is the early college high school, which targets low-income, mostly minority students and challenges them to thrive in a rigorous setting.

With high expectations a founding principle, the schools allow students to graduate from high school with both a diploma and up to two years’ worth of credits toward an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.

Today, there are 66 early college high schools in 24 states, with one more opening in January 2006. The Early College High School Initiative, a Boston-based umbrella group, expects the number to top 170 by 2008 through more than $120 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other sources. That figure does not include another 75 by the end of that year in North Carolina alone.

“When you put kids on a college campus, they change,” says Michael Webb, executive vice president of the Boston group. “They want to fit in. They want to be more mature. The idea is that they are college students; they are college material. It changes the whole paradigm. And they actually do better.”

Some experts who study education reform question whether the movement is expanding too quickly, given that most early college high schools are too new to show a consistent record of success. But preliminary results are promising.

Early college high schools report attendance and grade-promotion rates above 90 percent, according to the Gates Foundation. And Webb points to data, collected by his organization over the past two years, that shows early college students usually outperform their freshman college counterparts.

Meanwhile, statistics from one of the first early college high schools, which opened three years ago at LaGuardia Community College’s International High School in New York, show that all 30 students in the first cohort graduated with college credit this fall. Twenty-three of them are expected to earn two-year associates degrees by summer.

Horatio Thomas, a 16-year-old junior at The Early College at Guilford in Greensboro, N.C., paraphrases the first paragraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance to sum up his educational experience.

“We’re brought here to an environment where everyone is more or less equal,” he says. “It’s where you take the rubber band of the mind and stretch it and then adapt to that rubber band. By the time you get to your junior year, you have expectations of yourself. You have a general focus. You know what you want to achieve.”

Building a culture

Other schools unaffiliated with the reform movement also are exposing students to the benefits of higher education.

“We want to build a culture here to get everyone to think of themselves as college bound,” says Meredith Gavrin, codirector of New Haven Academy in Connecticut. The magnet school, now serving 180 students in grades 9 though 11, has added one grade each year since opening in 2003. Plans are to enroll a total of 250 students in grades 9 through 12 by 2006-07.

From ninth grade on, New Haven students explore potential colleges and careers. By junior year they are talking in depth with advisers about life after graduation. Perhaps most notable, as part of a pilot program for the 2005-06 school year, six students chosen by the faculty are taking freshman-level philosophy and sociology courses at nearby Quinnipiac University.

But whether high expectations are already built into a school’s culture or must be incorporated, communication is key -- as it is with all relationships. And educators must realize that they cannot always control both sides of the conversation.

“Education is still ultimately on the children,” says Thomas, now with the Community Teachers Institute. “It’s up to them to decide they’re serious and want to learn. I’m not going to necessarily save everybody. I had to accept that.”

Echoes Haberman: “If the ship is sinking, you can still spend the last seven hours making lifeboats. You won’t be able to save the ship, but you can help people survive.”