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Philip Kurian taught math at Gratz High School.
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Gains at Gratz: Teaching in the time of NCLB
by Philip Kurian
When you tell someone that you work at “Gratz,” two responses often ensue: gasps of fear or consoling pats of sympathy.
Four years ago, Simon Gratz High School was one of Pennsylvania’s persistently dangerous schools, having reported 20 or more violent incidents annually for three consecutive years. Also that same year, Gratz was branded a “Corrective Action II” school under No Child Left Behind.
Yet in 2006, this North Philly high school met all targets toward “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP). Since 2003, Gratz has been classified as a safe school. What can explain the turnaround?
I taught at Simon Gratz High School from 2005 until 2007. As an advocate for Gratz students, I can state with full confidence that neither fear nor sympathy is justified.
During my tenure there, NCLB was like a ghost – always lurking, disconnected from our world, frightening everyone. A new teacher, I spent the majority of my time attempting to make sense of the discordant messages from school administration, fellow teachers, and students. How can teachers keep pace with the core curriculum and prepare for the PSSA if they are charged to remediate basic skills and help students apply concepts meaningfully in new situations?
Furthermore, as 25-year veteran Richard Kozlowski said, “Teachers in inner-city schools must fight through the social issues of poverty, before we get to the academics.” Overcoming years of habitual neglect of students is no small task.
While NCLB focused us on raising test scores, the fundamental question for me was how to change classroom dynamics. The teacher learning curve is steep, but jagged, and navigating this terrain requires veterans. I was blessed to find my school-based guru in James Murray, Jr., a master teacher with more than 15 years of experience and a member of the Pennsylvania High School Coaching Initiative.
Under his tutelage, my instruction improved dramatically, but not necessarily in the ways intended by the federal legislation. I learned how to motivate students, diffuse tense situations, and appreciate the lively presumptions of young people.
Murray offered methods to weave the arts, technology, and student lives into math curricula. He would observe my teaching, provide feedback, and model best practices. He was attuned to the emotional and spiritual struggles of teaching. Above all, he demonstrated what effective teachers do: listening, setting high expectations, and encouraging students to believe they can succeed.
Many people had a hand in Gratz’s revival. The largely veteran staff at Gratz makes a huge difference. Math chair Chuck Lohse encouraged collaboration and provided teachers with access to the graphing calculators indispensable on standardized tests. Horace Rooney became a support system, just around the corner from my classroom.
Academy and disciplinary leaders set the tone for how students act in hallways and classrooms. “After employing several strategies with a child, the biggest support I can give to my teachers is removing an unruly student, calling the parents, and suspending if need be,” observed academy leader James Peterson. “You must have someone there to let kids know you’re serious.”
Gratz’s former principal, Dr. Delores Williams, spent three years fully implementing the current uniform policy, to which many attribute Gratz’s coming off the persistently dangerous list. Rooney added, “Dr. Williams brought a strong sense of security, with constant hall sweeps. You get into a fight, you don’t go to the prom. You get into another fight, you get arrested. There was a no-tolerance fighting policy.”
When Gratz increased its math scores by nearly 22 percentage points and made AYP in 2006, my own shock surprised me. I did have boundless faith in my students – but not in the validity of the standards by which NCLB measured them.
Under the pressure of NCLB, savvy veteran teachers around me had somehow kept their focus on good pedagogy, but without ignoring immediate test gains. While I’d been occupied with the personal or qualitative changes I was trying to create, I saw that our kids’ test performance had made a difference to the folks in charge.
In some ways, we made AYP without kowtowing to District law. I was told the School District did not approve our pullout program for PSSA prep in 2006, but the principal implemented it anyway. Probably, the District wanted to limit programs where only certain students had access to additional support.
As a teacher, I also grappled with the benefits of the pullout program. Should kids who were struggling in my class be removed for test prep? Despite my ambivalence about the test, I gave way to the flow of the larger community, which dreaded the repercussions for non-compliance with NCLB.
So why didn’t Gratz make AYP in 2007? In math, we sustained our remarkable improvement and added another 5 percentage points, but our reading scores dipped slightly.
Peterson said, “The PSSA prep class was not offered last year, and that’s one of the crucial things that prevented us from making AYP.” To put the data in perspective, just four more proficient kids in reading would have vaulted us over the NCLB hurdle for a second consecutive year.
Gratz’s scores were not a fluke; AYP’s all-or-nothing nature just conceals our steady instructional growth.
Perhaps the focus on numbers obscures the more important lesson: school improvement is about relationships and takes a willingness to let these young lives change you. Without such reciprocity between teachers and students, what remains is fear: fear of the arbitrary standards set by outsiders and fear of the students we may fail to understand.