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At Sneak Preview, Stranded Student Relates
by Melissa Bailey | Oct 18, 2010 10:02 am
(18) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Schools, School Reform
Superman never came to rescue Patra Drury. Now she has found hope she might still learn something at school.
Drury (pictured), who’s 18, was one of dozens of parents, students and educators who filled a theater at Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street Thursday night for a private screening of Waiting For “Superman.”
The documentary, which has been embraced by school reform proponents nationwide and sparked national outcry from teachers unions, was brought to New Haven for an invite-only sneak preview hosted by Connecticut’s Black Alliance For Education Options. The film
resonated with the New Haven audience, and sparked discussion about how it fits into the city’s school reform drive. The movie opened Friday in select Connecticut theaters, including the Criterion.
Drury, a high school senior, identified with the students in the movie, though her story has a more hopeful ending than the one she saw on screen.
On screen, she watched the tales of five students who, frustrated with the offerings of their mainstream public schools, try their luck in lotteries for public charter schools. The narrative centers on kids with uncertain futures, one whose father died from drugs, another whose parents never finished high school. The film sets up the viewer to root for the kids in a climactic scene as they wait for their numbers to be pulled so they can escape from a system that’s failing them. The viewer watches as one girl, crestfallen, fails to make the randomized cutoff.
The movie offers a heartbreaking view of the challenges these children face—and a broad-brushed solution. It paints teachers unions as downright diabolic. The only way out of a failing system that bad teachers have run into the ground, it argues, is to win a highly competitive admissions process at an elite charter school. The assumption: If these kids don’t get into a KIPP school, or a charter boarding school, then they’ll be doomed.
Drury said as she watched the film, she identified with the kids. Earlier this year, she was waiting for Superman, too. As a high school junior, she was stuck in a notoriously low-performing transitional high school for kids who get booted from mainstream schools. The school, New Horizons School for Higher Achievement on Hallock Avenue in the Hill, suffered sky-high truancy rates.
“It was horrible—no textbooks, no supplies,” Drury said. “I can’t name 10 things that I learned from one school year.”
Drury said she landed at New Horizons after being kicked out of Wilbur Cross due to poor attendance. After one year at New Horizons, she sought desperately for a way out. Through the city’s school choice program, she applied in the spring to three well-reputed, small-scale high schools: New Haven Academy, High School in the Community and Coop (Cooperative Arts and Humanities Interdistrict Magnet).
Drury moved to New Haven five years ago from Bridgeport. In applying to a better school, Drury said, she was “trying to get out of New Haven and make something from myself.” If she graduates, she’ll be the first one in her family to finish high school.
Her own story was featured in a documentary called Lost In Translation made by fellow teens at Youth Rights Media. Waiting For “Superman”, which is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also made An Inconvenient Truth, mirrored her story in some ways.
In Guggenheim’s film, the kids are shown waiting, fingers crossed, as a school official rolls a lottery ball, or draws slips of paper from a hat. Drury said her process was “even tougher.” New Haven has a closed application process. Applicants submit paperwork, but don’t see a public drawing. Drury equated the process to “playing phone tag” to see where you get into school.
Like one child in the film, she ended up fifth on a waiting list at one of her preferred schools, New Haven Academy. And as for some of the kids in the movie, Superman didn’t come. She never made it off the waiting list.
“It was a huge disappointment,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Here, however, her story diverges from the film’s projected storyline.
Her “horrible” public school, New Horizons, got dramatically overhauled this year as part of a citywide school reform drive. A new principal, Maureen Bransfield, arrived from an ACES program for troubled kids, and revamped New Horizons. She spread purple paint on the walls of the dingy cement bunker. She brought in a slew of new teachers, as well as students from the ACES program, which folded due to budget issues. The city started investing more in the school, including hiring two behavioral therapists who help kids with extra-curricular problems and even visit them at home.
Drury said the school got more resources: “now we have textbooks, brand new teachers.” It’s changed for the better, she said.
For another member of the audience, school reform activist and banker Jeff Klaus, the movie resonated in a different way.
Klaus (pictured) said the film “points out that there are still far too few schools that are excellent,” and the admissions process is mysterious. While New Haven is making strides with school reform, progress needs to move faster, he added.
Klaus is a founding member of a charter school of the type that the movie applauds. In 1998, Klaus was part of a group that set about founding a new charter school called Amistad Academy. Klaus said before setting up Amistad, his group met with David Levin and Mark Feinberg, who set up the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in 1994. A year later, Amistad opened with a new model based partly on KIPP, which is heralded in the film as a way to rescue Los Angeles kids from hopeless academic sinkholes.
Through a not-for-profit entity called Achievement First, the Amistad model has been replicated into a network of 17 public charter schools serving 4,500 students in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and Brooklyn, NY. Achievement First is now a nationally recognized charter group; it’s partnering with KIPP and Hunter College on a new teaching university in New York.
Students and teachers at Achievement First schools plan to gather together during the school day to watch the film as a community, Klaus said.
Much is made in the documentary about how hard these high-performing charter schools are to get into. There are applicants for a small number of seats, sometimes a ratio of 20 to 1. Their lots are pulled in public lotteries.
By comparison, New Haven’s admission process has become cloudier, Klaus noted.
Klaus said like the KIPP schools, Amistad used to hold public drawings for admissions lotteries. After doing so for three years, Amistad merged its admissions process with the city’s, Klaus said. The goal was for kids applying through the public school district to see Amistad as one of their options, instead of having to seek out a separate lottery.
Achievement First runs five public charter schools in the city.
Under the closed lottery system, the number of students who apply to those schools is not made public, according to Klaus. While he’s no longer involved directly with Achievement First, he is married to its CEO and president, Dacia Toll, and is heavily involved in school reform.
Klaus said with an open lottery draw, parents are able to “trust the system.” The current system is less transparent.
Parents scramble to get their children into select few schools, including charters as well as high-performing neighborhood schools. At schools like Edgewood and Worthington Hooker, the process is anything but easy to understand. Parents get up in the wee hours of the morning to physically wait in line to get on a list, then are told to keep calling back to see if they’ve made the cut.
“People believe the system is rigged,” Klaus noted.
(Click here, here and here for stories on that topic.)
Klaus said the city is beginning to address some problems identified in the movie, through a new school reform drive that brought in portfolio management of schools, will build leadership skills, and is introducing a new way of evaluating teachers based on student progress.
“The issue for New Haven is no longer are we going in the right direction,” Klaus said, “but how fast we are going. Velocity matters. We need to urgently close this gap.”
In a brief public discussion following the film, several people echoed that call.
Jerome Richardson, a senior at Wilbur Cross High School, said the movie “opened my eyes” to an urgent need to make schools better.
“If you have to wait to get a better education, what’s the point of sending your kid to school?” he asked the room.
Damaris Rau, New Haven’s director of instruction, stood up to defend the district’s reform drive.
“It was a great film,” she said. “It’s a shame that any student would have to wait in a lottery.”
But New Haven is making “solid promises,” she said—including a soon-to-be-rolled out program called Promise, which will offer college scholarships to district kids who keep up good grades and finish high school. The city’s new teacher evaluation program was arrived at “collaboratively”—not with unions standing in the way, as depicted in the film.
“Nobody wants a bad teacher—not the union, not the parents, not the administrators,” she reassured the crowd.
She closed with a pitch for the crowd to get involved with the city’s reform effort. “Visit our website,” she urged.
Post a Comment
Comments
posted by: Fonseca on October 18, 2010 12:55pm
“It’s pretty hard to teach a kid who has been raised by the television, when he hasn’t eaten breakfast, when the family has been kicked out of their home, when he has to work a job to help feed the siblings, when the parents have just gotten divorced or lost both of their jobs, when no-one at home speaks English, or when their most alluring role models are dope dealers, pimps, or gangsta rappers. Imagine, then, trying to teach a room full of such trauma cases. […] If you want better schools, work for more stable incomes, families and neighborhoods.”
- Robert Freeman (via AZspot), addressing the biggest problem our modern educational system faces: not bad teachers or bad schools, but the downward spiral of poverty and the decimation of the middle class.
posted by: L.Dixon on October 18, 2010 1:59pm
“Without a vision the people will perish” It appears that many African American’s in New Haven lost the vision that education would save the poor amongst us from the horrors of slavery and ignorance. For some it did but for others who did not learn the lessons. They were left behind in prisons of doubt,dispair,and rage against a community whom they failed. So how do we start to educate our selvies. We begin with the truth. African American can educate our own people. Superman never visited our communities or saved anyone in it. The Legacy of Slavery still
exist,and Carter G. Woodson was correct in his
analysis of the mis-education of blacks. Learning to READ AND WRITE will set us free and the lessons of Booker T. Washington are still needed to-day and we must teach our own children the visions of our ancestors.
We must set our own selves FREE.
posted by: Cross Teacher on October 18, 2010 3:48pm
At what point are parents and students responsible for their education? According to the article, Drury was sent to New Horizons because of truancy problems at Cross. Cross has its problems, but it has the strongest honors and AP programs in the city. A student could get an excellent education at Cross, if he or she just showed up.
It seems disingenuous to compare this student’s situation with the students in “Waiting for Superman.”
posted by: streever on October 18, 2010 4:51pm
Cross Teacher:
Maybe you should watch the documentary about Petra.
Petra was an excellent student—until some pretty awful things at home happened.
A similar thing happened to me in high school, and luckily my teachers were dedicated enough and aware enough to pull me aside, ask what the heck was going on at home to cause the sudden change, and then help me get my act back together.
However, Wilbur Cross, well-known for using out of school suspensions as it’s first & last punishment, simply pushed an earnest, inspiring, motivated, and challenged student into a so-called transitional school to nowhere.
I’m extremely glad that the city is moving to improve that school and the quality of education there, but as a teacher, can you HONESTLY defend the institution she was first put in? No books. No real classes. Just 5 students sitting in a room waiting for a bell to ring.
No opportunity to transition out. Constant encouragement to just drop out & get a GED at Gateway.
That is not an acceptable answer, and I hope that as a teacher, you agree.
posted by: Threefifths on October 18, 2010 5:28pm
I saw this move and it was just show one side.In fact check out what teachers have to say.
This teacher reacts to seeing “Waiting for Superman”
What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by point.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-superman-got-wrong-point.html
For another member of the audience, school reform activist and banker Jeff Klaus, the movie resonated in a different way.
A Banker.I told all of you that the school reform is load with corporate ... What he should do is clean up the cesspool that is in his industry.I wonder if he works for one of these banks.
Bankers Ignored Signs of Trouble on Foreclosures
By ERIC DASH and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Published: October 13, 2010
Under the closed lottery system, the number of students who apply to those schools is not made public, according to Klaus. While he’s no longer involved directly with Achievement First, he is married to its CEO and president, Dacia Toll, and is heavily involved in school reform.
Why should he have to be involved directly with Achievement First.The corporatist money that is being made off the backers of the poor is still in the family.Does his wife school have a teachers union. For the teachers who work there if it doesn’t you teachers better form one or this could happen to you.
First-grade teacher Sauda Johnson docked $9,700 for missing two days of work at charter school
BY Rachel Monahan
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, October 7th 2010,
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/10/07/2010-10-07_teach_out_for_2_days_docked_9g.html
I am going to say it again and again.This school reform is nothing more that a profit for
the corporate vampire hedge funders.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-and-“superman”-school-predators
I hope that all who saw this movie.Will go see these movies that show the other side.
http://www.waitingforsupermantruth.org/
P.S. I almost forgot.you had CEO Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone in the movie talk about how bad the public school system is.Now bear in mind tis is the school that good old President Obama wants to model all of the public school systems after.He better think again .Check this out.
Friday, October 08, 2010
Amsterdam News: charter school (Harlem Children’s Zone) Not Making the Grade
Charter school not making the grade
By Nayaba Arinde,
Amsterdam News Editor
and
By Cyril Josh Barker, Amsterdam News Staff
Published: Thursday, October 7, 2010
http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2010/10/amsterdam-news-charter-school-harlem.html
Now bear in mind mr.Canada school don’t have union teachers.So What happen?
posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on October 18, 2010 6:16pm
Fonseca,
Excellent quote, thanks for sharing.
Improvements in school facilities, increased qualification of teachers, more effective curriculum, better structured days, and integration of newly discovered material will always be needed. However, the most productive thing we can do with our funds is support development of economic opportunity for people of all skill and education levels. When families stabilize, the children will be in a better position to succeed in school. If neighborhoods are made up of sizable populations of unstable families, there are a million ways for a child to get caught up.
We need to forget about individuals for a second and do what is best for the long term vitality of New Haven as a place. A healthy New Haven is one that attracts people, creates a sense of stability, opportunity, safety and facilitates meaningful interactions between diverse groups of people. An unhealthy New Haven is one that exports young talent through misguided investment in education, and only attracts new people to the neighborhoods that are already successful.
To create a healthy New Haven we have to abandon the misguided policies for the last several decades. Giant sky scraper apartment buildings (360 State), mono-functional specialty buildings (Winstanley’s buildings), and single family houses (Dell Drive in Quinnipiac Meadows) cannot be the focus of development in the city. We have to employ the design principles of inherent adaptability with more modestly scaled buildings that maintain density, which can support nearby retail. The neighborhoods that suffer the most from lack of investment are the neighborhoods that have the best adaptive buildings in them. The key to “reforming education” will be to attract a large portion of the middle class back into the city by taking what is currently seen as blight and make its full potential realizable to the public. The multi-family houses, small apartment buildings, and mixed use buildings in this city are great for creating affordable, private, spacious and attractive housing if we would just stop being so fascinated by shiny new large scale, big block development.
Fair Haven, as an example, currently has a population of about 14,000, but it could easily and comfortably support a population of 20-25,000 people. That increased population would represent more tax dispersion ie lower taxes, more eyes of the street, more people to shop and support low skill service jobs, and enough school kids to support all the new schools.
posted by: Cross Teacher # 2 on October 18, 2010 6:28pm
Streever
Your blanket statements about Wilbur Cross show that you have not set foot in there during class (5 students waiting for the bell???). There are books, classrooms, dedicated teachers and high-achieving students. And yes, there are students who skip class and cause disturbances and we try our best to get them back on track, using out of school suspensions as a last resort. I challenge you to come spend a day there and see the whole picture.
...
posted by: Maybe Me on October 18, 2010 9:39pm
Drury’s have been graduating from high school for a long time. Drury’s with serious family problems have been graduating high school for a long time. I know because I am one.
Yes, some Drury’s have dropped out (my brother being one), but dammit, she isn’t the first in the Drury family to graduate…she may be the first in her immediate family, but we Drury’s are a hardy lot.
Welcome to the real world, sister.
posted by: Threefifths on October 18, 2010 10:55pm
I like this point of view.
The Myth of Charter Schools November 11, 2010 Diane Ravitch.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/
posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on October 18, 2010 11:22pm
Cross Teacher #2,
I could be wrong but I think Streever was referring to the transitional school on Hallock Ave, New Horizons. If he was in fact referring to Cross, then I agree with your comment.
3/5s,
I’m with you on the Charter Schools - they’re terrible. Their scale is unsustainable, and useless given the number of students we need to educate. They are funding with public money, yet operate as private institutions. And they do not address the core issue with education in this country, they are just the new version of Magnet Schools. Magnet schools were great when they first started, then the underlying issues ate away at them. Same will happen to Charters.
posted by: RealEdReform on October 19, 2010 6:17am
I’m concerned about the uniformly pro-charter coverage in the New Haven Independent. While charter organizations like Green Dot, a group that creates unionized charter schools with some success, have a lot to recommend them and while there is plenty to criticize in our public schools, I’m amazed at the lack of balance in reporting. Not all charters are created equal. And many of the assumptions on which they are based are simply unsustainable on a large-scale or flat-out bad for education. New, untested, inexperienced, and unprepared teachers, even if they’re willing to work 12 to 15 hour days, do not get the same results as more experienced teachers. Nor is a model based on a two to five year turnover in staff, largely because no one can make a career out of 15-hour days forever, one I’d want my kids to be educated in. For more on the ways in which charters get it wrong, read Diane Ravitch and Debra Meier’s blog, Bridging Differences, and the former’s latest book. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/ Read Anthony Cody’s blog, Living in Dialogue. http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/
Why isn’t the Independent asking questions and exploring criticisms rather than just accepting the charter view of the world?
posted by: Threefifths on October 19, 2010 10:08am
posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on October 18, 2010 11:22pm
3/5s,
I’m with you on the Charter Schools - they’re terrible. Their scale is unsustainable, and useless given the number of students we need to educate. They are funding with public money, yet operate as private institutions. And they do not address the core issue with education in this country, they are just the new version of Magnet Schools. Magnet schools were great when they first started, then the underlying issues ate away at them. Same will happen to Charters.
You as always hit the nail on the head.Also did you know that Charter Schools have a high rate of counseling out students who are failing or have behavior problems.and were to you think they go back to.The public school system.Also I have had parents tell me that in some Charter schools the failing and behavior problem students are force to wear a different color uniform from the other students.And are some time tease buy the other students.Bottom line for me is that charter schools are a sham. They are set up by private companies and hedge fund pimps to put public education out of business and make money off of the poor.The Cities across the country support them because they eliminate unions and thus, pension costs. Government also likes the idea because they now become the good guy. The government can then washes its hands of responsibility for educating the children and comes in to close down failing schools instead of taking the responsibility to create successful public schools.
posted by: Elisa on October 19, 2010 10:19am
I have to agree with RealEdReform. Why doesn’t anyone ask Achievement First about their students’ SAT or AP scores? They aren’t nearly as high as those of Cross students, but we never see that reported anywhere.
Also, why don’t more people acknowledge the self-selection that, as Fonseca noted, naturally gives charter schools an edge?
If we want to “fix” schools, we need to be honest about what works and why.
posted by: streever on October 19, 2010 1:25pm
Hopkins is correct, CT#2. You have misread my comment, which refers to the conditions Petra experienced at the school she wanted out of, the so-called “transitional” school.
If you are offering a serious invitation to visit Cross and see how school is conducted, I will happily take you up on it. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
I don’t think Cross is a bad school, for the record, but I do think that the disciplinary practices need major work. I do know some of the teachers there, and think they are dedicated and do excellent work.
However, the principals habit of using at-home suspension as first & last resort is a horrible failure of the administration of the school.
posted by: streever on October 19, 2010 1:29pm
JH, 3/5ths:
I’m (largely) with you on the issue of Charter Schools not being the be-all end-all. I have friends who teach at Charter Schools who would never claim they are the be-all end-all. Some of them are excellent, and while there may be underlying problems, that doesn’t mean that those ones aren’t doing great work.
What is difficult about this problem is that the public schools have problems not due necessarily to a lack of funds, but due to entrenched and inept administration and bureaucracy.
The individuals running and working at Charter Schools are pursuing an admirable goal of positively impacting the lives of children, in a way that they know will prove successful for at least some of those children.
I’m sure there are other ways they could try to accomplish this, but I applaud them for doing what they are doing, and think they should keep going. The only alternative I see is for them to sit back and await the public school system to be reformed from the ground up.
posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on October 19, 2010 7:32pm
Streever,
Friends of mine who transferred to Charter Schools during middle school said that much of it was remedial for them and they could easily do the work. Their parents took them out of the public school because my friends were getting in trouble, fighting, arguing with teachers and performing poorly. Unfortunately, the issue wasn’t the school, it was the neighborhood dealers and near daily beatings they experienced in their neighborhoods that were causing behavioral issues. The Charter School did very little for them. I’m not going to assume that its the same with everyone, but clearly the underlying problems have nothing to do with schools.
Schools are a product of community demand. A healthy, prosperous, diverse community has thriving schools. The idea that we can manufacture good schools through funding is as new and as omnipotent an idea as thinking that public housing projects are a viable way of addressing affordable housing shortages.
The practice of choosing where to live based on the school district performance is a very recent phenomenon that has had extremely adverse effects on the housing market, which just worsens other school districts performance by concentrating certain incomes, which are connected to school performance instead of allowing organic mixed income neighborhoods.
We cannot focus on individual success, we have to support successful places that people care about and invest in. As a natural result of successful places comes schools that have students who perform well.
posted by: Threefifths on October 19, 2010 11:18pm
posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on October 19, 2010 7:32pm
The practice of choosing where to live based on the school district performance is a very recent phenomenon that has had extremely adverse effects on the housing market, which just worsens other school districts performance by concentrating certain incomes, which are connected to school performance instead of allowing organic mixed income neighborhoods.
I think this proves your point.
Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback.
posted by: Cross Teacher #1 on October 20, 2010 8:54am
(Not that I’m the #1 Cross Teacher; I am only the first one to comment on this article.)
Streever,
Cross is well-known for an incident this past winter in which the district told the administration to come down on cell phone users and hat wearers. If you read the other articles in the Independent since then, you would see that that adminsitration has turned over and that the school is working on implementing a teacher-led restructuring which is designed to give much more support to the students and reach out to parents.
Also, Cross does not have the authority to “send” any student to any other school. That is something that has to happen on the district level.
Most importantly, nowhere in my post do I defend New Horizons or the decision for Ms. Drury to go there. Nowhere do I say that she deserves to go to a school with no books.
