Mission Possible

How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School

Eva Moskowitz, Arin Lavinia

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118239629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Strategies for making the schools we need that work for all kids

Eva Moskowitz (the founder and CEO of the Success Charter Network in Harlem) and Arin Lavinia offer practical, classroom-tested ideas for dramatically improving teaching and learning. Moskowitz and Lavinia reveal how a charter school in the middle of Harlem, enrolling neighborhood children selected at random, emerged as one of the top schools in New York City and State within three years. The results of the Harlem school were on a par with public schools for gifted students and elite private schools.

• Describes what can be accomplished when students and adults all work to focus on constant learning and performance improvement; DVD clips can be accessed using a special link included in the book.
• The Success Academies have been featured in two popular and widely distributed documentaries, Waiting for Superman and The Lottery
• Details the Success Academies' THINK Literacy curriculum, which produces dramatic results instudent's reading and writing skills

In addition to providing strategies and lessons for school leaders and teachers, Secrets of the Success Academies also serves as a guide for parents, policymakers, and practitioners who are passionate about closing the academic achievement gap.

Chapter One

Why?

What's Wrong with American Schools?

How can it be that in the United States more than a million teenagers—one in four—leave high school for the streets each year?¹

How can it be that more than 60 percent of all students and nearly 80 percent of black and Hispanic students in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade are reading and doing math below grade level?²

How can it be that a third of all fourth graders can't read at even a basic level?³

And why is it that things get worse the longer our students stay in school? Our nine-year-olds score in the top quarter on international tests in math, reading, and science. By age fifteen they've fallen to the bottom half.⁴

We used to be the world leader in graduating kids from high school. Now twenty-five of the world's thirty-four large industrialized nations have higher high school graduation rates than the United States.⁵

Not long ago we set the pace in sending students to college. Now we're thirteenth in the world—not because our college attendance rates have dropped, but because other countries have expanded opportunity and postsecondary capacity faster than we have.⁶

And it isn't just that we have more poor kids (one in five American kids grows up in poverty) and more minorities.⁷ The gaps in learning between rich and poor are lower in numerous other countries, many of which also have large numbers of minority and immigrant students.

Sadly, we kid ourselves into thinking that this is an inner-city problem or a poverty problem or a black problem. The reality is that mediocrity is a pandemic in American education. Our schools, as philanthropist Bill Gates put it in a recent speech to the National Urban League, “range from outstanding to outrageous.”⁸

The management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, in an analysis of the 2006 results for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to fifteen-year-olds in dozens of countries, concluded, “The facts here demonstrate that lagging achievement in the United States is not merely an issue for poor children attending schools in poor neighborhoods; instead, it affects most children in most schools.”⁹

McKinsey also calculated that GDP would have been between $1 trillion and $2 trillion higher each year if the United States had closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of such top-performing nations as Finland and Korea.

Scholars from Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of Munich recently compared the math scores of American eighth and ninth graders with the scores of kids around the world. Their conclusion: “The percentages of high-achieving math students in the U.S.—and most of its individual states—are shockingly below those of many of the world's leading industrialized nations. Results for many states are at the level of developing countries.”¹⁰

According to the same study, only 6 percent of all U.S. students (and only 8 percent of white students) reached the advanced level. Sixteen countries, from Canada to Switzerland to Finland to Hong Kong to Taiwan, had two to four times that percentage of advanced students. “The only members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development … that produced a smaller percentage of advanced math students than the U.S. were Spain, Italy, Israel, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Chile and Mexico.”¹¹

In Massachusetts, our top state, 11 percent of students were advanced, but even if every American student knew that much math we'd still trail fourteen countries. “The lowest ranking states—West Virginia, New Mexico, and Mississippi—have a smaller percentage of high-performing students than do Serbia and Uruguay (although they do edge out Romania, Brazil, and Kyrgyzstan),” the study said. In Mississippi, only 2 percent of students with a college-educated parent scored at the advanced level.¹²

New research by Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas and Josh McGee of the Arnold Foundation explodes the myth that the problem is confined to inner-city schools and minority students. In an Education Next article titled “When the Best is Mediocre,” they compared the OECD test results with those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and concluded that students in ritzy Beverly Hills, California, who are approximately 85 percent white, 7 percent Asian, 5 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black, scored barely above average in math (53rd percentile), and those in Fairfax County, Virginia, an affluent suburb of the nation's capital, fell just below average (49th percentile).¹³

The picture is worse in big cities. Students in Washington DC stood at the 11th percentile compared with those in developed countries, in Chicago at the 21st percentile, and in New York City at the 32nd percentile. Not one of the twenty largest school districts—which enroll more than 10 percent of the nation's schoolchildren—was above the 50th percentile. Overall the results are disappointing “even in our best districts,” Greene and McGee concluded. The “rare and small pockets of excellence in charter schools and rural communities are overwhelmed by large pools of failure.”¹⁴

In a world where prosperity is almost entirely driven by brains, not brawn, we are losing the education race. We'll have to change our course dramatically if we are to have a prayer of recovering.

Learning algebra in ninth grade is not rocket science. But legions of American kids can't do it. Most public schools ask shockingly little of students. Rich, poor, or in between, our children are being permanently held back by the slipshod standards and mediocrity in our schools.

It's not just our children's futures that are at stake. As President Barack Obama has said repeatedly, “It's an economic issue when countries that out-education us today are going to out-compete us tomorrow.”¹⁵

Throwing Money at the Problem

Let's start with a close look at how we got into this predicament. Americans have been wringing their collective hands over the shortcomings of our public education system for a half century or longer. As a country, we've repeatedly thrown money at the problem and tried reform after reform to make schools better. Presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower (the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act) to Lyndon B. Johnson (Head Start, Title I) to Ronald Reagan (the A Nation At Risk report) to George W. Bush (the No Child Left Behind Act) all made passes at the problem but came up short.

In 1989 George H. W. Bush and the nation's governors (including Bill Clinton) pledged to make American schoolkids tops in the world in math and science by 2000; that didn't happen by a long shot. George W. Bush, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Congress decreed in 2002 that all students would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. That's not happening either.

No one can say we have not invested in education. We spend well over $10,000 a year, on average, educating each of the forty-nine million children and teens in public schools.¹⁶ No country in the world except Luxembourg spends that much. New York State spends roughly $20,000 per pupil, double the national average. We pay teachers more than $55,000, on average, with summers off.¹⁷ This pay is less than for other professions requiring graduate degrees, but 10 percent higher than the median household income in the United States.

Real spending (after inflation) on K–12 schools has doubled since Reagan was in the White House and quadrupled since John F. Kennedy's inauguration. (Still, it's sobering to realize that as a nation we spend almost two and a half times as much per prisoner as we do on each student.)¹⁸

We've expanded teaching and support staffs dramatically,¹⁹ cutting class sizes from twenty-five-to-one to sixteen-to-one. We've made some modest gains and trimmed the shameful dropout rates in some places (including New York City), but nothing has really budged the needle. The achievement gaps between white students and minority students have narrowed somewhat on the federal government's NAEP, which is given to a cross-section of thousands of students in a variety of states each year. A third of all fourth graders and a quarter of all eighth graders have below basic reading skills; in math, 9 percent of fourth graders and 16 percent of eighth graders scored below basic. Although black and Hispanic students have made progress in the past two decades, the gulfs between majority and minority students remain monumental. In math, almost half of all black eighth graders and two-fifths of Hispanic eighth graders fall below basic compared with one-sixth of white eighth graders.²⁰

Society blames poverty—Who could possibly expect black and brown kids and those from impoverished families to keep up with kids from affluent homes?—but that doesn't explain why children from privileged families are also doing poorly.

Most of the countries that are beating the pants off us—Singapore, South Korea, China, Finland, Belgium, and Canada among them—have a single education system and rigorous curriculum for all students. Singapore in particular puts us to shame. “Remember that in the early 1970s, less than half of Singapore's students even reached fourth grade. Today, Singapore ranks near the top,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted.²¹

We've got a crazy quilt of school districts, curricula, and standards that vary widely. Most standards are way too easy. No Child Left Behind was supposed to boost all schoolchildren to proficiency in reading and math, and to place highly qualified teachers in every classroom. Despite sharp increases in funding, the public schools have fallen far short of the lofty goals, and the U.S. Department of Education is now letting them off the hook. Although the 2002 law required every state to administer statewide tests in reading and math, it let each devise its own tests and use its own yardstick to measure results. This led to a misleading cascade of rosy test data that allowed politicians and educators to claim big progress with the same old sorry results. NAEP assessments told the real story, with a third of fourth graders read...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Praise for Mission Possible
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Video Clips
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Why?
• Chapter Two: How?
• Chapter Three: Who?
• Chapter Four: Fast
• Chapter Five: Rigor
• Chapter Six: Reading
• Chapter Seven: Writing
• Chapter Eight: Call to Action
• Endnotes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• Download CD/DVD content