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NEW ORLEANS — “At the count of three, I need talking to stop, everyone sitting straight. Uno, dos, tres.” With these words, math teacher Melanie Boulet steers her eighth-grade students back to the task at hand. They are preparing for the upcomingLEAP test — Louisiana’s version of ISTEP — and there’s not a minute to waste.
For almost 100 minutes, students tackle one practice problem after another, working out equations in their heads or showing their steps on the whiteboard. Boulet allows for only a few pleasantries such as NCAA brackets and favorite flavors of Starburst, the subject of one of the story problems. No one is off the hook.
This is what educational reform looks like at the classroom level. During a recent visit to the Arthur Ashe Charter School in New Orleans, I observed effective teaching and learning and met a principal committed to the notion that every student deserves a world-class education.
Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had one of the worst public school systems in the country. Today it is rebuilding from scratch as a result of a historic double whammy: the 2003 Louisiana law creating a special district to take over failing schools and the 2005 storm, which washed away schools and defenders of the status quo. With Indiana poised to take over as many as 23 failing schools soon, there are lessons to be learned here.
In New Orleans, the Recovery School District runs 33 traditional schools and oversees 37 charter schools that are publicly financed and privately run. Four traditional schools and 12 charters are what remain of Orleans Parish Schools. In both districts, charters are setting the reform tone.
They are not “creaming” the best students to inflate test scores, a claim often leveled by critics to play down charter school success stories. That occurred decades ago when the middle class left the public school system to attend New Orleans’ abundant private and parochial options.
At Arthur Ashe, a K-8 school with 240 students, 90 percent are on free or reduced-price lunch; 95 percent are black; most live in neighborhoods riddled with drugs or crime. One girl just lost her father in a shooting near the school. It’s standard urban school stuff and all irrelevant when it comes to expectations.
Mastery is expected from every student every day, and it’s made possible by an orderly environment and the use of data to drive instruction, said Principal Aqua Stovall. Math and language arts are so vital that those periods last 100 minutes.
No student “graduates” from Boulet’s math class without an “exit ticket” that verifies mastery of the skill taught that day. No exit ticket? The student returns in the afternoon for 45 more minutes of instruction while peers enjoy enrichment classes such as art, cooking or dance.
Boulet, who taught 17 years in urban and rural public schools, became a believer in just a year at Ashe. “I would say that students are learning 95 out of the 100 minutes each day,” she said. The school’s approach works for many reasons, not the least of which is “consistency between classes: same expectations/same consequences all around.”
The school uses the Urban Excellence Framework developed by the not-for-profit New Leaders for New Schools, which trained Stovall and others for the unique challenges of inner-city education. The framework consists of principles that studies show cause dramatic gains in achievement:
Rigorous goals for what students should know and be able to do at the end of each class period for every course at every grade level.
Consistency in how students are taught. Instructional practices, classroom culture and student routines are uniform from room to room.
Instruction modified regularly based on data and supplemented by individual intervention for students who are behind.
Monitoring and continuing education of staff. Teachers are observed almost daily by the principal or member of the school leadership team.
Ashe made the largest test score gains in New Orleans in 2008-09 and had the fifth highest scores of schools in the recovery district. No doubt the trend will continue with this spring’s LEAP. The principal and teachers expect nothing less.
