“They’re the same kids, but our students have had a harder way to go,” said Geddis, the Maya Angelou principal.
Nearly 30 percent of Maya Angelou students have repeated a grade, and school officials say they frequently receive requests from other charters to take on their most troubled kids. The school, in the old Evans Junior High campus on East Capitol Street NE, also takes students from the D.C. juvenile justice system.
On this year’s city tests, 23 percent of Maya Angelou students were proficient or better in reading and 41 percent in math. Rates of growth in scores were also poor. The 76 percent re-enrollment rate was 14 points below a target established by the charter board.
Other charter schools with “alternative” missions also landed in the charter board’s third tier. Maya Angelou officials called the ranking unfair.
“We think it is essential that [the ranking system] does not discourage schools from working with the city’s most at-risk students,” said Lucretia Murphy, executive director of the See Forever Foundation, which operates Maya Angelou. “At present, we think a number of the measures do exactly that.”
Woodruff said the board is considering alternative rankings for schools with high at-risk populations.
One striking aspect of a visit to Maya Angelou is the presence of African American men, often scarce on other school staffs. Here it’s considered essential to help engage male students. A description of the “prep notes” and D.C. Prep’s rule of detention for not wearing a belt elicited laughter from a group of Maya Angelou teachers and administrators.
“Just to get them into the classroom is an accomplishment of sorts,” said reading coach Luther Sewell.
The academic program is infused with attempts to heal psychological wounds students carry through the doors. That means less of Doug Lemov and more of a social-emotional learning model pioneered by the University of Illinois. That model focuses on helping students learn to manage emotions, resolve conflicts and make ethical choices.
Maya Angelou’s day, like D.C. Prep’s, includes extra reading and math sessions to help students catch up. But the struggle here seems more acute.
In one morning class, Antoinette Brock works with sixth- and seventh-graders who read on fourth-grade level. They’d finished “A Raisin in the Sun” and were watching a scene from a video version of the Lorraine Hansberry play that deals, in part, with a black family’s plans to move into a white neighborhood. In the scene, a seemingly benign man from the white neighborhood association visits the Younger family and, after much hesitation, offers it money to stay away.
“What does ‘beating around the bush’ mean?” the teacher asks. There is silence.
“What about ‘sugarcoating’?” Again, no response.
Nick Michalopoulos, who teaches English at a Maya Angelou charter high school at the same location, said students often need a confidence boost. He said he challenges them: “Why can the kids in Northwest read ‘Othello’ and you think you can’t?”
Sewell, the reading coach, said too many public schools that serve disadvantaged students operate from a fear of failure.
“There is no fear of anything here,” he said. “There is only the fear of not trying.”
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