School's Zero-Tolerance Approach Is Credited for Minority Achievement
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 14, 2005
NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- When Amistad Academy students showed interest in a suggestive rap song, their teachers did not ban the music. Instead, they helped the students rewrite the lyrics to emphasize a very different message: "We like big books, and we cannot lie."
Putting a positive twist on the less savory aspects of youth culture is one of the unlikely techniques that have helped propel the New Haven public charter school to the forefront of a nationwide drive to close the "achievement gap" that separates minority students from white counterparts. The school's methods have been so successful that Amistad, whose student population is 97 percent black and Hispanic, is one of the highest-performing middle schools in Connecticut.
Founded in 1999 by Yale law students who wanted to tackle what principal Dacia Toll describes as "the number one civil rights issue in the nation," Amistad is attempting to replicate its success elsewhere. Over the past year, Amistad has spawned a new elementary school and middle school in New Haven, will open three campuses in New York City this fall and plans two more in 2006.
Amistad is part an informal network of "no excuses" schools challenging the notion that black and Hispanic students are doomed to perform at a lower level than their white and Asian American counterparts. Its educational philosophy is similar to that of the KIPP, or the Knowledge is Power Program, which now has more than 40 schools nationwide, including two in the District.
Key to the Amistad formula, teachers and students say, is an obsessive attention to detail and a highly regulated system of reward and punishment that keeps the 275 pupils focused on improving their academic performance. Students and parents are required to sign contracts promising to live up to school standards on dress, attendance and homework completion, as well as core values such as respect and hard work.
The school day begins with a rally known as "morning circle" at which students who have fallen short in one way or another are required to formally apologize to the rest of the school. Throughout the day, students are monitored relentlessly for minor disciplinary infractions that would pass unnoticed in most schools -- an untied shoelace or a grimace at a teacher.
"We fight the small battles so we don't have to fight the big ones," said Doug McCurry, the superintendent of Achievement First, a nonprofit organization established to supervise Amistad's expansion. "If you can stop them rolling their eyes at you, they are not going to curse at you."
McCurry compares the school's educational philosophy to the "zero tolerance" approach that has resulted in cleaner subway systems in New York and Washington. A favorite Amistad slogan is: "We sweat the small stuff."
The emphasis on discipline is combined with high academic expectations. All eighth-graders study algebra, and seventh-graders tackle works by Shakespeare and Toni Morrison.
Classroom walls are decorated with slogans such as "Education is Freedom," "Be a Star" and "Read, baby, read." All the students are dressed in blue shirts and tan trousers, except for one who has lost the "privilege" of wearing a standard Amistad shirt, and is wearing a white shirt instead.
"It's like real life," Toll said of the reward-and-punishment system. "Any society, including a street gang, provides its members with status symbols. In many cases, what is getting valued is drugs, sex and money. We have to control what is valued in society. To get these kids to learn, we have to get them to believe that it is cool to do well in school."
Amistad, Toll explains, is trying to turn the values of the street upside down. The school teaches students that it is "cool" to do your homework, "uncool" to be a bully.
"We don't accept any excuses," said Stephen Buchner, who taught at an unruly elementary school in the District before transferring this year to Achievement First's new elementary school in New Haven, a sister school to Amistad. "When a teacher is speaking, everybody has to have their eyes on the teacher. That starts from Day One. If it doesn't happen, there is a consequence."
A peek inside Kim Mowery's sixth-grade science class illustrates some of the techniques used by Amistad teachers. Prowling the classroom like a drill sergeant, she barks out questions to the students to determine how much they have absorbed from the previous lesson. Correct answers are rewarded with red raffle tickets, part of an elaborate incentive system that can result in extra field trips or punishment such as more homework.
"Come on, people -- we are losing time," she snaps, as students struggle to explain the functioning of the human eye. "You have to earn the right to visit the lab."
To thrive at Amistad, students often cut themselves off from friends and neighbors. "It's hard to stay in touch with other friends once you are here," says Alexandria Blackwood, 13, whose prize possession is a special eighth-grade pin, one of Amistad's highest honors. Students who wear the pin are permitted to eat lunch in a special room and walk school hallways unmonitored.
What is surprising is that the students seem to buy into the system and strive for small status symbols, such as the pin. "In the beginning, it was hard to adjust," said Laqueria Davis, an eighth-grader. "I would snap at people and be sent to the dean's office. But you get used to it."
As a charter school, Amistad is part of the New Haven public school system but has greater freedom than regular schools to recruit teachers and establish its curriculum and disciplinary standards. But it is required to admit students by lottery, rather than cherry-pick those most likely to succeed. Last year, there were 500 applications for 70 slots.
Critics say, however, that the lottery provides an initial screening of students. Only the most motivated parents apply for openings at the school, they suggest. Some have also questioned whether the school can replicate itself elsewhere as it tries to expand. McCurry acknowledges that "the limiting factor" is the ability to recruit top-notch teachers.
Standardized test results suggest that Amistad students are catching up with, and in many cases overtaking, white students. In 2003, for example, 81 percent of Amistad eighth-graders achieved "mastery" in reading on the state test, compared with 31 percent of students in New Haven and 67 percent statewide. Two years earlier, in sixth grade, the same students had lagged behind their statewide counterparts by 38 percent to 64 percent.
Over the past five years, McCurry said, Amistad and similar schools have changed the nationwide conversation about closing the achievement gap -- "from if it can be done to how it can be done."