Rhee Weighs Ideas to Fix 27 Schools

Still, parents and teachers at several of the schools -- including Roosevelt, Coolidge Senior High in Northwest, Woodson and Eastern senior highs in Northeast -- said they have decided to devise their own plans, which they said they hope Rhee will approve.

Terry Goings, Coolidge's PTA president, said he is leading an effort to hire as consultants the principal and assistant principal of Bedford Academy High School in New York to oversee improvements at Coolidge. Bedford Academy is a public school that specializes in turning low-income failing students into high achievers, its assistant principal Niaka Gaston said.

"We need a new start, a new mission and new curriculum," Goings said. Bedford Academy offers "a good program," he added. "I don't see [Rhee] turning it down."

Although specific plans and costs have not been determined, some changes are very likely regardless of the No Child Left Behind option chosen, Martin said. The system plans to beef up staff in all 27 schools and provide an array of teaching experts, including literacy and math specialists. The school day would be extended by an hour for reading and math, and Saturday and summer programs would be expanded.

Elementary schools could get an intervention program such as Direct Instruction, which provides scripted lessons to teachers. The program has been used in numerous urban districts, including Houston, Atlanta and Baltimore. Although it helped students with extremely low reading skills, the program has been less successful in schools where teachers resisted the scripted lessons, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.

George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, said he heard complaints from former D.C. teachers working with a similar program in other districts.

"They feel it moves the students too fast. It's guided by a script rather than your ability to assess whether the student is ready to move," he said. "Teacher input and teacher involvement would be critical to make sure any strategies put into place would be something they would buy into and would work."

Overage students -- including more than 200 15-year-olds in seventh grade -- would participate in Twilight, an intensive program of literacy and math instruction, Martin said. These students often are extremely disruptive, bully their much smaller peers and drop out, she said.

"They go to a whole different class with a whole different schedule," she explained. "It helps these children build skills so they will be successful in high school."

Darlene Williams, president of the PTA at Sousa Middle School in Southeast, said she supported Rhee's proposed focus on overage students but was not impressed with the other ideas. "What she's doing has already been done," Williams said. New school system leaders always "come from out of town implementing stuff that's already been implemented and not doing anything for the kids."

In high schools, Rhee is proposing to create three self-contained career-themed programs in each building. Each would have its own principal and staff. The themes include technology, science and early college for students who want to take simultaneous courses at the University of the District of Columbia.

Such "schools-within-a-school" have become fixtures in systems including those in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Charlotte, said Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools. The smaller classes and personal attention paid to students have in general reduced truancy and boosted graduation rates, he said, but academic achievement has made little improvement.

In the late 1990s, the D.C. school system used grants from the Education Department to establish career academies at several high schools. The academies never received the level of funding to follow the schools-within-a-school model by becoming self-contained with separate staffs, officials said.

Hampton, Roosevelt's PTA president, called the proposal "a good idea." He wants to expand Roosevelt's culinary arts, business, media and barbering/cosmetology academies. "Roosevelt is ready for that if it's going to be 100 percent funded."