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At P.R. Harris, Exercises in Frustration

About This Series Carol Rankin passes out homework papers to her seventh-grade class. (By Susan Biddle – The Washington Post) Harris Educational Center Patricia Roberts Harris Educational Center, in Southeast Washington, is struggling to overcome teacher shortages, lack of substitutes and funding delays. The Post followed the school's progress.

By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 2, 1998; Page A1

A blackboard schedule in first-period English said it was time to read "Home Boy," a novel about a Caribbean immigrant drifting aimlessly through high school. But in this District classroom, only teacher Carolyn Rankin, her voice clear, one hand on her hip, was actually reading.

Before her, 20 seventh-graders sat in ragged rows, following the words in thin, worn copies of a book that seemed to describe some of their own learning hurdles.

"Eddie didn't return to school for the rest of the month, and Marcus tried to stay out of trouble. He still hated Social Studies," Rankin read. "They were studying American government, and the words were as long and confusing as the nonsense his tutor back home had tried to teach him."

A few eyes stared into space and a boy fidgeted with his pen as the teacher struggled to hold the students' attention in what passes for a literature lesson at Patricia Roberts Harris Educational Center in far Southeast Washington.

Rankin says many of her students, who range in age from 12 to nearly 16 but are clustered in the same class, lack the skills to take turns reading aloud. Most would stumble frequently over the story, she said, and probably would stop cold at such words as "tenement," "immigration" and "priority." Their classmates would make fun or grow more distracted.

That's why, this 24-year teaching veteran explained, she has resigned herself this year to reading to her students, rather than helping them learn to read for themselves.

"When they read aloud, it is very time-consuming," Rankin said, though she hopes the youngsters will read a book on their own this spring. "A lot of them have never read a novel from cover to cover. At least this way, they'll have been through a whole novel."

Rankin's situation is a dispiriting illustration of the academic paralysis that afflicts so many public school students in the nation's capital. D.C. schools Chief Executive Julius W. Becton Jr. was hired 14 months ago to cure just this type of systemic dysfunction and to reverse years of widespread educational failure. He and his new, tough-talking chief academic officer, Arlene Ackerman, have vowed to improve classroom teaching and, for the first time, hold back students who are not performing up to par on nationally recognized math and reading tests.

The retired Army general and his recruit from the Seattle school system preach the importance of new teacher training and materials, and they warn that they will judge city educators by how much their students progress when they take the latest round of achievement tests in April.

Ackerman has adopted Becton's mantra: "Failure is not an option."

But with the school year half over, many teachers at P.R. Harris and other public schools in the District say success still seems a distant dream. Students who already lag years behind spend class time listening to their teacher read, instead of the other way around. New training and supplies have barely appeared in the classrooms. A shortage of teachers persists, as well as other problems.

Rankin does not assign "Home Boy" to her students as homework, for example, because she has only 30 copies to share with her five English classes. These are all that remain of the 150 copies purchased for seventh-graders at the school six years ago. Even if she had enough copies, most students couldn't navigate the novel themselves, she said. And many probably would ignore the assignment, as they do other work she gives them.

"That's the problem with homework," Rankin said. "It just is not returned the way it should be."

P.R. Harris, on the edge of Oxon Run Park, has some of the lowest test scores in the city's 77,000-student school system and is one of 21 schools ordered by Ackerman to improve scores by 10 percent this year or risk having its administrators and teachers reassigned. Its principal was replaced in August by Theodore Hinton, an award-winning former assistant principal from the highly regarded Hine Junior High School on Capitol Hill.

The school serves nearly 900 students from pre-kindergarten through ninth grade, 88.5 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The youngsters live in the surrounding apartment complexes. Many carry the scars of urban American problems – teenage pregnancy, neighborhood violence and crime, unemployment, parents struggling with alcohol or drug addiction – with them each day through stern gray metal detectors at the school's front doors.

Hinton has won praise for bringing order and energy to the sprawling building. In January, he launched weekly test-preparation seminars for the teachers and met with them in small groups to ask what additional resources they need.

"We can improve. We're gonna improve," he said at a recent faculty meeting. "In June, we're going to celebrate. And it's going to be on me, because, hopefully, I'll have a job for another year."

But in his office later, Hinton let exhaustion creep over his face. "It's a mammoth job," he said. "I look for a large number of kids who are not going to be promoted."

Upstairs, in Rankin's classroom, signs of promise are few and far between. Asked for an example of student work she was proud of, Rankin brought out a collage of magazine cutouts depicting characters and scenes from "Home Boy." Its creator – the only one in his class to turn in the assignment – can barely read or write, she said, so he dictated the simple picture captions to a friend.

"This made me feel good, because I saw that he was really interested in the story," Rankin said. "I'm trying, but, you know, I'm not a miracle worker."

Assistant Superintendent Helena N. Jones, who oversees P.R. Harris, is sympathetic to the challenges faced by Rankin and other D.C. schoolteachers but believes these challenges require new approaches, such as finding easier books that students can read on their own.

"Children get better at doing things with practice," Jones said. "If there is a case where what is being expected of students ... is not being [done] in the classroom, then the teacher must adjust her instruction."

Charles Coaston uses a globe in his geography class. (By Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)

The students from Rankin's first-period English class start their day next door in Homeroom 326, under the strict eye of social studies teacher Charles Coaston. Thirty students – 21 boys and nine girls – are listed on his attendance ledger, including several special education students who are enrolled in separate academic classes. The usual age for seventh-graders at the start of the school year is 12, but slightly more than half the students in this group are 13, 14 and even 15 years old – meaning they began school late, have been held back or both.

Nearly two-thirds of the students were far below grade level on the math and reading tests in October. If the strict new promotion standards are applied to seventh-graders this spring, they will need to do much better on the April tests to go on to eighth grade. Ten of the students are assigned to a remedial reading program while their classmates are in wood shop; a half-dozen have signed up for tutoring one day a week by volunteers from the Social Security Administration.

Coaston, like Rankin, has lowered his teaching expectations to meet his students' limited skills. Instead of lecturing or leading class discussions, he guides them page by page through their 10-year-old world geography text, stopping at each boldface vocabulary word, asking a student to read the definition of that word, then coaxing the class to write the word and copy the definition.

"A sphere or a ball with a map covering it is a globe," one boy laboriously read aloud recently. He pronounced the word "sphere" like "spear" and said "on" instead of "or."

Across the room, Keisha Jones, 12, was impatient. "S-ph-ere," she enunciated in a stage whisper, rolling her eyes and tossing her head. "We did this before," she said. "I did it."

"Write it down in your notebooks," Coaston said, encouragingly, pacing the room. Most of the students dutifully did. Some copied the definition incompletely, however, or misspelled several words. If they looked at their notes at home that evening – like Rankin, Coaston has only one set of this text for all his classes – they would have been hard-pressed to figure out what the vocabulary words meant.

One youth, seated up front near the blackboard, wasn't writing at all. Coaston had given him special permission to take a textbook home, the student explained, because he was failing the class and needed to study. Sitting sideways at his desk, playing with a glove he wore on one hand, the youth said he had written the vocabulary definitions at home a few days earlier and saw no need to do so again.

Halfway through the lesson, teacher's aide Karen Rush came in and scanned the desks for a student who needed help. Rush splits her time among all the sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms, working 30 hours a week and making $19,000 a year. She is 41 years old and is taking classes at the University of the District of Columbia to become a teacher.

Without a word to Coaston, she settled in next to Parrish Burrow, who was struggling to find the definition of one word the rest of the class had already located.

Parrish's mother, Ethel Burrow, was one of only five parents and grandparents from the class who showed up for a recent meeting with teachers. She said she was deeply worried about her son's future.

"I get on him all the time," said Burrow, who has registered her son for the free tutoring program. "I've been telling him for the longest time to go and get some help."

At the meeting, Rankin, Coaston and the other seventh-grade teachers painted a bleak picture of student performance. They told of reading for the students who couldn't, assigning homework that never got done and reviewing vocabulary words again and again – only to have students fail simple tests. Coaston, who, like nearly all staff members and students at the school, is African American, told the small group he was especially bothered by the failure of children from his own community.

"It breaks my heart when I see these black kids come to class [and] do nothing," he said. "This is our future. We need to do better. ... I go home and tear my hair out, because these are our kids."

Although other teachers voiced similar urgency, the school's assistant principal and a guidance counselor were strikingly neutral. They spoke generally of the need for cooperation and hard work, of drawing parents in rather than alienating them. They never mentioned Hinton's belief that many students will be held back if their scores do not improve.

"I hope that you don't think we were trying to be negative," Assistant Principal Gloria C. Smith said. "That is not what this meeting is about."

Later, Coaston said his remarks were fueled by frustration at the decline he has seen in students' skills during his 26-year career. They have fallen behind gradually, he said, and as their attention spans have shrunk, their behavior problems have multiplied. The school system, he added, doesn't seem to know what to do.

"We're supposed to hold them back if they can't read. We're supposed to," he said. "But then we got a memo last year saying we're failing too many kids. It's kind of a Catch-22. If you fail a whole bunch of kids, they say you're not doing your job. And if you pass a whole bunch of kids who aren't up to par, what are they saying? You're not doing your job."

Coaston consoles himself with brighter moments. He keeps business cards of two former students, now in their twenties, in his wallet. And he smiles when Keisha and some classmates break into an animated discussion about the solar system, showing they do understand what he taught them in Chapter 2.

Teaching would be easier, Coaston acknowledges, if he had textbooks for all his students. But he says the books he wanted were not available in April, when Becton asked schools to turn in complete book orders to avoid past problems with shortages. Smith, the assistant principal, said that she had been unaware of Coaston's problem and that he should have consulted her if he was concerned about what to buy.

"Each child should have a book," Smith said.

Rankin, she said, will be able to replenish her paperback supply after this school year. In the meantime, Smith and other school officials said, Rankin and other teachers should seek creative ways to get all students reading – trips to the library, photocopied poems and short stories, anything that captures and holds their interest.

Rankin said she would love for her students to read on their own. But most treat homework with a carelessness that was obvious the day they returned from Christmas vacation – and Rankin asked for the diaries they were supposed to keep during the break.

Augustine Hughes, a diligent student, proudly handed in a detailed pocket diary. The girl next to her offered up three pieces of notebook paper with two sentences written for each day. Keisha Jones hastily finished a one-sentence-a-day account. Jamar Drew gave Rankin one entry.

Sixteen other children shook their heads. They hadn't done the assignment.

Sometimes Rankin gives students time in class to catch up on unfinished work. One day in December, she allotted 10 minutes for old writing assignments, including a formal letter to Santa.

"And I want to see you actually writing," she said, interrupting two boys in animated conversation.

"There ain't no Santa Claus," one youth replied.

"Then you write, 'Dear Mom,'" Rankin cajoled, standing over the student until he put pen to paper.

But when she turned away, the pen came up. The youngster resumed dreamy bragging with his classmate about the cars and other luxuries they would buy for their mothers if they had $5 million. When Rankin told the students to close their journals, neither boy had written a word.

The students filed up to their teacher's desk and selected from the stack of tattered paperbacks. It was time to listen to "Home Boy."