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Troubled School Improves, Retains Staff

About This Series Theodore Hinton, principal of P.R. Harris Educational Center. (File/By James A. Parcell – The Washington Post) P.R. 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 progress.

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 17, 1998; Page D1

They're going to keep their jobs after all.

The administrators and teachers of Patricia Roberts Harris Educational Center in far Southeast Washington – for the last year under the threat of being out of work if student Stanford 9 Achievement Test scores did not rise – will be back next year.

And the boss got a promotion.

With test scores up an average of 12 percent throughout the school this past spring compared with the year before, with student attendance rising and with other improvements at the struggling school, D.C. School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman decided this month to give Acting Principal Theodore Hinton his job on a permanent basis.

"It was up and down, I have to say, but it's over now," said Hinton, who came to the school last August from the highly regarded Hine Junior High School on Capitol Hill, where he was an award-winning assistant principal. "We really didn't know what would happen."

That made for a tense year at P.R. Harris, located on the edge of a park near the southern tip of Washington. It educates nearly 900 students from pre-kindergarten through ninth grade, 88.5 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

With some of the lowest test scores in the city's 77,000-student school system, P.R. Harris was one of 21 schools ordered by Ackerman to improve test scores by 10 percent last year or risk having its principals and teachers reassigned. In 1996, those 21 schools were designated "specially targeted assisted schools" that would receive special attention and resources to improve performance.

Ackerman wound up "reconstituting" – or removing the staff – at Shadd Elementary School in Southeast, and also at the Alternative Education Department. She said some principals – she would not say how many or which ones – have been given another year to improve their schools or face removal in 1999.

When Hinton arrived, he set new discipline rules and began patrolling the halls to establish order from chaos.

Like the principals of seven other "specially targeted assisted schools," Hinton adopted an experimental program from the National Institutes of Health that teaches reading through a combination of phonics and "whole language," and by using games, songs and repetition.

He set up after-school and Saturday classes and other programs for students who needed extra help. He arranged partnerships with American University and George Washington University for their students to come help his students learn to read.

Ultimately, the effort helped. "It works when you set clear goals," he said.

In May 1997, 46.5 percent of students scored below basic in reading on the Stanford 9 tests, and 61.5 percent scored below basic in math. This past April, according to just-released scores, 39.3 percent of students were below basic in reading, with 52.8 percent below basic in math.

With new rules on student promotion, Hinton had expected large numbers of students to be held back. In fact, potentially thousands of students across the system could have been held back according to promotion rules first issued a year ago, though they have changed several times since then.

It is still unclear how many students will be kept back across the city, including at P.R. Harris, because grades from the largest summer school program are still being calculated, according to school officials.

Decisions on promotion will be made at individual schools, taking into account a number of factors, according to Deputy Superintendent Elois Brooks.

But the number of students who will be held back at P.R. Harris is not likely to be as large as Hinton once feared, he said.

During the year, Hinton faced problem after problem. The school was two teachers short when classes started last fall. One whom he hired quit.

Early on, teachers had to spend their own money for supplies and some programs were put on hold because Hinton didn't receive all the money he was supposed to from downtown.

"I can't tell you how difficult it has been," he said.

A visit by Ackerman in the spring did not go well.

In fact, she recalled, "I had a fit. ... People must have been saying that I was on the warpath."

What so upset her, she said, was that students were being taught in large open spaces with little partition. That was a result of the school's architecture: P.R. Harris is the biggest of a few dozen "open space" schools built in the District in the 1970s.

Each floor is a vast area separated into classrooms by portable dividers that do not block noise. Open space education has been discredited, and some schools have since built separate classrooms.

P.R. Harris has not – and the class dividers are often minimal. Minnie Bartelle's first-grade class was located around the corner from a hallway where hundreds of children are served lunch every day. About 11 a.m., a wall of noise would rise that forced Bartelle to shout to be heard.

As students in the hallway munched on sloppy Joes and coleslaw, Bartelle screamed to her 24 students, "Is a ghost real?"

"No," the students shouted.

"Give yourself a round of applause," she roared back.

Such is not Ackerman's preferred teaching style.

"You've got to give kids some privacy – and teachers, too," she said. "They can't learn with so much noise. ... There are just some basic things we can do that won't cost us much, to help the learning environment."

She was so angry that she didn't wait to get back to the office to order changes.

"I got back in my car, got on the phone and called the facilities director and told him to do an assessment of the school," she said.

"It was totally unacceptable. There was no way a child could stay focused in that school. I told them I wanted partitions, and I wanted an estimate to do some minor facilities work to wall in some of the space, to create separate rooms."

Her reaction to the school, where officials say they struggle to maintain quiet so students can learn, left many there concerned that she would not retain Hinton.

But, in the end, she decided, he deserved to stick around.

Now Hinton is making plans for next year, extending his reform efforts, planning to establish more partnerships with organizations and schools.

He has developed an academic plan that he hopes will help improve grades and test scores up to 20 percent next year. And he wants to improve student attendance in the secondary grades to more than 92 percent. Last year attendence was in the 80th percentile. This past year saw an increase in faculty attendance to 97 percent from "much less," he said.

"I'm looking forward to the new year," he said. "Now that we know we'll be here, we can get moving."