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The View from Avon Avenue

September 2010

 

FAR FROM THE set of the Oprah show, a young teacher from Newark named Princess Williams had embarked on a profoundly different approach to repairing public education. For eighteen months, Williams had worked with school leaders Dominique Lee, Charity Haygood, and three other teachers and administrators preparing to take the helm of Avon Avenue School, one of the very worst in the state, in one of Newark’s poorest neighborhoods. Booker was right, they agreed, that the district urgently needed a systemic overhaul. But as teachers, they knew that transforming education would require far more than strict accountability, performance incentives, and heightened emphasis on data. They were intimately familiar with the challenges Newark children brought to the classroom, and they knew of no model for addressing them other than child by child, teacher by teacher, school by school, from the bottom up. As Booker, Zuckerberg, and Christie vowed on television to create a national model for turning around failing districts within five years, Williams, Lee, and Haygood resolved to commit their entire careers to Newark’s schools. They considered themselves reformers too, having arrived in the Newark school district initially through Teach for America. Princess Williams, who signed on as Avon’s lead kindergarten teacher, felt a sense of destiny about teaching Newark children.

Lee referred to Room 112, Williams’s kindergarten classroom, as “the future.” The door opened onto a room appointed with simple, homemade learning activities—a large calendar highlighting the date and day of the week, a chart displaying the day’s weather (clouds), Post-it notes in a repeating color pattern enumerating the days since school started. A clothesline stretched across the room, with student work hanging at child’s-eye level. On this day, the line displayed colored paper on which children had represented the numbers zero through ten in dots, stars, or blocks. Williams had written an enthusiastic remark on each.

Looking younger than her twenty-seven years, the small, pretty teacher wearing a rose-colored blouse over brown cropped pants commanded complete attention from twenty-three children seated before her on an alphabet rug. “We have a special visitor who would like to show you two new letters,” she announced with excitement. “Drumroll, please!”

The children rapidly and rhythmically slapped their legs, eyes focused with anticipation on Williams. The teacher reached dramatically behind a whiteboard and slowly, her dark eyes widening, revealed a white stuffed owl with brown speckles, holding a card bearing the letter O in its beak. There were oohs, ahhs, and wriggles of excitement.

“I want you to meet Echo,” said Williams, cuddling the fluffy toy in her lap. “What letter did he bring for us?” The class answered in unison. She then turned the card over and showed them a picture of an octopus. “O. Octopus. Aw,” everyone chanted. Then Williams made Echo disappear behind the whiteboard and emerge with a card displaying a G and a picture of a board game. “G. Game. Gih,” everyone said.

Williams noticed one girl not looking at Echo. Without raising her voice or breaking the mood, she said, “Sah’Jaidah, our eyes are looking at the letters so our brains all remember them and make a connection to the sound.” Sah’Jaidah looked immediately at Echo, who now was showing the class a K and a kite, followed by an H and a hat. Williams had the children hold their hands in front of their mouths to feel the hot air as they made the “h” sound.

It all appeared to unfold effortlessly, with the grace and pacing of ballet. But everything Williams did that day and every day was the result of serious thought, preparation, and even love. She knew from experience that learning represented a lifeline for every child seated before her. Her calling was to ensure that they loved it and craved it, starting now, at the beginning of kindergarten. She treated every moment of every class as an opportunity to infuse the ordinary with wonder—a special visit from Echo to light up a phonics lesson, a pause to create a sensory connection to the rush of air in the “h” sound. It was no coincidence that Echo was within arm’s reach. Williams placed him there when plotting out the day’s lesson to guard against any interruption in the action, which could allow young minds to wander, breaking the spell of learning. As if to illustrate the risk, squeals and shrieks arose from the kindergarten class next door. “Yes, I’m wearing fishnets!” the teacher could be heard screaming above the clamor, which went on for several minutes as Williams’s class moved to their tables where phonics workbooks awaited them for a writing activity. “Look for the O page in the workbook,” she said, as if sending them off on a treasure hunt. “Oooh! Lanice found it! Let’s see quiet thumbs-up if you found the O page.” She moved among the tables, giving encouragement and help to those who hadn’t found the right page. When the noise died down next door, Williams’s students were busy at work, writing O’s and circling pictures of an orange, an ocean, an octopus, an owl.

She seemed to have endless ways to make learning playful. When calling on students to spell sight words—those they were supposed to recognize instantly, without sounding out—she offered them a choice: play it (as if strumming a banjo with each letter), shoot it (as if throwing a basketball), kick it, or punch it. A girl named Shaniyah, her braids clasped with colorful barrettes, loved kickboxing, so she kicked out each letter of c-a-n.

Explaining the difference between a square and a rectangle one day, Williams summoned the two smallest and two tallest children and asked the class if the four of them could form a square with their bodies as its sides. “NOOOO!” chorused about half the students. Since not everyone got it, she instructed the short and tall students to lie down in a four-sided figure. “Are these sides all the same or are two shorter and two longer?” she asked. Some children still weren’t sure. She reached for some masking tape, running a strip alongside each student, then asked the four to stand so that everyone could see the resulting four-sided figure. Clearly the sides were unequal. “OOOOH!” everyone exclaimed. So what is it, Williams asked. “A RECTANGLE!” they all said with excitement.

At the beginning of school, few of her students could distinguish between the front and back cover of a book. Nor did most know that words moved from left to right in a sentence, although New Jersey provided free preschool led by certified teachers for children in the poorest school districts. Williams used a literacy program called STEP, developed at the University of Chicago to measure each child’s pre-reading skills and target instruction to their individual needs.

But beyond tools and teaching skill, what made Williams powerful as a teacher was her connection to her students. She was one of them, and they could feel it. One day, teaching a lesson on the importance of vivid details in storytelling, Williams sat down at a whiteboard and said she wanted to draw a picture of her family’s recent barbecue. What details should be in the picture? Everyone had ideas: a grill, hamburgers, hot dogs, grass, the sun, the sky, her baby cousin, her mother, her aunt. As Williams drew the pictures, one boy asked, “Where’s your daddy?” A girl who never had known her own father cast an annoyed look at the boy and declared, as if stating the obvious, “Miss Williams ain’t got no daddy!” Williams responded that she did have a father, but he wasn’t there.

“The children know I’m from Newark. They’ll tell me a parent is in jail or parents were fighting. They blurt it out during a lesson,” Williams said one day after school, sitting in a child-sized chair under the clothesline of her students’ latest work. Once, a little girl confided that she had seen her mother’s boyfriend beat up her father the night before. With no time to think about what to say, the response rolled out from her life experience: “Miss Williams has seen things like that. One day you’ll be able to choose not to be in situations where people treat each other that way. I’m going to help you do that.”

Knowing well that poverty cramped children’s horizons, Williams talked to them of “excellence,” striving to surpass their best. At the end of each day, she singled out the students who had done so. Some of those who missed the cut were invariably disappointed, but Williams reminded them that they knew how to handle it. “Don’t pout! Blow it out!” they said along with her, taking a deep breath and exhaling. “I push them to be more excellent, never to accept mediocrity, otherwise they hit a ceiling,” she said. She sometimes lay in bed at night thinking of ways to raise their expectations of themselves. If a child liked to braid hair, Williams would say, “That’s a great skill for a surgeon.” Those who talked a little too much in class heard, “You should think about becoming a debater.”

“I think a lot about what distinguished me from my friends who became statistics,” she said. “Yes, I saw people get shot. Yes, I saw people get arrested in my own family. But I never had a teacher say, ‘I’m going to expect less of you because of what you’re going through.’ We have to say, ‘We understand this is very hard for you, but we’re not going to use that as an excuse to hold you to a lower standard, and you can’t allow it to make you lower your own standards for yourself.’”

Williams came by this understanding the hard way, beginning at age seven, when she, her mother, and two brothers fled their Newark apartment—and Williams’s stepfather—for a battered-women’s shelter. From then on, there were periods of stability alternating with homelessness. But through it all, Williams’s mother, Samantha Lucien, focused her children on learning as the surest path to a better life. Lucien told her children that her own childhood was troubled, as was her education, and now she wanted—expected—only the best for them.

Williams took her mother’s expectations as her own, as did her brothers. When money ran short and their electricity was turned off, she would gather her books and go into the hallway of their apartment building to do her homework under the fluorescent lights. It didn’t occur to her to ask her teacher or mother for a reprieve. She was valedictorian of her middle school and won a scholarship to Kent Place, an all-girls private school in upscale Summit, New Jersey, through a national program for students of color with leadership potential, A Better Chance. She excelled as a student and a dancer, even when the family became homeless again and she commuted by bus from a Newark shelter to attend classes with daughters of privilege. As holidays approached, her classmates talked of traveling overseas—“like something that happened every day: you got on a plane and went to Madrid. I was going to Six Flags.” It was the mid-1990s, and urban styles hadn’t made it to Summit, so when Williams arrived at Kent Place one day with braids and extensions, she recalled drawing a crowd. “It felt like a cultural barrier,” she remembered. “They said, ‘Your hair grew!’”

Halfway through her junior year, she was suffering from depression and transferred to West Side High School back home in Newark. There Williams met students she considered as bright as she was—students she was sure would have excelled, as she did, if given opportunities—and yet the school system appeared to treat them as if they weren’t worth the effort. While some of her own teachers were excellent, Williams felt that, overall, she had gone from a level of rigor that challenged her every day to no rigor at all—no advanced placement classes, no anatomy and physiology. “The mindset at West Side was ‘These kids can’t do AP. They’re nowhere near ready for it. They’re incapable,’” she said. Worse still, most of the students appeared to have the same expectations of themselves. “They mostly didn’t do homework until the period before it was due,” she said. By contrast, she and her group of friends were always studying. She’d sit in the cafeteria reading and taking notes while other kids talked. Inevitably, someone would ask why she was studying at lunchtime, why she carried a book bag full of books, why she carried books at all, she recalled. What made her normal at Kent Place—a drive for knowledge and excellence—made her an outlier among most kids back home.

In her senior year at West Side, Williams’s family became homeless again and wound up living in a family friend’s basement, in a single room lit by one lamp. She remembered sitting under it filling out her college applications, telling herself, “This is going to get me out of here.” She got into New York University, where she studied and graduated alongside the academic elite from around the country.

While there, she did a work-study program in the New York City public schools, tutoring struggling elementary school readers under the supervision of teachers she considered exceptional—experienced, nurturing, demanding of themselves and the children. She found herself imagining what her friends and classmates at West Side would have become with teachers like that all along the way.

“That’s when I said I want to teach, and I want to teach in Newark,” she said. “I want to help cultivate those brilliant minds. I want to deposit in my hometown what people deposited into me. I want to teach in Newark because I love my city. I love it because there’s so much promise here. I want to invest my life’s work in the city, because I believe in it.”

 

Avon Avenue School, where Princess Williams saw so much promise, was 105 years old, an immense hulk of red brick rising three stories and filling almost a full square block. The grand scale reflected the school’s aspirations—very much akin to Williams’s—when in the early 1900s Newark and public education were passageways to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of working-class immigrants and their children. The city was a national leader in manufacturing and retail. It had visionary civic leaders who built public institutions—the library, the museum—into engines of democracy that spread culture and literacy to the masses. In heavily poor, immigrant communities like Avon’s, public schools remained open all summer to “continue the process of Americanization” of disadvantaged children and “give the opportunity for a large number to advance rapidly,” in the words of Addison B. Poland, Newark’s turn-of-the-century superintendent.

The Avon area in the early 1900s was mostly German immigrants, living in three- and four-family homes, working in factories, and sending their children to the neighborhood school. A century later, after economic decline, riots, and white flight, it was almost all black and poor. Nearly half of the children came from families who lived in what the government classified as “extreme poverty,” or fifty percent of the federal poverty level, approximately $11,000 a year for a family of four. The school had suffered along with the neighborhood. Nothing inside worked as it was supposed to, even the clocks, which each told a different time, all of them wrong. Barely one in six students in third through seventh grade had passed the most recent state literacy test, and the math results were even worse, especially in the middle school, where only four percent of seventh graders passed.

“A generous description of Avon Avenue students would be ‘semi-literate,’” wrote Gordon MacInnes, a policy analyst, summarizing the years leading up to the turnaround effort that drew Williams there. “The results on the math test raise this question: was there any intentional effort to teach mathematics to Avon Avenue students?”

MacInnes emphasized that poverty posed an enormous barrier to learning in Newark and nationally. The pattern was consistent across the country: the poorer the children, the lower the test scores. Yet worse than the damage from poverty at Avon, he found, was the district’s unconscionable and systematic neglect of the children’s needs. MacInnes wrote with outrage and astonishment, hurling aside the detached tone of most policy papers: “There is no helpful explanation how the Avon results could be overlooked for so many years without triggering intensive attention from NPS,” the Newark Public Schools administration.

 

During the summer of 2010, the newly appointed leaders of Avon, Dominique Lee and Charity Haygood, along with Williams and other teachers, were intently studying the school’s academic results and developing a reform strategy rooted in supporting and strengthening the teaching staff. All of them had a personal journey that led them to teach in Newark. Lee, just twenty-five years old at the time, had spent most of his childhood in low-income housing developments in Pontiac, Michigan, with a single mother who was periodically on welfare. Then, as if by magic—in Lee’s view, by God’s grace—his father, who had been living in Texas, reappeared to care for him as he entered his teens. Having risen into management at Exxon, his father took a position in the Detroit area with ExxonMobil after the two oil giants merged. Lee moved in with his dad in suburban Bloomfield Hills but remained at his urban Pontiac high school. Accustomed to making B’s and C’s, he faced a new standard with his father: nothing below an A would do. Lee graduated at the top of his class, was admitted to the University of Michigan, and graduated with honors. He liked pointing out that he was a third-generation college graduate on his father’s side, first generation on his mother’s. “I should be a statistic,” he said. “I’m a black male with an uneducated single mother. ‘Amazing grace!’ God ‘saved a wretch like me.’”

After college, when Lee arrived at Newark’s Malcolm X Shabazz High School to teach social studies and English, many of his students reminded him of his younger self—except that no one had saved them. They were often reading four or more years below grade level, couldn’t name the continents, and didn’t know the difference between a governor and a mayor. Angular and high-energy, a towering six feet five inches tall, Lee was irrepressibly positive, pushing his students and himself. After struggling for three years to teach basic skills in tandem with the Civil War, he felt compelled to confront the larger problem: four lower schools, all serving Newark’s poorest children, fed into Shabazz, and barely a quarter of their graduates were proficient in reading and math. His idea was to recruit a small group of highly motivated Newark teachers for each of those schools, to build a culture of excellence in which newcomers and veterans together would raise the quality of teaching and learning. He called his idea “a kind of naïve little dream to meet the neediest children’s needs.”

His first call was to Charity Haygood, then a district assistant principal who had come to Newark thirteen years earlier with Teach for America and made it her home. They connected instantly. Haygood grew up in Denver, with a single mother who never finished high school but inspired her to work her hardest. She attended chronically low-performing Manual High School, which was closed soon after she graduated—later to be reopened—but she credited teachers and classmates in her college-bound classes with pushing her to aim high. She was admitted to Colorado College and, based on her family’s poverty, received a full scholarship.

She also shared Lee’s religious conviction. For years, Haygood and her husband, a civil rights attorney, had led a weekly church youth group and had taken into their home children whose parents struggled with addiction and illness. “If you live in Newark and you’re going to do what needs to be done, you have to be brave enough to act in faith,” she said. “It’s not about being the boss, but being the servant willing to wash other people’s feet. More than anything, it’s about understanding you don’t have all the answers. This is so much bigger than me. It’s bigger than Cory Booker. It’s bigger than Barack Obama. It’s recognizing that you’ve got to be humble.”

They began planning in earnest in 2009, recruiting four colleagues from other Newark schools. Princess Williams was the only one of them to have been born and raised in the city. At dinner one night, they brainstormed a name for their organization and came up with Building Responsible, Intelligent, Creative Kids, or BRICK—an allusion to Brick City, Newark’s nickname from the 1940s, when brick housing projects stood at the heart of the city.

They spent eighteen months reviewing research, consulting educators, and visiting high-achieving urban schools, including charter schools. The earliest charters were expected to serve as laboratories for innovative practices that district schools would adopt and spread. In fact, there had been little cross-pollination in Newark or elsewhere. The BRICK team, though, took it upon themselves to glean many lessons from the city’s best charter schools, and found charter school leaders eager to help. They organized themselves as a nonprofit agency through which they raised private money to purchase the rigorous, early-literacy program, developed at the University of Chicago for kindergarten through third grade, that was used in the two leading charter networks—the TEAM schools of the national KIPP organization and North Star Academy, a subsidiary of Uncommon Schools. This was the STEP program Williams now used with her kindergarten class.

They envied the charters’ freedom to hire the best teachers and to set their schedules based on student needs—unconstrained by union contracts, tenure law, and the district bureaucracy. But BRICK’s founders resolved to work in district schools. They were convinced that charters didn’t serve children from the most struggling families, with the greatest learning needs, the kind who came to Avon. They believed some charters deliberately avoided these students, or pushed them out. Even the TEAM schools, which went to great lengths to recruit the most disadvantaged children, faced a selection bias: the most motivated parents with the highest ambitions for children were applying in droves. The Avon teachers felt almost personally insulted by the notion that the district was too broken to fix. Princess Williams had turned away overtures to teach at TEAM and North Star, despite being impressed by their commitment to top-level instruction. “My calling is to fix the public schools,” she said. “If something is broken and we have the power to fix it, why would we abandon it for something else? It’s like saying, ‘Because so much negative is happening in Newark, we should just totally level the town and bring in new people.’” That was the message many in Newark took from Governor Christie’s call to “grab the system by the roots, pull it out and start over.” With more than four out of five children in district schools at the time, that was where the BRICK teachers felt they belonged. “If you want to change public education, you have to attack the district buildings,” Lee said.

Clifford Janey, then the Newark superintendent, encouraged the BRICK team to write a proposal for a school. They wanted to concentrate on the early school years to ensure students were reading proficiently by third grade. They proposed to open with only kindergarten, first, and second grades, and then to grow one grade a year. Most charters in Newark began with a single grade level, then added one a year as the founding class advanced. They also asked for a waiver from the union contract to hire teachers of their choice, another hallmark of charters. In April 2010, Janey named Dominique Lee and his team to lead Avon, but instead of only three grades, he gave them all nine, six hundred and fifty students, in kindergarten through eighth grade. He also assigned them the existing staff, under whom Avon students had failed for years.

If they had a choice, Lee said, they would have rejected about a third of Avon’s forty teachers as subpar. But among the others they found capable teachers who they believed could become good with the right support, and good ones who could become exceptional. It was a mantra of the reform movement that children and their genius were trapped in failing schools, but the BRICK leaders found gifted teachers were trapped there as well. Since few Newark principals spent time observing teachers and supporting their growth, teachers throughout the district had languished for years with unrealized potential. Avon, for example, already had a star-quality third-grade team in Sharon Rappaport, Teresa Olivieria, and Regina Sherrod, who coaxed impressive gains from their students, only to see them lose ground in later years with less effective teachers. Because so few teachers had received meaningful support from principals, Lee and Haygood looked not for preexisting powerhouses but for teachers who knew their subjects, had strong relationships with students, and were willing to work on their practice with a goal of becoming more effective.

The BRICK leaders divided administrative responsibilities so Haygood could devote the bulk of her time to observing teachers and helping them improve. Dressed in the BRICK uniform of yellow shirt and navy pants, her dark hair bound in a curly ponytail, she radiated kindness, even when delivering harsh assessments. “Charity can tell you essentially, ‘You suck,’ and you walk out with a smile on your face,” said Lee.

Rappaport said she and some other veterans resented the new leaders at first: “They came in saying we were going to work longer days, longer weeks, longer years, and I said, ‘Who let them in here? This is our building.’” But she said she changed her mind because of one of the newcomers, Chris Perpich, who at half her age was her instructional coach and assistant principal. With modest suggestions, one at a time, she said, he made her a stronger teacher.

The new leaders also required all teachers to develop a “BRICK plan” for each student, an individualized improvement program with specific responsibilities for families as well as teachers. Federal law mandated such plans for students with disabilities, but the BRICK leaders felt all parents should know how their children performed in comparison to national standards in reading, writing, and math, and how to help each of them meet the bar. After so many years of failure as the norm, they said, parents often didn’t know what to expect of children. The BRICK plan listed up to three tasks for families to perform with students every night, and three kinds of academic support activities that teachers would carry out with them every day.

 

One of the cruel ironies of Newark’s schools was that throughout their long decline, the district often appeared on paper to be in perfect compliance with all requirements. A 2009 outside review of the Avon Avenue School found that the curriculum aligned well with state standards in math and literacy. And the district had a written policy requiring principals to observe teachers regularly, supplying feedback and coaching to ensure they were reaching all children.

But inside Avon, as in many schools across the district, reality bore little resemblance to the script. An application for federal aid, filed shortly after the outside review, reported that too many teachers displayed “an inability to captivate student interest and motivate them.” And there was “minimal use of higher order questioning.” The quality of the curriculum had little relevance without effective instruction. Numerous students recalled that in earlier years, while they sat in class trying to learn, other children routinely ran, yelled, or fought in the halls. Principals and teachers appeared powerless to stop them. Avon was mentioned in the police blotter almost as often as in the Star- Ledger’s education coverage. In 1996, an Avon kindergarten teacher was indicted on charges of official misconduct for ordering her five-year-old students to line up and punch a classmate in the back for tearing up her lesson plan. In 1998, two men were charged with selling heroin and cocaine from an apartment next door.

The disconnect between rules and reality was hardly limited to education. Down the hill from the Avon school, a city sign for years had warned, “No Littering $1,000 Fine.” No one in the neighborhood had $1,000 to spare, so the seemingly harsh consequence was a joke, as the broken liquor bottles, crushed beer cans, and candy wrappers strewn in all directions made clear. As school board member Marques-Aquil Lewis once put it: “This is Newark. Rules were made to be broken.”

Against this backdrop, the new leaders of Avon fanned across the neighborhood in the summer of 2010 to knock on every door and talk to parents about working together to change the school. They gained credibility when they persuaded the district to light Avon’s playground, which led to a blossoming of nighttime hoops. And Dominique Lee successfully fought the district to have the aging school’s interior repainted with a trim of bold, primary colors, as opposed to the default hues of beige and brown. In late summer, four hundred men, women, and children from the neighborhood turned out for a barbecue—the best attendance anyone could recall at a school event.

Yet doubts kept surfacing in the form of a recurring question: Are you turning Avon into a charter school? Charters had become a code word in parts of Newark for rich, white outsiders who hid self-interest behind a veil of altruism—a narrative of distrust going back to urban renewal days.

Lee patiently batted away the rumors, affirming BRICK’s solid commitment to district schools. But the question rankled. Why vent so much anger and fear on charters while excusing the district for failing Avon students for so long? One day, in response to yet another question about the rumor, he blurted out: “No, we are not a charter school. But what is it about charters that’s scarier than four percent proficiency in math?”

 

A life-sized casualty of the long decline arrived in sixth grade on the opening day of the rechristened BRICK Avon Academy, three weeks before the Oprah announcement. His name was Alif Beyah, and he had been promoted year after year despite failing basic subjects. He also was a discipline challenge, forever getting thrown out of class for refusing to do his work.

“He acted—excuse my French—like an ass to me in the hallway one day and I suspended him,” said Melinda Weidman, the assistant principal for the middle school grades.

But the next morning, she said, Alif returned and apologized, pleading to be allowed to go back to class. Another time, she gave him detention and noticed that he arrived precisely on schedule to serve his time. When she called him out for being disrespectful, she said, he was quick to own up to it, showing genuine remorse.

Weidman, a former high school social studies teacher, was small, with blue eyes, long blond hair, and a voice like a drill sergeant’s. The rowdiest eighth graders straightened up when they saw her coming, in part because they knew she’d risk her safety to protect them if a fight broke out. They’d seen her do it.

Weidman built a relationship with Alif’s mother, Lakiesha Mills, who confided that she and her boys’ father had recently split up. She worked from noon until midnight at concession stands at various arenas and rarely was home to make dinner or supervise homework and bedtime. She was terrified that Alif would fall increasingly behind and slip into a brutally familiar spiral: failure in school, leading to anger and eventually expulsion, with nowhere to turn but the streets. She was desperate for help.

Weidman began to conclude that this wiry stringbean of a troublemaker with large, dark eyes and a shy smile was in fact a good boy. But somewhere along the line he had fallen far off the track, and now, on the verge of becoming a teenager, faced maximum peril.

“I just started looking out for him and wanting to figure out what had happened,” Weidman said.

Part of the explanation was in Alif’s cumulative record—known in the school district as a cume card—an oversized, vanilla-colored chart with handwritten notations added year by year, listing his teachers and grades beginning in kindergarten. Every year through third grade—years when he should have learned to read—he got mostly D’s and F’s. By his own admission, he was a hellion. “I was bad then,” he said. “I used to just sit in class and do no work. I was not acting right.” Looking back, he couldn’t explain why, nor could his mother. Lakiesha Mills said she had assumed that Alif simply wasn’t trying. A cousin who was an aide in Alif’s third-grade classroom told Mills that he refused to pay attention or do his work. Mills said it didn’t occur to her that his teachers could have been responsible.

But it is hard to separate a discipline problem from a teaching problem, especially in a classroom of young children. The BRICK team took the view that effective teachers were a powerful antidote to most misbehavior—teachers who captured and held children’s attention through a combination of strong pedagogy, empathy, and leadership. Even reluctant learners tended to get caught up in the positive flow. As it turned out, Haygood and Lee determined that Alif had almost uniformly weak teachers in those years. Asked what he thought of the teachers, Alif said he liked most of them, but he recalled that his classes were full of disruptions, and he always joined in. “If other kids were talking, I always went along with them,” he said.

In those years, Avon had four certified teachers on the payroll as full-time tutors to support struggling students, thanks to the New Jersey Supreme Court’s landmark Abbott v. Burke decisions. In a series of rulings in the 1990s, the court ordered the legislature to equalize the funding of New Jersey’s poorest and most affluent districts in the name of guaranteeing educational opportunity to the state’s poorest children. But Alif and his mother said he never was offered tutoring.

Required to repeat third grade, he landed the second time around in the class of Sharon Rappaport, one of Avon’s finest and firmest teachers. His reputation preceded him. “I saw his name on my class list, and I just took a deep breath and thought, ‘We’re going to work this out,’” Rappaport recalled.

A mother of five who demanded the same respect and cooperation from pupils that she got at her dinner table, Rappaport was meticulously organized about reaching all her students, from stars to strugglers. Raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, she felt connected to them as a fellow child of what she called “the ghetto,” who grabbed education as her ticket out. She immediately noticed that Alif had almost no foundation in reading. She also recognized that he needed tremendous emotional support just to bring himself to try to learn.

“You could tell he really wanted to do well, to be proud of himself,” she said. “He would get this little glow if you praised him.” She sat with him during independent-reading periods, reading aloud to him, asking questions about the texts and working on letter sounds. She praised every positive step he took—a word he spelled correctly, a neatly written sentence. She developed relationships with his mother and father, talking often about how he was doing at school and at home.

Rappaport also noticed that Alif was relatively strong in math and asked him to stay after school to help tutor students who were failing. His attitude changed dramatically, and his mother was stunned.

“That was one of his teachers that he really, really loved,” his mother said. “She knew how to go about getting inside children that age. He’d come home and say, ‘Mrs. Rappaport wants me to do this. She wants me to do that.’ He loved staying after school and helping her. He began to believe that he could be good in math. Mrs. Rappaport embraced him, and for the first time he felt comfortable enough to try.”

At the end of the year, Alif failed the state proficiency test in literacy, but he easily passed in math, falling only five points short of “advanced proficient.” For the first time in his life, he made the honor roll, with all A’s and B’s, except for a C in reading and writing.

After his banner year with Rappaport, though, Alif returned to making D’s and F’s in fourth and fifth grade. On his cume card, under a category labeled “Demonstrates Evidence of Learning Through Completion of Class and Homework Assignments,” he received an N, for “not evident.” Yet both years, under the old Avon regime, he had been promoted to the next grade.

 

The idea behind every school reform effort taking shape in Newark—from the Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg plan to BRICK—was that in the future there would be no Alifs. Equipping five-year-olds from the poorest neighborhoods in Newark with a strong foundation in reading and math, along with a love of learning, represented an essential first step on a path toward a better life. For now, the odds were stacked perilously against poor children everywhere. Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words. They also had little exposure to books. After kindergarten, the gap grew wider and more treacherous every year. Children who entered first grade without basic literacy skills were unlikely to read proficiently by the end of third grade, which was equivalent to falling off a cognitive cliff. Elementary education boiled down to this: children learn to read by third grade; they read to learn from then on. After third grade, reading was the ball game—math moved into word problems, social studies and science into demanding texts, language arts into novels. A straight line ran from the poor reading skills of Avon third graders to the single-digit passing rate of its middle schoolers on state reading and math tests. Children who couldn’t keep up in later grades became frustrated, alienated, and more likely to act out. According to a consultant’s analysis of Newark district data, only four percent of students who arrived in high school significantly below grade level went on to pass the state proficiency test for graduation.

Every brand of education reformer shared the same end goal—to reverse the damaging tide of poverty that robbed the poorest children of their potential. The big difference lay in where they started: from the top down or the bottom up.