Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Size doesn't matter
If you want students to learn, you have to want to teach them. Nothing fancy or complicated there.
A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.Brockton succeeded by throwing out the CW and bringing everybody up to speed and on board with the program. And it was a pretty diverse group they were working with.
Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym...
The committee’s first big step was to go back to basics, and deem that reading, writing, speaking and reasoning were the most important skills to teach. They set out to recruit every educator in the building — not just English, but math, science, even guidance counselors — to teach those skills to students.
“You meet a new person every day,” said Johanne Alexandre, a senior whose mother is Haitian. “Somebody with a new story, a new culture. I have Pakistani friends, Brazilians, Haitians, Asians, Cape Verdeans. There are Africans, Guatemalans.”Hearty congratulations to the Brockton crew for showing us something that Republican/Teabaggers hate to see, public education working the way it should.
“There’s a couple of Americans, too!” Tercia Mota, a senior born in Brazil, offered.
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