How to Fail Urban Schools

Patrick is a fourth-grader in inner-city Phoenix, Arizona. He sits across the table from his grandmotherly principal and gleefully stuffs a folded slice of pepperoni pizza into his mouth. Patrick’s school has a hard time getting kids to show up to class, so these monthly pizza parties are raffled off to students with perfect attendance.

Patrick grins to himself as he tears through his second piece, and the principal turns to the woman next to her.

“This one’s a special one,” she says. “Patrick, we didn’t see you at the Thanksgiving dinner last week.”

His blond shag bounces as he looks up.

“I know,” he says. “We were at Frank’s.”

Frank, the principal explains, is the mother’s ex-boyfriend. Patrick and his little brother live in Frank’s apartment. They’d live with Patrick’s mother, but the hotel room she works and sleeps in is off-limits to kids. Besides, they’d get in the way of the customers. Kids are not something a John wants to see.

“We went to McDonald’s,” Patrick says. “And Timmy saved the lettuce from his burger for his turtle.”

His smile doesn’t fade as he quietly explains how he has to keep the turtle hidden and Timmy, a first-grader, quiet. Those are the rules of living in your mother’s ex-boyfriend’s apartment.

It’s easy to want to believe Patrick’s smile. Right now, he looks content and serene. Here at school, he is in a stable place, with stable adults who won’t hurt him, send him away, or scare him and his brother into hiding. When he is here, Patrick is with an entire network of professionals doing everything in their power to give him a positive day, a positive year, a chance at a positive life. When he is here, he is happy.

What might surprise Patrick, and shocks the hell out of me, is that the Bush administration says his school is failing to help him. They’re wrong. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the dedication, seen the data, seen how kids flock to this place of good in their lives. Children that stay in this district improve. They’re given a solid chance to change their own story of poverty.

I see all of this at Patrick’s school, but the government doesn’t. Through the No Child Left Behind Act, they’ve declared that five out of the six schools in his district are failing. According to their data, the sixth is too, but the agency administering the act overlooked it. It wasn’t the first mistake they made.

While they demand improvement from all schools—an effective start to any school plan—what the regulations of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) don’t do is measure the progress being made in a district like Patrick’s. In his district, returning students at all six schools see gains every year, but 40 percent of the students that walk in the door in August are gone by the end of the year.

In the southwest—and along the east coast from Boston to Miami—many urban schools have highly transient populations. Students move in and out of these schools as their guardians find seasonal work in another area of the state, or housing difficulties force a move. It is fair and just to expect schools to educate these students as devotedly as all others, but ludicrous to test the schools’ ability to educate based on the scores of students who arrive just weeks before the test.

The act also includes a provision to penalize schools that don’t test a sufficient percentage of all of their minority groups. This clearly well-intentioned policy is easily misapplied, as it was when a few of the Native American students in Patrick’s district didn’t show up on test day, and the school was accused of suppressing that ethnic group in their testing program.

NCLB doesn’t direct its harshest threats at mediocre, laissez faire suburban schools filled with bored teachers using 1960s textbooks and methods. Their students come with parental support. They come with early childhood knowledge of English. And despite the possible failings of their school, they handle test day on their own. Middle-class schools like this, though often stagnant, are spared the punitive reach of NCLB.

This experience doesn’t translate to an urban landscape. In Patrick’s district and other inner-city districts with low-performing, highly transient student populations, No Child Left Behind continues to leave behind truly wonderful schools.

In America’s inner cities, there are two basic types of schools: reform-oriented learning institutions that develop progressive teaching methods, and pits where our educational system has dumped our poorest and most troubled children.

The problem with NCLB isn’t that it’s trying to get rid of those dumping grounds, but that it goes straight to the heart of America’s impoverished urban communities and brands the failing label into their schools, threatening fine institutions with sanctions and oversight. It acknowledges no difference between the most hopeful situations and the dumps that lost hope years ago. It calls good schools failures, and it fails as education reform.

Lucas L. Tate ’05-’06 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.