Harlem Principal Won’t Let Kids Fail Poverty Needn’t Be An Obstacle, Educators Told
Teachers at Lorraine Monroe’s school in Harlem assign homework every night. Students wear blue-and-white uniforms, with neckties for the boys. No one chews gum.
“I run it like a private school, but it is a public school,” Monroe said Thursday in Spokane at an annual teaching conference.
Monroe is principal of Frederick Douglass Academy, which is drawing national attention for raising expectations for all students - especially those living in poverty.
“Some of our top scholars have absolutely shattered backgrounds,” Monroe said. “That’s why I’d love to have a dorm. They unravel at night. Every morning you knit them together again.”
Henry Levin gave a similar message at the state Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development conference at the Spokane Convention Center. About 1,000 educators were expected to attend, but bad weather kept some away.
Remedial programs and special education for so-called “learning disabled” students only guarantee school failure, said Levin, director of Stanford’s Center for Educational Research.
“We give them a lot of crawling lessons,” he said.
Levin’s Accelerated Schools Project is a network of 800 elementary and middle schools trying to teach all children with techniques developed for gifted students.
Monroe and Levin’s ideas resonate in Spokane, where annual achievement tests show a strong connection between poverty and low scores.
As a rule, public elementary schools in affluent parts of Spokane score 40 to 60 percentile points higher than schools in high-poverty areas.
The Harlem principal’s no-nonsense formula of tutoring, extra-curricular activities and homework resulted in improved test scores and a waiting list for applicants, she said.
The school ejects students who don’t live up to behavior expectations, but expulsion is rare because students and their families know what they are getting into when they apply.
That’s a far cry from the school’s mid-1980s history of violence and poor performance. The central Harlem school board closed Intermediate School 10 in 1991 and reopened it as the Douglass Academy with Monroe at the helm.
Monroe, who went to school in central Harlem herself, overhauled the failed school. It now serves 700 students in grades 7 through 11, and will add 12th grade in the fall.
The school is 80 percent African American and 20 percent Latino.
“Seventy-five percent of every entering class has to come from central Harlem,” she said. “We don’t have white kids coming in because they’re afraid of the neighborhood.”
Monroe said she works 12-hour days and isn’t afraid to ask benefactors to pay for special projects.
She expects teachers to follow her Monroe Doctrine, a list of 11 guiding principles. The eleventh is: “Be egotistical enough to believe that but for you and your plans and your work, the kids would die - because figuratively and literally this is true.”
, DataTimes