Troubled school improves without relying on suspensions

Four years ago, Stanton Elementary School in Anacostia was the lowest-performing elementary school in the District and in danger of being closed. But partly thanks to an innovative alternative to suspensions, Stanton is now on the rise.

According to those who knew its “before” phase, Stanton now is almost unrecognizable. Before, says Ashley Johnson, who has overseen a nonprofit tutoring program at the school for years, “It didn’t resemble a school in any way.” According to Johnson and others, administrators weren’t administering, teachers weren’t teaching, and kids were running wild in the halls.

Since then, Stanton’s standardized test scores have more than tripled in math and doubled in reading. In terms of student growth on tests, it ranks 15th in the District. Home visits by teachers have led to an active and engaged parent body. Clear and consistent behavioral expectations have created an orderly environment where learning can take place. And for those few students who haven’t responded to the usual behavioral incentives, there’s a system that temporarily removes disruptive students from regular classrooms and also helps them learn.

Scholar Academies (SA), the Philadelphia-based charter management organization that has partnered with DCPS to turn the school around, had a certain amount of freedom from regular DCPS rules because the school was classified as failing under the federal No Child Left Behind law. All of the existing teachers had to reapply for their jobs, and only 3 were rehired. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of a charter school operated by Scholar Academies, DC Scholars.)

Coaching teachers

SA also brought in a new principal and a director of school culture to coach teachers on how to manage classrooms and engineer smooth transitions. It invested in training all teachers to use the same language and behavioral techniques, so that students would have consistency throughout the school day.

Teachers now come to school 90 minutes early, twice a week, for professional development, and SA pays them extra for that time. Lars Beck, Chief Executive Officer at SA, says the organization has invested about a million dollars in the school. He also says that DCPS has been extremely supportive of all that SA has done at Stanton.

But SA’s first year at the school was rocky. Parents learned about the takeover only three months before it happened, and some were unhappy to hear of the change. When the new administration tried to enforce new rules—for example, about drop-off and pick-up rules and times—some parents resisted.

With the help of the Flamboyan Foundation, teachers began visiting parents at home and providing them with information that would help them reinforce learning. Attitudes began to change, and now there’s an active Parent Teacher Organization.

But some students were at least as resistant as parents the first year of the turnaround effort, 2010-11. With about 360 students in kindergarten through 5th grade, there were 244 suspensions, many of which were probably imposed on the same group of students.

Jana Wilcox, Chief Operating Officer at SA, says the organization realized that some students’ behavior was so deep-rooted that they weren’t responding to suspension. So SA tried something they call “PATH Academy,” a sort of school-within-a-school. (“PATH,” the SA mantra, is an acronym for Professional, Attentive, Thoughtful, and Hardworking.)

The first full year of PATH, the number of suspensions plummeted to 32, even though about 20 more students were enrolled. Last year, with a little over 400 students, there were 47. In other words, the number of suspensions as a percentage of the student population fell from almost 70% to about 10%.

Debate over suspensions

In many schools, especially high-poverty schools, a minority of students with persistent behavioral problems disrupt learning for everyone. And they often have a charismatic effect on other students, who start to imitate their behavior.

Some high-performing charter schools incorporate a strict suspension policy into their system of behavior management and end up giving one-day suspensions to a substantial proportion of their students.

But critics object that suspensions deprive students of classroom time and can lead to academic failure and brushes with the juvenile justice system. They argue that schools should use other disciplinary techniques, like behavioral contracts and restorative justice.

But what if a few students fail to respond to those methods? At some charter schools they may be expelled, or choose to leave, and possibly become DCPS’s problem. DCPS, which doesn’t have as much freedom to expel students, may send them to an alternative school. Or they may stay in regular classrooms and remain a disruptive influence.

PATH Academy, or something like it, seems to provide a way to remove those students from the classroom, for a while at least, without removing them from the community. Stanton’s PATH consists of two self-contained classrooms, one for kindergarten through 2nd grade, and the other for 3rd through 5th. Class size is capped at a maximum of 12 students, with one teacher and one teacher’s aide.

A few weeks ago when I visited Stanton, the older PATH Academy class had its full complement of 12, but the younger class had only 5 students. They were at lunch when I spoke with Tracy Jenkins, the teacher, an experienced educator who exuded both warmth and authority.

She told me that although the students had been behavior problems in regular classes, several were now performing above grade level. While some students are happy to stay in the environment indefinitely, others are anxious to rejoin the regular classes. There’s a carefully graduated system to test whether they’re ready to do that over a 6-week period. On average, students stay in the program about a year and a half.

Jenkins also observes students who are candidates for PATH, and sometimes she’s able to make suggestions that improve students’ behavior enough that they can stay in their regular classrooms.

Wilcox says that SA looks for PATH teachers with “a strong sense of classroom management and a strong presence.” There’s no separate curriculum for the Academy kids, but there are more frequent behavioral reminders and more emphasis on learning how to manage conflict and regulate emotion.

Wilcox remembers one boy who was “almost non-verbal” in 1st grade. He spent 2nd grade in PATH Academy, and now, in 3rd grade, he’s “actively engaged.”

Could something like PATH Academy work at other DCPS schools, or at charters? Wilcox says it’s a matter of deciding where to allocate resources: you need to have at least one extra teacher and teacher’s aide, and you’re not getting any additional revenue to cover their salaries because you’re not adding any students.

But if the approach can work to enable the largely well-behaved majority to learn while also addressing the root problems of the troublesome minority—while furthering their learning at the same time—maybe it’s worth a few extra salaries.