Aki Kurose searches for success
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Jennifer Hodges peppers her seventh-graders with last-minute reminders the day before the state test on which their school has done poorly.
Read each question fully and carefully, she counsels.
Go back over the 210 vocabulary words learned this year.
She wants her students to do much better than last year's class on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning — for their sakes, but also for herself and other teachers at Aki Kurose Middle School. She doesn't want the public to think Aki Kurose is a bad school.
Hodges and other teachers say they did more than ever before this year to raise student achievement at the two-story, brick building in one of Seattle's poorest neighborhoods. But there's no guarantee that this year's scores, to be released in the fall, will be good news.
In many ways, Aki Kurose's efforts show just how difficult it is — despite good intentions and hard work — to change the fact that, in school districts across the nation, minority students score lower than whites.
Aki Kurose, where 93 percent of students are minorities, sits on one side of that racial and class divide. Many of its students do well. But, like a thousand other schools in similar low-income neighborhoods across the country, most do not. The school's test scores are the lowest among middle schools in the Seattle area. Just a quarter of seventh-graders pass the WASL reading test. Fewer than 10 percent pass math.
That low rank brings assistance, and pressure to improve. Still, progress has been slow.
A handful of schools across the nation seem to have found a way to bridge the so-called achievement gap, but most, like Aki Kurose, keep searching for answers.
"I won't say that we can't do it," says Bi Hoa Caldwell, the school's respected and straight-talking principal. "I just don't know when."
First challenge
Hodges arrived at Aki Kurose seven years ago as a substitute for a class that had already had a string of substitutes. Hodges, however, wanted to stay. Aki Kurose is near the Rainier Beach neighborhood where she grew up, it's the school she attended.
Caldwell, a well-liked principal from Whitman Middle School in the North End, had just been assigned to the school, then called South Shore. Her job was to turn it around.
When Caldwell arrived, there weren't just fights, she said, but brawls. Because the school had only half-walls between classrooms, when someone yelled "fight," some students would spill out of their rooms to form a tight knot around the combatants. Others stood up to watch.
That quickly stopped, Caldwell said, when she started sending everybody involved home — the fighters, the fight promoters and fight observers. But that was just the first challenge.
Achievement was low, many students had troubled home lives, and she had concerns about some teachers' attitudes.
"There was lots of blaming the kids for not learning," she said.
The school moved two years later to South Graham Street, a more traditional school with walls. Caldwell and staff members stepped up efforts to address students' writing and reading gaps.
The first focus was writing, and those scores remain higher than those in math and reading. Then the school turned to reading.
Catching up
The challenge then, as now, was to help students catch up. This year, more than half the sixth-graders arrived with reading scores in the 40th percentile on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, considered below grade level. Even more scored that low in math.
Three years ago, Diana Arya, the school's reading specialist, tested nearly every student. She found they could read, but they struggled with comprehension. They needed to build their vocabularies, practice making inferences and drawing conclusions from what they read.
So staff members decided to teach reading 20 or 30 minutes every day in every class, even in P.E., where students stop running around the gym, grab a book from a cardboard box, then follow along as their teacher reads novels like "Hoops," with an athletic theme. Arya says research shows such read-alouds are one good way for students to build vocabulary.
This year, the math teachers asked their colleagues for help, too. So twice a week in homeroom, every teacher helps students work through problems handed out at the staff meeting. Some, like Hodges, incorporate math exercises into their other classes as well.
It helps when staff members coordinate on instruction, says Jennifer Hancock, the school's math specialist and longtime math teacher.
"The kids see you're on the same page," she said. "I feel the kids know we're trying."
The school also added a new class this year, offered on a pilot basis last year, aimed at average students who were sliding by. It's called Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, an elective where students learn organizational skills, get help from tutors and are encouraged to prepare for college.
Eighty students took AVID this year, and many report that they've raised their grades from Cs and Ds to Bs and As.
At WASL time, teachers also offered seventh-graders a field trip if they tried to answer all the questions — in the past, many students just left some blank. And parent events were organized.
Yet all these efforts and more haven't translated into higher test scores, although more students are closer to passing than before.
Which avenue to success?
There are a number of views about what needs to change.
Arya stresses that teachers must study what students need, not get directives from the district — or anyone else.
The answer isn't some canned, commercial program, she says.
"There's this seductive line 'come to my program to cure all ills.' It's almost like we're still looking for snake oil."
Colleen Oliver, the district's middle-school director, says the math curriculum needs to be more consistent across grades and classes, and Kurose, like other middle schools, ought to find creative ways to give students more instruction time. At Hamilton Middle School this year, for example, every student took two math classes a day, something Aki Kurose is considering.
Behavior is still an issue, with too many students disrupting class.
When his students lose focus — at least once a week — math teacher Jeff McKenzie says he tries to get them to broaden their horizons. He sometimes asks: "What do you think is going on in a North End school right now? At Lakeside? Would students be throwing paper at each other?"
Some suggest teachers' expectations of students should be raised, despite the challenges some students face at home.
"We still need to work on our belief system in terms of our kids. We allow ourselves to make excuses, and that's part of the problem," says Brad Brown, who runs the AVID program and the after-school tutoring also sponsored by a federal grant.
Still, Brown acknowledges challenges exist.
Caldwell lists them: Enough foster kids to keep two full-time caseworkers busy. Students from single-parent homes without much supervision. Kids who've seen things Caldwell wouldn't wish on an adult. The goal, she says, is to provide support without letting it become an excuse. She agrees it's a fine line.
Even students without problems at home — like middle-school students everywhere — don't often think about the future.
Hodges says she has many students who are much more capable than she ever was at their age, yet they don't expect to go to college.
"Sometimes I want more for them than they want for themselves," she said.
Teacher Robert Lee questions whether Aki Kurose should be held responsible for seventh-graders' scores when it's really a sum of seven years of learning, not just the one and a half they're in of middle school — and whether schools should be asked to solve what amount to society's problems.
Principal's vision
If she could, Caldwell says, she'd reduce class sizes, lengthen the school day and require students to attend academic sessions on Saturdays. She also wants to get a share of the money that the Seattle School District concentrates in elementary schools to support students who are struggling, like the dollars from the federal Title I program and the state's Learning Assistance Program.
Without more instruction time, many think Kurose has little chance to help students catch up. Teachers say many of their students are bright but have holes in their learning or lack, as Hodges puts it, "the traditional skill set."
"The bottom line for the achievement gap is that if kids have a deficit in skills, then they need more than what we normally deliver," said Stephanie Haskins, the consultant hired to help Aki Kurose as part of a state school-assistance program.
Now, that time must be squeezed out of the six-hour school day, by teaching reading in every class, math in homeroom. The school also moved to a block schedule, in part to reduce time spent changing classrooms.
Optimistic on scores
Despite all the challenges, teachers think they'll see a jump in WASL scores this year, at least in reading. "It seems they're doing so much right," says Susan Toth, who worked as a principal intern at the school this year. "If we don't see a huge increase, I don't know what that will mean."
The day before the WASL, Hodges joked that she felt like a coach giving a pep talk before the big game, and suggested the students make a huddle and cheer. As the bell rings, a number stop before leaving to chant "WASL time!"
Afterward, Hodges said she, too, is confident scores will jump this year. But then again, she adds, she was confident last year, too.
"Every year," she says, "I get my hopes up."
Up or down, however, she plans to stay and is proud most of her colleagues will do the same. It's easy to return to a school where the plan works, she says. It's harder to come back when the plan fails, and teachers have to regroup and try again.
Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com
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