HAVE A LITTLE FAITH IN DETROIT’ S KIDS
One of the biggest problems facing the Detroit Public Schools is the lack of faith that some of its employees have in the children.
That is the word from Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the district’s chief academic and accountability auditor, who has spent months completing an extensive and not-yet-released analysis of how the district educates students.
There is nothing wrong with the city’s children or parents that cannot be remediated, she said. But there must be a sea change in the way district employees — from top to bottom — deal with their clients.
“Sometimes people revel in the despair,” she said in an interview where she gave a sneak preview of her findings. They include:
■ Children in the same grade with vastly different and defi cient curricula.
■ A lack of progress reports to parents.
■ A total failure to evaluate and improve the performance of struggling teachers.
But the saddest thing Byrd Bennett discovered in conversa tions with hundreds of students, teachers, parents and principals? Some people just don’t believe in the kids.
“There has got to be a suspension of their disbelief that children can achieve,” she said.
What kids need: A dream and a chance
Barbara Byrd-Bennett recalls being a 19-year-old volunteer teaching reading to inmates with life sentences at the prison on Alcatraz off the coast of California.
“They were in there for life, and I could still see the hunger in their eyes,” she said. “They wanted to learn.”
Byrd-Bennett, chief academic and accountability auditor for the Detroit Public Schools, said she has seen that same hunger in the eyes of some DPS students. She also heard directly from ded icated teachers, heroes who work their butts off and still want to be even better, to reach kids more.
“You can’t move a district until you … change the culture of a district, and the culture doesn’t change until people begin to change,” she said.
For months, Byrd-Bennett has quietly guided the finan cial decisions of DPS emer gency financial manager Rob ert Bobb while examining all aspects of academics and teaching across the district.
Her extensive, not-yet-re leased audit shows that decades of poor administration, little communication with parents and inattention to students have left standing a district that is a monument to chaos, a district that will take years of innovation and a sea change in attitude to fix.
“There has got to be a suspension of their disbelief” in these children. “If you can get a group of people to believe in the children and their parents, you can change things.”
Where are the standards?
Among the problems Byrd Bennett outlines in her audit:
■ The district does not use the uniform, core curriculum system that was designed to keep all students on the same pace.
Students at one school learn more — and more effectively — than kids in the same grade at another school.
“As a parent, as a kid, I should know that in ninth grade, here are the core requirements. In order to move from freshman to sophomore, I need to complete this num ber of classes. And there’s something deeply wrong when you think foreign lan guage is an add-on.”
■ There is little regular communication between teachers and parents, and few progress reports on how students are doing.
■ There are no standard, uniform evaluation tools for teachers or principals.
“I don’t know any job that where you’re never evaluated, assessed or helped and supported,” she said. “That is obscene.”
■ Many teaching methods used in the district are out dated, some from the 1970s.
The good news, Byrd-Bennett said, is that “as I went into schools and talked with teachers, I found that people are hungry for the support.
People want to know how to do a good job. People want to know how to get out of the frozen ’60s and ’70s teaching methods.”
■ There is a belief among many employees that DPS children are inferior students. Rampant social promotion, a statewide problem, places students in classes where they are ill-equipped to learn and mainly mark time until they drop out. Teachers must deal with students who are years behind in reading and math, who have behavioral problems or, in the case of a teacher I recently reported about, had a class of 28 stu dents who were on 10 different reading levels. And I get heartbreaking e-mails from teachers who have to adapt their teaching plans to the arrival of students at different academic levels all through out the year.
“What I’ve learned is that the academics have been subordinate to finances here for longer than anyone could have imagined,” Byrd-Bennett said.
There is nothing wrong with the children or their parents that cannot be remediated, she said. But there must be a sea change in the way district employees — top to bottom — deal with their clients.
“Sometimes people revel in the despair,” she said in an exclusive interview. “I’ve said this over and over. There has got to be a suspension of their disbelief that children can achieve.”
Core course requirements should be the same at every high school, but students should have the chance to try different career paths without affecting their college prep.
“But people push back and say these kids won’t do that.
They don’t believe in these kids.”
The gift of a dream
Byrd-Bennett has found what’s wrong. When she releases the final academic audit, we better pay attention. This time.
“Sometimes a superintendent, an associate sup has to stand for the kids. All the adults have their representation. We are the union for the kids. I’m the union rep,” she said. “Every kid I’ve met wants to learn. I’m the kid from the low-income projects of Harlem. The difference was: There was a group of significant adults who believed that I could be some thing better. … “Nobody has suspended their disbelief.”
I remember those dreams.
Every adult on my street in Tarboro, N.C., had that dream for me. They lived it.
They made me live it. I always saw beyond that street.
Now we must give that gift to Detroit kids.
■ CONTACT ROCHELLE RILEY: RRILEY99@FREEPRESS.COM
“IF YOU CAN GET A GROUP OF PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN THE CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS, YOU CAN CHANGE THINGS.”
BARBARA BYRD-BENNETT, chief academic and accountability auditor for the Detroit Public Schools
No comments:
Post a Comment