Connecting with at-risk kids is the key to a DPS turnaround
Many education problems facing Detroit students, teachers and principals loom outside the classroom, as underscored by a recent Free Press profile of teen mother Sade Lewis and her classmates at Detroit’s Catherine Ferguson Academy. Lewis’ childhood included searching for her mother in crack houses, handling her father’s incarceration and death from AIDS, and shuttling from relative to relative while attending 10 schools.
Yes, suburban schools have students with similar problems, but the concentration of such students at most Detroit schools raises challenges that administrators must confront in a more comprehensive and focused way. New parent resource centers are a good start, but providing individual mentoring and guidance in the schools — along with smaller class sizes — should become the centerpiece of education reform.
That’s true whether or not the Detroit school board wins its legal battle to halt emergency financial manager Robert Bobb’s plan to close 41 school buildings and make sweeping academic changes. Both sides claim to represent reform, and meaningful reform is impossible without a plan to ensure that Detroit’s dis proportionately disadvantaged students get the individual atten tion they need.
Keep the emphasis on students
Such changes are especially important for the DPS students most at risk, who are more likely to go to prison or jail than to college. Bobb’s reorganization plan, now under a preliminary in junction, would move most of them from four alternative schools into one building at the Northwestern High campus. Inadequate resources will continue to plague the district. Nevertheless, if it concentrates the most troubled students at one campus, lowering their class sizes is even more imperative.
Virtually all dropouts have one thing in common: They don’t talk to school staff and eventually disappear from class. Every high school ought to have designated staff members — advisers, mentors or homeroom teachers — responsible for the success of a group of students. Those teachers would talk to their students daily, ask them what’s going on in their lives, and call them or their parents when they’re not in school. One concerned and con nected adult can make an enormous difference in a troubled child’s life. Creating such a system in every Detroit school would not require significant increases in staff or money, but it would require renewed commitment to a student-centered mission.
Some successful Detroit schools, such as Catherine Ferguson and Frederick Douglas Academy, already provide that kind of in dividual attention and graduate nearly all of their students. DPS administrators need to talk to successful principals, teachers and students to assess what they’re doing right and determine wheth er they can duplicate their success. Other nearby districts also run innovative programs, such as cyber classrooms, that could benefit Detroit, said Sharif Shakrani, co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University.
Find creative options
District officials are working to reduce class size, but it must become an immediate priority. Lowering class sizes can’t wait for the district’s financial problems to clear up, without abandoning the mission of public education. Classes of 18, instead of 25 or 30, and high schools with enrollments of about 400, instead of 2,000, enable teachers to provide the help and attention disadvantaged students need.
With scarce resources, Detroit and its leaders need to get cre ative. In St. Petersburg, Fla., former Mayor Rick Baker used his business connections to raise millions of dollars for disadvan taged schools, creating mentor, scholarship and other programs. While not in charge of his city’s school district, Baker found ways to help. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing can and must do the same.
Nearly 70% of the district’s students drop out. Still, given what many of them face daily, it’s a minor miracle they do as well as they do. Sade Lewis will graduate this year with a B average and plans to attend college in fall. That kind of tenacity and courage in overcoming adversity should inspire district reformers to give all Detroit students the education and opportunity they deserve.
