Can Good Teaching Be Taught?
Cynthia Gunner is not easily daunted, but on an October
afternoon in 2016, she was feeling especially discouraged.
Gunner, 47, is a career educator who has worked for the
Atlanta Public Schools for nearly 20 years, always in
segregated neighborhood schools that primarily serve lowincome
students on the city’s predominantly black southwest side.
Gunner got her start at Peyton Forest Elementary, a K-5 school where she
completed her student teaching in the late 1990s and later taught fourth
and fifth grades through the mid-2000s. Stints at other schools followed —
as a classroom teacher, a literacy specialist and an assistant principal. And
as of that fall, she was back at Peyton Forest as a first-time principal, a
promotion that felt like a homecoming.
In 2009 and 2010, the Atlanta school system endured a cheating scandal
that involved more than 40 schools. That turbulent time had begun to feel
thankfully distant. But the goal of increasing student achievement
remained. High-poverty, segregated neighborhood schools like Peyton
Forest have, on average, low reading and math scores. In 2015, it ranked in
the bottom 10 percent of Georgia public schools, which were then being
targeted for potential state takeover, and had earned an F on the state’s
annual report card. As a result, Gunner and her teachers were under
intense pressure to increase scores. That afternoon, Gunner was visiting
teachers’ classrooms, as she did most days, and was struck by the
dispiriting reality of how many of the school’s roughly three dozen teachers
were struggling.
Although most of them had taught for three or more years, several of the
veterans were new to the building. Over the summer, Gunner scrambled to
fill multiple openings, especially in third through fifth grade, which were
subject to state testing and particularly acute scrutiny. One new hire, for a
fourth-grade class, was Bianca McNeal, who grew up in southwest Atlanta
and graduated from college in Savannah, where she was still living just the
previous December. Gunner conducted the interview by Skype, as
principals often have to, and was concerned about McNeal’s inexperience — she was only 24 — but hoped, given her background, that she might have
a rapport with students. “I’m going to take a chance on you,” she told the
teacher.
Now Gunner, an imposing presence with a warm laugh, was turning from
desk to desk in the back of McNeal’s classroom two months into the school
year, kidding with students. She accused one of “throwing” her “under the
bus” when he revealed her assistance on some work, prompting a rare
laugh from McNeal, who with sober dutifulness was walking her students
through a math problem. “So, the question,” McNeal said haltingly, “is how
many students from each school will be inside the auditorium. We already
have 140 and 110.”
“Her voice used to put me to sleep,” Gunner said as she exited the room,
referring to the start of school. But she wasn’t being unkind; she was noting
McNeal’s improvement. She was speaking in less of a monotone, and her
lesson was better than several others Gunner witnessed earlier in the day
during the school’s two-hour “literacy block.” Gunner had been dismayed
by the absence of books, reading or sustained engagement with texts of any
kind in several classrooms, where teachers were devoting inordinate
amounts of time to isolated skills, such as a nearly half-hour lecture in one
class on the prefix “re.” “Our children can’t read, but hardly any reading is
happening,” she groaned.
In the hallways between classes, she’d put a hand against a wall to brace
herself, to pantomime her suffering at what she was witnessing, or give an
exaggerated squint, to indicate her bafflement or incredulity. Such humor,
often self-deprecating, was how she kept her spirits up and cheered those
around her. But her agony for students was real. Gunner was particularly
discouraged after sitting in on one class where the teacher had gathered
students around a blue PowerPoint with dense definitions of “subject” and
“predicate,” apparently lifted from a teacher’s manual or curriculum guide,
which she was trying to impose on first graders still struggling with
deciphering words like “that” and “hat.”
There were other challenges. One third-grade class still had a permanent
substitute, and two other teachers, Gunner believed, were on the verge of
quitting. Most of all, Gunner worried about her students, most of whom
lived in four low-income apartment complexes, which saw a lot of
transiency. Thirty-seven percent of the school’s students arrived or left
midyear. The day before, a family showed up looking to enroll and was so
poor that both the adults and children were barefoot and hoping for a free
school lunch as much as classroom seats. When a school-board member
asked Gunner at a district event early in the year what she needed as a new
principal, Gunner immediately said a washer and dryer, so she could wash
the clothes that many students wore day after day. Many students had
experienced trauma — the violent death of a loved one or homelessness or
physical, sexual or verbal abuse — and arrived in the mornings in
emotional distress, easily dissolving into tears or erupting in fury. Over
long weekends, students sometimes went untended or had little to eat,
which made returning to school both welcome and difficult. Yet the school
had only one full-time social worker and a counselor for more than 450
children.
Still, there were bright spots, as there were every day. One teacher had led a
lively discussion on the differences between a folk tale and a fable before
students read a story about a chipmunk that lost its stripes. And there was
always the marvelous Ericka Fluellen, who had been teaching at the school
for six years and who could keep several centers, where students were
reading or writing independently, in motion in her third-grade class, while
working effectively with a small group of students at her desk.
What Gunner really needed, she thought, was more Ms. Fluellens. But
teachers like that were always in short supply and weren’t exactly beating
down the door to work at Peyton Forest. So part of Gunner’s job was to help
the teachers she already had to improve — and to do so without igniting a
revolt.
schools employ 3.2 million full-time teachers, more
than the number of lawyers, physicians and engineers in the United States
combined. Because the job is demanding and pay is low compared with
other professions requiring a college degree, finding effective teachers, retaining them and helping those who need to get better is a never-ending
challenge.
Yet starting in 2002, the federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind
established guidelines for holding schools accountable for student scores
on state tests, closed schools deemed ineffective and expanded the nation’s
charter-school sector. A largely untested series of assumptions about
teaching and its ability to increase student achievement began to drive
education policy: that the best way to advance student outcomes was to
increase teacher effectiveness, and that the way to do that was to hold
teachers individually responsible for student performance on state tests,
which in turn would ensure teachers found the means and motivation to
improve. And nowhere, perhaps, did this idea blast off more quickly, rise as
far and fall as hard and as fast as it did in Atlanta.
District officials aggressively pushed this reform agenda. Educators who
didn’t meet the law’s ever-rising bar were fired or pushed out. And then test
scores soared. Low-performing schools suddenly saw double-digit gains
year after year. One school’s math scores jumped over 60 percentage points
between 2005 and 2006. Philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation rushed to invest in Atlanta’s miracle.
As the city soon discovered and the country learned only belatedly,
however, the belief that simply setting ambitious targets would catapult
100 percent of American students to rigorous, grade-level proficiency by
2014 — the original goal of No Child Left Behind — was always unfounded.
Starting in 2008, the city’s schools came under scrutiny from The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, followed by a state probe assisted by the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation. The inquiries determined that some teachers and
administrators in the school system, their livelihoods on the line, coached
students during the 2009 test or tampered with students’ answers in
response to a toxic “culture of fear” and retaliation in the district. More
than 150 people who worked in or oversaw Atlanta’s schools, including
Peyton Forest, were eventually implicated in the cheating and lost their
jobs or voluntarily left.
“It was ugly and horrible for everyone whether you were accused of
cheating or not,” says Gayle Burnett, who worked in the district’s central
office at the time and is now executive director of the district’s office of
innovation. “You were hearing horror stories about people being
intimidated. You were crushed by what people were admitting they had
done.”
Yet many teachers had also been put in a terrible bind. While teacher
effectiveness may be the most salient in-school factor contributing to
student academic outcomes, it contributes a relatively small slice — no
more than 14 percent, according to a recent RAND Corporation analysis of
teacher effectiveness — to the overall picture. A far bigger wedge is
influenced by out-of-school variables over which teachers have little
control: family educational background, the effects of poverty or
segregation on children, exposure to stress from gun violence or abuse and
how often students change schools, owing to homelessness or other
upheavals.
Under No Child Left Behind, new models for rapidly increasing student
achievement at high-poverty, segregated neighborhood public schools like
Peyton Forest were supposed to emerge, but few did. Success stories
existed, but they almost invariably involved changing the population of
students within those schools: either through greater integration in the
case of traditional districts or by opening up charter schools that attracted
an entirely new set of students through a lottery system. By contrast,
turnarounds of traditional neighborhood schools were often considered so
difficult that almost no charter groups were willing to take on the
assignment, and among those that did nationally, very few succeeded in
increasing scores.
Prosecutors in Atlanta indicted 35 people on racketeering, a federal charge
usually associated with drug trafficking or organized crime. Most of the
defendants pleaded guilty, but 12 people stood trial for the supposed
conspiracy, and in April 2015, all but one of them were convicted. The
sentences were jaw-dropping — 20 years, in some cases, with seven to serve
— even though the recipients, all of them black in the city’s majority-black school system, were first-time offenders. Two weeks later, the judge,
apparently recognizing that the terms were insupportable, reduced the
most severe prison sentences to three years, punishments that were still
uncommonly harsh.
An interim superintendent was appointed to clean house. “He fired
everyone who was a director or above in the instructional end of the central
office,” Burnett says, which also served to drain the district of institutional
memory. “Nobody knew what we were doing or why,” she says of the years
immediately following. Most teachers hadn’t cheated. “We had huge dips in
performance after the state came in, but it didn’t fall all the way back — all
of it wasn’t fake,” she says. “But no one believed anything good happened
before.” For decades, would-be school reformers had argued that almost
anything would be better than the status quo. But there was something
worse than no reform, it turned out: unsuccessful reform, which made
finding the will, resources and trust for better, future change that much
harder.
This was the landscape Meria Carstarphen stepped into when she arrived in
Atlanta in 2014 as the first permanent schools superintendent since 2011.
She introduced a new “turnaround” strategy, partnering with organizations
including two local charter operators that were willing to forgo a lottery to
operate traditional neighborhood schools, and a small nonprofit based in
upstate New York called the Rensselaerville Institute. Through its School
Turnaround program, Rensselaerville specializes in providing leadership
training to principals to help them become masters at recognizing and
teaching good instruction in their schools.
Gunner was assigned a Rensselaerville specialist named Mildred Toliver,
who would work with her over the next two years. At the heart of
Rensselaerville’s approach, which is similar to other programs for
beleaguered neighborhood schools in urban districts, was a belief that
principals had to get out of their offices and into classrooms — not as a
“compliance officer,” stringently holding teachers to account, but as
someone who intervenes and works side by side with teachers to help them
become the very best they could be.
Gunner grew up in Beaumont, Tex., in the 1970s, which she recalls as a
lot like Atlanta today. “All the black schools were on one side of town,” she
says, “and all the white on the other.” (Atlanta is the second-mostsegregated
city in the country, after Chicago, according to one 2015
analysis, and has the highest level of income inequality of any metropolitan
region, according to another in 2016.) Gunner didn’t attend an integrated
school until 1981, after a federal court order compelled Beaumont to
desegregate. She was entering sixth grade and was bused to a white school
across town.
“It was the first time I’d ever seen a white principal or a white counselor,”
she says. Gunner had tested into the gifted class the previous year. But at
her new school, she was told a reading test she took disqualified her from
the gifted program. Her mother, who worked for the Beaumont
Independent School District as a teacher for homebound students,
questioned the decision. So Gunner took the reading test again and passed.
She was the only black student in the gifted track for most of middle school.
“My mother,” Gunner says, “was always in there having to fight.”
Gunner eventually ended up at Spelman College, the historically black
women’s college in Atlanta. She loved the city and stayed after graduation.
When she was a young teacher at Peyton Forest in the 2000s during the No
Child Left Behind era, the job was becoming so stressful — the principal
who hired her was replaced for not sufficiently raising scores, according to
testimony in the state investigative report on the cheating scandal — that
Gunner considering taking a job in Buckhead, the affluent white suburb
north of town. But that would have made her life’s work just a job and not
the commitment to her community she wanted it to be, so she accepted a
position at another elementary school, where her new principal became a
life-changing mentor, showing her the difference a strong leader could
make for teachers. She hoped to have the same impact at Peyton Forest.
Gunner tended to see her teachers there as belonging to one of three
categories. First were the already excellent teachers like Ericka Fluellen.
Second were several teachers like Bianca McNeal, the novice, who might
not be strong instructors yet but were willing to put in the effort to
improve. Third were the teachers “who can but won’t,” in Gunner’s phrase; these teachers had the capacity to become more effective educators but
appeared to have no interest in doing so. They were already set in their
pedagogical ways or didn’t think change at the school was necessary or
possible or didn’t want to put in more effort, or there was some other
reason Gunner couldn’t yet divine.
She spent most of her time pinning her hopes on the second category and
being exasperated by the teachers in the third, who not only weren’t serving
the students but also made life more difficult for their peers like McNeal,
who needed better teaching models — a team — but didn’t have that.
Throughout the fall, McNeal exhausted herself during the week, planning
lessons late into the night and collapsing on the weekend. By early 2017,
she felt she’d finally gotten over the hump and could catch her breath.
Although she was so attached to the kids that she often let them stay with
her for hours after school as she graded papers or prepared for the next
day, she felt lonely and out of place among the adults. The other fourthgrade
teachers were much older, and she often felt they were giving her the
side-eye for keeping such long hours at the school. “I know they have kids
and families at home,” she told me that winter, which she didn’t begrudge.
But she also didn’t want them making her feel bad — asking her, for
example, “Why would you do that?” — when she took several students to
dinner or even once to Six Flags with her own money as a class reward. She
did not feel comfortable turning to them for help and advice.
McNeal did what she did because her students’ hardships reminded her of
some of her own. She grew up with her mother and an older brother in the
Bowen Homes, a segregated public-housing project in northwest Atlanta.
(Her parents weren’t together, but her father remained involved in her life.)
The project was notorious for “warehousing families in concentrated
poverty,” in the words of one Atlanta Housing Authority official, and was
razed in 2009. “There was a lot of violence and drugs that a child shouldn’t
have to see,” McNeal recalls.
Her mother worked for a time as a cafeteria worker, cleaning homes on the
side. “There was never enough money,” McNeal says. She attended
Frederick Douglass High School, most of whose students were low-income. Her teachers encouraged her to stay in school, take A.P. classes and join the
debate team. When she couldn’t afford a dress for the prom, a teacher
bought her one. McNeal’s mother was one of 17 brothers and sisters, and
McNeal had scores of aunts, uncles and cousins on that side, but she was
the first among them to attend college; she graduated ninth in her high
school class and won a full scholarship to the University of West Georgia
outside Atlanta, where she decided to enter the pre-med program.
But for all her hard work and her teachers’ generosity, she hadn’t received
the academic preparation she needed. She did well in her English classes,
but despite studying around the clock, she barely got through college
chemistry and failed a required math class, causing the university to
rescind a portion of her scholarship, which threatened her ability to
continue. She learned about a teacher-preparation program at Armstrong
Atlantic State University in Savannah, now part of Georgia Southern
University, applied and received enough new financial aid to graduate.
Eight months later she was at Peyton Forest, having sought out a majorityblack
low-income school because she wanted to be the “second family,” she
says, to her students that her teachers had been to her.
Gunner or a vice principal or one of the school’s literacy or math specialists
was a regular presence in McNeal’s classroom. Gunner had been
encouraged by Rensselaerville and her coach, Mildred Toliver, to give daily,
concrete feedback that teachers could readily incorporate into their
teaching instead of relying on a formal evaluation. At first, this made
McNeal self-conscious, but after a while, she got used to it and welcomed
the comments. But not every teacher felt the same way. One of them filed a
complaint against Gunner, and a district “escalation” expert named David
York, a former principal and teacher in his 60s, came to investigate and
share his findings with Gunner.
The teacher felt as if she were “being targeted” with excessive expectations,
York said, declining to identify the teacher. He told Gunner the teacher
“was stressed” and had “a lot going on at home.” She had also heard from
another teacher that Gunner had called her a slacker. “I’m not a slacker,”
the teacher had tearily protested, according to York. “I thought I was doing
what she wanted,” she said, and “I can’t work under these conditions.” Gunner acknowledged that the teacher might feel under pressure. “We go
into every room every day, sometimes twice a day, and that’s a paradigm
shift for this entire school,” Gunner said. “I do think she’s sincere,” Gunner
added, but, thinking about her teacher categories, she added, “What makes
cases like this so hard is it gets to be where it’s will you — or can you?”
“I can’t say the efforts she’s putting forth are paying off,” York conceded,
allowing that Gunner was “appropriately impatient.”
Gunner seized on the phrase. “Appropriately impatient! I like that!”
York encouraged Gunner to do more to recognize the teacher’s feelings.
“You can’t tell someone how to feel,” York said, and noted that during his
interview with the teacher, several former students visited the teacher’s
classroom to get hugs, evidence that she was “having some kind of positive
impact on kids.”
He also left Gunner with this warning. “She may quit,” he said, “and you
might think, ‘Oh, goody!’ ” But Gunner, York noted, wasn’t likely to find a
better teacher midyear and would very likely end up with another
permanent substitute. “And then you’re going to have to figure out how to
support her,” he said.
The teacher did eventually quit, and by early 2017, so had another.
Managing these sudden departures was hard on students. Fluellen, the
third-grade teacher, told me that students who had experienced other
traumatic losses and felt as if school was “their safe zone” would often act
out when their teachers left. And in fact, days after Gunner replaced the
second of these teachers, who taught fifth grade, with an emergency
substitute, she received an urgent call in her office over a school walkietalkie.
A child in the class was “being disrespectful” to the new sub — not
following directions and directing curse words at other students, though
not at the teacher. Upset, the teacher was threatening to quit, too. Gunner
thought that in the annals of fifth-grade antics, this was a situation a
competent teacher should be able to handle. But she also couldn’t afford to
have the parade of teachers continue, and she placed the offending child in
a different class for the day. The sub quit anyway after just two weeks; only with the third teacher did the school finally find a consistent and capable
instructor.
Gunner had a natural, take-charge assurance and almost frenetic energy
that sometimes belied her own learning curve as a first-year principal.
Straightforward with staff and expecting the same in return, she had little
patience for what she liked to call “shenanigans” — excuses for repeatedly
showing up late, for instance, or without a lesson prepared. But in her
eagerness to see rapid improvement in the school’s instructional practices,
she could sometimes overwhelm her staff with critical feedback and had
trouble delegating authority — for example, giving such precise details of a
message she wanted her assistant principal to convey to staff that the
assistant principal finally blurted out, “What I hear you saying is you want
to do this.”
It was Toliver’s job to help rein in some of these impulses. Toliver, who is
64 and has an instinct for what motivates people and an unflappable, seenit-all-before
manner, worked with Gunner at Rensselaerville’s multiday
workshops, mapping out matters involving staffing and student data.
Toliver visited Peyton Forest one or more days each month, and she and
Gunner would tour classes. They would discuss what they’d seen or what
they hadn’t and wished to — and how to address both.
When, early in the year, Gunner and Toliver watched the teacher use the
PowerPoint with first graders, Gunner was so frustrated by the lesson on
top of the others she’d seen that she went on a tear once she and Toliver
were back in Gunner’s office. If a teacher didn’t know this was
inappropriate for 6-year-olds, “how do you teach someone common
sense?” She resolved to deliver a long list of “nonnegotiables” to her
teachers that afternoon; one of the items on the list was going to be “no
PowerPoints in grades K-2!”
Toliver agreed that the lesson was “ridiculous.” But she gently steered
Gunner in a different direction, encouraging her to let her assistant
principal, who would be less intimidating to teachers, lead the meeting and
let them brainstorm about “instructional norms” they could embrace as a group, instead of Gunner’s just delivering dictates from on high. And she
encouraged Gunner not to deluge her teachers with too many things to
change, or they would just end up shutting down. Gunner had to pick and
choose wisely.
The approach was something David Jernigan, the deputy superintendent of
the Atlanta Public Schools and the founding executive director of Atlanta’s
KIPP network of charter schools, thinks is critical. “As someone who’s been
a principal as well — you can’t give a teacher a ton of feedback,” he said.
“You have to be very focused, very targeted, make it actionable at that
moment.” Figuring out what sorts of critiques were helpful for particular
teachers was knowledge built over time, but that could be learned faster if
you had a more experienced coach “walking around with you to test what it
is that you’re seeing.” But for a coach to be able to give “tough feedback in a
way that principals can hear,” Jernigan acknowledged, there had to be a
trusting relationship first.
To Gunner, Toliver was “calmer, more mature and had a level of experience
I just didn’t have,” but just as important, Toliver was someone Gunner
could relate to. Toliver was also from the black side of a segregated
Southern town, in her case Shreveport, La., but was a generation older. She
was a first-year teacher in the early days of integration in Louisiana at a
school with only a small number of black students. Her first class consisted
of 23 students, all of them black, with third through sixth graders in a
single class. It was like a one-room schoolhouse inside an otherwise
affluent white school.
She taught seven more years and became a principal in Shreveport and
later in Fort Worth, which contracted with Rensselaerville in 2002. Toliver
was coached by Gillian Williams, a former teacher and principal who
founded Rensselaerville’s School Turnaround program. (I knew Williams
when we taught at the same school in New York in 1990.) Toliver liked how
the program taught her to think about what it meant to be a leader,
something she had never really considered, and also its relentless focus on
the classroom, where the work of schools is actually done. When she left
the school district, Williams hired her as a specialist. (Rensselaerville hires
only specialists who have had successful leadership experience in low- performing schools, and more than half of them are men and women of
color.) “It was the first time someone had come in from the outside,”
Gunner acknowledged, “that I actually listened to.”
One of Toliver's main messages is that to be helpful to teachers, you can’t
just tell them what they’re doing wrong; teachers have to actually see what
good teaching looks like, and they need to see how to do it with the children
they are actually teaching. Fluellen told me that so much of instruction for
teachers is generic and not relevant to schools like Peyton Forest.
“Sometimes people will say, ‘Here’s a video of best instructional practices,’
and teachers are like, ‘Well, that’s not my kids — our kids can’t do that.’ ”
To address this, Rensselaerville advises principals to set up a “model
classroom” as an on-site resource and inspiration for teachers. Gunner
made Fluellen’s third-grade class one of the school’s model rooms.
One afternoon in March 2017, shortly before dismissal, when the nerves in
many classrooms are beginning to fray, Fluellen remained unruffled. She
didn’t engage as students got annoyed by classmates’ making objectionable
faces to their peers. When one’s boy anger at a girl seemed in danger of
escalating, Fluellen wordlessly tossed him the class’s stress ball, which he
began to squeeze, calming him for a time. Students then broke up into
groups, as orchestral music softly played, to either rewrite a story about a
girl on a soccer team from a first-person point of view or to interview
classmates about their sports preferences for a math exercise on graphing
data. At her desk, Fluellen had a third group and was playing a game with
flashcards and giving high-fives to those who won.
Another way to teach teachers is for principals to go into classrooms
themselves, a message Gunner took to heart. That same March, she helped
McNeal, the fourth-grade teacher, grade essays that her students had
written about Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. In the process,
McNeal realized she had missed a key element of the assignment:
comparing and contrasting the two figures, not just writing about each in
turn.
A few days later, McNeal retaught the lesson with Gunner looking on. This
time, McNeal explained that students were to write “all the similarities” in one paragraph and “all the differences” in another, bookended by an
introduction and conclusion, two elements most of her fourth graders
omitted entirely. Yet as McNeal got started, it was clear that most students
still had no idea what an introduction entailed. As McNeal began to address
this, she didn’t provide a preamble to pique students’ interest or draw them
in, something she’d struggled to do all year.
Gunner jumped in to model a different approach. She dropped her loud
teacher voice several registers, as if to invite students into a delicious
conspiracy. “What if this was the very first day of school,” she all but
whispered. “And you came and sat here. And you’d never seen your teacher
before, right? And I walk in and said” — Gunner now strutted dramatically
into the class, raising her voice back to thunder level — “ ‘Turn to Page 12,
we’re going to be doing Problems 1 through 10!’ ” Several students giggled.
She asked them what they would think. Tentative at first, a boy finally
ventured he’d wonder who she was.
“You’d be confused, right?” Gunner signaled that his answer was correct.
“But what if I came in and said” — her voice sweet and low again — “ ‘Good
morning, my name is Ms. Gunner. I’m your new fourth-grade teacher, and
today we’re going to be studying math.’ ”
Not only, she pointed out, would they know who she was and what was
going on, they’d know the direction the class was going in — the same way a
good writer helps a reader by hinting at the direction of an essay in the
beginning. For the next 10 minutes, Gunner teased out with students how
this literal introduction applied to introductions in their writing. By the
lesson’s end, students were calling out when a classmate’s proposed opener
was “effective” or when it was just “turn to Page 12 and do Problems 1
through 10,” a phrase students were now using as shorthand for bad
writing.
But not every class was progressing. One day late in spring 2017, Gunner
and Toliver were on their usual rounds. They looked in the window of a
fifth-grade classroom. The students were horsing around, without any
apparent work to do. The teacher was sitting at her desk, engrossed by her
phone as she rapidly tapped the screen. She continued to tap without looking up. Gunner would get exasperated with teachers who didn’t
circulate among students but sat at their desks for an entire lesson. But as
soon as she opened the door, the teacher would usually get up and begin
looking over students’ shoulders.
Now when Gunner swung the door open to enter, the teacher kept tapping,
apparently unaware that her supervisors had just arrived in her classroom.
The students looked at them and back at the teacher, wide-eyed, waiting for
something to happen, as Gunner and Toliver continued to observe. Finally,
one of the students alerted the teacher to their presence. But the teacher
didn’t stand up. She simply put down the phone and gave Gunner an
expressionless look. When they left, it was Toliver who was momentarily
agitated, telling Gunner, “I’d write the teacher up,” meaning putting a
formal complaint in her file, a move that principals typically take when
trying to create a paper trail before deciding to fire someone. It would not
prove necessary; the teacher left at the end of the year.
As spring advanced, anxiety about the state tests, which were in late April,
after spring break, began to mount. Gunner worried students would be
hungry and otherwise at loose ends over the vacation, making them ill
prepared for days of tests upon their return. Gunner and other staff met
individually with “bubble” students from each grade, whom she, Toliver
and the school’s leadership team had identified as having the best chance of
jumping from “developing” to “proficient” in reading, math or both.
Gunner couldn’t always hide her own anxiety, which sometimes permeated
whatever space she was in. She would call out to students randomly in the
hallway, “Only 21 days to the test!” or “Only 14 days to the test!” Over the
last decade, pep rallies before state tests have become rites of passage in
schools, as familiar as the prom. Peyton Forest had theirs.
The atmosphere became increasingly frantic, as Gunner began to
encourage teachers to do extra lessons on reading and math, even if this
meant neglecting other subjects. Gunner complained to Toliver about a
teacher who conducted a science experiment involving dirt and water,
which resulted in a lot of mud. Gunner didn’t relish the expenditure of time
“so close to the test” on something other than reading or math. “We’re going to have to have a tough conversation about that,” Toliver told me,
referring to what she saw as a counterproductive narrowing of the
curriculum. To read well, students needed familiarity with a range of
experiences and exposure to broad subject matter. The original intent of
the standards movement had been to infuse schools with richer, more
substantial content. But the nation had ended up with an “accountability”
movement instead.
In May 2017, Gunner got the raw results from the state’s tests. The
school’s scores had improved: In reading, the percentage of third-throughfifth-grade
students who were scored “proficient” had moved to 15 percent
from 12 percent. In math, the jump was greater: to 21 percent from 11. And
when the state calculated the school’s College and Career Ready
Performance Index (C.C.R.P.I.) score, which adjusts for factors like
poverty, the school did sufficiently well to move from an F on the state
report card to a D.
Still, given how hard everyone had worked, Gunner had hoped for an even
bigger rise. Over that summer, 12 more teachers decided not to return to
Peyton Forest. In the hunt for replacements, Gunner decided that it was
better to be frank about the demands of the job and the needs of the
students than to try to sugarcoat the challenges and then have a teacher be
surprised and quit.
Even so, a fifth-grade teacher quit two weeks into the new school year, and
in November, three more teachers abruptly left. Still, there were some
positive signs. By fall 2017, enrollment at the school had grown by more
than 15 percent, a sign to Gunner that word on the street about the school
was good. No longer a first-year principal and having shown some small
gains, Gunner felt the pressure ease. She opened a “lit lounge” in the
school, a room that looked like a child’s fantasy clubhouse, with colorful
rugs, beanbag chairs and donated games like air hockey and even an
electronic bowling alley. Students could win lit lounge privileges by
behaving in a way that demonstrated that month’s character word, such as
“risk-taker” or “courageous.” There were pajama reading parties and Friday
movie nights and money for field trips, under a district plan to give
principals more control over their budgets.
By this spring, there was a palpable difference in the school. Reading
classes included more actual reading, and from class to class, students were
toting library books. Fluellen was now an instructional coach and had
started a “new-teacher academy” to help develop and retain the school’s
recent hires. Teachers were meeting weekly after school in grade and
subject teams, discussing instructional problems they had in class and
helping one another to resolve them. McNeal, no longer tentative, showed a
group of her colleagues a new way to teach adding fractions.
Last month, the scores arrived for this past school year. The reading scores
climbed to 21 percent “proficient.” Some of the biggest gains were in fourth
grade, where McNeal taught the entire grade language arts. Math inched up
another point to 22 percent. (The C.C.R.P.I. score and state report card
grade won’t be calculated until later this year.)
But how much more a school like Peyton Forest can improve without
addressing the more systemic challenges it faces is anyone’s guess, and past
experience is not encouraging. In the years after No Child Left Behind was
enacted, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely
considered the gold standard for measuring achievement over time in
American schools, rose marginally in reading but more so in math,
suggesting that an initial injection of energy and attention into districts
may have goosed scores. But they have since stagnated, remaining flat for
roughly a decade. Teaching does matter, and it can improve. But there is
little evidence — at least to date — that it can counter the effects on
children of attending neighborhood schools that remain racially and
economically isolated.
On Gunner’s worst days, she told me once, “I don’t think people really
think it’s possible,” referring to turning around neighborhood schools like
Peyton Forest. On days that aren’t her worst, Gunner tries to focus on the
job right in front of her. And it is a job, in fact, that she loves. The
profession, as it is currently constituted, seems to require a bifocal vision:
an ability to see the dispiriting big picture, but also an ability to see the
child close at hand.
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