Eleven-year-old Dalvinepps Boswell used to dread going to Sherman Elementary School. But this year is different.
“I’m excited,” he said as he raced across the playground during an open house last week at the school.
There’s a lot of excitement at Sherman.
The South Side school has undergone a complete overhaul under No Child Left Behind sanctions.
The principal, the teachers and the rest of the staff were replaced. A new reading and math curriculum was selected. A more demanding discipline code was created. And the school, which has struggled with violence and low test scores, was turned over to a private, non-profit company.
Only the pupils will be the same when school starts Tuesday.
It is the most radical alteration of an Illinois school under the sweeping federal reform.
“This is a situation where we felt we had to do something drastic, something far more dramatic than what we had done at other schools,” said Barbara Eason-Watkins, chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools. “We needed a high-quality school in that neighborhood immediately, and we took action.”
Under the federal law, chronically underperforming schools are subject to a series of increasingly stringent sanctions. If failure persists for six years, schools face what is known as “restructuring,” which can mean state takeover, conversion to a charter school or mass firings.
Nationwide, about 1,750 schools are in restructuring. But in the vast majority of cases, districts have used an escape clause in the law that allows them to institute weaker reforms. They’ve simply added reading teachers or increased teacher professional development, for example.
This school year, Chicago Public Schools will employ a variety of minor interventions to try to turn around the other 184 schools that are in restructuring.
Only Sherman Elementary was gutted and rebuilt from scratch.
More Top Picks Best Uv Nail Lamps For Seniors
The Sherman transformation is one of the grandest experiments in public education today, and it will be closely watched by local and national experts. No Child Left Behind reforms are based on the premise that every child can read and write at grade level if given access to the best schools and the best teachers.
At Sherman, returning pupils will get just that.
Now the question is, can the best teachers and additional resources turn around a failing school?
Chicago officials have so much riding on the rebirth of Sherman that Mayor Richard Daley and schools chief Arne Duncan will be at the school Tuesday to ring the opening-year bell.
Lionel Allen, the low-key but intense former history teacher who was hired as the new principal, recognizes the challenge his staff faces.
“We embrace it,” he said. “But we are not focusing or concentrating on outside pressures. We are focusing inward, on giving the kids in this community the best education possible.”
Sherman Elementary, 1000 W. 52nd St., nestled between the dangerous and depressed neighborhoods of Englewood and Back of the Yards, has struggled mightily. Six years ago, a 12-year-old Sherman boy was brutally beaten on his way home from school. A few years earlier, a 13-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed himself in front of classmates at the school.
Academically, Sherman pupils–who range from pre-kindergarten through 8th grade–have performed poorly. For the last decade, an average of nearly 80 percent failed state and national achievement exams. Last year, 75 percent did not make the grade on state tests.
But Allen and other district officials have high expectations for the 600 pupils, all of whom live in the neighborhood.
The key to those expectations lies in the quality of the teaching staff.
Sherman will be run by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a non-profit based in Chicago that recruits mid-career professionals and recent graduates from elite colleges and puts them through an intensive training program. Allen, with the help of academy officials, hand-picked a teaching core of about 30 educators who he argues are among the best in the city.
Seventy-five percent of the teachers have master’s degrees. Five have National Board Certification, which requires a rigorous yearlong process of assessment and skills development. Two are winners of the Golden Apple Award, a prestigious local honor given to top-notch educators.
Four are recent graduates of the academy, which runs four other Chicago public schools. Others have transferred from other academy schools.
“It’s all about the teaching,” Allen said. “You can build a beautiful new building, buy all the fancy computers you want and institute the best math and reading program. But if you don’t have good, quality teachers, you are not likely to succeed.”
Studies show that low-income children, such as those at Sherman, are far more likely than their wealthier counterparts to be trapped in schools with the lowest-quality teachers.
The academy also is pumping extra money into Sherman to help pay for teacher mentors and high-quality professional development. Seven highly experienced and well-trained teachers have been hired to help guide instruction and professional development. Each will receive a $30,000 stipend over the next three years to help put together the best teacher training programs.
Last week, about 30 Sherman educators gathered in a muggy cafeteria for a three-day seminar that focused, in large part, on how to teach reading. Jerry Michel, a reading specialist who ran the seminar, said he was impressed by the caliber of the Sherman teachers.
“They are engaged. They are intelligent. They ask the right questions and dig deep into reading strategies,” said Michel, who has worked with dozens of schools statewide. “This is a very high-level staff.”
Aiko Boyce, a 38-year teaching veteran and Golden Apple winner, jumped at the chance to come to Sherman.
“It’s definitely a risk to come to a new school like this,” Boyce said as she stood in front of her freshly painted and scrubbed classroom, hands on hips, picturing where to put her art supplies. “But that’s when we do our best work–when we are challenged, when we are pushed to think hard and work hard and come up with the solutions that aren’t so obvious. I feel energized by the opportunity.”
Tyesha Boswell, Dalvinepps’ mom, feels relief.
She has three sons at Sherman and was one step from pulling them out last year and transferring them to a school farther away.
“I just thank God they finally did something to help my kids,” she said. “They are good boys and they deserve a good school.”
———-
More Top Picks Best Adjustable Focus Reading Glasses