Gary Cartwright
One School Left Behind
Austin's experimental Garza High rescues troubled kids and sends an overwhelming majority on to college. So why does George W. Bush's education reform law consider it a failure?
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The irony is inescapable: If Garza didn't accommodate the needs of its students, chances are that few would graduate at all. Applying No Child Left Behind standards to a school like Garza confuses the political imperative of accountability with the educational imperative of creating an environment that promotes the success of every student. Instead of applauding the extraordinary resilience of Garza's students, the law treats them as failures. "A lot of kids need to repeat Algebra I," Garza's principal and founder, Vicki Baldwin, told me, "but you can't afford that under Bush's law. The mentality is that everyone learns at the same rate. No one with a lick of common sense believes that."
Most of Garza's students have survived some life-altering experience: the death of one or both parents, mental or physical illness, an abortion or the birth of a child (15 percent are parents), a slide into drugs or alcohol, or some other crisis that strays from the norm. Like Ellie, many work thirty to forty hours a week. Nearly one third fit the legal definition of "homeless." One boy lived in a friend's doghouse, and several other students live in their cars.
Garza has the same requirements as other schools in the district, but its open-enrollment policy allows students to start school or complete courses anytime during the school year. Rather than having two inflexible semesters, the school operates on a five-semester system. Students attend year-round, eight weeks of class followed by two weeks off. There are no tardy
One School Left Behindslips at Garza, no bells, no dress code, no classroom lectures. Teachers, or facilitators, as they're called at Garza, work one-on-one with students. Baldwin's system forces students to take responsibility for themselves. Though Garza's curriculum is more difficult than that of most schools in the district, students told me that the challenge works as an incentive. They abide by an honor code, which is part of the school's culture: "At this school we will demonstrate personal honor and integrity at all times; choose peace over conflict; respect ourselves and others." Fights almost never occur; Garza was in its fifth year before one broke out—over the interpretation of a basketball rule. Baldwin sentenced the combatants to "reflection time," requiring them to consider two questions: Is this the place for me? And can I live by the code? Ellie, who attended two other high schools before Garza, told me, "If you have a problem here, you go to a counselor. At a regular school, people don't notice problems until a fight starts in the hall."
Baldwin, 61, is a tough cookie—but with a soft center. For twelve years she was the principal of a gang-infested South Austin middle school, and in 1995 and 1996 she was the principal-in-residence for President Clinton's Department of Education, in Washington. When the AISD superintendent asked her to design a school for juniors and seniors that would circumvent the traditional barriers of high school, she laid down a couple of conditions: a liberal budget (Garza has one computer for every three students and its own media lab, both the envy of other schools in the district) and absolute say over who would be on her staff. Baldwin speaks the language of the street as easily as that of the classroom. The respect and unconditional love that she shows her students is reciprocated in dozens of small ways. There's a lot of hugging and reassuring at Garza. In the hall one day, she put her arm around a huge twenty-year-old man-child named Hank. Hank dropped out after both of his parents died, Baldwin told me, but now he was back, completing high school in the morning and working in the afternoon to support his younger brother. "Hank got into drugs for a while," she explained, as he hung his head and shuffled his enormous feet, "but now he's got his shit together."
Whites are a plurality at Garza, though race here doesn't seem to be a big deal. Ellie jokes that her race is "stirred, not mixed": Her father was black and her mother is white. Ellie lived with her grandparents, Jayne and former state district judge Joe Dibrell, until she was twelve. "My grandmother was old-school," Ellie told me. "She had me taking ballet, horseback riding, tennis, Girl Scouts, something every day." When Jayne began to develop Alzheimer's, the girl went to live with her mom, who by then had remarried. Ellie goes to school until noon, sometimes works until eleven o'clock at a pizza parlor, drives her own new car (her grandfather replaced the one that was wrecked), and makes her own life choices. She has a tattoo that is a tribute to the father she barely knew: the word "Daddy" on one ankle, above a depiction of the AIDS ribbon and the date of his death. "Ellie is high-maintenance," Baldwin confesses. "She can be too smart for her own good."
Short and attractive, Ellie wears her long, curly hair in a bun and works out at the YMCA to maintain her ideal weight. She is bright and precocious but can be excessively dramatic and self-absorbed. She favors off-the-shoulder blouses and high stiletto heels. "It's a forties look," she explained. For her English IV reading assignments, she selected books that were once censored, including Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Her goal is to graduate from the University of Texas law school, where her grandfather and uncle are alumni. "My dream is to be on the U.S. Supreme Court," she told me. "I know that's really, really unlikely." She would settle for being a judge, like her grandfather. Garza has given her a chance to reach that goal. "It has taught me that I can defy the odds," Ellie told me. "A lot of people think Garza is a last-chance school, and in a way it is. We're giving ourselves a last chance."
But Garza may be facing its own last chance in a few years if its graduation rate doesn't rise. So draconian are the penalties under No Child Left Behind that Baldwin sometimes wonders if the Bush administration's real agenda is to discredit public schools and convince people that vouchers are the solution. If accountability is really the goal, she says, they should give Garza extra credit for the fifteen students who graduated in only three years. "Schools have to have higher standards," Baldwin concedes, "but we don't have to have this gotcha mentality."
In the meantime, she has developed a plan to help students catch up before the federal alarm clangs: a four-credit thematic course under the rubric "Forensics." Assisted by the Austin Police Department, students are working on a realistic criminal case—DNA analysis, fingerprinting, evidence collection, ballistics, and finally, a mock trial—while taking four separate courses in chemistry, integrated physics, desktop publishing, and criminal justice. Not surprisingly, the class is filled to capacity.
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