Head of The Class
With test scores down and the dropout rate up, everyone’s looking to fix Texas’ schools. Has a Turkish Muslim who has been influenced by the teachings of an obscure philosopher found an answer? Just ask the hundreds of at-risk students who have graduated from his charter schools.
Dave says: Check the new harmony schools: Dallas: hsnature.org/ San Antonio: hsasa.org/ Houston: hsart.org/ Austin: hspaustin.org/ thanks Harmony System. I don’t need to buy 50 years old house in an expensive neighborhood just to send my children to a good school. (February 22nd, 2011 at 12:22pm)
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Observers like Houston state representative Garnet Coleman argue that even good charters drain away funds from local districts. Coleman understands why parents send their children to charter schools when the neighborhood school is inferior: “Who would argue with that? But parents have a different job. My responsibility as a legislator is to all children.” He freely admits that schools such as KIPP, YES, Uplift, and Harmony follow practices proven to work: longer hours, after-school and weekend tutoring and enrichment programs, insistence on parental involvement. “We need to take those things and make them universal,” he said. “If kids need to stay until five o’clock or come on Saturday, let’s do it. If necessary, run a second set of buses to make that possible. If parents need to be involved, make sure the schoolhouse is open and the lights are turned on at night to accommodate working parents who can’t get there in the day. If small classes are the key, let’s pay for small classes, not increase class sizes from thirty to forty students. Since we have all these models that have ‘proven themselves,’ why aren’t we doing that for all children? That is a failure of the people in government in the state of Texas.”
So what can all schools—charter and otherwise—learn from the success of the Harmony model? Though the Harmony schools follow the regular public school calendar (KIPP, by contrast, has school days that last from 7:30 until 5, along with a mandatory summer session), they offer extensive tutoring and time-intensive extracurricular activities, such as robotics, after school and on Saturdays. Another important idea picked up from KIPP is home visits. Harmony teachers visit more than 90 percent of their students’ homes at least once during the year. HSA-Houston student Djenaba Aswad said, “It’s good to see the teachers interact with my family. My parents see the teachers as caring. It makes the school seem more like a family. My chemistry teacher is like another father or an older brother.”
At most Harmony campuses, 60 to 90 percent of the students are Hispanic or black and qualify for free or discounted lunches. But because admission is by lottery, there can be no quotas, so the demography of the schools tends to reflect that of the neighborhood. However, principals at nearly every school I visited spoke of parents who drive at least half an hour to bring their children to school. As Harmony’s reputation spreads, the picture may change. At HSA-Houston Northwest, the distribution is about 30 percent Hispanic, 30 percent Asian, and 30 percent Anglo. Banners hanging from rafters in the gym signify students with roots in more than forty countries. In recognition of their diversity, the schools organize and invite parents to participate in Day of the Dead and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, Black History Month, Asian Heritage Week, and an international festival to cover other cultures.
But ultimately what distinguishes Harmony and the other top-performing charter schools is a well-taught, rigorous curriculum. Harmony students are expected to perform above grade level and, as a natural by-product, to score well on the TAKS tests. As TAKS results are the primary measure by which schools are judged under No Child Left Behind, public schools have no choice but to pay attention to these annual tests, but many educators view them as an inferior indicator. The Harmony schools take them seriously but do not let them take over the curriculum. “When we started,” Tarim recalls, “people told us to focus on that, but we decided it was inadequate. That is a very low standard. If you focus on that, you are setting kids up for failure.”
That message has been delivered. At every school I visited, teachers conceded that doing well on the TAKS is important but that it does not consume their lives. “When I first came here, it immediately struck me that Harmony is not a TAKS-oriented school,” said Jennifer Butcher, a teacher at HSA-Laredo. “They were actually teaching the curriculum. At public schools I’ve worked at, they were always passing out practice tests. Here I actually get to teach history, science, grammar, and everything they need to learn. It’s not just TAKS.”
That approach seems to work. More than 90 percent of Harmony students consistently pass the TAKS tests. When Hispanic and black students at Harmony schools are compared with their ethnic counterparts across the state at the sixth- and ninth-grade levels, they outclass them by 30 to 54 points, with the largest difference at the higher levels, indicating the cumulative effects of Harmony schooling. This success at closing the achievement gap led to HSA-Houston’s receiving the National Title I Distinguished School Award in 2005. It was one of only 52 middle and high schools in the nation to do so, and the only charter school.
In addition to regular classroom instruction, every school offers extensive free tutorials after class and on Saturdays for students who need extra help, all year in every subject. More important, teachers and administrators know which students require additional attention. Within the charter school community, Harmony is becoming famous for its sophisticated database at its central office, in Houston, which houses an extraordinary level of real-time data. In addition to such administrative information as salaries and other expenses, the database includes the full curriculum, test-preparation tools, attendance records, and a fantastically detailed grade book for every course. On the day a test or other assignment is graded, a student, parent, teacher, principal, or curriculum director in the central office can see not only the overall grade but how the student performed on parts of each test or other assignments. This makes it possible to spot trouble early on and direct students to individual or group tutorials specifically tailored to their shortcomings.
The database may prove to be the key to replicating the Harmony model on a much larger scale. The schools already give the software free of charge to any other type of campus, as long as it has a math and science focus. But Tarim has a much grander vision. He has offered the program to Rice University’s Connexions project, an ingenious multilingual computer resource that publishes materials that teachers and researchers around the world can use to suit their needs. Together, Tarim and the Connexions team are writing a $30 million grant proposal that would pay thousands of teachers to prepare lesson plans in their various fields. These lesson plans in turn would be reviewed by experts who would customize them for schools around the world.
The database also keeps a running score on students’ standing on the Discipline Point System. Following advice from KIPP and YES, Harmony holds students to a high standard of order and responsibility. Various “unwanted behaviors,” such as tardiness, failure to bring materials, talking back to the teacher, chewing gum, or leaning back in the chair, are assigned points befitting their perceived seriousness. Students who amass more than ten points in a week are required to attend after-school or Saturday detention. If they go a week without receiving any points, the count reverts to zero.
Though the Harmony schools have embraced many of the typical elements at other campuses, so far organized sports are limited to basketball, volleyball, soccer, and karate. State representative Richard Raymond, who has a son at the Laredo HSA, described the seventh-grade basketball team he volunteers to coach as “sort of the Bad News Bears, but I’m trying to teach them the basics—the mental part, teamwork—and they’ll be better next year. We often lose by twenty points, but they’re all going to play and they’re all going to play the same amount of time. Over the course of the season, everybody made some baskets. In the last game, they played a girls’ team that was a year older—and won. Man, you would’ve thought they had won the NBA championship.”
Harmony also encourages students to enter all sorts of academic contests, to prove to themselves that they can face the strongest of competition. The result is display cases, even in the newer schools, that are filled with trophies and medals and plaques. The display at HSE-Houston shows President George W. Bush presenting an award to a student who placed first in the national Math Counts competition in 2008. More recently, the school’s computer programming team placed first at the state UIL competition in April. Robotics is a popular activity at most Harmony schools, and their teams have excelled repeatedly. The two-year-old Laredo school placed first among 80 teams that competed in Houston in February, and an El Paso team competed for the United States against 84 teams in a 2009 European robotics championship in Denmark. Even though most Harmony schools have been open for less than a decade, their students have won more than two thousand awards in local, state, and international science fairs and Olympiads. Given this record, it is not surprising that of the first 35 schools designated as T-STEM (Texas Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) Academies, which receive funding from public and private organizations such as the TEA and the Gates and Dell foundations as part of the Texas High School Project, 14 were Harmony schools.
More impressive than all these plaques and trophies is Harmony’s ability to achieve its primary stated goal: to thoroughly prepare students to enter and succeed at four-year colleges. “If it stops with high school,” Tarim says, “we are not successful. And we don’t want them to drop out of college.” In almost every school, from the elementary grades upward, scores of college pennants point students to that goal. When asked what they like about Harmony, fourth graders volunteer, “It’s preparing me to go to college.” When I asked middle-schoolers, “How many of you think you will go to college?” I invariably got a unanimous show of hands. But humanities teacher Amy Curtis said, “That is not a question we would ever ask. We ask them, ‘Which four-year college are you going to attend?’ College readiness begins in elementary school, not in the ninth or tenth grades.”
These efforts are not feeding an empty hope. Of the 83 students who graduated from the Harmony Science Academies in Houston, Austin, and Dallas this spring, only 3 had not yet been accepted to a four-year college. Such a record would cause most superintendents to puff up with pride, but Tarim is not satisfied. He is, however, optimistic. “We are not yet successful,” he insists. “We are at the beginning. In three years we will have close to a thousand Harmony school graduates in the state. Eventually, far more. When all the Harmony schools produce students who graduate from four-year colleges and become contributing members of society, then I can confidently say we are successful. We can’t claim that now, but the mechanism is in place.”
Harmony and other successful charter schools can serve the purposes for which they were created—testing ways, both old and new, of improving our educational system and reaching students who have failed in or been failed by other schools. They can be invaluable models for regular public schools. But they still serve less than 2 percent of the nearly five million school-age children in our state. The task ahead is to discern the best practices of both kinds, as well as those of private schools, and to have the will to implement them. It will likely mean rethinking teacher education, restructuring tenure, assigning veteran teachers to challenging posts, lengthening both the school day and year, encouraging home visits, and instilling a culture of high expectations and “no excuses.” It will mean providing the resources required to attract more young people from the top third of their college classes into the noble profession of educating children. And since little of this will be free, it will also mean coming to realize that taxes are not a curse to be avoided but the dues we pay for civilization.
Read a Q&A with William Martin.
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