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.
Photograph by Adam Voorhes
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)
The beige building on South Braeswood Boulevard looks run-down for the Meyerland section of Houston, which helps explain why the Hebrew academy formerly housed there left for better quarters. The interior offers little to improve that first impression. Painted in shades of light yellow and green, the narrow hallways, though lined with pennants from dozens of colleges, do not inspire. The library/computer lab is a dark, low-ceilinged room partly lit by a string of white Christmas lights. The lunchroom area is more like a wide hallway, with banks of blue lockers along the walls. To make the space seem gracious, several large pictures of the sort one sees in a grandmother’s house hang high above the lockers: landscapes, sailing ships, skylines at eventide. The gym is new, but the basketball court is not regulation size, and the sidelines come within a couple of feet of the walls. It is about what one would expect in a school where 70 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged and 80 percent are either Hispanic or black. At one point in the tour, the principal, Dr. Edib Ercetin, smiled and said with a shrug, “It’s like an old woman. No matter how much makeup she puts on, you can tell.”
It was a matter-of-fact acknowledgement, not an apology. The truth is that Ercetin’s school, the Harmony Science Academy, is one of the best in the country. It received an “exemplary” rating from the Texas Education Agency for the 2008—2009 school year, reflecting its outstanding test scores and its zero dropout rate, placing it in the top 8 percent of all public high schools in the state. This year the HSA received the Silver Medal in U.S. News and World Report’s America's Best High Schools, putting it in the top 3 percent in the entire nation.
The name may not be familiar to most readers, but the Harmony Science Academy is part of a growing movement in Texas that may revolutionize our educational system. It is a charter school, which is a public school funded by taxpayer money but run by a nonprofit organization or a for-profit business (Harmony is the former). In Texas, the State Board of Education grants the charter, and the TEA monitors the school’s academic progress. The charter establishes a new school district, which can have multiple campuses. Each charter receives $450,000 in start-up money and about $6,000 a year for each student enrolled, approximately $1,200 less than the allotment for students in regular public schools. As compensation for lower funding, charter schools have considerable freedom to operate as they see fit. They set their calendar and the length of their school day, and they have wide discretion as to how and what they teach.
Texas has been particularly hospitable to charters, which began to spring up in the mid-nineties. In 1994 Houston teachers Mark Feinberg and David Levin created the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). In Irving, a group of concerned citizens opened the first Uplift Education school, in 1997. In 1998 Chris Barbic founded YES Prep in Houston, and that same year Teach for America’s Tom Torkelson and JoAnn Gama launched IDEA Academy—its motto is “No Excuses!”—in Donna. Today, Texas ranks third in the number of charter schools in the country, with 464 campuses and nearly 120,000 students.
The Harmony Public Schools are the largest charter school system in the state. Since the opening of the Meyerland campus, in August 2000, Harmony has grown to include 25 campuses in seventeen Texas cities, most serving economically disadvantaged minority children and often housed in big-box buildings reborn as schools—a Walmart in San Antonio, an Albertsons in Waco, a warehouse in Laredo. Seven more campuses are slated to open this fall, and administrators hope to have a total of 35 schools up and running by 2012, with an enrollment of 24,000 students. The newer schools are already receiving accolades comparable to those at Ercetin’s. Of the 19 that were operating in 2008 and 2009, 11 received the TEA’s “exemplary” rating, 6 were “recognized,” and 2 were “academically acceptable.”
The success of the Harmony schools, and the other Texas charters, is hard to ignore, especially when you consider the crisis in public education. The problems are not new. In 1983 a comprehensive report called A Nation at Risk documented in depressing detail the shortcomings of elementary and secondary education in this country. On a series of nineteen tests, U.S. students never placed first or second when compared with children from all over the world; when compared with students in other industrialized countries, they ranked last on seven of the examinations. U.S. students did fairly well on the reading tests, but they performed miserably in chemistry, physics, and math. Follow-up reports in 1998 and 2006 found little significant improvement. On the benchmark Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, conducted in 1998, the U.S. ranked ahead of only Cyprus and South Africa in math and science literacy. Even our best students ranked at the bottom when compared with the best in other countries. What’s more, tests of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students showed that U.S. kids fared worse and worse by comparison as they progressed through the system. Later studies, in 2003 and 2007, concluded that American students had performed poorly at all three levels.
To make things even more problematic, our educational system is also dealing with a rising dropout rate. Major studies indicate that 25 percent of American students fail to graduate from high school. Among blacks and Hispanics, the figure is nearly 40 percent. Closer to home, Texas has ranked dead last in high school graduation rates in recent years, with nearly 49 percent of students failing to earn a diploma. Moreover, of those who do manage to finish high school and enroll in Texas colleges, half need remedial courses and many never graduate. This is not the picture of a nation at risk but of a nation and state in peril.
Though they are not without their detractors, charter schools have tried to establish themselves as an answer to this challenge, and they are riding a powerful wave of support. Following the lead of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, President Barack Obama has called for their expansion, urging states to lift the cap on the number of charters they will authorize—the Texas cap is currently 215, and the TEA has received bids for each spot—to qualify for grants from the $4.35 billion educational stimulus package known as Race to the Top. (Governor Rick Perry chose not to participate in the program because he believed it had too many strings attached.)
As the Harmony schools have become models for other programs across the state, they are poised to take advantage of this groundswell. Yet there’s an interesting wrinkle in the story of the Harmony schools. The organizers, key administrators, and about half of the math, science, and computer teachers are Turkish Muslims, not exactly what one would expect in Texas. Many of them have at least some ties to a broad-based movement in which well-educated, pious Muslims have established hundreds of the highest-performing secular schools in Turkey and the surrounding Turkic states. Though this has created some controversy, it appears to be of no concern to the parents, students, and non-Muslim teachers connected to these schools. What is of concern is whether their approach to public education provides a road map for other schools to help improve the quality of education across the state or, as critics contend, merely drains resources away from existing public schools. Is the answer to our educational crisis to be found in that run-down building in Meyerland?
The founder of the Harmony schools is an intense but unfailingly courteous 43-year-old named Soner Tarim, who was born and raised in Istanbul. In 1991, while Tarim was teaching at a Turkish university and working on his doctorate in aquatic ecology, his older brother asked him to come to Houston to look after his wife and three children while he underwent treatment for colon cancer at M.D. Anderson. As the ultimately unsuccessful treatments dragged on, Tarim started taking courses at the University of Houston to improve his English. He also began to check out possibilities for continuing his scientific studies in the U.S. After his brother died and his family returned to Turkey, Tarim enrolled at A&M in 1994, where he joined a cohort of more than 150 Turkish graduate students, nearly all studying math, science, and engineering.
As he gained more teaching experience at A&M, he and some of his colleagues discovered that, unlike beginning students in Turkey, many of the freshmen in the undergraduate courses they were teaching did not have the basic math and science skills needed for college work. To bring their struggling charges up to speed, they began offering free tutorials in the afternoon. They soon realized that what these students lacked was not intelligence but instruction.
Tarim and many of his peers have been influenced by the writings of Fethullah Gülen, an immensely popular imam and one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Gülen’s message, contained in sixty books and countless sermons, is that one can be both completely modern and completely Muslim at the same time and that the rejection of modernity, especially in the areas of science and technology, has kept many Muslim countries mired in the Middle Ages. For decades he has spoken of the need for a “Golden Generation” of people who will lead Turkey to a brighter future. He stresses the value of altruism, volunteer service, and generous sharing of one’s time and money. In a pattern repeated thousands of times in Turkey and elsewhere, people influenced by his teaching have formed independent foundations that start and operate schools, hospitals, relief agencies, newspapers, radio and television stations, banks, and businesses.
Tarim and his colleagues were about to become the latest. With friends at the University of Houston, Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Baylor College of Medicine, they put together a proposal and applied to the State Board of Education to open the first Harmony Science Academy, in Houston. Tarim served as the first principal, and as more schools opened, he became the superintendent of the Harmony Public Schools and Harmony’s single-minded champion. “Our schools are a plus for the neighborhood because they provide parents with an option,” he says. “If you go to the grocery store, you like having a choice between brands. We explore, we experiment, and we have the freedom to try different programs.”
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