Dr. James Comer, now retired, was for many years on the Yale faculty as a pediatric psychiatrist at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. In the late 1960s, Dr. Comer began working with educators in schools that serve children from underclass and poverty neighborhoods.
An African-American, James Comer was raised by parents who were short on formal schooling but long on those qualities that every child needs - character, maturity, and life skills.[i] While Comer’s friends were just as clever as he, they stalled out and he kept moving forward. He asked himself why. Comer believed it was because he had received proper guidance in life, from his parents, while his peers had not received the same guidance, not from their parents or any other adults. During his childhood, Comer’s parents had used the dinner hour to teach their children how to argue, debate, and stay calm. Winning a debate at their dinner table required a superior argument. Put one together and you could win; debate foolishly and you would lose. Comer’s parents set high standards and coached their children in how to meet those standards.
Now fast forward to the late 1960’s. Young James Comer is now Dr. James Comer, a pediatric psychiatrist in New Haven, Connecticut, a town with a large African-American population. Of New Haven’s many elementary schools, none is especially successful. Weaknesses that lead to failure are everywhere; strengths that can generate success are missing. As Comer studies the culture of the town’s elementary schools, his background and training give him an intuitive sense of what those missing success factors might be.
Dr. Comer begins to work with two of New Haven’s least successful elementary schools. He doesn’t focus on reading skills, or math skills, or any of the tangible skill issues. Instead, what interests Comer is the challenge of reshaping the school culture so that it will emphasize life skills and personal support. He helps the staff absorb the inner spirit of this new success factor.
Comer tells a story to illustrate what he’s looking for.
One day Johnny shows up in class, and Johnny is in a terrible mood. He starts acting up almost immediately, quarreling with the other kids, interrupting the class, and causing trouble.
What will happen next? In a traditional school, Comer suggests, what matters are the rules. If Johnny doesn’t stop misbehaving, he can be referred up the ladder, out of the classroom, with ultimate consequences in discipline and suspension.
Instead, in Comer’s telling, the teacher approaches the boy with the question, “What’s the matter, Johnny?” And the story unfolds. Johnny’s dad is in prison. He was due to be released, and Johnny was expecting him home for Christmas. Now Johnny has learned that his dad won’t be coming home after all, not for Christmas, not for some time.
The teacher sees the heartbreak and the anger in her student.
“What if you write a letter to your father?” she suggests. “You can tell him how much you love him, and how much you miss him. And how glad you will be when you can see him again.”
The teacher offers a few words of counsel, explaining that she understands his feelings and why he’s so upset, but cautions him that getting angry won’t fix the problem. He needs to find another way to cope.
In Comer’s telling, one hears the teacher channeling the voice of Comer’s mother. “If you like I will help you write the letter.”
What does Johnny learn from this? First, the teacher isn’t just a command and control authority figure; she’s a caring person and he matters to her. Second, getting angry isn’t the only way. There’s a more effective way to respond.
Comer’s work in those two New Haven schools produced significant results. The culture changed, the climate improved, the kids settled down, and because they felt cared about, their learning improved. Their skills grew. The schools Comer helped went from being two of New Haven’s weakest to two of New Haven’s strongest.
Comer believed his approach was replicable, and created the Comer School Development Program, housed at Yale’s Medical School. It is one of the nation’s stronger programs for whole school reform.
Siegfried Engelmann’s Direct Instruction
Siegfried Engelmann is best known as the founder of Direct Instruction, a rigorous and successful method for educating elementary school children.[1] Direct Instruction is considered one of the best school reform programs available. In 2005 the American Institutes for Research evaluated twenty-two school reform packages by examining their enduring benefit to the students they had served. Two programs ranked ahead of all the others; one of those was Direct Instruction.[ii]
Engelmann began his work in, of all things, a market research firm. His boss wanted to get smarter about reaching young children successfully with advertising. Engelmann was set to work investigating the differences between ads children will remember and ads they won’t.
Engelmann reached out to a researcher at a nearby university who specialized in childhood learning. It was a life-changing switch. Engelmann soon abandoned advertising and made it his mission to improve the learnability of the lessons that young children are given in school. Engelmann’s research zeroed in on the relationship between instructional clarity and the speed and ease with which a child learns. Nothing was too microscopic to escape his attention. Phrase by phrase, concept by concept, he examined the techniques by which ideas were presented to children. He wanted to know exactly what it takes to make sure that each idea clicks in every child’s mind.
He watched carefully. Each time a child became confused, Engelmann treated this as a signal that the teacher’s presentation was somehow flawed. Step by step, lesson by lesson, he pinned down the essential ingredients of clear instruction. It was an obsession. There was always a best way, he felt, and if a teacher always used the best way of presenting a lesson, you wouldn’t see children falling behind.
His goal was a set of templates in which all the weaknesses had been combed out so that children would learn consistently and dependably. “Instruction,” Engelmann concluded, “must convey only one interpretation. It must also start at a level that will predict success.”
It worked this way. Engelmann noticed a subtle difference in two apparently identical math problems, “what is 2 plus 4?” and “what is 4 plus 2?”
A child initially tries to solve the problem by counting forward from the first number. The first version requires counting forward four more places, “three, four, five, six.” The second version only requires counting forward two more places, “five, six.”
With the first version, some children will count forward till they reach the number four, and then stop. Their bias for counting out the answer can lead them to make an unintended mistake. At this early stage in the instructional process, teachers want children to feel the satisfaction of getting right answers. “What’s four plus two?” is less prone to error and is therefore part of Engelmann’s instructional routine.[iii]
Engelmann built his template, Direct Instruction, piece by piece, phrase by phrase, instruction by instruction, purging from the teacher’s routine every phrase that might lend itself to misinterpretation.
His book tells of his clash with the educational establishment. His approach wasn’t compatible with the prevailing doctrinal norms. He had worked backward from the needs of the student, not forward from the rules of the system. He was elbowed to the side, his methodology available to the mavericks of public education but never blessed as a mainstream approach.
Rafe Esquith’s Shakespeareans
In a Los Angeles neighborhood where few children are native speakers of English, Rafe Esquith has been teaching fifth grade at Hobart Elementary School for more than twenty years.[iv] Every year, Rafe’s children memorize and perform a Shakespeare play, read extensively (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X), learn to play the guitar, and participate in a mock classroom economy in which the money they earn is used to rent the desks they occupy. Whenever state tests are given, Rafe’s students far outperform their peers.[2]
While Rafe is brilliant and original and therefore hard to copy, the core notions that guide him have also inspired other great educators. They can be replicated. Among those are:
Care about the kids visibly.
Take the time to teach every child to mastery
Use longer school days – Rafe’s school day starts an hour early and runs at least an hour longer.
Do not accept short cuts.
Work hard, be nice.
Run a classroom with lots of excitement and activity – field trips, plays, miniature economy, etc.
In a video documentary, Rafe is shown taking three children aside in the back of the classroom to give them low-key, offline counseling. The kids have broken an important rule and need discipline, but Rafe doesn’t want to embarrass them by lecturing them in front of the class. He reviews their mistake, warns them of the serious consequences if they do it again, and tells them explicitly that he believes in them and he’s pulling for them.
His exciting classroom is the carrot. Kids follow the rules and participate because they have the reward of the classroom culture.
Mike Feinberg & Dave Levin’s KIPP Academies
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) was launched in the early 1990s by Michael Feinberg and David Levin, at the time young and relatively inexperienced fifth grade teachers in Houston. Each had waved good-bye to his second batch of fifth graders and wished them well as they moved forward to middle school. And then their kids started calling back. They had loved fifth grade with Levin or Feinberg, they said; it was really cool. Now they were in sixth grade and it was terrible.[v]
The two men had Ivy League educations and had joined Teach for America because they wanted to make a real difference for children. They weren’t about to let the educational gains they had worked so hard to achieve be washed away by an indifferent and incompetent middle school.
Together, they developed a number of hypotheses about what was missing in a typical public school. Their minds bubbling, they pulled an all-nighter, typed up a plan for the middle school of their dreams, and then began the knock-on-every-door process of shopping it around. Finally they were told that if they could recruit enough parents, they could launch a new charter school and apply their ideas. That was all they needed. They recruited parents, one by one, gained the support they needed, and KIPP was launched, with an opening class of fifth graders. It was a school for minority children from poverty neighborhoods, just the sort of children who often fall by the wayside in a traditional public school.
Their new school worked well. With each succeeding year they added another grade, grade six, grade seven, grade eight, till they’d filled out their Grades Five Through Eight middle school. After a bit Levin returned to the Bronx, his hometown, to open a second KIPP Academy. These first two KIPP schools succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, their graduates winning scholarships to some of the nation’s best prep schools. Sixty Minutes devoted a Sunday evening segment to KIPP’s success. Don and Doris Fisher, owners of The Gap clothing chain, threw their support behind Feinberg and Levin, funding the launch of a KIPP foundation so that the success of the original two schools could be replicated many times over.
Everything at KIPP begins with motivation.
KIPP creates an emphatic culture of being “KIPPsters.” From the very first day, children hear reminders of the year that they’ll be entering college. A fifth grader entering KIPP in the fall of 2011, for example, will be told he’ll be entering college in 2019. He’ll hear it over and over again, “you’re the Class of 2019, you’ll be entering college in 2019.” Did a KIPP teacher graduate from Bucknell? Her classroom will be called Bucknell.
A KIPP student signs a contract. So do the student’s parents or caregivers. The teacher also signs. Each commits to something significant. The student commits to be nice and work hard; the parent/caregiver commits to checking on daily homework; the teacher commits to do everything possible to make sure the student succeeds. "When the kids come to school there are 101 daily challenges that can get in the way of their learning and succeeding in school and in life," Feinberg notes. "Our perspective is that if there are 101 daily challenges, we need 101 daily solutions. We look to widen our sphere of influence so that whatever challenges KIPP's students and families face, either we can help them directly, or we can find others in the community who can."[vi] It’s another way of restating the core success hypothesis – if you have enough success factors, 101 solutions to 101 daily problems – you can enlist every child in learning.
Discipline is important, reinforced with a currency of field trips. One earns the right to go on field trips with good behavior. A child who breaks the rules will not be allowed to participate in the next field trip. Such carrots make sticks unnecessary.
There’s more to KIPP than motivation. KIPP attends to learnability as well. Who but KIPP would turn the multiplication tables into a rap number that the kids can chant in unison? Good coaching is a teacher’s nonstop responsibility. Does a child have a homework question at ten in the evening? He’s expected to call the teacher and ask for help. In a cell phone era, KIPP’s teachers are round-the-clock coaches. KIPP believes that learning time is an essential success ingredient. KIPPsters spend sixty percent more time in school than their public school counterparts. Motivation? Learnability? Teacher coaching? Time? KIPP’s formula makes liberal use of every success factor one can imagine. KIPP’s success isn’t an accident. The program was designed by teachers who worked backward from the needs of the students. It is a different kind of competence. It is the kind of competence that sets an example for everyone.
Richard Esparza’s Granger High School
Richard Esparza for nearly a decade was the principal of Granger High School, in a rural area of Washington State forty miles north of the Columbia River. With one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school, the district primarily serves Latino children from a low income area of the state.
When he first arrived as Granger’s new principal, Esparza found a struggling school – high dropout rates, low parental involvement rates, worrisome rates of teen crime. In Esparza’s view, it was yet another typical high school, designed to fail. He took as a symbol of its flawed design the student to guidance counselor ratio – 400 students for each counselor. How are students to get the help they need, he asked, if they have to wait in line behind hundreds of others to see their counselors?[vii]
He wanted Granger’s children to succeed, and to him this meant that every child had to have regular access to an adult mentor. He therefore created a mentor list for Granger, consisting of every Granger staffer with teaching credentials, including Esparza himself. Now the student-to-mentor ratio was 20 to 1 or better. Now he had a chance.
Mentorship was a long-term thing. Mentors were generally expected to stick with the same kids from freshman year to graduation.
A mentor was expected to be up to the minute on his or her kids. Teachers were to update mentors regularly on the status of each student. No child was to fall behind without that child’s mentor getting the news immediately.
In a typical school, Esparza pointed out, a teacher with five class periods might face 150 different children. Of those 150, as many as 30 might be at risk, far too many for one teacher’s energies and talents. In Granger’s system, each mentor has no more than 20 students, of which only four or five might be teetering on the edge. That’s a small enough number to keep the load manageable for all the mentors.
Students and mentors meet regularly. Short mentoring periods, just a bit longer than a traditional homeroom, keep students in regular contact with their mentors.
Esparza also expected mentors to meet parents and caregivers as well. Relationships with caregivers were especially important at Granger, where as many as 75% of the children live with someone other than a parent.
Was this a once-a-year meet-and-greet? Not for Esparza. He insisted on five mentor-caregiver meetings a year. For every student, that student’s caregiver, and the student’s mentor. No exceptions. The student leads the meeting, and explains his/her goals for each class.
Esparza is uncompromising. Should one of the teachers at Granger resist the idea of mentoring, Esparza suggests they move on. Full teacher buy-in is essential to Granger’s mentorship program.
Esparza’s motivational strategy also has a monetary element. He keeps a box with $400,000 in play money in his office – all twenties. If a student drops by to say he’s thinking of dropping out, Esparza invites him to dig into $400,000. “That’s what you’ll lose in lifetime income. If you drop out.” Each $20 says PLAY MONEY on the front, though it looks realistic. The back is blank, except for a simple slogan: “Honor Your Family and Yourself By Valuing Your Education.” Play money though it may be, $400,000 in play money is an impressive amount of ersatz cash. Students get the point.
The website for the Granger School District is rightly proud of its results. “Over 96% of our parents attend our student-led parent/teacher/student conferences. The district’s graduation rate has risen to an all-time high of over 92%.”
June Eressy’s University Park Campus School
June Eressy for several years headed the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts, 200 students in grades 7 through 12. 70% of UPCS students are from poverty families; at best, they read at a 5th grade level when they enter. Yet all of them pass the state’s mandatory 10th grade English and Math tests (MCAS). All of them graduate.[viii]
In the mid-1990’s, Clark University approached the Worcester public school system with an idea for creating a first-rate public charter school in the neighborhood adjoining the University. The neighborhood was slipping and Clark wanted to reverse the trend. As an incentive, Clark guaranteed free tuition to any high school graduate who had lived in the neighborhood for at least five years. The public school system agreed, and the University Park Campus School was born.
UPCS began with very little – an old and cramped building and an entering class of students that tested very poorly. As with KIPP, they grew their program one grade at a time; it took UPCS six years to develop its full student body.
Piece by piece, the leadership at the new school assembled what has turned out to be a winning template. Like KIPP and others, they reached for an entire menu of success factors.
They pared the curriculum down to the bare minimum – no electives – and focused primarily on reading and math. Their objective for 7th and 8th grade was simple – Every ninth grader must be ready for on-grade high school work. Not semi-ready. Truly ready. No excuses, no compromises. In seventh grade, students spend the full day on remedial reading and remedial writing. Eighth graders spend two and a half hours a day on math.
At the heart of the school culture was a determined commitment to every student, coupled with high and unyielding expectations. You will succeed. You will work hard, you will have our support, and you will succeed. They let no one off the hook.
When Eressy describes her school, one template truly stands out – the school’s tenacious commitment to writing. Every day, in every classroom, every child writes. They call it “low stakes writing.” Each student has to fill a page. Teachers will look at it but no one’s writing is graded until the young writers have developed their self-confidence. Children will write if one takes away the fear. UPCS stresses informal, unstructured, and very nearly continual writing. In addition, the school encourages students to use their own voice. Authentic, low stakes writing is a way of exercising one’s mental muscles. The more writing, the more mental exercise; the more mental exercise, the stronger one’s thinking skills.
Every class emphasizes writing, science and math as well as language arts and history. What James Comer’s parents sought to achieve through verbal argument at the family dinner table, Eressy pursued by insisting on student writing – every subject, every class period. Practice, practice, practice. (A superintendent I know in California has made his district one of the best in the state in part by doing the same. When students write regularly, their learning skills rise.)
Teachers thrive in the observation-rich environment that UPCS creates. Teachers regularly benefit from the formal observation of their colleagues. Informal observation is frequent, too. A teacher’s planning period is typically spent sitting quietly at the back of another teacher’s classroom. It’s work time, of course, but colleagues learn a lot about each other’s skills as a natural side-effect.
All this learning is harvested and put to use in the weekly Wednesday morning staff meeting. Every Wednesday, the district’s itinerant specialty teachers rotate into UPCS and take over the school. Music. Art. Physical Education. Relieved of their classes, the regular teachers gather as a staff to digest what’s going on.
With so much regular observation under their belts, teachers are full of ideas to share. “Here’s what I observed; here’s how you might reach Johnny, here’s how you might reach Natasha.” Superb coaching of children begins with staff meetings in which teachers receive frequent coaching from one another.
Integrating and Optimizing: Distilling the Templates
Comer. Engelmann. Esquith. Feinberg. Levin. Esparza. Eressy. Trailblazers all. Each was intent upon a mission – create experiences for children so powerful that every child learns. They had an instinct for what that takes, and they got better and better at their work as they went forward. They illustrate the importance of setting the right success standard – every child learns – and they illustrate the value of being relentless in the search for working solutions.[3]
In their stories and in the stories of similar pioneers, certain themes recur.
One must pack a school with success factors. If one is to cause success for every child, lots of things have to work right all at the same time. Coast along as schools for middle class kids can do, and the middle class kids will succeed. Children of poverty will fall by the wayside. A school has to do fifteen things right, or 101 things right, if it is to engage and educate children from poverty neighborhoods. Wise principals want every child to catch fire with a personal hunger for learning, and so they overload their schools with success factors. Engage all children in a hunger for learning, and the school will develop a self-sustaining success spiral. Leave some behind, and the school will find itself afflicted by spirals of slipping motivation and persistent failure. When children truly engage, the baggage from the past starts to fall away. Great principals create schools so powerful that all children engage.
Great principals possess an intuitive success hypothesis. A child learns successfully if there’s no bullying to worry about, if he or she is motivated, if the instructional material is learnable, if the teacher is an effective coach, and if the child has sufficient time on task. These five points weave their way through the story of any successful school.
Freedom from Bullying. In a school that tolerates bullying, children cannot learn. Create a school that connects with every child, and you will have a school where the child who might be a bully can be taught to behave. When bullying disappears, a climate of learning can take root.[ix]
A Motivating Culture. If every child is motivated, the teacher is more than halfway there. Comer creates motivation by teaching schools to shift from control through rules to control through empathy. Esquith creates motivation with excitement. Feinberg and Levin create motivation with a hundred and one different ways of pumping students up and taking care of problems. Esparza creates motivation with student-teacher-parent relationships and friendship.
Learnable Lessons. Engelmann creates learnability by vetting every instructional phrase for its clarity and absorbability. Eressy supports learning by accepting students at their existing ability levels and moving forward from there. Then she emphasizes writing, writing, writing, as a way of honing a child’s ability to learn and turn that learning into something more. Esquith and Feinberg and Levin create learnability with rap chants, drama, and excitement.
Effective Coaching. Children blossom when they receive the coaching they need. Eressy’s teachers have so many opportunities to observe one another that they become masters at giving feedback and applying what they learn from their colleagues to their work with their students. Esparza’s mentors know students well enough to continue as their personal coaches all through their high school years.
Sufficient Time. As the saying goes, “you can’t sleep fast.” Children need sufficient time to learn. KIPP’s school days are long. Saturday classes are frequent. The school year is longer. Esquith’s classes begin well before the starting bell and run long after the closing bell.
These are powerful action principles. Create a school so exciting that every child engages. Create safety. Create motivation. Create learnability. Create good coaching. Create enough time. Put a great leader in charge, and expect every teacher to rise to the challenge. When an entire faculty puts its heart into this way of doing business, the results can be stunning.
11.2 Version 2011-06-27.
[1] See his book Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System.
[2] Rafe has written a book, There Are No Shortcuts. For those who prefer video introductions, watch “The Hobart Shakespeareans,” a fifty minute TV program now on DVD. Half a dozen Rafe Esquith shorts are available on YouTube.
[3] Readers who want to follow these trails further will appreciate David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff and Jay Mathews’ Work Hard. Be Nice.
[i] Dr. James Comer, July 15, 2006. Public speech at Pascal Auditorium, Anne Arundel Community College, Maryland.
[iii] Siegfried Engelmann. Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System. 2007. Chapter One.
[iv] Esquith discussion based on: Rafe Esquith. There Are No Shortcuts. Anchor, 2004; Also draws from The Hobart Shakespeareans, Mel Stuart Documentary, 2004, available from Netflix.
[v] KIPP discussion based on 60 Minutes profile of KIPP, September 19, 1999; Jay Mathews Work Hard. Be Nice. 2009; KIPP website, www.kipp.org.
[ix] I owe this point to Spear Lancaster, a co-founder of the Chesapeake Science Point charter school in Anne Arundel County. Chesapeake Science Point is an exceptional school; parents of its black students have testified before the school board that black students do as well there as white students.
