Paul Bass Photo
Rushing back from City Hall, about to rush back to a press conference, Lola Nathan gathered together her teachers in a third-grade classroom. She had news for them. And a question.
“We’re a ‘Tier 1 school,’” Nathan (pictured), Davis St. 21st Century Magnet School’s dynamic principal, told the teachers. “But for how long?”
“I wanted them to to start thinking. I wanted them to know: ‘You can be Tier I [today]. In two years, you can be Tier III,’” she said later. “The bottom line is: We don’t go backwards.”
Under Nathan’s leadership, the K‑6 school has been racing forward for years now.
That’s why it emerged at the top of the heap Monday afternoon when officials announced their first “grading” of city schools, launching a key part of an ambitious reform drive.
Davis was one of two schools (Edgewood is the other) labeled “Tier I.” That means they’re top performers. That also means the principals will be freed from some school system work rules to make more improvements.
Average-performing schools were labeled “Tier II.” Failing schools, “Tier III.” Two of those Tier III schools are being reconstituted, one as a charter.
“We accept the recognition gladly. We’re excited,” Nathan said in an interview in her office Tuesday amid the swirl of a typically hectic school day. (“I’ve been busy all morning. I feel Like I’ve been here 10 hours,” she said at 10:30.)
“But we don’t want to be status quo and complacent. To me, ‘school reform’ means change. This is a challenge. We accept the challenge.”
That attitude is how, quietly, Davis became a poster child for school reform in the first place.
Percolating
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Both in New Haven and nationally, public attention has focused on what reform means for the most troubled public schools. They’re getting closed, then reopened with new staffs, new work rules. Some, like New Haven’s Urban Youth Middle, labeled “Tier III turnaround,” will become charter schools.
But just as central to school reform is the quest to improve the majority of schools that don’t rank at the bottom, and to find out what works.
That’s been happening at Davis, outside of the spotlight.
“There’s a lot of energy in that school. They have a great team in the school that works together collaboratively,” observed Superintendent of Schools Reggie Mayo. “She has all the ingredients to take it to the next level.”
Before New Haven’s DeStefano administration and D.C.‘s Obama Administration put together their ambitious new reform plans (which resemble each other quite a bit), Lola Nathan and her staff have already instituted the central components: Creating individual plans with parents and teachers for each student’s progress, based on intensive tracking of test scores; involving parents in every aspect of the school; setting high goals; recruiting top talented teachers; tackling the personal or family stress some students bring into the classroom; targeting the racial achievement gap. In fact, last year Davis eliminated that gap; its black students perform as well as on standardized tests as white students throughout Connecticut. (Click here for an Independent archive of stories about Davis.)
More than any one of those efforts, Davis has made progress because of a guiding philosophy: Not accepting failure or even “good enough.” Always pressing to do better.
That attitude was on display as Nathan absorbed the meaning Tuesday morning of her schools new Tier I designation.
She declared Davis a “Tier I Turnaround” school.
She and her staff must now put together a plan for how they’d like to improve Davis, perhaps by being allowed to bend some of the rules governing the public education system.
For starters, Nathan set a new goal: She wants 80 percent of her students to reach “goal” on standardized math and reading tests in coming years. Last year 65 percent reached goal in math, 50 percent in reading. (“Goal” is higher than “proficient,” which basically means passing.)
You could see ideas percolating like popcorn kernels in Nathan’s head as she tossed around new ideas for getting there. She floated one novel way to boost teaching at Davis … then insisted the idea couldn’t show up in an article.
Why? She doesn’t plan to come up with ideas on her own. She doesn’t run her school that way. She wants to solicit and share ideas with her staff and agree together on which ones to present to the school system for approval. (Any changes in work rules, for instance, must receive a 75 percent approval vote from unionized teachers.)
To that end, she marked Monday’s Tier I placement by freeing teachers from their regular schedules this week. They don’t need to abide by the time allotted each day for each subject. One teacher spent extra time working with students on Venn diagrams of similarities and differences between the Middle and New England Colonies. Another went long on a study of Korea. Teachers already were losing some students to Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) make-ups. So Nathan figured this was a chance to bend the rules — and get the teachers in the groove of experimenting with new approaches.
Nathan’s also eyeing an expansion of a holiday “CMT camp” she experimented with last month (pictured above). She had some ideas about how to use the school’s Tier I status to make that happen — again, ideas that can’t show up in an article.
“The Drawer”: The Sequel
Besides setting the academic bar higher, Nathan hopes to use the Tier I challenge to tackle kids’ behavior (aka “social skills”).
Davis already began bringing back the so-called “Comer Method” of helping kids work out problem. Mayo wants to see that happen systemwide; Nathan wants to use it more at Davis.
She wants to build on other ideas, as well. She has two parents spearheading an effort to teach kids and parents to eat better and exercise more. Nathan (a self-described “vegan 80 percent of the time” and a vegetarian all the time, who gets up at 5 a.m. to take walks) has barred cupcakes and soda from school events and classroom birthday parties. The kids are getting used to the fruits and the juice, she said.
Davis doesn’t have problems with fights, she said. But there’s enough “inappropriate” behavior that she wants her staff to help her come up with new approaches as part of the Tier I improvement plan. Especially when it comes to “distractions.”
Nathan has a drawer in her office for confiscated distractions. Tuesday it contained Samsung and Nokia cell phones as well as a McDonald’s fire truck (pictured).
The other day a sixth-grader showed his cell in school to two other kids, who snatched it. When Nathan got a hold of it, she put it in the drawer until the boy’s mom came to retrieve it — and talk about the rules.
“I don’t search anybody. If they have them at the bus stop because parents want them to be safe, I don’t get into that. I’m not going into anyone’s pocket,” Nathan said. But phones need to be kept off, and out of sight, in school.
She didn’t chew out the boy, she said. He pleaded with Nathan not to call his mom. She explained why she needed to.
“I can’t go around screaming at kids,” she said. “Kids like to be listened to. I always listen to my kids. They’re important to me. I’m also firm and no-nonsense.”
As she and her staffers figure out how to help kids to behave better, Nathan said, they have to remember their own behavior as well. “We have to model it,” she said. Just as Davis is helping to model reform for a city’s worth of schools.