A HARD LINE WORKS WELL FOR KIDS AT THIS SCHOOL

Date: Saturday, December 24, 2005

Columnist Joanne Jacobs hitched her wagon to a star: Downtown College Prep, a charter high school in San Jose, Calif., whose students are almost all poor, Hispanic, and years behind their grade level when they arrive as ninth-graders. And when they graduate, they go to college prepared to succeed.

Jacobs thought it would take her a year to write a book about the school's story when she started on the project in 2001. It was more like four years: Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds was published in November.

As she says, "I observed classes at Downtown College Prep, assemblies, basketball games, Tech Challenge competitions, Mock Trial practices, faculty meetings, disciplinary hearings, parent classes, board meetings and a teacher evaluation session. I tutored students. (I had to relearn algebra to do it.) I hung around."

It is an inspiring story. Students who have never succeeded at anything suddenly catch fire.

Of course, many students don't make it. They can repeat a grade, but not more than once, if their grades don't improve. Discipline is strictly enforced, and students who repeatedly misbehave are expelled. Of the original class of 102 who started in 2000, 54 graduated on time in 2004, and every graduate went on to college, most to one of the California State universities but three to a University of California campus.

If that sounds like a discouraging level of attrition, it is actually lower than for comparable students in the city's public schools. The modestly hopeful message has to be: Not every child can go to college, but a lot more can than people usually think.

The first year, founding teachers Greg Lippman and Jennifer Andaluz realized, they were too lenient because they didn't realize how far behind their students were. "Our kids couldn't read," Andaluz told Jacobs. And Lippman said, "We didn't realize how time-consuming remediation is." Now, students who enter with poor skills are expected to repeat ninth grade.

DCP is only one school, and a small one at that. What about the rest of San Jose, or all the other cities, including Denver, with similarly disadvantaged populations?

I asked Jacobs about that, and she replied by e-mail, "They think seriously about what they're trying to achieve, design curriculum to meet goals, measure whether it's working and redesign curriculum and rethink teaching practices in light of the data.

"That's what all the effective schools do. They also set fairly strict rules and enforce them. They hire smart people to teach but because so many are inexperienced they don't necessarily have a more effective teaching staff than more established schools. I guess being smaller costs money, though they're able to save with fewer bureaucratic layers.

"They also save on special education because they mainstream everyone. Classes are designed for students with attention problems and work well for most of the learning disabilities; a clear discipline system works for the 'behaviorally disordered' quite well."

Before they started DCP, Andaluz and Lippman toyed with project-based, experiential learning at the large San Jose high school where they taught. But they found it wouldn't work at DCP; their students "required more structure, not just to teach skills but to inculcate the culture.

"They'd never intended to offer such a traditional, rule-bound, step-by-step curriculum, but the students needed it, at least in the first two years," Jacobs says.

"We'll do whatever works," Lippman told her.

DCP has changed a lot since 2000, and it will keep changing as needed. Perhaps that is the most important message of Our School.