Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough

Author:Paul Tough [Tough, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2009-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

AS CANADA SAW IT, the only thing that needed to be fixed at Promise Academy was what he called “blocking and tackling,” the basic nuts and bolts of school management that Terri Grey sometimes seemed to him unable to master: solving discipline problems, collecting useful data on students’ progress, developing curriculum, managing teachers.

Grey, not surprisingly, didn’t think the problem was that simple.

The previous year, Grey’s impression had been that she and Canada were working from two competing paradigms—hers a progressive model concerned with educating the whole child and avoiding burnout in both students and teachers, his a results-oriented model in which every available resource was devoted to improving test scores quickly. But this year, she told me, she felt like the competition between the two paradigms was over, and Canada had won. “It was just kind of a swallowing of ‘OK, this is the way it’s going to be, so I’m just going to make the best of this situation even though it may not be what I philosophically believe is best for students,’” Grey explained. Unlike the previous year, when it wasn’t until February that there was a plan in place to prepare students for the standardized tests they would be taking, this year test prep was under way by the third week in September. There were morning test-prep sessions, a test-prep block during the school day, test prep in the afterschool program, and test prep on Saturdays. Students went over the basics again and again: grammar, spelling, punctuation, how to write a coherent essay, as well as multiplication, fractions, and geometry. Grey tried to safeguard the elements of the curriculum that she cared about more than test prep: project-based learning; art and music; “advisories,” the regular small-group discussions between teachers and students about real-life problems and concerns that were becoming popular at many middle and high schools. But as the year went on, the time dedicated to test prep only grew, and the time dedicated to everything else was forced to shrink further.

Grey didn’t much like the test-prep regime, but it wasn’t her biggest headache; her biggest headache was the behavior of her students. There was no dean of students or vice principal at Promise Academy to enforce discipline, so Grey was the one who had to deal with the frequent disruptions in class, as well as the occasional fight in the hallways or the cafeteria. And the more she learned about the home life of her students, the more their outbursts and breakdowns made sense to her. “Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of our students have serious emotional needs or behavioral challenges,” she told me. She could rattle off a list of the issues they were dealing with at home: “substance abuse, domestic violence, foster care, involvement with ACS”—the city’s child-welfare agency—“as well as mental illness or emotional disturbances within their family.” Her students needed help, and lots of it, and she didn’t always know how to give it to them.

To Grey, that was the crucial

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