Photograph by Peter Newcomb
About a 10-minute bus ride from 1200 Market Street, where a couple dozen high-school students wearing yellow T-shirts tattooed with the pun-tacular slogan “Don’t Slay Our Future” are just beginning day two of their pre–spring break civil-disobedience road trip, I’m getting a lesson in asthma from a little girl named Adia. “Hello, and welcome to City Academy,” she says before giving me the bullet on today’s lesson in her fifth-grade health class. “We’re talking about how asthma’s treated and how to prevent flare-ups with devices like inhalers, spacers and nebulizers.”
Message to Jeff Foxworthy: No, I’m not smarter than this fifth-grader.
The fact that I’m here while disenfranchised students from Metro and Roosevelt high schools sit in semipeaceful protest outside Mayor Slay’s office is just an (un)happy coincidence; this visit was planned long before the teenage occupation began. The fact that I’m here exactly one week before the Missouri State Board of Education will vote to take over the St. Louis Public Schools and the chairman of a residential-construction company will be tapped to head the three-person transitional school board is not a coincidence; this visit was part of a mission to find out whether all is, in fact, lost at schools within the city of St. Louis.
The mission isn’t to show that everything is A-OK in city schools. Abysmal attendance, frighteningly high dropout rates and disturbingly low test scores have solidified that fact, but the bickering tangle of egos and agendas in the public school district has succeeded in branding all schools in the city—state-run or not—as burned-out war zones, incapable of being saved. In some instances, that may be the case, but buried under the posturing and turf wars is an unspoken suggestion that begs to be disproved: No matter what you try, “those inner-city kids” just can’t be educated. And that’s why it’s important to start drawing some distinctions.
Despite the cries that the whole damn thing should just be razed, there are a handful of schools—among them SLPS’s Clyde C. Miller Academy, where Steve Warmack governs with a firm hand and a soft heart, and the private Soulard School, where Kelly Holloran Bock is intent on shaping a new education paradigm—that prove the entire city isn’t the teenage wasteland it seems to be.
Turning the Page
I’m almost done with my tour of City Academy, the “independent private” grade school just south of I-70 on Kingshighway, when Adia spots us in the hallway outside her classroom and comes running to greet us. A couple of minutes earlier, downstairs in the second-grade hall, I was treated to a similar welcome by Jasmine, who leaped from her chair when she saw me outside her English class and marched out with her little hand already extended. It was undeniably cute, but I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps I’d been set up, as if these khaki-pants-and-dark-blue-golf-shirt–wearing ambassadors of book smarts knew I was coming and had been coached to show me that good things do happen in schools east of Skinker. After turning a corner, I ask my guide, director of admissions and placement Nikki Doughty, whether this is the case. “No,” she says matter-of-factly. “They do that any time they see new people come into the building.”
Truth is, City Academy administrators wouldn’t have needed to dial up the precious factor by staging scripted encounters with overachievers to make the point that something’s working. They just needed to take me to the library.
“This is our fourth-grade class,” librarian Martha Brown says when I get there, gesturing to a group of bashful, giggling kids clustered near the front of the room. “I have every class, twice a week, and what we’re trying to do is get every child, from first grade to sixth grade, to read 5,000 pages outside the curriculum.”
As of the middle of March, 10 percent of students had already reached that goal, and a quick glance at the leader board in front of the stacks makes an even stronger case for the program’s success: The top three readers have devoured between 8,000 and 9,000 pages. “They just go from one book to another,” Brown says, “and once you know how to read, you can educate yourself.”
The school’s president and co-founder, Don Danforth III, is a little hesitant to release specific numbers about test scores when I meet with him in his office, and it’s hard to blame him. With a $10 million endowment and tuition of about $12,000 per year, he’s well aware that a couple of iffy numbers can start prompting questions about whether the results meet the lofty expectations that kind of money can create. (This isn’t that kind of private school, though: Sixty-four percent of the school’s 117 students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch. No one pays the full tuition, the average family pays $2,800 of that yearly tuition, and 10 percent pay about $900. The balance comes from private donors.)
After a second request, a week later, Danforth relents and offers this: In the fall of 2006, 77 percent of students scored above the national median on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, up from 45 percent in ’03.
Small class size gets some of the credit for the improvement—there are generally 15 to 18 kids per grade, and there’s a plan in the works to split those classes into even smaller groups next year to facilitate more focused teaching—but Danforth is quick to point out the importance of a partnership between the school and the parents. “If you have a school full of great kids whose parents can’t get them here or can’t do what they need to do, then it’s not a good program.”
Hope Inc.
“I’m going to see your test score, and if I find out you were sleeping I’m going to put my foot somewhere.”
“Somewhere,” I can only assume, is the backside of a student named Nathaniel, who has just walked past Steve Warmack and me in the halls of Clyde C. Miller Academy, just north of Powell Symphony Hall on North Grand. The threat comes with a wink and a smile, but there’s an unmistakable hint of truth behind those words. Goateed and barrel-chested, Warmack comes off as sort of a friendly enforcer—like he might pat you on the back when you make him proud or, as he warned Nathaniel, put his foot up your backside if you don’t.
Warmack is the principal of one of the lesser-known success stories in the SLPS. Everyone’s heard about Metro High School and its feeder schools, but Miller Academy (formerly known as the St. Louis Career Academy) makes for a slightly different narrative. Launched 10 years ago as a four-year high school with a career technical focus, its goal is to prepare students for college or a two-year vo-tech school. Of the 90 students in Miller Academy’s 2006 graduating class, 82 went on to further schooling. By December 1 of last year, 150 of the 153 students in the class of ’07 had applied to college, and by the second week of March, 67 had been accepted to such places as Saint Louis University, the University of Missouri–Columbia and Purdue University.
(While we’re on the subject of numbers, Warmack would like to clear something up: Miller Academy’s attendance number of 68 percent, as reported by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, is false. As I sit in his office, his data-processing administrator, Rita Logan, runs a report for me. It shows that the school of 749 students has an attendance record of 94 percent for the year. “How the state runs that data and comes up with the numbers that they’ve got is beyond my imagination,” he says, his gravelly voice softening with resignation.)
When Warmack came to Miller Academy, in 2005, attendance was at about 73 percent, he says, and just under half of graduates went on to a two- or four-year college. He won’t accept credit for the turnaround in the two years since, instead pointing to the implementation of a curriculum tailored to the district and an in-house continuing-education program for his teachers. “We’ve looked at the research, and for a school to climb up out of the muck and start making improvements, you have to devote time for professional development,” he says. “Prior to that, teachers would just go in and fly by the seat of their pants.” (The teachers whom he’s spending so much time teaching, by the way, have an average of six years’ experience. “They’re willing to change,” he says when I ask him how he’s done so much with such a young staff.)
When Warmack’s eyes flash as he talks about rigor, relationship and relevance (the new three R’s of education), it’s kind of hard not to imagine that part of this success is attributable to him, though. “I don’t know if you go to church,” he says as he looks out his office window and waves at a passing student, “but there’s a line in the Old Testament: ‘Without hope, the people perish.’ What we’re trying to do is give these kids hope that they’ve got a life and that they don’t have to give up by the time they’re 18 or 19 years old.”
“You’ve got to carry your load.”
It smells of fresh paint in the basement offices of Access Academies, and Tom Nolan keeps using the word “embedded.” Every time he does, I can’t help but picture him in a Kevlar helmet, holding a microphone and riding a tank in the desert.
It might be a bit of an exaggeration to suggest the executive director of Access Academies is at war; it’s probably safer to call it a tactical operation. When he says “embedded,” he’s actually talking about his organization’s method for installing a demanding program of long days, a challenging curriculum and a mandatory six-week summer session at existing faith-based middle schools for low-income children. In education circles it’s called the NativityMiguel model, and since Access Academies instituted it in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades at St. Cecilia’s in South City in 2003—which was on the verge of closing at the time—Iowa Test of Basic Skills scores have gone up 22 percentage points, and every child who’s finished the program has been accepted into the college-prep high school of his or her choice. (The nonprofit has launched the program at Most Holy Trinity and Central Catholic/St. Nicholas in the years since and plans to start it at three more schools in the next three years.)
Nolan has been at this for a while—he helped found Cardinal Ritter Prep in 1979, served on the St. Louis Board of Education from 1993 to 1999 and was the president of Loyola Academy from 1998 to 2005—and he speaks about Access Academies’ work in a casual, almost offhanded tone, occasionally tapping the table with the edge of a business card. But when he talks about what Access Academies isn’t, he sits upright—even leans forward a little—and stops tapping. “This isn’t ‘Oh, you poor little boy ...’” he says. “No, it’s ‘You’re a young man, and you’ve got to carry your load, but we’re going to help you—and you can do it.’”
That idea of helping extends beyond the classroom, too. As students graduate and move on to high school, an advisor from the NativityMiguel school tracks their progress, lending a hand if coursework—or life in general—gets to be overwhelming.
The night before my visit, the organization’s development director, Terry Mehan, got a call from a former student. He’s a pretty well-rounded kid. He maintains a B average, plays football at his Catholic college-prep school and works 20 hours a week. He does a lot, in other words, but when he got a letter informing him that he owed a $500 registration fee for his senior year, he had to call Mehan for help. “He said, ‘My mom’s not working, and we don’t have $500. What do I do?’” Mehan tells me, as Nolan listens. “You ever hear that term ‘helicopter parent’? Our kids don’t have helicopter parents. They have caring parents—but they’re not the parents who run up to make sure their kids are signed up for violin lessons. It’s not that we want to replace the parent, but we’re just trying to offer that support where we can.”
In the next room, a phone rings.
“It’s their school.”
In a principal’s office that was once a janitor’s closet, Kelly Holloran Bock is explaining the importance of accountability and ownership at Soulard School, when the cleaning crew comes in—except it’s not your typical cleaning crew. They are about 4 feet tall, have freckles and aren’t wearing any shoes. They dutifully go about their business of emptying Holloran Bock’s trash and putting a new liner in her wastebasket, and she just keeps talking about the importance of parental involvement in a neighborhood school, as if the fact that her students are hauling away her garbage isn’t the least bit strange. “They all rotate through the little jobs,” she says when I ask her about it. “They love it: ‘Can I be a helper? Can I go with them to help take out the trash?’ It’s their school.”
And in almost every sense other than financially, this two-year-old private grade school is theirs. (Tuition ranges from $2,200 to $7,800, but most families pay about $4,000, and a fourth pay the minimum or even less. The difference comes from private donors.) The kids have had a major hand in determining the look of the landscaping. They help cook the school’s family-style sit-down lunches. They get the chance to direct some of the curriculum on the basis of their interests at the time. Heck, they even drafted a list of rules for proper bathroom etiquette.
It all sounds a little Lord of the Flies meets Kindergarten Cop, but the more Holloran Bock explains her philosophy of “inductive” learning, the more it makes sense. She says she’s had enough of the standard top-down six-degrees-of-separation model of instruction (state directs district, district directs school, school directs teacher, teacher directs students) and has instituted a more bottom-up approach: The core curriculum of math and reading adheres to rigorous academic standards, but Soulard School teachers have the freedom to augment lesson plans or units in other subjects on the basis of feedback from the kids. This year, first-graders spent several weeks learning about whales in their science class—even though it’s a topic they wouldn’t typically touch until the fourth or fifth grade—because they requested it. “All of our students love to come to school, and they don’t want to go home,” Holloran Bock says. “It’s sad to me that that has been taken away from so many children. It’s a natural thing to want to incorporate new knowledge, and I think the big machine of education has kind of squashed that.”
(It’s only fair to point out that that approach is, in large part, possible because the school has a total enrollment of only 32 students, most in grades K–2. But even when the school hits its projected ceiling of 108 students in about five years—12 per grade in K–8—the inductive philosophy will remain, Holloran Bock says.)
She recognizes that this method isn’t for everyone. It’s the kind of freethinking (“hippie chic,” she jokingly calls it) approach that can make a parent brought up in public schools a little squeamish, but she’s got the results to prove that it’s working: Last year, 100 percent of her students tested at or above their grade level in math, according to National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards, and 92 percent were reading at or above grade level, according to Missouri literacy standards.
Is Soulard School the answer? “Heck no,” she says. “I’m not saying my route is the right route, by any means—but what I am saying is ‘Get off the path for a little bit. Clear brush somewhere and start making a different path in a different direction.’”
* Not his real name
