Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need

Book by Ouchi William G

Chapter One: The Best Schools in America -- Problems and Solutions

Welcome to the Goudy School: Where the Future Dies Early.

-- Chicago Schools: Worst in America (1988)

The year was 1988, and William Bennett was secretary of education. Americans were furious over the continued failure of their public schools. To galvanize the nation's attention on this issue, Bennett visited the city of Chicago and declared that its public schools were the worst in the nation, and he singled out one school as the city's worst failure, and thus, by inference, the worst school in America: the Goudy Elementary School, pre-kindergarten through 8, located in Uptown/Edgewater. Uptown/ Edgewater is a blue-collar, immigrant neighborhood on the far north end where twenty-six languages are spoken every day. The teachers, students, and families were devastated by the negative publicity. Within the year, the Illinois legislature moved quickly to pass a new law that gave local control to individual schools to free them from the shackles of the massive, top-down bureaucracy of the superintendent's central office.

Fourteen years later, under the leadership of Principal Patrick Durkin, Goudy has risen like a phoenix. Goudy has an official capacity of 850 students, but today it is packed with 938 children, all of them from the neighborhood. Ninety-eight percent of the students are from low-income homes and thus qualify for free or reduced-price lunches under a federal program; 41 percent are classified as limited-English-proficient. On the Iowa Test of Basic Skills used in all Chicago schools, reading scores have risen from the 14.9th percentile to an astounding 56th -- above the state and national averages. Math scores have also skyrocketed, from the 24.7th percentile to the 63rd. This in a school that has a student population that is 29 percent Hispanic, 28 percent Asian-Pacific, 22 percent white, and 21 percent black (I sometimes refer to students as black or Hispanic and other times as African-American or Latino. In each case, I'm using the form that the school district uses in its official reports). Virtually every eighth grader from Goudy takes the test to enter one of Chicago's elite test-in high schools like Northside College Prep, Lane Tech, Lincoln Park, or Whitney Young.

How did Patrick Durkin produce this miracle? Our study shows that he, like the other successful principals described here, relied on a set of management principles that I call the Seven Keys to Success. He used his freedom to custom-design a school that would exactly fit the needs of his unique population of students. No other school in America has precisely the same situation, and thus no other school should be quite like Goudy. Understanding that, the principal set out to craft the right school for his children.

Patrick Durkin is an entrepreneur. That is, he's the opposite of a bureaucrat -- he doesn't follow rules blindly, he keeps his eye focused on his main goal, which is to see that his students succeed. He operates under another rule: that it's easier and better to ask forgiveness from the central office after taking action than to ask permission beforehand. He expects to be held accountable for results. Durkin knew what to do with his newfound freedom allowing local control. He focused everyone on student achievement, not complaining about the poor children who were in the neighborhood, but seeking to do right by every last one of them. To accomplish this task, he delegated most of the decisions to his teachers, who chose their own approach to teaching reading and math.

Durkin moved quickly to take control of all of the money that the new law allowed him to use at his discretion. He and his teachers decided, for example, to place an intense focus on reading, with everyone spending ninety minutes on reading in small classes of no more than twenty, and he added a teaching aide to every class in grades 1 through 4. Durkin also made sure that every teacher felt accountable for the progress of his or her students. He instituted a system in which every student is tested on reading level when he first enrolls, and then is measured for progress.

To help the students from China, Mexico, Africa, the West Indies, Poland, Albania, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bosnia who have trouble with reading, he added two reading recovery teachers who tutor each child one-on-one. His teachers did their own research and imported a program from New Zealand that in six or seven weeks can help a child who is in danger of falling behind in reading. Today, virtually all of the children are reading by the end of first grade.

In order to put the resources in grades K-4 where they were most needed, the teachers decided on larger class sizes in the later grades. In one fifth-grade class, for example, thirty-two children are intent on their work -- and they are not distracted when visitors enter the classroom. An eighth-grade class has thirty-four children eating a late lunch at their desks, because there is no other place. Breakfast and lunch are served in the auditorium, which then is closed for another reading program for groups of twenty at a time. Goudy has no new buildings, but it needed space for these newly created activities, so the former book storage room and the teachers' office space were converted to that use. Durkin designed teachers' desks that would fit along one wall in the wide hallway. The small library is full to overflowing, and it has received donations of 25,000 brand-new books from the Starbucks Corporation over the past few years.

Principal Pat Durkin loves his school. That's clear to any visitor. He's the kind of principal who insists on taking visitors to see every single class in the building. He knows in detail what is going on in each class and what progress the students are making. The teachers are visibly fond of him and each one greets him warmly. He knows most of the students by name. Even the reading recovery teachers, who work in what was formerly the school's safe -- which still has the impregnable steel door -- have smiles for the principal. Because Pat Durkin has the freedom to choose his own teachers, he has only teachers who share his passion for the school's mission, and the results speak for themselves. Goudy Elementary has become more than just a school -- it's become a community of learners that includes teachers, students, and families.

If the worst school in America can become one of the best, then every school can be a success. Pat Durkin, please note, did not make a wholesale change in his teachers or his students. The only changes that he made were in the way the school was organized and managed. If you had to change all of your school district's teachers to improve it, you'd be understandably gloomy about the future. The good news in this book, though, is that you don't have to change the teachers or the students -- you only have to change the way that your schools are managed, and that is entirely within the realm of the possible. If the same teachers and the same students can go from the cellar to the penthouse as at Goudy, then it can be done elsewhere. For those who believe that an inner-city school made up of immigrants from homes in poverty cannot achieve at high academic levels, Goudy proves otherwise. Every school in America can and should be this good, and you can help to make them so. Before we get on with the process of how to do this, though, let's briefly review some of the troubles that our schools face today, and let's identify the reasons that most of them are still in the cellar.

REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES IN THE EDUCATION WARS

Our schools are failing -- everyone knows it. School board meetings have become battlefields as angry parents are on the attack and central office bureaucrats strap on their helmets and hunker down. In New York, the state legislature has admitted that the New York City schools are failing and, in desperation, has given control to Mayor Mike Bloomberg. The New York Times reported on July 11, 2002, that only 29.5 percent of the city's eighth graders passed the state English test, lower than the year before and lower still than in 1999, when the current test was first used. The really bad news, according to the newspaper, is that students in Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo are doing even worse. In New England, the Boston Globe reported in February 2002 that the charter school movement to secede from the public system has grown to the point that it now is battling increasing opposition from public school officials.

In April 2002, Governor Mark S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania assumed control of the failed Philadelphia school district and hired several private firms to manage this system in which more than half the students cannot pass basic reading and math tests. Several months later, Philadelphia hired former Chicago superintendent Paul Vallas to turn its district around. On July 10, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette carried the front-page headline: "Foundations Yank City School Grants." The paper quoted William Trueheart, president of the Pittsburgh Foundation: "It's clear the school system is in a crisis." Education Week reported in March that the Detroit Board of Education had to "abruptly adjourn" its meeting amid "emotional chants and songs of protesters" and that the Dallas Board of Education called a sudden recess due to a scuffle with a speaker and then located observers to a separate room to watch the remainder of the meeting over closed-circuit television.

Our nation also has a persistent gap in educational attainment between races. While 93 percent of white students graduate from high school, only 63 percent of Hispanics and 87 percent of blacks do so. Writers such as Jonathan Kozol have argued that this gap is a result of embedded racism, which leaves students of color with underfunded, abandoned schools. He may be right, but we have found many schools that are successfully educating poor minority students -- thus demonstrating, as we'll see, that good management of a school can ov...