It’s Being Done

P.S./M.S. 124, Osmond A. Church School
New York City, New York

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Did Shakespeare hate women?

Seventh graders working on a writing project.

The seventh-graders wondered. They had finished reading “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and they couldn’t agree. Heated arguments inspired the students to read more of Shakespeare’s plays to try to answer the question. Some ended up answering yes, some no, depending on which plays they relied on, but the end result was that the seventh grade of Osmond A. Church Elementary School, otherwise known as P.S./M.S. 124 in Queens, New York, spent a lot longer on the Shakespeare unit than had been planned by their teachers. “It took on a life of its own,” said principal Valarie Lewis.

To interest twelve-year-olds in formulating such a question, and then allow them to push their teachers for more time to read and use primary documents as evidence, is a feat worthy of any school. But P.S./M.S.124 is a school that would be written off by some as incapable of nurturing such intellectual discourse.

About 40 percent of the students at P.S./M.S. 124 are African American, 23 percent Latino, and 33 percent Asian (mostly new immigrants from India and Pakistan). More than 90 percent of the students meet the requirements for the federal free and reduced-price meal program. Toward the outer edge of Queens, so close to Kennedy Airport that the planes sometimes sound as if they are landing on the roof (some at the school call it “Hanger Number 12”), P.S./M.S. 124 had almost 200 students from nearby homeless shelters in 2005-2006, though that number dwindled to about 30 afterward. With more than 1,000 students, the old brick building is officially overcrowded, which is reflected in the fact that it needs to have four lunch periods.

To some those statistics would almost guarantee low academic achievement.

And yet, as a result of steady improvement over a number of years, the school posts higher proficiency rates than the state as a whole and much higher than New York City. In 2006, Lewis reported that, in English Language Arts, “Our scores continue to rise with more than 82.3% of the students reaching a level 3 or 4,” with 3 being considered meeting standards and 4 exceeding standards. In addition, she added, “Math is on a continued upward progression for all grades with the students all showing marginal realistic growth. The average math scores range from the 80th to 90th percentile depending on the grade.”

Since then, New York State published the 2007 scores for English Language Arts, and a comparison to Queens and New York State (see chart) shows that in each grade, Osmond Church matches or exceeds the rate of proficiency posted by New York State students. In some grades fully 80 percent of students meet state standards.

That is a far cry from 2000 when fewer than half of students met state standards. Not that it was ever considered a failing school. “We weren’t a failing school; we were marginal,” is how Lewis described the school in those early days. “We needed something to jumpstart us.” Even now she doesn’t count her school as a success. “As far as we’ve come, that’s how far we have to go,” she said.

Osmond Church began its improvement journey in 1999 when it received a three-year, $784,000 Comprehensive School Reform grant from New York State Department of Education. Lewis was then assistant principal at the school, where she had taught for several years, and she had applied for the grant. When the school received the grant, she and the then-principal, Elain Thompson, went to the teachers and asked them to agree to adopt Core Knowledge, which was then a relatively new program.

Core Knowledge, conceived and developed by author and scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr., begins with the idea that it is the job of schools to produce educated citizens and that to be educated means knowing a large body of content as preparation for being able to read, understand, and evaluate newspaper and magazine articles, election materials, jury instructions, scientific research, literature, and anything else educated citizens might be called upon to read and evaluate. The Core Knowledge Foundation has a plan for instruction that focuses on building a knowledge base about world history, geography, civics, literature, science, art, and music.

Lewis said her interest in Core Knowledge developed as she saw that “teachers were teaching 150% but they weren’t getting the results. The children weren’t strong readers. They didn’t have background knowledge—up to the point of not knowing what animals they liked. Teachers would teach skills, but if [the children] didn’t have background knowledge, it didn’t stick.”

Lewis gives the previous principal, Thompson, credit for being the person who brought to the school the vision of helping every individual child learn to be an educated citizen. Thompson retired before the 2005-2006 school year, but she still frequently stops in on Osmond Church to check on Lewis and see how the school is doing. Thompson began her education career as a para-educator in 1970 and after earning her college degree taught social studies, physical education, and reading. She first came to Osmond Church as an assistant principal. When she arrived, Thompson said, “only the gifted children had textbooks.” She was given a huge bunch of keys as part of her assistant principalship. “But the keys didn’t open anything,” Thompson said. “There were no expectations of the job.”

When Thompson and Lewis look back on those days, they agree that the school was organized more for the convenience of the teachers than to ensure that students learned to high levels. Teachers would sign in for each other, permitting their friends to arrive at work late, Lewis said. And, she added, “If you had to go shopping, you were freed up.” The emphasis, she said, was on “containing children in the classroom” rather than teaching them.

The person who was then principal, she said, “had very low expectations, particularly of minority children.”

Lewis had come to Osmond Church relatively late in her career. She had been a teacher for a short while before having children, but then stayed home with her two children and started a cottage business tie-dying dresses and other children’s clothing that eventually grew into a sizable business with 40 employees, mostly other mothers who were staying home with children, many of whom had disabilities. That gave her a close-up view of the kind of support children with disabilities needed. In addition, a close relative of Lewis's suffered a bout of meningitis as a young boy and needed a lot of help and support for years but has since grown up to be an accomplished and highly educated person. “That taught me never to accept limits on children,” Lewis said. “Don’t tell me what a child can’t do. Each child is gifted—just with different gifts.”

Sixth-grade students

When she was ready to rejoin the teaching workforce, Lewis sold her business and began substitute teaching. One of her assignments was at Osmond Church, where Thompson was assistant principal. “I never intended to stay,” Lewis said, but she saw in Thompson someone she wanted to emulate and work with. “She was never defeatist—she always said, ‘try something different.’”

That first year, Lewis was assigned to teach a second- and third-grade class of 30 students with disabilities in a half-sized classroom. One of the children was autistic, and she agonized over how to reach him. The then-principal asked her, Lewis remembered, “Why do you care? He’s black.” At the end of the year many of the children in Lewis’s class performed at much higher levels than had been expected and thirteen were able to be placed in regular classrooms, despite the lack of support for instruction from the principal.

Meanwhile, as assistant principal, Thompson had begun laying the groundwork for improvement. Among other things, she urged Lewis to get a master’s in special education. Thompson’s work was jumpstarted the first year she served as principal with the grant that permitted the school to purchase materials and training from the Core Knowledge Foundation. That first year the grant paid for teachers to come in during the summer to learn the program. “We all learned Core Knowledge together,” Lewis said. Core Knowledge gave a framework for teaching much more content than teachers had ever taught before. The teachers developed a three-month scope and sequence of what they would teach in the fall. It was too overwhelming to teach the entire Core Knowledge program all at once, so the school phased it in—about half the first year, three-quarters the second year. Now the school aims to teach the entire program.“

The main thrust was flexibility—if something didn’t work for them, we changed it,” Lewis said. For example, she said that at first Core Knowledge was what she thought “too Eurocentric,” so she and the teachers worked to include more information about Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which Core Knowledge has since done as well.

The process of working to master a rich, content-oriented curriculum worked to bring the teachers together as a team, Lewis said.

“They were good teachers, but we were all isolated.” The first day of the summer institute, Lewis said, “was group therapy. As an educator, what are your strengths, weaknesses, goals? They had never talked before.”

Former principal Elain Thompson (l) and current principal Valarie Lewis.

When the original grant ran out, the school received another federal grant, this time a desegregation magnet grant to establish a technology program, with the idea that the school would attract more white students to the school. The technology program failed to attract more than a handful of white children, but the school was able to use some of the money to purchase training from the Core Knowledge Foundation. Now all the grants have run out, but teachers still come in for the summer institute the school holds to deepen their content knowledge. “Teachers have pride in the work that the children have done,” Lewis said. She added that the staff have pretty much “outgrown” the training that Core Knowledge can offer, but Title I funds support the purchase of materials and continuing professional development needs that are identified by teachers. Professional development often goes to helping teachers deepen their knowledge of the subjects they teach—first grade teachers learn more about Egypt, second-grade teachers more about Greece, and so forth.

The seventh-grade class of 2006—the class that became interested in Shakespeare’s attitude toward women—was the first class to receive the benefit of the school’s curricular improvements throughout their schooling. Four years before, Lewis said, 60 percent of the children were failing in third grade—“they were six months behind where they needed to be to be promoted.” But by seventh grade, she said, they have written ten-page papers on such subjects as Sudan, Nazism, and the hardships faced by immigrants to America, and “will debate you on democracy and imperialism. They’ve really grown,” Lewis said. Because of Core Knowledge, Lewis said, students “are really thinking critically. But it took seven years.” She added that “everybody’s looking for a quick fix,” but that real improvement takes time.

Former principal Thompson said, “I give [Core Knowledge] credit for equalizing the education for all the children in this building.”

One of the jobs the school took on was to educate parents about the curriculum, in part because many of the parents didn’t know the material and were upset that they couldn’t talk with their children about what they were learning in school. “Teachers became teachers of the parents,” Lewis said. All parents receive a copy of E.D. Hirsch’s book, What Your First Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good First-Grade Education or the equivalent book for their children’s grade level. Every six weeks the school holds a Saturday workshop where parents learn about the science curriculum and about the tests their children are preparing for. While parents are in their classes, their children are off learning other material. In addition, there is a curriculum night every six weeks where parents learn about the curriculum in addition to learning how to help their children academically. “Some parents don’t know how to color with children or how to read a book to their children,” said Lewis. “So we teach them those skills.”

Hallway display of student work

Before Core Knowledge was adopted, the school only attracted ten or twelve parents to meetings, Lewis said; now, she said, hundreds attend the workshops.

In addition, the school has worked hard to incorporate the different cultures represented by the families. The last few years have seen a large influx of families from India and Pakistan, including a large number of Sikh families. After 9/11, some of the other children, unfamiliar with Sikh turbans confused them with the turbans worn by Al-Qaeda leaders and accused their classmates of being “terrorists,” which Lewis said was just about the worst thing a New Yorker could say to anyone immediately after the World Trade Center was blown up. The school began celebrating major Sikh holidays, and held a multi-cultural fair in the 2006-7 school year.

By paying close attention to both instruction and those kinds of school climate issues, P.S./M.S. 124 engenders great loyalty. “Kids who are moved to shelters in Brooklyn keep coming back,” Lewis said. “They leave at 5:30 in the morning to get here. This is the first place they felt safe.”

Lewis said that students at P.S./M.S. 124 bring to school all the issues of any large school. “We have lots of kids who have been hospitalized, who are suicidal, bi-polar, schizophrenic, ADHD.” The school provides a support system when things don’t go well, providing referrals to social workers, health services, and housing services in addition to having a counselor, a half-time social worker, and a half-time school psychologist on staff. “We’re a total-care facility,” Lewis says, only half joking. “We get them bereavement groups, AA, drug rehab.”

Parent support is the reason that the school has added grades so that the school now goes through eighth grade. Lewis said that many of the students who had earned the top scores of 3 and 4 on the New York State assessments didn’t maintain those scores in middle school. When P.S./M.S. 124 staff went over to the middle school to check on their students, they saw that instruction didn’t match what the students were used to. “[The middle school] pulled them in because they thought [their scores would] carry the middle school. They couldn’t. The kids were bored.” The parents fought to keep their students at P.S./M.S. 124 through middle school and won. In the 2006-7 school year the school extended through 8th grade.

As a New York City school, Osmond Church is subject to all the curricular mandates as every other school, but because of its successes it has been able to maintain a bit more autonomy than many other city schools. As recognition of its successes, it was asked to serve as a mentor school for seven other schools which started to use the Core Knowledge curriculum in the 2006-7 school year.

In general New York City is considered to have more of a “skill-based” curriculum rather than a content-based curriculum, and Osmond Church works hard to make sure that teachers teach the skills New York City wants taught through the content provided by Core Knowledge.“Core Knowledge has really given us a focus. It really gives teachers the meat. But teachers still need to teach the skills,” Judy Lefante, the school’s Core Knowledge coordinator, said. “You can’t have one without the other, but we’ve worked hard through professional development to make sure they teach skillsthrough content.” So, for example, skills such as making inferences, drawing conclusions, and separating facts from opinion are all worked on within the science and social studies content areas.

Principal Valarie Lewis with some of the hallway displays that are posted throughout the school.

In addition, Lefante said, “We try to integrate everything as much as possible so we don’t have fragmented learning and children really build their background knowledge.” So, for example, if the children are studying the medieval period and reading Robin Hood, “there is a lot of non-fiction that you can use as well,” Lefante said.

Students are constantly working on projects related to what they are learning, and the halls are filled with fairy tales, book reports, science, and art projects.

Second-grade teacher Christine LeRoy said that this integrated approach with an emphasis on projects makes both teaching and learning more enjoyable. “When I was younger social studies wasn’t fun. I wish I had gone to a Core Knowledge school.”

"In a system that is becoming very micromanaged,” Lefante said, referring to the many New York City mandates, “teachers [at P.S./M.S. 124] are given leeway. They are empowered as much as they can be.”

Teacher Tracy Lorigan circulates among students providing help during a writing assignment

Sixth-grade teacher Tracy Lorigan agrees. “It’s not burnout level work because I enjoy doing what I do….It’s fun.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Teachers work hard to master the curriculum and to figure out ways to reach each of their students.

For many years, teachers met weekly for 100 minutes every other Monday for professional development, but that time was eliminated because of a city-wide mandate that every school offer extra academic help to struggling children for 37-and-a-half minutes every afternoon. “Now we have nothing,” Lewis said. Although grade-level teams do have a common planning period, “It is difficult to do professional development during the common prep time,” she said. Many times teachers will eat lunch together to get additional time to discuss their lesson plans, she said, though they are not required to.

That has hampered but not stopped the efforts to improve. For example, because the school has identified science instruction as a weakness, Lewis is working on getting a lab for the school, and has solicited donations from local businesses. Hilton Gardens, one of the nearby airport hotels, has promised to donate microscopes.

Lewis and assistant principal Linda Molloy are continually in classrooms, observing instruction and making sure that teachers and students are on track. “They want to do a good job,” she said. “My belief is that new teachers need time to grow.” She considers that she has two or three teachers who are marginal, so she sends in the literacy coach, the math coach and the Core Knowledge facilitator to teach model lessons and help the teachers develop their skills. In addition, she said, she sends those marginal teachers into the classrooms of stronger teachers, arranges for professional development, and “celebrates their marginal successes.” In these ways she both makes sure that students don’t suffer from bad teaching and helps strengthen weak teachers. “The community needs to make each educator better,” Lewis said. Teachers who have fully mastered their grade levels will be assigned to teach a new grade level so that they, too, are constantly learning.

For staff for whom this [program] is too rigorous, I help them find other jobs,” Lewis said. “No one has the right to waste a day in the life of a child,” she added.

Students at a sixth-grade "author party" to which relatives were invited.

To ensure that the school is on track, teachers and administrators track individual student growth on several measures, including unit tests. By studying the data, school staff have identified the weakest area in the school to be grammar. Students often don’t understand issues such as verb agreement and verb conjugation. “We tried to keep grammar instruction,” former principal Thompson said, “but the city and region moved away from that.”

To address the weakness, Lewis has purchased grammar textbooks and arranged for professional development of teachers on the subject.

“The expectations are always high,” Lewis said. “It’s about the belief.”Students appear to appreciate the expectations and the level of instruction. As one student, who came to P.S./M.S. 124 after being in another school, said, “I like this school better because you learn more things.”

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Last updated: Fri, May 23 2008