In contrast to Tennessee's principals, with their fears of competition and honor rolls, this Delawarian principal not only runs a school with an honor roll, but he pens personal notes to each student on their report cards:
In November, when the first report cards of the school year went out to the 533 students at A.I. du Pont Middle School in Greenville, there was a handwritten message on each from the school's new principal, Ray Gravuer.
To eighth-grader Jasmine Badson, Gravuer wrote, "Good job for making honor roll."
"That was the only principal I ever had that did that," Jasmine said.
Maariyh Stevens, another eighth-grader, was equally impressed.
"That shows that he cares about his students and he's trying to help them," she said.
The caring is calculated. It has to be under No Child Left Behind, the federal school reform act that has made accountability the gold standard in education.
"Once you show them you care about them, they respond," said Gravuer, at 36 the youngest principal in the Red Clay Consolidated School District and heading a middle school that faces some of the biggest academic challenges of any in Delaware.
Holy cow. He's less than a year older than I am, and he's in charge of 533 kids. I'm impressed.
To shed the [academic watch] rating, Gravuer, who appears earnest and eager behind rimless spectacles, must coax better test scores from legions of students such as Maariyh. On her report card, he wrote, "Great attendance but need to work more on my academics," she said.
Mr. Gravuer has his work cut out for him - a lot of his students need to work on their academics:
A.I. Middle has the highest concentration, nearly 63 percent, of low-income students of any middle school in the state. Thirteen percent of the student body is in special education. Nearly a quarter are so new to the United States they must learn English.
Last year, 43 percent of the eighth-graders didn't meet the state standard in reading, 68 percent did not in math.
But improvements are being made. The percent of students on the honor roll has risen from 18 to 29%. The school has a one-on-one tutoring program for students who are at least two grade levels behind in reading, and some who enter this program exit on the honor roll. Principal Gravuer has learned, in this underfunded school, to sqeeze a quarter so hard that the eagle screams, and in between each class he's out in the hallways with his walkie-talkie. A new federal grant for preparing kids for college has come in, and the school has tripled the enrollment for honors algebra.
And everybody's on the testing bandwagon:
Everyone inside A.I. Middle focuses on helping students raise test scores, staff members said. Julia Keleher, the guidance counselor and a savvy numbers person, searched academic journals for studies that would tell her what she could do to help.
One study that she found said students who fail an important standardized test are more likely on the next to leave questions unanswered rather than risk error. Afterward, she culled the names of 25 students who missed passing their seventh-grade reading test by one or two points.
One by one, she called all of them to her office to impress upon them how much putting something down as an answer increased their odds of passing.
"You should have seen their little faces," Keleher said, recalling how far the attention went.
I would never have supposed that students who failed might be fearful of guessing, but there you go. Ms. Keleher's strategy is sound; on a test in which students can only help themselves by guessing, they should definitely be encouraged to guess.
Posted by kswygert at January 25, 2004 08:45 PM