It's Being Done: Capitol View Elementary

The following school profile appeared in the Achievement Alliance newsletter, The Alliance Alert, Vol.2, #6, Oct. 2006. “Capitol View” is a Core Knowledge Official School in Atlanta. Reprinted with permission from the Achievement Alliance. Visit www.achievementalliance.org.

One thing that drives the teachers and administrators at Capitol View Elementary School to work hard is knowing that some people expect them to fail.

“The expectation that we will fail pushes us higher,” is how second-grade teacher Amanee Salahuddin put it. “There are people who say, ‘They won’t be able to match last year’s test scores.’”

Almost all of Capitol View’s 250 or so students are African American and most are poor, with more than 70 percent meeting the requirements for the federal free and reduced-price meal program. The school sits in a neighborhood in southwest Atlanta which, although it has lately been somewhat gentrified, is still thought of by Atlantans as dominated by strip clubs and daytime prostitutes. These facts alone would be enough to explain academic failure in the eyes of many.

And yet Capitol View has been one of the top-performing schools in the state for years.

Assistant principal Trennis Harvey: “Kids will meet the standards you expect of them.”

In 2005, not only did 97 percent of all students meet state standards in reading and English Language Arts, but 58 percent exceeded them — and more than 80 percent of the fifth graders exceeded standards in reading. Math scores were a little less impressive — 90 percent met standards, with 35 percent exceeding them, but with few exceptions those scores are only matched in Georgia by schools where very few students are poor. (To see a story about another exception, go to “Success Stories” at www.achievementalliance.org and look for Centennial Park Elementary.)

When teachers are asked what distinguishes Capitol View from low-achieving schools, they respond, “It’s the expectations.”

“Kids will meet the standards you expect of them,” said Trennis Harvey, the school’s instruction specialist and, in effect, its assistant principal.

“Society in general has bought into the idea that demographics have something to do with the ability to learn,” Harvey said. “If you’re poor you may not have access to trips to Paris, but you can still learn. One thing that No Child Left Behind has done is to say that schools have got to teach all children. You can’t take Johnny and throw him in a corner because he’s not getting it. Schools have to teach Johnny, too.”

“No excuses” is a common catchphrase in the school, but the school does not run on expectations alone. Principal Arlene Snowden says the school runs on “hands-on activities and engaging instruction.” Its curriculum is carefully mapped to Georgia’s state standards but far exceeds it in breadth and depth, in large part because of its Core Knowledge curriculum.

Second-grade teacher Amanee Salahuddin: "Core Knowledge brings in a lot more resources."

Core Knowledge, developed by author E.D. Hirsch, is built around the idea that all children need to be taught a common base of knowledge in order to be prepared to function as educated citizens. In his books Cultural Literacy and The Knowledge Deficit, Hirsch argues that schools have an obligation to teach all children a carefully built curriculum, but that obligation is particularly acute for those poor children who are not surrounded by educated adults and books. The Core Knowledge curriculum starts with Mother Goose rhymes in kindergarten and builds carefully to classic and modern literature as well as teaching children about ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China on through modern American history, and about all the major topics of science, from the structure of cells to weather systems. All students at Capitol View study French for 30 minutes a day, and the French lessons are often pegged to what the students are studying during the rest of the day.

Fourth-grade teacher Martin Hummings, a Morehouse graduate, with a student he plans on helping apply for the same scholarship that sent Hummings to private secondary schools. “I always wanted to be a teacher, but I didn’t want to be poor. I wrestled with it for a while, but I decided I wanted to affect young black men.”

“Most of our units are concept-based,” said second-grade teacher Amanee Salahuddin. She gave as an example a problem-solving unit that she taught for six weeks. Students studied inventions that solved specific problems, learned about inventors, and invented something themselves, which they had to research and do cost analyses of. “It was all integrated with science and social studies,” Salahuddin said. Core Knowledge, she said, provided “plenty of resources, books, books-on-tape, and videos.”

In stark contrast to schools which have “narrowed the curriculum” to focus on developing the skill of reading, Core Knowledge educators have broadened and deepened the curriculum so as to give students the background knowledge and vocabulary to read complex text.

Or, in the words of Harvey, “We teach reading through social studies and science.” This works several ways, from identifying antonyms and synonyms in science and social studies concepts to reading fiction that matches the period the students are studying. “When we first started teaching reading through science and social studies four years ago,” said principal Arlene Snowden, “it became really clear how excited and interested children were. They are naturally curious about the world, and this way they learn about it.”

Capitol View adopted Core Knowledge in 1995 under the previous principal, Marcene Thornton, who had arrived the previous year. Snowden and Harvey, who were both hired by Thornton, estimate that it took about four years for Thornton to completely transform the school from a low-performing one to one dedicated to excellence. “It takes about that long to embed the culture,” Harvey said.

Part of a school’s culture has to do with developing a committed staff. Although a few of the 18 classroom teachers have remained from before Thornton’s arrival, most of the staff has turned over since then. "If you're the principal of the school, you're responsible for putting in place only the staff who believe in your vision," Thornton told the Athens Banner-Herald early in 2006. "If you've inherited some people who don't buy into that ...it takes time to put in place the staff you need. I didn't want anyone who didn't like my kids."

A Spelman College graduate herself, Thornton hosted many student teachers from Spelman and Morehouse Colleges (the female and male private historically black colleges in Atlanta) and hired quite a few of their graduates. Harvey, for example, is a Morehouse graduate who first student-taught at Capitol View, and Salahuddin is a Spelman graduate.

By hiring a number of Spelman and Morehouse graduates, Thornton tapped into a long collegiate tradition of commitment to intellectual excellence in the face of difficult circumstances and a sense of service to the community.

Snowden, who had worked for years as a middle-school math-science teacher, decided to come to Capitol View as instructional specialist in 1998 because, she said, she had spent years puzzled about “why children were coming to middle school not being able to read.” When Thornton became principal of the Early College high school, a new high school in Atlanta, in the fall of 2005, Snowden became principal and appointed Harvey, who had taught for eight years at Capitol View, as instructional specialist and assistant principal.

In addition to having a staff dedicated to its vision, part of Capitol View’s culture has to do with how decisions are made. “We do everything collaboratively,” said Harvey. “Of course your leader has to make some decisions, but most decisions here are made by teams.”

For example, the leadership team, which consists of one teacher at each grade level, the principal and the assistant principal, decides how to spend the school’s $74,000 in Title I money. Title I is a federal program that sends money to schools with large percentages of students who meet the requirements for free and reduced-price meals. In the 2005-06 school year, the leadership team decided that science was a weak area that the school should work on. Although 93 percent of the fifth graders had met state standards, only 26 percent exceeded them, and the leadership team decided that that data meant the school needed to strengthen its science instruction. They spent some of the school’s Title I money to buy science tables, stools, and materials for a newly established science lab. Now, in addition to having regular classroom science instruction, third-, fourth, and fifth-grade students go to the science lab three times a week to do hands-on experiments and other science activities keyed to the curriculum.

Similarly, the leadership team decided to use a three-year $150,000 federal grant from the Comprehensive School Reform program for the professional development of teachers. Such professional development included paying for teachers to visit other Core Knowledge schools and attend professional conferences.

Grade-level teams, consisting of the classroom teachers at each grade, decide what units to teach and what field trips and other enrichment activities should be organized.

Even hiring decisions are made collaboratively. Teaching candidates are interviewed by five or six teachers and administrators who check references, look at a portfolio of lesson plans and other materials, and ask a battery of questions designed to get at whether the teachers will fit in at Capitol View. One question asked of them, Harvey said, is how they differentiate instruction so that they can meet the needs of high- achieving students as well as those who are behind.

To make sure teachers have enough time to work collaboratively, the school’s schedule is carefully built so that once a week students in each grade level go to back-toback “specials” — physical education, music, art, science, or counseling — allowing the teachers on that grade level to meet for two hours with the principal and assistant principal. At those meetings team members go over any data that have been collected that week about student achievement to make sure that any child who is falling behind gets help, plan the upcoming curriculum units, and discuss field trip schedules and other housekeeping details.

In the fourth-grade team meeting the week before spring break, discussion centered on such topics as what more could be done to prepare for the state testing which was scheduled to take place shortly after spring break, and what “compelling unit” would be taught after testing. Core Knowledge is divided into “compelling units” lasting six or seven weeks, and the fourth grade agreed to teach “Around the World in 80 Days” once testing was done. The unit would encompass geography, world culture, and literature and take the fourth grade through the end of the year. Teacher Sara Johnston said that she felt uneasy with the way the unit had been organized the previous year when a whole section was devoted to teaching about Islam. “It got uncomfortable,” she said, noting that some of her students were Moslem and their mothers had offered to come in and show the children Islamic prayers. Johnston thought it came too close to teaching religion and said that some of the other parents — Christians — had been offended. Fellow teacher Sylvia Mack agreed that religion was too touchy a subject to include in the curriculum.

Without telling the teachers how to organize the unit, Harvey offered the teachers a different way to think about it. “As an intelligent human being, you need to know that Islam exists. I am not Moslem but I know about Mohammed and the five pillars of Islam. I am not a Buddhist but I know something about Buddhism. There are parents who didn’t like that we taught the Battle Hymn of the Republic when we studied the Civil War, but it is part of what students need to know.”

Principal Arlene Snowden (at head of table) meets with the fourth-grade team, from left, Martin Hummings, Sara Johnston, and Sylvia Mack. Assistant principal Trennis Harvey is not shown.

He added, “There’s a certain basic knowledge that every American should know to function in society.”

The teachers agreed to make sure that information about Islam was included in the unit, even if they changed the organization of it a bit so that Christian parents wouldn’t have reason to feel their children were being proselytized.

This sense that schools must systematically and thoughtfully impart to children a basic knowledge of the world is part of the philosophy of Core Knowledge and leads directly to the idea teachers must be curious about the world and work to expand their knowledge. “We have to keep learning,” Harvey said. Such a sense is what led the school to seek out grants from Fund for Teachers, a non-profit group in Texas, to send two fourth-grade teachers to China, two second-grade teachers to Greece, and plan to send two first-grade teachers to Egypt in the summer of 2006. These summer trips are specifically designed to deepen teachers’ knowledge of the content areas they teach, and teachers bring back photographs and artifacts to help them expand the knowledge of their students.

Because spring break and spring testing were so imminent, some of the discussion at the grade-level team meeting centered on what more could be done to prepare students to take Georgia’s standardized tests. Capitol View takes state assessments very seriously, both as an opportunity to take stock of its instruction and because third- and fourth-grade students in Atlanta are in danger of being held back if they do not pass the assessments. No students have been held back at Capitol View for some time — the few students who didn’t pass in the spring were able to pass in summer school — but it is a possibility that weighs on the staff.

In addition to the danger of retention, Atlanta’s superintendent, Beverly Hall, has set some exacting standards that she expects Capitol View to meet — much more exacting than the federal No Child Left Behind targets for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). She expects constant improvement, and unlike AYP, she counts every student who is at Capitol View the day of the test. In contrast, AYP only counts students who are enrolled in the school for the full academic year. Atlanta’s targets are so much more difficult to meet than AYP that, Harvey said, “If you meet the system targets you have blown AYP out of the water.”

For example, Hall has said that to meet Atlanta targets all fourth-grade children at Capitol View must meet the English/Language Arts standards and that 24 of the 37 students must exceed the standards, a difficult target because Georgia’s English/Language Arts assessment is set to get harder, requiring students, for example, to identify puns, idioms, similes, metaphors and rhyme schemes of poems — not just the main idea of a paragraph. “That’s all part of Core Knowledge,” Snowden said by way of saying that the harder test shouldn’t pose a problem for Capitol View. For example, poetry is part of everyday instruction. Students learn such poems as Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” and Langston Hughes’s “I, Too, Sing America,” among others, as part of their literacy instruction. Because the instruction at Capitol view is so comprehensive and goes far beyond state standards, the faculty at Capitol View did not seem to think that students will do poorly on the new test, but they are alert to the possibility that they will not do quite as well as in the past. “It will be harder to exceed standards,” Harvey predicted.

Snowden asked the teachers, “Are there any of the targets that are problematic?” They shook their heads. “I don’t think so,” said teacher Martin Hummings. Teacher Sylvia Mack said, “My class’s problem will be with the math, not reading and language arts. They are still having trouble with multi-step problems.”

“Really concentrate on multi-step problems,” Snowden advised the teachers. Hummings informed her that multi-step problems would be included in the packet of work students would be expected to do over spring break.

Fourth-grade math is a concern — although Capitol View has higher rates of proficiency than the district and state, its performance in the past has not been as stellar as in reading. For that reason, fourth-grade teachers were taking some extra time in the week before spring break going over multiplication and division. Mack led a long division contest in her class and Hummings a multiplication and division contest in his.

Fourth-grade teacher Sylvia Mack's class divides up in teams and solves long division problems to win points.

Fourth-grade teacher Martin Hummings leads a multiplication and division contest with two contestants at a time. Whoever banged the desk fastest after the problem was posed won the chance to give an answer. If contestants were slow to bang or gave a wrong answer, they sat down and let someone else from their team have a chance.

The team agreed to do a quick assessment at the end of spring break to see the students’ weak areas. “But it has to be quick,” Snowden said. “They shouldn’t be all tested out by time the state assessment comes.” Hummings suggested that perhaps the students should write down what they feel their weak areas are and what they want to work on the last week before testing. “That’s a good idea,” Snowden said. “Let’s have something fun on Friday,” she added. “Let’s have a school-wide multiplication bee – boys against the girls.”

Teacher Mack added, “throw in some division problems, too. That will get the multiplication in.”

Although the atmosphere at the team meeting was informal and conversational, a lot of business got transacted — even the social talk about vacations and diets went to building a collegial faculty that knows and likes each other.

But scheduling the school in such a way to find that kind of time is tricky — Harvey said that a great deal of time is spent building a schedule, and the first three weeks of school require a fair amount of “tinkering” before everyone is satisfied that there is enough time for planning and collaboration.

The basic schedule of the school is that each grade spends an uninterrupted two hours a day on “literacy.” The early grades spend more time building the skill of reading, including decoding and fluency. The later grades spend more time building the knowledge base and vocabulary necessary to read sophisticated text. More accomplished readers in the older grades will hold “literature circles,” similar to book clubs, while teachers work with less-skilled readers to get them up to speed.

A third-grade teacher works with a small group of students as others read on their own.

In each classroom the structure of the literacy block is similar — teachers will introduce some new concept or skill to the whole class and then work with small groups to work on any areas of weakness students have while other students rotate through “centers” that include a vocabulary development center, a writing center, and a listening/speaking center. Students are expected to read at least 30 minutes a day on their own in school and another 30 minutes a day at home, and the school uses the Accelerated Reader program as a way to keep track of students’ reading. Accelerated Reader is a commercial program that assigns a point value to books and provides short computer comprehension quizzes for thousands of books. Each student has an Accelerated Reader point goal that they are able to reach by reading a certain number of books and by passing the associated tests. Each Friday, the school holds a celebration of students who have met or exceeded their goals, serving pizza and awarding prizes that are either bought out of grant funds or donated by outside organizations. Carter Real Estate, a local commercial real estate firm, which provides mentors for each of the school’s fifth graders, will sometimes donate extra tickets to the Hawks or the Falcons or other Accelerated Reader prizes.

Unlike many low-performing schools, little of the school’s time is taken up with discipline. “When you focus on discipline,” said Snowden, “that will be your focus. When kids are fully engaged, they don’t pose discipline problems. We focus on rigorous, engaging, hands-on activities.”

That doesn’t mean that there are no discipline problems, but for the most part teachers seem to handle them with little trouble. A student who needs some time to regroup is sent to another teacher’s class for a while. A student who really doesn’t get along with another teacher will be moved to another classroom for the rest of the year. “But it’s kid things,” Snowden said about the discipline issues.

She said that for the most part the students at Capitol View and their parents know how important it is to learn and get a good education. “They are very motivated,” she said. And the school will accept no excuses for poor performance. She related the story of a little girl who wasn’t coming to class. “I went to her house and her mother said she wasn’t coming to school because she didn’t have shoes. I got Tania, took her to get some shoes, socks, and some outfits, and she came to school. We don’t allow any excuses.”

Principal Arlene Snowden saying goodbye to students at the end of the day

Schools, Snowden said, “need a leader who helps look at the data.” Certainly staff at Capitol View are constantly collecting data and looking at it to improve instruction. In addition to looking at the standard kinds of data, Snowden said, “We always try to do some action research every year.” One of the experiments now going on at Capitol View is that in the upper grades, some classes are all-girl, some all-boy, and some mixed- gender. Part of the rationale for trying the separate classes, Snowden said, is that “Boys don’t always have a role model in how to be a gentleman, and girls don’t have a role model in how to act like a lady.” The first year the data was a little bit skewed, she said, because the school hadn’t counted on the fact that the male students’ teacher was most passionate and knowledgeable about social studies and the female students’ teacher was more excited by science. However, in general, Snowden said, the mixed-gender classes “have had better achievement.”

This kind of willingness to examine data and research is a hallmark of Capitol View and openly cultivated by Snowden, who links it to the success Capitol View has achieved.

Capitol View’s “fortitude to look at data and research and to implement best practices” is, she said, what has made the difference and allowed students there to be successful.

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