TurnAround Corps
Blueprint Magazine
July 23, 2005
By Michael Goldstein
One of the toughest and most important public policy changes facing the country right now is to turn around failing urban high schools. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), many of these schools will soon be required to restructure, hire new principals, or retrain teachers. But a missing ingredient in the reform effort is a mega-dosage of high-quality tutoring for those students who start off high school academically behind -- which, in failing schools, means nearly all of them.
A specially targeted national service initiative that expands on AmeriCorps could help fill that need. Call it TurnAround Corps.
AmeriCorps already helps thousands of inner-city schoolchildren. The program recruits senior citizens as reading coaches; it subsidizes Teach For America, which recruits elite college graduates to teach in struggling schools; and it funds programs like CityYear, which runs after-school clubs, teaches AIDS awareness, and helps children develop leadership skills.
But AmeriCorps has no formal link to state or federal departments of education, and therefore its activities are not coordinated with NCLB reform efforts. To be effective, a TurnAround Corps initiative would need to bridge that gap and systematically provide high-caliber tutors to schools that are most in need of improvement under NCLB.
Brigades of volunteers, even extraordinary ones, won't be a panacea, of course. Without certain ingredients in place -- a good principal, a reasonable degree of order, and, ideally, small school size -- volunteers would be wasting their time. But if the basic foundations for success are there, then a massive amount of tutoring could help vault schools into compliance with state academic standards.
Here's how the program could work in inner-city high schools:
It could provide a team of 30 to 50 volunteers to each qualifying school that asks for the extra help. The volunteers would work full-time for one year and be paid the same stipend as other AmeriCorps volunteers. Students would each receive an hour of math tutoring and an hour of English tutoring every day, all year, from the same people -- essentially an extra class in each subject. Two kids at a time would work with one TurnAround volunteer, who would have to be a college graduate who scored at least 650 on the math or verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test or Graduate Records Examination (GRE), depending on which subject they were teaching. And instead of tutoring after school, when teenagers are tired and punchy, schools should weave the tutoring into the school day.
Students' test scores would skyrocket.
That assertion is based on personal experience. I founded Boston's Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH), where we have launched a tutoring program called MATCH Corps with the help of AmeriCorps and local foundations.
MATCH is a successful school, not a failing one in need of a turnaround. We have proved that the intensive tutoring concept can work well.
MATCH Corps has attracted 45 top college graduates from around the nation to work as full-time tutors. Their GRE scores are comparable to the scores of typical Stanford University graduate students. Aside from the highly talented volunteers, three other features make MATCH Corps different from typical tutoring programs: We have reworked our entire school schedule to maximize the value of the corps; tutors are held accountable for student results, just as teachers are in the best schools; and all students are tutored, not just those most in need of help, thereby removing the taboo of tutoring and increasing student buy-in.
The results have been striking. Ninety percent of our students are African-American or Hispanic, and 75 percent live below the poverty line. When they arrive as 8th graders, they typically have test scores in the lowest 10 percent of students in the state. Yet, by their 10th grade Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams, they outperform suburban white students. All take Advanced Placement classes, and all go on to college.
Based on our experience, it is reasonable to expect that a national TurnAround Corps could not only raise test scores, but also help change the culture of failing schools. One reason is that it is a teacher-friendly model. We have found that it boosts teacher morale, because it helps kids complete their homework assignments far more often. That, in turn, allows teachers to raise their expectations of students and demand even greater performance. It also ensures that every student receives the kind of one-on-one attention that teachers have a hard time providing without volunteer help.
Nationally, TurnAround Corps would be a low-cost initiative. Yet it could drive measurable achievement gains, jump-start deeper school change, and create a pipeline for a new generation of high-quality teachers.
Michael Goldstein is founder of the MATCH School in Boston.
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