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...Boom!" Leroy Hayes describes sitting in his seventh-grade English class at Philadelphia's Shoemaker Middle School when he heard the explosion. It was startling but not necessarily surprising, he says. Crazy stuff happened all the time at Shoemaker. Once, he recalls, a student urinated into a soda bottle during class and threw it in a math instructor's face. Crazy stuff. After hearing the big explosion, Hayes and his friends rushed out of the room and discovered that someone had set off fireworks in the corridor. "The school was in chaos," the 11th-grader remembers of the 2005 incident...
Mastery has already increased test scores by double digits in each school, partially through a "no excuses" philosophy that stresses personal discipline as much as academics. Students noticed the attitude change immediately. "They really brought down the hammer," says Samuel Cowans, a 17-year-old Shoemaker student who was at the school when the weekly food fights and daily brawls gave way to uniforms and silent halls. Now a combined middle and high school, Shoemaker requires students to turn in their homework at the beginning of each...
...works for companies may not necessarily work for schools. But the business analogy holds, says Mastery CEO Scott Gordon, if you see kids as customers and schools as the product to be reworked, perfected and sold. Mastery schools operate with obsessive attention to data. Daily and weekly figures on student performance, attendance, tardiness - these numbers are pored over by teachers who are themselves regularly monitored and evaluated. The goal is for every person in the building to be constantly improving...
Gordon believes that if you focus on the performance of the adults and the system in which they operate, student success is sure to follow. The biggest problem with many failing schools, he and others in the turnaround movement say, isn't the kids, the parents or the community - though all three are undeniable factors. The key flaw is that the schools are poorly run. "We are trying to apply modern-management common sense," says Gordon. "Invest in your talent, set goals - continuous improvement, constant feedback." This differs, he says, from typical public schools, where teachers receive evaluations only once...
Michael Zheng ’12, another Kirkland student in DeWolfe, said that while it would be “unfortunate” that fewer rooms would be available to rising sophomores, ending DeWolfe housing “will be good for the House...