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The cult of great schools

Challenge in the cities

Jay Altman is determined to narrow the achievement gap between children from rich and poor backgrounds in New Orleans. ‘I’m part of the cult of great schools for all kids’ he tells Angela Spencer.

Teaching English and humanities at the most prestigious independent school in New Orleans was a complete revelation for state-educated Jay Altman. Never had he experienced such rigour, high expectations and intellectual stimulation in a school setting.

"I thought why can’t everybody have this education?" he said. "If they did, they’d have a much better chance of getting into college and a lot more options for life."

As it was, there were three school systems in New Orleans: elite independent schools, academically selective magnet schools (grammar schools) and everything else. If you didn’t get a scholarship to a private school and you didn’t pass the stiff tests to get into a magnet school, you went to a ‘chaotic, low achieving’ Key Stage 3 middle school where your chances of a good education were significantly diminished.

Determined to do something about it, Jay set up a summer programme where university students gave extra tuition to youngsters from 30 state primary schools in a bid to help them gain the higher entry test scores necessary to secure them a place at a magnet school.

When that wasn’t enough, he asked the New Orleans superintendent to let him set up an alternative school. Two months later, the James Lewis Extension School opened in the disused annexe of a Catholic school, leased from the priest for $5,000 a year. It had 100 students, four teachers – three of whom were in their first year – and a support staff of parent volunteers who did everything from fixing the building to serving lunch, running the office and organising road crossing patrols.

"Our unwavering faith that, given the right education, students from poor backgrounds could do just as well as those from comfortable backgrounds eventually played out: in six years, the school had grown to 360 students and had morphed from being this odd bird in the flock to being the first charter school in New Orleans – New Orleans Charter Middle School – and the highest performing open admissions KS3 middle school in the city. We had students who went through that school and became doctors and teachers."

That was 17 years ago. The school no longer exists – wiped out four years ago by flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina – but its ethos lives on in an expanding movement of small charter schools in New Orleans whose determination to narrow the gap in achievement between children from disadvantaged and comfortable backgrounds is having dramatic results.

Nationally, other educational leaders in the charter school movement have had similar ambitions and some of these schools have developed into networks run by parent organisations, the most successful of which are mission-driven non-profits like Jay Altman’s FirstLine Schools.

What they have in common is their size – around 250 pupils – and a boot camp approach to schooling that has been dubbed both 'no excuses' and 'extreme' education.

The word extreme refers predominantly to their unrelenting prioritisation of the core skills of literacy and numeracy – often 10 to 12 hours of literacy and 10 hours of maths a week – at the expense of a broader curriculum.

They focus on quality teaching and learning, using formative assessment data to drive skilful teaching, with layers of inclusion support for students who are struggling – and they are obsessed with social norms. Jay said: "Unless you have a culture conducive to quality teaching and learning, with a strong sense of community, it is very difficult to help students achieve at high levels. Visitors frequently comment on how well mannered and focused the students are."

These schools have absolute alignment around high expectations and a motivational culture where attendance is high:

"Students want to be in school and they see lots of possibilities for themselves in the future".

At the same time, they have a longer school day (typically 7.30am to 5pm), a longer school year, and a strict behaviour management system of rewards and consequences. Disruptive students are always removed from class without negotiation, there are detentions every day, temporary exclusions of up to three days, and students who have a bad week lose their usual Friday afternoon off.

But Jay baulks at the ‘no excuses’ label. "I think it’s misleading," he said. "It implies insensitivity to the backgrounds of students, which isn’t true. A more accurate label would be 'whatever it takes schools' because what we are saying is 'it doesn’t matter what a student’s background is, we will do what’s necessary to ensure all students achieve at high levels.' This is the cult of great schools for all kids, right?"

In recent years, Jay has worked for international children’s charity ARK (Absolute Return for Kids) in developing a network of academies to help break the cycle of underachievement in schools in the UK’s most disadvantaged areas. As ARK’s director of education, he also worked with the National College and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) to develop the Future Leaders programme aimed at training and supporting the next generation of headteachers for challenging urban schools.

Now back in New Orleans, he is leading the FirstLine Schools mission to both directly operate schools and support education across the city by developing training programs for teachers and school leaders – an agenda aligned with President Obama’s reforms to increase the number of charter schools and to build up talent pipelines for high need areas.

Jay said: "Last year New Orleans became the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools. The irony is that it would never have happened so quickly but for hurricane Katrina, which effectively swept away the abysmal public school system and cleared the path for us to develop something better.

"Autonomous independent state schools have been able to do what centrally controlled schools did not because they have made it easier for more people to be highly effective. Larger schools systems are anachronistic. They don’t do a good job of developing teachers and leaders because too much attention is directed at feeding the system rather than focusing on student achievement and wellbeing.

"Of course reforms to create autonomy took place nearly 20 years ago in the UK, but in the US we are only now decentralising our large LEAs.

"Test scores in New Orleans have improved by 20 per cent over the last four years and I’m hoping that we will be outperforming the state within the next 10 years. If we do that, it will change urban education in America because all cities will want what we’ve got.

"They’ll realise that you have to give autonomy to school leaders and commission a variety of providers through a variety of governance structures to run schools so that they can be more adaptive to the needs of individual students."

About Jay Altman

Jay Altman joined education thinkers and practitioners from Australia, Hong Kong, Canada and the US at a National College international symposium to address three education challenges: reducing variability, narrowing the gap and enhancing sustainability.

The symposium heard how the UK has one of the strongest links between the socio-economic group a child is born into and adult outcomes. A child on free school meals is less than half as likely to gain five GCSEs including English and maths as other students, and twice as likely to leave school with no qualifications.

As part of its work to narrow the gap, the National College has expanded its role to include leadership development for leaders of children’s services. This is alongside existing initiatives, including support to help schools develop joined-up multi-agency approaches.

The Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services (C4EO) is currently overseeing a two-year programme looking at how to create and sustain links between schools, children’s centres and children’s services and engage parents in helping their children to succeed.

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