North Star Receives Ed Trust Award for Closing Achievement Gap

In a ceremony earlier this month in the nation’s capital, the Education Trust bestowed upon North Star Academy its prestigious “Dispelling the Myth Award,” which honors schools in the United States that have demonstrated success in closing the achievement gap for low-income students and students of color. The award has existed for five years and has honored 20 other schools since its inception. Three other schools join North Star this year: P.S./M.S. 124 Osmond A. Church School in Queens, NY; Lockhart Junior High School in Lockhart, TX; and Keith L. Ware Elementary School in Fort Riley, KS.

Established in 1990 by the American Association for Higher Education, the Education Trust works to help schools and colleges “close the achievement gap.” The organization highlighted “common themes” that are manifest at North Star and the other 2007 award-winning schools: “having high expectations for all students, improving instruction, analyzing data to track student progress and individual student needs, providing a rich curriculum that is aligned to state standards, and using purposeful professional development to improve teachers’ skills.”

Each year, Daria Hall, Assistant Director of K-12 Policy Development at the Education Trust, analyzes data from schools around the country to winnow the list of potential recipients. “Our criteria are more stringent than the blue ribbon criteria,” Hall said, referring to the No Child Left Behind-Blue Ribbon Schools program which honors public and private schools that outperform schools in their state or demonstrate gains in student achievement. “For example, it is very important to us that schools not have any specific or exclusionary selection criteria. We want to figure out what’s happening to schools that take all of the students that come to them, and have much more success with them.”

Candace Crawford taught middle and high-school history at North Star Academy from 2002-2004, and now works at the Education Trust as a research associate. “Having seen it on both ends,” Crawford said, “I can attest to the fact North Star is definitely not creaming. I believe that North Star is doing an excellent job with students that many people wrongly and unfortunately believe cannot achieve at high levels.”

After Hall and her team analyzed the data, Karin Chenoweth, a senior writer at the Education Trust, visited the schools to determine if they were, as she says, “really walkin’ the walk.” What she saw at North Star flagged it as a winner: “The passion is really evident, the instruction is incredibly thoughtful, and the structures set in place are careful to allow the teachers to teach and allow the students to learn.” She also cited the interim assessments as being “especially impressive in terms of helping teachers understand where students are and where instruction needs to go.”

Juliann Harris, North Star High School’s assistant principal, traveled to Washington along with five North Star parents and two North Star alumnae who are current sophomores at Howard University to attend the awards ceremony. At the awards dinner, Roger Wilkins, Professor of History at George Mason University, spoke before the hundreds of educators from around the nation who had gathered for the Education Trust’s annual conference. Along with Kati Haycock, President of the Education Trust, Wilkins presented the award to North Star, which now sits prominently on Harris’ shelf at North Star’s downtown Newark campus.

Aaliyah Rainey, one of the two North Star graduates to attend, recalls that “after the awards ceremony, tons of people were coming over and congratulating us, even the other schools who had been honored. They wanted to know more about North Star, and were telling us how we’re doing wonderful things, the kind of things their schools wanted to be able to do some day.”

  
— By Sophie Brickman

Janna Genzlinger, Fine Arts Director at Excellence Charter School, looks down at the 24 first-grade boys sitting on the rug below her and says, in her best serious tone, “OK boys. It’s time. It’s time to get your frog on.”

In a blink of an eye, the boys have assumed “frog position”— crouched, hands on the floor, primed for hopping — and on her cue, begin to belt out a Puerto Rican song about el coquí, a Puerto Rican frog, accompanied by a wild jumping and general flailing of limbs. At the end of their song, they collapse breathlessly onto their carpet squares, and happily listen to the applause of their audience – parents, teachers, guests, and their principal, Jabali Sawicki, who claps with great drama and laughs loudest of all. Inspirational quotes from musicians adorn the walls around them – “Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong,” Ella Fitzgerald – and these young gentlemen, who are in the middle of their first music recital at Excellence, make the quotes hum with life.

The boys sing songs in Spanish, French, and English in the “Caribbean” unit of the first grade curriculum. Genzlinger explains, “We use the Kodaly method here, which suggests you start with the child’s own culture.” Genzlinger’s first-graders begin with the Afro-Carribbean experience and then move around the world, stopping at different countries and cultures throughout the year. Zoltan Kodaly, inventor of the method Genzlinger uses in her classroom, once said, “Often a single experience will open the young soul to music for a whole lifetime. This experience cannot be left to chance; it is the duty of the school to provide it.” The boys pronounce the foreign words and translate them into English as they clap along to the beat, the class effortlessly incorporating the pedagogy of multiple subjects. As the boys gleefully sing and dance along to the music, one imagines Kodaly standing at the back of the classroom, quietly marveling at the successful realization of his theory.

They run through their prepared songs, from Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” to Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” a song which elicits the occasional unrehearsed refrain from a six-year-old overcome by the music (“Yeah, don’t you worry ‘bout a thing!” “Everything’s gonna be al-RIGHT!”). Then the boys ask to sing more. Genzlinger is flexible and asks for suggestions.

Instead of a repeat of the frog song, the biggest hit of the recital thus far, Maximus requests “We Shall Not Be Moved.” The boys nod eagerly, and within moments, the music room in the basement of the school becomes a small spiritual gathering, family members swaying back and forth on their chairs, the boys rocking back and forth on their carpet squares beneath as they sing with voices whose decibel level they have not yet learned to control. After one verse, Davon raises his hand: “Can we sing the ‘on our way to college’ part?” Genzlinger nodes and quickly the boys create their own gospel song:

On our way to college, we shall not be moved.

On our way to college, we shall not be moved.

Like a tree standing by the water,

We shall not be moved.

There is a beat, Sawicki flashing Davon a quick thumbs up, and the somber song lingers in the air before Genzlinger releases the boys to do the limbo. College is still a long way off for these youngsters.

Sawicki, whose musical experience involves rapping and playing the conga drum, recognizes the multiple functions music plays in his school. It complements the rigorous academic day, engages parents in the school community, and allows the boys to tap into their creative side. In sync with the Kodaly method, Sawicki cites the cultural aspect of the music curriculum: “We want to be sending students to Exeter and Andover, and we want them to learn the violin. But we also want them to appreciate the djembe drum. Part of what we’re trying to do is celebrate the culture and heritage of our scholars in a way that makes them feel good about themselves and good about their opportunities in life.”

Of course, watching the youngsters shake their stuff while dancing to a rap version of “Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?”, another feature shines through just as brightly: “The boys love rhythm, they love music, they love dancing, they love singing along,” says Sawicki. “They enjoy it, and the enjoyment filters out and trickles down to every aspect of the school.” 

— By Sophie Brickman

Chances are, statistically, that George Davis is probably the only person he knows who regularly belts out Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” on Thursday afternoons. Sober. To a classroom of 30 kindergartners.  But he does so with all the zing he can muster, and his young charges happily follow his lead, unwittingly learning to spell as they sing about one of the school’s core values.  

A more jarring – and quantifiable – statistic applies to Davis. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, he is one of only 2% of male Kindergarten teachers in the country. Though Davis did not originally plan to teach elementary school, after meeting John King, a managing director at Uncommon Schools, during his senior year at Harvard, learning more about Uncommon Schools, and interviewing, his path greeted him with neon lights. After one year learning the ropes, he is now in his second year at Leadership Preparatory Charter School in Brooklyn, a school he praises for its “amazing and incredible” support, a support his teacher friends do not necessarily receive elsewhere. It is this support that has directly helped Davis evolve from a teacher who “didn’t know what to anticipate” to one who seems built for the classroom.

He teaches reading, math, social studies, science, and physical education during a day that starts, for him, at 6:45 a.m. and rarely ends before 5 p.m. He cuts each lesson into tiny, kid-sized segments. Outsiders can forget how difficult it is to keep the attention of four and five-year-olds for a day that not only lacks nap time, but lasts hours longer than that of district schools. All kindergarten teachers keep things moving, but Davis is downright peripatetic, constantly engaging them in new ways every two to three minutes: he’ll sing a quick, ten-second song here, take them through part of a phonics lesson, have them act out a word, pause for a quick dance break, read a bit more, switch to reading in mock robot voices, and then have them give themselves a special clap.His technique works, and is inspiring to watch, eliciting giggles from the students.

Davis is exhausted at the end of the week: not only does he work twelve-hour days, but he attends classes on nights and weekends as he works towards a Masters degree in Teaching from the new Uncommon Schools/KIPP/Achievement First program at Hunter College. Nonetheless, even while his co-teacher takes over, Davis hums along to the students’ songs as they sing. He’s entirely invested in his students, who he says are the reason he can do the work he does every single day.

“It’s this amazing thing,” he says during one of his brief breaks. “They’re sponges. You do something, and the next thing you know, they’re doing it.” He pauses. “It’s kind of scary, actually, because you want to make sure you give them the right things to soak up. But they keep me young!” He is twenty-four.  

After lunch, Davis teaches a “Core Knowledge” class on how to differentiate between that which is living and that which is non-living. After brief discussion, the students agree that a turtle is, indeed, alive. So is a shark. One kid suggests, “A cocoon?” Without a beat, Davis becomes a raccoon, little paws curled under his chin. “You mean a RA-coon?” The young scholar nods quickly in agreement. They get it.

Then Davis throws a wrench into the group of youngsters sitting on the carpet below his chair. “What about grass?” he asks them. He wants them to be puzzled, and they are.

To help them out, Davis reads them a small book about a blade of grass changing from a seed into a plant. Some students “oooh” and “ahhh,” attention riveted on their teacher. He reaches the end, all students now understanding that grass does, indeed, embody all three necessary components of a living thing (it changes, it moves, and it grows), and the class erupts in a round of applause. Caught off guard, Davis contemplates for a split second whether or not to hush them, but then he thinks better of it and lets the applause continue for a few more seconds. He smiles and takes a half-bow from his seated position in his kindergartener-sized chair before continuing on with his lesson.

                             
— By Sophie Brickman