Over the Underground Railroad

In 1945, Blake McKelvey, then Assistant City Historian of Rochester, wrote a brief biography of Susan B. Anthony for the Rochester History, a quarterly published by the Rochester Public Library. The occasion was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Anthony’s arrival in Rochester. McKelvey paints a picture of November 14, 1845, the family’s first night in Rochester after moving from Battenville, NY, where the patriarch’s savings had been destroyed by the depression:

                                             Susan and Mary [her sister], making their beds in blankets on the floor that night,

                                             may have had some doubts concerning the new home, but the next day the family’s

                                             spirits must have revived. From the house, standing atop a gentle elevation (near the

                                             intersection of the present Brooks Avenue and Genesee Park Boulevard), one could

                                             look east towards the curving Genesee. City church steeples could be seen in the

                                             distance beyond gently rolling fields. Several score of fruit trees contributed a settled

                                             appearance to the thirty-two-acre farm with its barn and smithy behind the Greek

                                             Revival farm house.

While the view from the former farm site is no longer graced by fruit trees and gently rolling fields (these days, a gas station and the Greater Rochester International Airport play those roles), the facts are there, buried in parentheses: True North Rochester Prep sits atop an historical landmark. Not only was it Susan B. Anthony’s family’s farm, but the farm was one of the Underground Railroad’s most prominent northern stops.

Last January, Rochester Prep Director of Operations Dan Deckman wrote Managing Director Doug Lemov an email entitled “history geeks unite,” in which he recounted overhearing this story on the local public radio station on his drive to work. Staying true to the email’s title, Deckman wrote Lemov, “I thought this was way too good to be true, so I looked it up…We are literally sitting atop some wonderful material.”

Investigation by Executive Director of The Susan B. Anthony House Deborah Hughes further informed this initial discovery: based both on the plat map of the tract Anthony’s father bought, and a comparison of the elevation of the school building and the farm house, chances are the farm house itself sat on the opposite side of Brooks Avenue from the school – vaguely where a parking lot now resides, also owned by the school. Nonetheless, the farm spanned thirty-two acres, making the whole area the Anthony farm, and the foundation of the schoolhouse historically relevant.

David McBride, history teacher at Rochester Prep, seized upon this newfound knowledge last year and incorporated it into his fifth grade class’ study of the Underground Railroad. For basic information, his students had read Steal Away Home, an historical fiction mystery about Dana, a young girl who discovers that her parents’ new house used to be a station on the Underground Railroad years ago. McBride took his students’ preliminary understanding of the era and started the unit with a U.S. map that traced the general Underground Railroad routes, from the American South up through Canada. Then he narrowed the map down to the Northeast, and next New York State. “For the final section, we went over some of the Underground Railroad routes in Rochester,” he said, “and I paused, told them to look around, look down at the ground. They got it, and there was a collective ‘Ahh!’ The location of the very classroom we were in, at that very moment, was one of the spots on the railroad. They were pretty into it.”

In all fairness, Anthony spent little time at her parents’ house, though she called Rochester her home. She was a school teacher, a headmistress, an active abolitionist, the founder of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, and spent years traveling across the United States and Europe to give speeches, sometimes a hundred in a given year, on women’s rights.

In 1866, she moved, with her sister Mary, to 17 Madison Street, where she lived until her death in 1906. It was there that she met abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and in the third floor attic, helped Elizabeth Cady Stanton write the influential History of Woman Suffrage. Just 2.7 miles away from her family’s farm, this house is now a National Historic Landmark – the highest historic designation given to a private home, White House included.

McBride’s students have plans to visit this house, but there seems to be no urgency. Like Dana, their immediate surroundings have already been brought to life in a way that seems hard to beat.

— By Sophie Brickman

Big Mann on North Campus: Principal Mike Mann and NSA Middle School

Lean, clean-shaven, his jet-black hair slightly damp, Michael Mann strides purposefully around the North Star North Campus cafeteria as his students eat breakfast and quietly complete their morning work. In his crisp white shirt, thin tie and gray slacks, he cuts a serious figure. Had he become the intelligence official that the State Department recruited him to be, he’d be the guy with the clipboard, commanding meetings at a linoleum-floored-and-fluorescent-lit building in Foggy Bottom.  Instead, he’s calling a couple of hundred middle schoolers together for a community circle.

Mann’s path to this moment has been a winding one, to say the least. After completing his undergraduate degree at Harvard College, he went to the State Department, which he instantly deemed “boring and very backwards.” Though offered a spot, he decided not to matriculate at Harvard Law School and, instead, traveled to Kunming, China, where he taught English. He joined Teach For America in 1993, teaching for three years in Washington in D.C., where he was routinely his school’s teacher of the year. Following that, he taught for two years at Ted Sizer’s charter school in Massachusetts and rode his motorcycle to classes back at Harvard for an M.Ed.  Upon earning his degree, he taught for seven years at North Star Downtown, where he became a legendary teacher and soccer coach. And finally, he ended up right where he should be: in an area which he describes matter-of-factly as “the Tony Soprano part of Newark until they built I-280,” where he runs a phenomenally high-performing middle school.

He leads his fifth, sixth, and seventh-graders into the large gym next to the cafeteria, in a building North Star shares with a parochial school (“the priests love our program and think this is what Catholic education used to be,” says Mann), and begins to read the school a story about Christina Amalita, a girl who used “strong words.” He loves being around children, and knows which little gestures will reach them. Somewhere amidst a day that starts before seven and does not end until after the sun has set, he has spent an hour writing the story, making flashcards relevant to the “strong words,” and constructing the physical “book” itself: a binder with a cover, complete with title and picture, slipped into the front. The teachers and students gather around for an enormous story time. When Mann finishes and asks the school the overall point of the story, nearly every hand shoots up, and one student delivers the thesis statement, eloquently and with no frills: “The story is about how intelligence can spread and diffuse in a community.”

Mann works to realize this sentence at the microcosmic level, and then extrapolate outwards, from the student, to the school, to the community, to the world at large. In 1998, he met two other individuals who shared this noble goal, and for the past ten years, he has devoted himself to the Uncommon cause.

“When I met Norman [Atkins, now CEO of Uncommon Schools] and Jamey [Verrilli, Principal at North Star’s Downtown Middle School], I was stunned,” says Mann of his first meeting with the two. “Jamey’s sense of mission and commitment to teaching, combined with Norman’s relentless nature and intelligence, was very attractive to me.” The day of his interview, Mann proved to be both committed and relentless in nature himself. A parent had gotten a flat tire in the parking lot, so Mann got out the spare, a lug nut wrench, and a car jack, knelt down on the ground, and fixed it for her.

While at North Star, as a middle-school History and English teacher, Mann founded “Brick City Soccer,” a Newark sports league for children in the area, and over the next six years of teaching, he began to amass a following. Shana Pyatt, then a teacher at North Star and now the High School Principal, put him together with his wife, Emily, then a Special Ed teacher at North Star and now a teacher at North Campus. Pyatt’s younger brother, Art, began hanging around the school, visiting classrooms, then co-teaching. Now he teaches history full-time at North Campus. Jesse Rector, now his assistant principal and, as of next year, his co-leader, coached in Mann’s soccer league, and came to North Campus with his wife, Jessica Mitchell, a seventh grade math teacher. When it came time to open a second middle school in the North Star network, Mann already had a tight-knit and philosophically-aligned crew.

One weekend in December of last year, Mann traveled to Philadelphia to teach TFA corps members a class entitled “Cooperative Learning Without Tearing Out Your Hair!” There, in a packed two hours, Mann gave a room of first year teachers a taste of life in his classroom (complete with maxims like “discipline is not what you do when children misbehave; it’s what you do so they won’t”).  He spoke to his fellow teachers as peers as he introduced what they would be doing for the next five minutes: a role-playing scenario in which he was the teacher, and they the students. Then he switched gears.

His voice changed tone, and increased, barely perceptibly, in volume. He began walking around the room, speaking about a group activity the class would perform momentarily, and miraculously, the classroom transformed. “You are young professionals,” he said, “and you’re going to hold yourself that way.” This particular classroom was, in fact, a classroom of professionals, and not merely adolescents preparing to play the role, but with this line, the “students” stopped their fidgeting. A quick glance from Mann at a slouching girl, and not just she, but all the students around her, straightened their backs, uncrossed their legs, and clasped their hands on their desks.

At first, the students looked around at each other, smirking. Was this guy for real? But five minutes later, when Mann broke character, they were converts. Even skeptics, who muttered that perhaps his treatment was too tough, audibly gasped when Mann rattled off the test scores of his students. As the corps members filed out at the end of the day, one said to another, “That was the best professional development I’ve ever received. Bar none.” 

Even at North Campus, certain students have more difficulty with these high behavioral expectations than others, and sometimes other tactics are necessary. At the start of the year, one boy does not pay attention in Mike Taubman’s English class. When other students work independently, Taubman kneels down at the boy’s desk in the back of the room and speaks to him quietly: “I know this is going to be a good year for you. What did you do this summer?” The boy replies that he went away to a warm place with his family. “So now imagine that you’re in a colder place, without your family,” says Taubman. “You’ll have to make sacrifices to go far. What will this hard work give you?” The boy responds that he’ll get into college. “Yes, but what else? You’ll be successful, proud, and intelligent, right? The reason I raised my voice before is that I need you to focus.” And with that, the boy turns back to his paper, fully calmed down and ready to work. The students clearly enjoy their teachers – students will often stop by the staffroom, during lunchtime, just to have a quick chat.

Parents are grateful for this kind of personalized attention, and feel comfortable enough with Mann to seek him out for advice on parental decisions. One mother comes to a meeting with Mann unsure if she should move her son to a school with a more developed sports program. “Maybe for him it’s not, but for me it’s all about academics,” says the mother. “And I know where he was at the start of his time here, and I see where he is now. It’s just drastic improvement.” Mann nods.

“That’ll just keep happening to him if he stays here,” he says, and then writes a large “60%” in the middle of a piece of lined paper and circles it for emphasis. “The academic level at other places will be about 60% of what we offer to your son here.” The mother nods, confident that Mann not only knows the ins and outs of the schools in the area, but what is best for her child, specifically.

And Mann does know his students well, in part because he maintains contact with them one-on-one. In addition to his gargantuan duties as principal, Mann teaches nine hours a week of “Liberation Arts,” a class he created initially to fill a gap in the schedule but which has since grown to become an integral part in maintaining and furthering the school’s overall ethos. He likens the class to “secular preaching,” and uses class time with his students to discuss the school’s core values (Respect, Caring, Courage, Perseverance, and Responsibility), as yet another way to encourage clear thinking, and thus clear writing.

Mann exalts the writing program at North Campus: “When I was teaching seventh and eighth grade writing, everything was so formulaic. Here, we really let the students show their voices.”

Teachers have plastered the walls with writing and vocabulary hints so that wherever a student looks, he can see a way to improve. One poster reads “POWER writing”:

Purpose and Plan

Organize

Write

Edit

Revise and Rewrite

ER…ER…ER…

Another wall is entitled “In Memoriam,” and below are lists of words that have “died” and been replaced with other, stronger words. One poster reads “‘small’ has been snuffed out,” and “slight” “minor,” and “unimportant” are written beneath. Another reads “‘funny’ went belly up”, with “witty,” “bizarre,” and “comical” below.

Like Christina Amalita, the girl in Mann’s community circle story, Mann’s students use these “strong words” in their writing, and as a result, often assume a writing tone beyond their years. A teacher has tacked sixth-grader Karla Cruz’s essay onto a classroom wall on the third floor. The essay ostensibly analyzes child labor, but her lead sentence manages to put into words the overall ethos of the school Mann has built: “Children are the renaissance to the future.”

— By Sophie Brickman

One Percent Solution: Words of Inspiration
 

“C-O-double L-E-G-E!”

“College is no fantasy!”

“C-O-double L-E-G-E!”

“For me it will be a reality!”

Nelson Ferrer, Fitness instructor at Excellence Charter School, and an auditorium of elementary school boys collaborate to bring jumping and fist pumps to the age old choral practice of call-and-response at an all-school meeting in Bedford-Stuyvesant. On this particular Friday, Ferrer introduces a new chant to the community. Never certain which will stick with his charges, he tries out different rhyming messages throughout the year, gauging the boys’ response. His frenetic energy pops off the stage and into the green-sweater-and-tie-clad audience of the ten-and-under crowd, which rises and belts out its part in unison, following Ferrer’s cues to a T.

In the Uncommon Schools network, similar chants, phrases, and poems echo off, and are written on, the walls of the schools. In James Verrilli’s history class at North Star Academy, his eighth graders transition from a silent “Do Now” to Mr. V’s instruction by standing up and belting out, in perfect unison, a Frederick Douglass quote: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” At the start of Sultana Noormuhammad’s first grade class at Leadership Prep, students punctuate each phrase with a clap as they sing:

“This is the way (hey!),

We start our day (hey!),

We get the knowledge (hey!),

To go to college (hey!),

But don’t stop there (hey!),

Go anywhere (hey!),

This is the way (hey!),

We start our day (yeeee-ah!).”

Many schools have, on one or more walls, a poster that reads “Smart is not something you are. Smart is something you get.” At the top of the fifth flight of stairs at Williamsburg Collegiate, a Dag Hammarskjold quote greets scholars, appealing both to their literal state and emotional mindset: “Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.” 

This practice, of reiterating positive thoughts through employing, in Uncommon vernacular, “words of inspiration,” is not unique to the Uncommon network: both Achievement First and KIPP schools incorporate them in the day-to-day lives of their students. David Levin, co-founder of KIPP, credits the early emphasis on chanting in his schools to Harriett Ball, his mentor teacher in Houston, Texas. (In fact, KIPP cites Ball, who took Sir Frances Bacon’s saying “Knowledge is power” and brought it into the classroom, as the one who named its organization and schools.) She now heads Harriett Ball Enterprises, Inc., a teaching program that advocates “multi-sensory teaching” – essentially, the use of mnemonics, clapping, and rhythm in lessons.

Reached on her cell phone in Spring, Texas, Ball recalled the first day she used a song in her classroom. She was teaching the lowest-performing students in the school, and one day, while at the board trying to teach them how to read fifteen digit numbers, she started writing a rap on the board. “It was like a Ouija board,” she said. “I just started writing and it came out. I said, ‘Read that!’ and that was the beginning. After that, my students’ scores soared.” Then, she gave an impromptu concert, effortlessly singing a snippet of that first song she sang years ago:

“…write what you see/if the number comes up to the comma you must make it three/add the zeroes to the front to make it three digits long/if you put it anywhere else you will be mighty wrong!”

From that day, she used foot stomps, call-and-response, and rap in all of her lessons, and started a movement in teaching. KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools all use Ball’s sayings and songs. She even managed to break into the New York City rap scene when Jay-Z sang a version of her song “Read, baby, read,” at the 2006 Robin Hood Foundation benefit.

Doug Lemov, author of the “Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices,” (and coiner of “the Threshold,” an integral component of last issue’s 1% daily hand-shake solution) stresses the importance of imbuing students with inspirational words every day. In what is surely the only paragraph in literature to reference both Rick Moranis and Winston Churchill, he names this practice “Speak it into Being.” Like Moranis in My Blue Heaven, who buys an expensive Italian suit to “change from the outside in,” and Churchill, who tried to feign courage on the battlefield and inadvertently began to believe in himself, Lemov underscores that students will believe what they hear coming from their own mouths. Writes Lemov, “great teachers contrive ways to put handy statements of purpose and values in their mouths so they can repeat them and come to think of them as their own.”

Many of Uncommon’s chants speak to the mission of its schools: to prepare each student for college. On the first day of school in 1997 when North Star Academy, the flagship of Uncommon Schools, opened, James Verrilli began the Uncommon tradition of “words of inspiration” by teaching his incoming middle-schoolers a call-and-response he’d written himself. It begins:

                            Who are you?

                            A star!  I shine brightly for others!

                            Why are you here?

                            To get an education!

Towards the end, the chant focuses on the school’s mission.       

                            Where are you headed?

                            To college!

                            And will you succeed?

                            Yes!

                            And when you succeed, what will you do?

                            Give back to others!

Incoming students learn the full chant and perform it publicly, and at the recently opened elementary school, Kindergartners both lead and call out the responses with as much vigor as their older peers. At the high-school graduation ceremony each spring, when Verrilli shouts out, “Where are you headed?” each senior replies with the name of his college. To date, 100% of graduating seniors have replied with a name.

Back at Excellence, where college is still a far way off, the “C-O-double L- E-G-E” chant has progressed to its third verse. The lyrics to this new cheer have been projected on the screen behind Ferrer, and some of the older boys have begun to read what was, until then, Ferrer’s part, leaving it to the youngsters to show off their spelling skills. It looks like this chant is going to stick.

“C-O-double L-E-G-E!”

“At a place of higher learning is where you’ll find me!”

“C-O-double L-E-G-E!”

“A college graduate is what I’m gonna be!”

 
— By Sophie Brickman