EDITOR’S PAGE For The Carter Kids, It’s Time To Stand and Deliver

In the modern parable of Jaime Escalante and his super-achieving, inner-city whiz-kids, popularized by the movie Stand and Deliver, the triumph of good over evil is as obvious as it is powerful. When the good guys (Jaime and the gang) excel on advanced placement calculus exams, the bad guys (institutional racists and bureaucrats) figure that these poor kids from the projects couldn’t possibly have placed out of calculus and that they must have cheated. Boo. hiss. But wait, they’re tested again and it’s true! They learned calculus! They achieved! Yea! Everyone leaves the theater feeling good about having kicked those fatal preconceptions in the teeth.

Ah, but real life is never as digestible as film. Consider the Carter High School Caper. As the movie begins to roll, a bunch of Carter parents are angry that their school is at the bottom of the achievement heap and that their kids don’t seem to be learning much. They demand some sort of drastic and creative response. They eventually get it in the form of one tough-talking, ass-kicking principal named C.C. Russeau. With Russeau comes a new school improvement plan that emphasizes educational drills and near-constant communication between students, parents, and teachers.

Here’s where the plot thickens, and I don’t want to spoil it for you (see “Who Framed Carter High?” page 64). So I’ll get right to the audience reaction. Did you swell with pride as a group of tow-achieving minority students and parents got their act together and demanded more from their school-and from themselves? Did you cheer when they sifted through a stack of recent studies looking for innovative ways to boost achievement and learning?

Or did you nod knowingly when one Carter student, who happened to be a football player, appeared to stumble and fall? If you’re like most people, you jumped right on the bandwagon by condemning a system you knew little about as “lowering standards” and designed to get around the state’s no-pass, no-play rule.

If you’re sports broadcaster Norm Hitzges. you took that a step further and analyzed Carter’s test scores (before the improvement plan) on the air, drawing the conclusion that anybody with test scores that low couldn’t possibly have gotten through a football season without losing a single player to no-pass, no-play. (Just like those kids in the calculus class. Right, Norm?) If you’re state Representative Bill Hammond, Dallas’s only delegate on the House education committee, you began to gel suspicious for the same reason. After all. even largely white, affluent Plano lost some kids due to academic ineligibility!

To be fair, in the early days of this unfolding drama, it was very difficult to determine whether or not Carter had cheated to get around no-pass, no-play. But that’s not what concerns me. What’s unfair is that by jumping all over the school before the facts were in, we sent those kids a message as clear as the rejection notices sent to Escalante’s calculus class. If those kids see the Carter flick, they won’t doubt for a minute how it’s supposed to come out.

It’s no secret that minority students in Dallas, as in every other urban area in the country, are not achieving at the same pace as their Anglo counterparts. That was certainly true at Carter. And it’s too soon to tell whether the new plan-which grades equally on class participation (drills), homework (daily, and graded), weekly tests, and a six-week exam-will help.

So far, educational opinion is divided. There are those, Hammond for one. who cannot accept as valid any system that, even theoretically, would allow a student to fail all of his tests and still pass for the six weeks. But the Texas Education Agency, in the process of reviewing the plan, has found little to criticize. Asked to elaborate on problems within the plan. Commissioner of Education William N. Kirby could only offer one specific: it creates too much paperwork for the teachers.

Why. then, has an experimental plan been denounced as a travesty, a farce, a triumph of mediocrity over excellence? Why have editorial writers stated that by adopting such a grading system. Carter High has in effect readopted the policy of social promotion? Why have we sold the system short even before the grades are in?

In part the issue has become embroiled in a larger battle over accountability. Whose fault is it when kids fail? The teacher’s? The student’s? The parents”? While many teachers resist the notion that they are responsible for a child’s grades, the Carter plan puts unprecedented emphasis on teacher feedback and makes them primarily accountable for lowering the failure rates.

The American public has demanded that our schools improve. But how can we measure improvement? By reviewing tangible evidence that learning has occurred. And in most cases, that evidence is test scores and grades.

Perhaps in the Carter case, a little knowledge was dangerous. How many of us can say precisely how our children’s grades are calculated? I asked teachers in Highland Park and Piano to describe their grading plans, and I was told that teachers there determine grades any way they please. If these formless plans were debated on the editorial pages, perhaps they too would be denounced-as “arbitrary.”

But there is a deeper problem. We are so ready to give up on the Dallas school system that we quickly believe anything negative about it. I think most of us realize how important it is that we educate all the children of Dallas-not just our own. But when it comes to rethinking solutions, we must open our eyes to change. We may have to admit that what works in an all-white, affluent school district like Highland Park may not work in an all-black neighborhood. At Carter, grades are viewed as motivational tools as well as measurements. If failure is assured in the early weeks of school, what is to stop a discouraged kid from dropping further behind, and eventually dropping out?

Throughout this whole the Carter kids have been extraordinarily calm and courageous. Let’s not damn them as cheaters and doom them to failure. Instead, let’s see whether or not they’re on to something that works.