August 6, 2003
One Curriculum, Many Skeptics
By MIKE McINTIRE

 
xhaling a long, smoky sigh during a cigarette break in his weeklong training for the city's new school literacy curriculum, David Strahl did not seem particularly "invested."

For starters, Mr. Strahl, an assistant principal at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, learned only a few weeks earlier that his training would interrupt a long-planned vacation.

Then, on his first day, he was sent to the wrong address.

As an administrator, it also fell to him to press teachers from his school to attend the classes. Of the five teachers he needs to begin using the curriculum for ninth graders in the fall, he succeeded in getting only two or three to commit to the training sessions, where some participants have been openly skeptical of the ambitious new approach.

"I think the concern is, does the supposed success of this elsewhere mean it's going to work here?" Mr. Strahl said recently.

Key to the success of any educational overhaul is convincing educators of its value — an intangible hurdle that the trainers refer to as investing, or "buying in." 

But as the city pushes ahead with plans to roll out new curriculums this fall, union opposition, bureaucratic mix-ups and New York irascibility — some teachers ascribe an earnest naïveté to the trainers, some of whom come from places like Rhode Island, Kentucky and Lackawanna, N.Y. — have conspired to place the hearts and minds of some city educators out of reach.

Interviews over the last few weeks with more than two dozen teachers and administrators taking part in training sessions for the Ramp Up to Literacy program, which seeks to improve the reading abilities of sixth and ninth graders whose skills are at least two years behind, found that roughly half had doubts about its likelihood of success. The skeptics tended to be older, veteran educators, while younger and newer teachers were more likely to welcome the new curriculum.

To some newcomers, the grumbling from their more senior colleagues was disconcerting.

"Some older teachers were constantly raising their hands," said one newly hired English teacher, "arguing about policies of the Department of Education, attacking the trainers." 

The Ramp Up program is one aspect of a teaching model known as America's Choice that has become popular among advocates of school reform. A common concern is that the literacy program has yet to be tested in a school system as sprawling and troubled as New York's, although a few individual city schools have experimented with the overall teaching model.

"Some people have doubts," said Nina Pitton, a special-education literacy teacher at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. "They're worrying about how it's going to be implemented." She said she found the training excellent and believed that the program would succeed.

Darlene Morris, an English teacher at Walton High School in the Bronx, said she worried that teachers were not being given enough time to learn the curriculum and use it effectively. Each Ramp Up training session this summer lasts five days, as opposed to the 10 to 12 days that America's Choice contracts normally call for.

"We need more weeks of training," Ms. Morris said. "It's a lot to process, and I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it." 

The Ramp Up training is just one part of a broad array of curriculum changes, collectively called Children First, adopted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. Teacher training is also under way for the city's new standard curriculums in reading and math, as well as other programs.

But much is riding on the Ramp Up component, because an inability to read textbooks and classroom instructions is a key reason that many high school students drop out. To that extent, New York City's $4.5 million Ramp Up initiative is considered critical to the success of much of the rest of the new curriculum.

Ann Borthwick, who is overseeing the America's Choice program in New York, said she had seen no evidence of widespread discontent in the training sessions, which are expected to involve 1,400 teachers and administrators and continue until late August. She said daily session ratings given by participants were "very high," averaging above four on a scale of one to five.

She said that a few people had complained or raised concerns, and that some dissension was to be expected. "We've had a couple of groups where that has been an issue for a day or so," Ms. Borthwick said, "and we've gone in and tried to take care of that." 

The importance of teacher acceptance to the success of the school system overhaul, and the difficulties that school districts sometimes face in winning that acceptance, are well documented.

University of Pennsylvania researchers published a study last year that found that fewer than half of the teachers in a random sample fully applied what they had learned in America's Choice literacy workshops. Important elements of the curriculum were missing in 45 percent of the classrooms observed in the study. Another study by the same researchers linked student achievement directly to their teachers' adherence to the curriculum.

Neither study involved teachers in New York City, where America's Choice has encountered some major hurdles. 

The president of the teachers' union, Randi Weingarten, has come out against Ramp Up, and the city's preparations for the summer training sessions got off the ground late — one high school administrator said he received a fax "at 5:39 p.m. on the last day of school" urging him to round up teachers to take part.

"The school system bit off much more than it could chew this year," Ms. Weingarten said, "and now they have a big problem trying to figure out how to get this implemented. 

"America's Choice gets spun positively by its promoters who sell it, and by some of the supervisors who bought it, but I've been to countless school meetings where teachers have complained that it's not useful to children."

The America's Choice model was created by the National Center on Education and the Economy, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that advocates standardizing teaching methods and measures of student performance. It has been adopted by more than 600 schools across the country.

In New York, teachers said they were being paid about $34 an hour to attend training sessions. But they complained that they learned of the training too late to change vacation plans, and that the whole exercise had a hurried feel.

Judy Codding, a co-founder of America's Choice, conceded, "The timing of the decision to implement the Ramp Up curriculum this fall was not the best for everyone.

"Certainly, the earlier you make the decision, the easier it is to pull it off," she said. "But we felt it was better to try to help kids now rather than put it off for another year."

Ms. Codding said she was perplexed by Ms. Weingarten's objections, and she defended the program as having a proven record.

"If we can get the teachers to open up enough, to initiate the program in their classrooms, they will be thrilled to see kids who haven't been succeeding succeed," she said.

The Ramp Up training sessions, whose instructors are mostly teachers from other school systems that use America's Choice, are intensive and involve lectures, role-playing and even homework. Charles Pincus, an English teacher at Intermediate School 72 on Staten Island, called it "the most in-depth program I have ever seen."

"I have bought into it," he said. "The program is outstanding. I do think that a lot of my colleagues are still stuck on the old paradigm of what a language arts teacher is. I can tell from their comments. This is much different from what many people are used to."

Reading a paperback during one of the breaks, an administrator from a Brooklyn high school who said he had been an educator for 32 years praised the program as "over all, very good," but raised concerns about the instructors. Like most other critics, he asked that his name not be used because he feared retribution.

"These instructors seem to be from Rhode Island, and there are some things they don't understand about New York City realities," he said. "We've raised questions, for instance, about the role of Regents exam preparations in the program, since the nuts and bolts of preparing for the Regents begin in the ninth grade. Well, there are no Regents in Rhode Island, so they really don't have much to say about that. That's a serious concern."

One instructor, Zinovia Canale, an English teacher in Newport, R.I., admitted that she knew little about the New York City schools. Nevertheless, she expressed confidence that the Ramp Up program would work in New York. "I know very little about the structure here," Ms. Canale said. "But I do believe that the kids are the same. There are just more of them here than in Rhode Island."