When Jay Sweeney joined the staff at the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School (AMSA), he was the only non-Russian in the math department. The school is in the middle of Massachusetts, so huh?

Now the school’s Principal, Sweeney explains that the original charter required that at least half of those teaching in math-related courses also have experience working in an industry using the skills they teach at AMSA. Sweeney himself worked for years at Intel and various start-up companies before becoming a teacher.

But perhaps as a sad comment on the quality of American math/science education, most of AMSA’s industry-experienced teachers, who now make up 60 percent of the total, were born and educated elsewhere – Asia, Russia, India.

People from those countries are also more familiar with AMSA’s highly unusual academic strategy, which they describe as an “Eastern Block” curriculum.

The lead designer of the school’s original charter was Dr. Julia Sigalovsky, herself a persecuted Russian Jew who fled to Israel before coming to this country. She and her colleagues designed AMSA’s original charter to model its curriculum after the one she knew.

So, for starters, in grades 6-12, students’ schedules include 50 percent more math than typical American schools – 7 and ½ hours per week. Math, according to AMSA’s philosophy, is the language of STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. Beef up math, you beef up STEM.

Makes sense.

An AMSA kid’s week is divided into 35 periods. Of those, 10 are devoted to science and 10 to math or computer science.

I recommend checking out their elaborate curriculum, laid out grade by grade, on page five of the charter.

Geometry is not a separate subject, but woven into various subjects. Social studies is divided into history and geography. English Language Arts is split into English language and Literature. To my relief, the Literature is unapologetically classical. The 8th graders study Dante, Petrarch and non-European medieval poetry!

The charter states, “Contrary to the widely-accepted belief that every subject must be intimately connected to a student’s everyday life, the Academy believes that the foundational principles and laws of academic disciplines designed to explore the world and universe are fundamentally more interesting to and useful for students.”

This place has nerve.

The moment they arrive, students are assessed and placed in ability-level groups in their math/science courses. They’re randomly assigned to humanities courses.

In math and science, AMSA skips middle school altogether and starts immediately with high school, with all 6th graders taking Algebra 1. Students are working on or done with Algebra II by the 8th grade.

College starts in 9th, when textbooks all become college level. By the 12th grade 90 percent of the students have taken some level of Calculus. AMSA ignores the curriculum sequence required by the middle-school MCAS tests and focuses instead on acing the 10th-grade MCAS, which they do. (See last week’s column.)

But wait! There’s no freaking way kids can do this, at least not when randomly chosen by charter lottery. Most of the students come from working-class towns with lackluster schools.

Sweeney full-on crows as he presents his “proudest accomplishment,” a graph showing the improvement of the most challenged students in the class of 2012, comprising a third of that class. In their math-related courses, they are the “college prep” group. (See graphs below.) Year after year, many middle-school students arrive with dismal MCAS scores – “In need of improvement” or “Warning,” the two lowest levels. By 10th grade, almost all have reached “Proficiency” or “Advanced.”

Though all students study the same curriculum, some take the math-based subjects more slowly than others. Given this level of rigor, in the lazy land of American teenagers, teachers are relentless about checking the students’ understanding with tests developed in-school, as well as some bought off-the-shelf and those mandated by the state. Every single student must have the foundational concepts so they are building on solid ground as the work gets increasingly complex and sophisticated.

An 8th period at the end of each day allows the school to support any students who are struggling in any subject and to strengthen the language of English-language learners. Academic hotshots use it to accelerate in whatever subject they please.

The point is that with support, all students can advance impressively. AMSA manages to make good on their charter’s seemingly outrageous promise:

The “Advanced” in the Academy’s name means that every student will become an advanced student. The Academy’s innovative educational approach will ensure that students previously considered “not capable” or “underachievers” will reach a level of knowledge that is currently considered only reachable by a few gifted and talented students. The “middle achievers” of the student population will find themselves enthusiastic, engaged and passionate about learning. Those who are chronically under-challenged and bored will thrive.

Sweeney says that the school’s goal is that “EVERY student will be able to solve any STEM problem presented to them.”

Oh and BTW: there’s also art instruction and after-school sports and clubs.

Next week we’ll look at the role computer science plays in both pushing and pulling in AMSA’s diverse learners.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

The road curves around Williams Lake in Marlborough, MA, a bucolic spot except for the boarded-up buildings left over from what was once a booming manufacturing past. These days mid-Massachusetts is a thriving hub for high-tech companies that have little need for the cavernous old plants.I head up a hill to a couple of re-purposed old buildings, now the home of the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School (AMSA).

A big sign welcomes me by name. Folks are friendly and easy, which seems to be the charter way. Because prospective students must apply to get in and be chosen by lottery, public charter schools enjoy the luxury of having teachers and families who actually want to be there. It tends to jolly up school atmosphere. AMSA adults shoo kids to class. The kids chat and dawdle. So far, this school seems pretty typical.

Typical it is not. In my 20-plus years of visiting schools, I’ve never seen anything like it. Business and industry have been screaming for better-prepared students for the STEM workforce – science, technology, engineering and math. But this school delivers incredibly well-prepared kids – in all subjects! – using a set of such unusual strategies, I’ll be spending the next three weeks examining them.

AMSA opened in the fall of 2004 with 300 6th and 7th graders. It grew by a grade each year, to grade 12, graduating its first class last spring.

But as the original 7th-grade class finished 8th grade, fully half of them chose to go elsewhere for 9th grade. School leaders were dumbstruck. The same drop happened the following year, leaving, curiously, 62 kids in each of those classes. Apparently, parents liked AMSA’s rigorous middle-school curriculum, but didn’t trust that a new charter could make their kids maximally attractive to colleges. Mid-Massachusetts also happens to be home to some of the nation’s most prestigious private schools, like Phillips Andover Academy.

Even so. While some of the most talented and well-supported kids departed, the remaining students stepped up big time. They have since enrolled or been recently accepted into Harvard, Brown, Cornell, University of Chicago and the like. Of course many are going to the state’s own universities, but the first two graduating classes proved that AMSA competes handsomely with “the best.” The attrition from grade 8 to 9 has diminished greatly. Why pay for the elitism of private school when a diverse public school offers excellent college preparation?

Bear in mind that any kid can put her name in the hat for a charter seat. Among AMSA’s current 966 students are geniuses, flakes and struggling learners. Enrollment preference goes first to siblings of current students, then students from four contiguous towns, Marlborough, Clinton, Maynard, and Hudson. If those groups don’t fill the roster, the school accepts students from anywhere. When they first opened, AMSA took kids from far and wide because the local public schools publically smeared AMSA in an effort to hang onto their kids.

While the school has only has a small portion of students eligible for federally-subsidized lunch (a poverty indicated), it is quite diverse. The professionals who work in the core towns’ computer and bio-tech industries tend to live elsewhere. These days about 46 percent of the students come from blue-collar Marlborough, the school’s home town.

Given the rigors of the program, the moment students arrive, they are tested so the school can map out a remediation strategy to bring all kids, no matter their background, up to grade level.

With the diversity of the student population in mind, let’s get a few more of AMSA’s achievements on the record:

Last year, AMSA’s 10th graders were #1 in the state on the state test, the MCAS.

In math, the 10th graders were #8 out of nearly 400 MA high schools. But AMSA was #1 for students scoring Advanced – 89% of last year’s 10th graders scored Advanced, beating out even the prestigious exam-school, Boston Latin.

The 8th graders were 2nd in the state on the MCAS science test.

Out of the 250 Advance Placement exams that AMSA students took, 81 percent got a 3 or higher, which is considered college-level achievement. Fifty-nine percent had a 4 or 5 (the highest).

The average score of the student body on the math SAT II was 740 (out of a perfect 800).

And just to show that the humanities are not slighted, the Latin Club were national champions at the “novice level” and came in 5th place at the “intermediate level.”

There’s more, but why harp? The question is: who are these guys? And how did they do it?

Over the next three weeks, we’ll look at three of their principal strategies. First, they use an “Eastern Block” curriculum, which is apparently everyday fare for, say, Russians. (A Russian started the school.)

Then we’ll delve into the requirement that every student in grades 6-11 take year-long computer- science courses.

And lastly, we’ll look at the advantages of instructors from different subjects collaborating on teaching the same topic. The humanities teachers might study the Greeks through the different lenses of literature, history, geography and art.

It’s a really unusual and rigorous place. With an upbeat atmosphere to boot.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

At a recent conference, nearly 600 attendees learned painful lessons about trauma’s effect on the young, developing brain. Dr. James Greer, psychiatrist and Clinical Professor at Brown Medical School, and his colleague Robert Hagberg, LICSW, presented their research and their experiences with effective treatment.Rhode Island’s Family Court hosted the two-day event designed to focus on improving the circumstances of the most obviously traumatized, troubled and vulnerable children, those whom the State had to remove from their homes. Conference participants came from the juvenile justice system, schools, social services and child-protective services. The point was to help everyone better understand the full plight of these kids, so agencies would collaborate more closely on taking better care of them.

Greer and Hagberg are principals in the Mind and Body Project, which treats trauma with physical techniques, including yoga. Their presentation repeatedly made the point that trauma is body based, not verbal. As therapists, they help kids use physical cues and exercises to control the effects of their own trauma. With detailed graphs and pictures, the therapist/researchers taught the audience how trauma wires itself into the brain’s architecture and becomes part of a kid’s automatic functioning.

One of their stories was about a kid I’ll call Raffi. For years his impulsive behavior has gotten him in trouble at school. Using a physical technique, he digs his fingers into his legs as he walks down the halls of his high school to concentrate on getting to English class.

But in the crowded hallway, some clod bumps him accidentally and wham, Raffi throws a punch. When administrators confront him about his actions, he honestly doesn’t remember what happened. At least he has no words for it. Trauma doesn’t think in words; it just reacts. So Raffi’s not just in trouble, but big trouble. Again.

The fact that this kid has trauma, “in no way excuses the behavior,” Greer says emphatically. “If they cannot control their behavior, they can’t live in the world with rest of us.” What they need are “corrective experiences,” which is to say reassuring, healthy interactions with caring adults who can, over time, help the kid trust that he can take a moment to think before reacting.

Greer explains, “Experience in childhood organizes the developing brain. Experience in adulthood alters the organized brain. And corrective experience does not happen in the office. It happens in home and at school.”

To me, the therapists’ “corrective experiences” translate as teaching or re-teaching. No one breaks a bad habit without learning and practicing a healthy habit that can take its place. So when it comes to social norms and handling emotions, traumatized kids need remedial education. Greer and Hagberg concede that this corrective or re-teaching work can be painstaking.

But if patient re-teaching works with traumatized kids, why wouldn’t it help all misbehaving kids learn new social habits?

As the presenters spoke, the typical behavior of their traumatized kids seemed for all the world like the obnoxious behavior we generally associate with any mouthy, uncooperative trouble-maker. So, of all youthful miscreants, what proportion is traumatized? And if not trauma, what are the other sources of the insulting, aggressive and uncontrollable behavior that has been flooding schools in recent years? Are there any?

Greer and Hagberg describe the three ways a kid’s brain becomes mis-wired and thus anti-social:

First is the obvious trauma of exposure to danger or harm. This would include natural disasters, accidental disasters like car accidents, or intentional harm like being beaten. Also, the threat of such harm is itself traumatizing. Hagberg says, “A sense of threat does more neurological damage than actual physical danger.” Gunshot-ridden neighborhoods are naturally threatening and thus traumatizing.

Second is the vicarious exposure to threat or harm. Increasing numbers of kids are growing up with parents who themselves have some form of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. They’ve survived war or the sorts of danger mentioned above. Kids pick up on the chaos in the parents’ inner world and become “disregulated” or chaotic themselves.

Lastly, and in some ways least obvious, is what Greer and Hagberg call “enduring neglect, which produces developmental trauma.” When Mom or the primary caregiver doesn’t respond appropriately or regularly, the child gets screwy messages about how to get her needs met. In our epidemic of disintegrating families, children often suffer an “absence of appropriate care.” Teen moms, for example, are often too immature to establish nurturing structures and routines.

But wait! That describes the whole range of kids who regularly misbehave. Even some middle-class kids are growing up with parents who want to be friends instead of setting limits and rules. Kids need, as Hagberg says, “structure, structure, structure.” But, he notes, “‘discipline’ can be a loaded word. Kids need structure and routine in appropriately developmental ways.”

The traditional approach to discipline, just punishing the kid, removes the unwanted behavior more quickly than providing corrective experiences. But punishment just reinforces the negative neuropathways already etched by traumatic experience. So misunderstanding and reacting badly to kids’ maddening behavior is likely just making it worse.

Hagberg and Greer made a compelling argument that everyone across all child-serving sectors needs to understand and to be responsible for re-teaching trauma-driven misbehavior.

Otherwise, I’m thinking, welfare rolls and prison populations will continue to soar.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

If a kid’s not listening, she’s not learning. If the kid’s not even in school, she’s certainly not listening.

Showing up every day and on time are skills absolutely necessary to success, especially at the entry level of any job or profession. Who would argue?

And yet, high absenteeism is a huge problem across the nation.

Hedy Chang, the Director of Attendance Works, says that Americans are perfectly aware that compulsory attendance at school is the law. They just don’t much care.

And no one teaches parents how to get 3 kids up, dressed, fed and out the door on time. It’s a feat. More challenging for some than others.

So Attendance Works’ mission is to help communities get their kids to school.

High absenteeism is a chronic problem that contributes to the more famous problems of low achievement and kids dropping out. Urban schools in particular are vilified for their poor academic performance, but they have limited control over whether or not the kids’ butts are in the seats. Yes, some instruction is deadly dull. But even schools with vibrant curricula, cool projects and caring adults can’t hang on to kids who have already disengaged from school, for whatever reason.

Chang’s research shows that kids start bunking school as early as 3rd and 4th grade.

So today, let’s focus on the littlest kids who have no choice about skipping school — those in kindergarten and grade one.

Nationally, one out of 10 of this very young cohort is “chronically absent,” missing more than 10 percent of school time. That’s 18 days out of a 180-day school year, about a month of school.

In Providence, Rhode Island, one third of the kindergartners are chronically absent. Rhode Island’s truancy law also says that three incidents of being tardy is supposed to add up to an absence, so even that one-third is seriously under-counted. (States have very different laws, by the way. In Maryland, truancy is missing 20 percent of school, or two months. In New York, each district has its own rules.)

The pain of it is that these kids will never make up the time. When kids are AWOL in the earliest grades, Chang says, “even if their 3rd-grade attendance is better, 5th-grade reading will still suffer. That includes kids who tested proficient when they came to K and 1. Low-income kids DEPEND on school to learn the habits that support reading.”

If a middle-schooler is disengaged, it’s absolute murder to get him back. So Chang emphasizes that the on-time-every-day habit needs be established as a non-negotiable when the child is quite young.

She cites three big reasons for chronic absenteeism among little kids.

1. Discretion. School just isn’t all that important to some parents. School’s convenient when it’s convenient.

Chang shakes her head, “Many people don’t understand how you learn a language or reading. You can explain the consequences of missing school to parents, but often they say ‘Just give me the work.’ It’s hard to convey the richness of the classroom and the powers of peer learning.”

“Discretion” is a parent problem.

2. Aversion. This one’s mostly the fault of the school. Perhaps the classroom is chaotic and therefore scary or stressful. Or the teacher is a bully and yells a lot. Kids tend to bully each other anyway at times, so that can get out of hand. And now that we’ve starved kids of time for recess, physical activity and running off steam, an otherwise great group of kids is bound to let off steam, somehow, even during class time.

Little kids can’t bunk, but they do get daily tummy aches. Those are red flags of aversion.

3. Logistical Problems. These include kids’ health, parents’ health, transportation, and so forth.

For example, when the City of Baltimore reached out to their chronically absent kindergartners and first graders, they discovered that a third of them suffered from asthma.

Also, transportation is a nightmare for many families. Some have several kids in as many schools. Many families move a lot, mainly for reasons of poverty. Space permitting, districts often transfer these mobile kids to a school closer to the new apartment, but that’s no favor to the continuity of kids’ education or relationships with friends and adults. It’s great if he can be bused to the old school, but if he misses the bus, Mom might not have a car, or the time to transport the kid herself.

So these kids start their school career by losing ground.

I’ve only touched on the problems of little kids. Attendance Works has gobs of research and information about absenteeism at all ages.

Chang strongly cautions that there’s no way you can know what the problem is until you go investigate. Dig. Find out. Don’t assume. Poor attendance unearths such an odd collection of issues that only good information can help to tailor good responses. Fortunately Attendance Works reports on solutions crafted by specific districts. Find them under“What Works.”

The bottom line is that improving the nation’s attendance rate is going to be hard, hard work. It will need a public campaign to solicit the whole community’s help. Because if the kid’s not there, all other school efforts just don’t matter.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

Back in December 2009, excited 4th graders at Westerly’s State Street School sat down to take a practice science test. Like little sports jocks, the kids approached the task as if it were training for the big game coming in the spring, the statewide science NECAP.

In 2008, the whole Westerly district had performed so poorly on that test that teachers actually volunteered their time to form a K-12 Science Task Force focused on redeeming their sullied academic reputation. (See last week’s column about this Task Force.)

Then, insult to injury, in 2009 State Street’s scores tanked again.

The heat was on. State Street had already started implementing the Task Force’s recommendations, including its strong emphasis on teaching writing.

Wait. Writing? That’s English, not science. But more on this in a moment.

Westerly’s students had struggled particularly with the “inquiry” part of the NECAP, where kids to do a hands-on task and draw conclusions from what they see in front of them.

State Street’s Principal Audrey Faubert says, “Science (NECAP) is only given at the 4th grade (and later at 8th and 11th), so K-3 weren’t exposed to the rigors of testing. We decided to give all the kids an inquiry task to complete. And the faculty also took some of the released test items from the RIDE website. Even though they’d been teaching inquiry with the science kits, it was interesting for the teachers to be on the other side of a test.”

But the spotlight’s glare was on those 4th graders.

Faubert smiled sadly, “The room was buzzing. The kids thought they did fantastic.”

Working in pairs, the school’s entire teaching staff scored the kids’ work. The results were enough to induce clinical depression.

But as it turns out, the school’s good efforts hadn’t quite paid off yet. The Task Force was onto a good thing when they decided writing was key to learning science. State Street’s instruction had only just started to take root.

Here’s the problem: Old science was about answers. When a test asks a question like: “How does wind change sand dunes?” somewhere in the science textbook was an answer that the kid was supposed to have memorized.

New science is about thinking and reasoning. The way Faubert puts it is: “The (NECAP) science test is a thinking test, not a knowledge test. Science isn’t about recall any more, but about synthesizing information.” New science poses essential questions, such as the sand dunes example, but now the kids need to derive the answer themselves, by sorting through data. Teachers provide techniques, tools, research methods, and experiences. But like scientists themselves, students must do their own research and figure out what their discoveries mean.

Writing is always the product of thinking. Writing forces a kid to organize her thoughts to be expressive and communicate clearly.

Middle school principal Paula Fusco says, “Prior to the work of the Task Force, we’d left writing up to the English teacher. But whatever the kids did or didn’t know, they weren’t able to communicate their understanding of science.”

To work on that understanding, Fusco says, “We’ve been taking the vocabulary out of NECAP – infer, predict, explain. So the kids aren’t afraid of the words they’re encountering.”

The ability to define “predict” doesn’t help at all if the ability to MAKE a prediction isn’t also a familiar habit. Kids need to demonstrate, by their writing, that they understand what they need to DO when the test asks them to predict, infer or explain.

Similarly, Fusco’s teachers began to work with the kids on “sentence starters” to guide their thinking – However, In conclusion, Whereas, Therefore.

Fortunately, Westerly’s students were in the habit of writing in science journals. But they had used them mainly to record observations. Faubert says, “Every teacher brought in examples of their students’ science journals. Oh, here are the strengths and weaknesses right in our own notebooks. We’d never had the kids prove their thinking in their journals. Think like a scientist, based on what’s in front of you. Prove your thinking. Prove your thinking. We said that so many times.”

At the end of the day, teaching the kids to EXPLAIN their predictions and reasoning was the clearest way to teach them habits of scientific thinking. And those explanations also helped the teachers assess kids’ understanding and misunderstanding.

By February, State Street dared to try another practice test with the 4th graders. Again, the staff scored it together. Ahhh, much better. So much so, Faubert felt more confident about improving on the 49 percent proficiency they’d managed in the prior year’s test.

In fact, when the results were released last Fall, State Street kids hit 80 percent proficiency, 8th highest in the state, out of over 150 schools that take that test. (And Westerly is the 8th lowest-income community in the state.)

Superintendent Roy Seitsinger’s take on the situation is this: “Nobody (meaning veteran educators) signed up for what we’re doing now. Most of the people weren’t trained to bring students through a thinking process. Now the educators’ job is to teach kids how to sift through all that information and to be critical, reflective and make decisions. We have too much information and not nearly enough sorting skills.”

Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

In 2008, bad news came like body blows to the little beach town of Westerly, RI.

First, the elementary and middle-school science scores were fairly disappointing, but the high school full-on bombed. The 11th graders scored a percentage point below the state average, which itself was a pathetic 18 percent proficient.Teachers had worked hard for test-score squat.

Second, the realities of falling enrollment and a strained budget meant the district had to mothball one elementary school at the end of the year. Always upsetting.

The re-shuffling of kids and teachers included adding the 5th grade to the middle school. The district laid off one elementary principal and assigned the others to the remaining schools. For the most part, teachers chose to follow their principal to wherever he or she got assigned.

And 6 superintendents had cycled through the district since 2005.

The system churned.

But even with all that roiling change, the district couldn’t afford to let science fall through the cracks. Remarkably, teacher volunteers from each building, K-12, stepped up to form a Science Task Force — on their own time and dime. Very unusual. They’re to be commended.

Teachers, not just curriculum officials, came out of the isolation of their classrooms and buildings to collaborate on a comprehensive picture of K-12 science instruction.

Once the hurt and defensiveness died down, the Task Force’s view of Westerly’s science program had many clear lessons, one of which was quite surprising.

But first a bit about Westerly. The large, lovely homes overlooking Narraganset Bay belong mainly to “summer people” whose kids go to school in New York, New Jersey, wherever. The monster casinos that moved close by in Connecticut increased the demand for Westerly’s rental housing. In the winter, the summer rental properties are relatively cheap. But that means the schools get and lose highly-mobile students all the time.

And the big manufacturing employers have been closing up shop.

So Westerly’s year-round population has Rhode Island’s 8th lowest median family income of Rhode Island’s 36 school districts – a surprise to me. The poverty rate among students has tripled in the last decade, from 11 to 33 percent.

Westerly officials make no excuses, though. The town wants good schools and is willing to support them. The current Superintendent, Roy Seitsinger, gratefully reports that their teachers union is supportive of reform efforts and wants to be “innovative and creative.”

While the Task Force preceded Seitsinger’s arrival, he was an instant fan of a K-12 approach to the science problem. “Any time you silo an effort to fix a problem, you haven’t trained the new habits of mind you need to keep the problem fixed. The Task Force is now a systematic practice. They are establishing a districtwide culture of data gathering and reflection.”

Well, what did they find?

Naturally, they found a whole laundry list of interrelated issues, including a badly misaligned curriculum with gaping holes.

But by far the biggest issue they found themselves facing was the fact that everything about teaching science has changed rather quickly, and Westerly hadn’t really kept up.

In recent decades, scientific research has exploded with new knowledge. That coupled with the advent of the internet means the subject has long outgrown its status as a body of knowledge, facts and formulae, that a kid could learn and spit back on a test. Instead, students need to learn to think like a scientist – predict, prove, show evidence. Most importantly, they must be able to show they can use their skills proficiently with hands-on tasks and experiments.

For example, consider a released item from the “inquiry” section of the state’s science test, the NECAP, This test question [PDF] question asks kids to perform a an actual task, know how to understand the physical evidence in front of them, draw conclusions and explain them. Very different from just remembering an answer.

Just for the record, Rhode Island’s secondary regulations mandate that high school diplomas must require students to demonstrate their ability to apply knowledge. In addition to exposing students to the subject in general, teachers need to pose essential questions and guide kids through learning the skills and information they’ll need to arrive at a conclusion. This practice of question or “inquiry”-driven instruction is a huge shift for all but the most recently-trained educators.

Fortunately, the kit-based science curriculum that the district had been using K-8, GEMS-net, is deeply inquiry-based. So Westerly had something to build with. But it was going to be ten tons of work to shift instruction from remembering factoids to focusing more on thinking.

Their work paid off big time. Last spring the high school students achieved 44 percent proficiency, while the state average struggled only up to 25 percent. Westerly’s elementary and middle schools are a good 22 and 15 points above state average, respectively.

But wait? What made the big difference? Surprisingly, the Task Force decided that the most effective way to solving the science problem K-12 would be – I love this – teaching the kids to write. Next week, we’ll see how showering the kids with writing instruction was the magic that turned disappointment to triumph.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

At the end of Dr. Martin Haberman’s most recent monograph on teaching is a collection of ugly comments made to actual students. He introduces them: “One of the questions which the (teacher-preparation) trainees are asked in the course of their training is the following: ‘Looking back on your own K-12 schooling, has any teacher ever said anything to you that hurt your feelings and that you remember till this day?’ We have never had a single educator who could not remember one or more of these hurtful comments.”

Thereafter follow two dense pages of these cringe-worthy quotes, selected from among the thousands of educators trained by the Haberman Educational Foundation.

“You’ll waste your money in college.”

“You’re not as smart as your sisters.”

“You’ll never amount to much.”

The comments are variations of the abuse secretly videotaped by a special-needs child that went viral recently.

The one I most remember was a teacher in a crowded hallway braying to a seriously overweight, misbehaving teen, “With breasts like that, how can you call yourself a boy?”

Under the right circumstances, such statements will kill a kid’s education then and there.

What’s the difference between the teachers who make such comments and those who wouldn’t dream of it?

Dr. Haberman’s answer: teacher beliefs.

For example, do teachers really believe “All children can learn,” as asserted by district and state websites?

Or do some educators believe, as Haberman puts it, “I can help those who want to learn. I can’t do anything to teach kids who don’t want to learn.”

Some teachers believe kids who “don’t want to learn” need a well-deserved “dose of reality.” Other teachers don’t question their right — even obligation — to fight back when they feel attacked. In any case, such beliefs justify making devastating comments.

From the 1960s, the beginning of his long and distinguished career, Dr. Haberman’s good instincts – and research – zeroed his work in on teacher beliefs as the foundation of teacher effectiveness. He invented the “Star Teacher Interview” that probes the beliefs of would-be teachers on several dimensions, including persisting with tough kids. Research has found the Interview highly predictive of effective teachers. Hundreds of school districts and universities use it faithfully.

The recently published 62-page monograph is aptly named “When Teachers Face Themselves.” It looks through the interesting lens of research about teachers’ relationships to themselves, specifically their beliefs, feelings, and tendency toward defensive reactions.

Bear in mind that all defensive people have gettable goats. They ignite into anger easily and feel victimized. Without thinking, they fight back. Kids LOVE to get adults’ goats.

Haberman states, “The school is, in effect, a judgmental pressure cooker in which all who participate are both victims and generators of anxiety. Unfortunately for students, large numbers of teachers remain in teaching who cannot function under constant pressure.”

While some schools have reached a counter-productive level of stress, Haberman notes, “A reasonable amount of anxiety is helpful for teaching and learning anything.”

However, “Teachers who exceed their tolerance for anxiety demonstrate angry behaviors when they cannot achieve the level of control they feel they need. This engenders angry student responses which in turn fuels the teacher’s anger still further.”

And there you have a retributive cycle that will inevitably undermine learning.

Haberman identifies the four goals of disruptive students: “to get attention, to exert power, to inflict revenge, or to not participate by displaying inadequacy,” aka “feigned helplessness.” Obviously, some students have more than one goal.

So the ability to deal with kids’ provoking behavior involves a combination of teachers’ beliefs – “I know I can reach this kid eventually” – and some classroom management techniques. Haberman is big on asking the kid disarming questions.

“Could it be that you want special attention?” “Could it be that you want to hurt others as much as you feel hurt by them?”

Indeed the monograph mainly consists of illustrative dialogues between rude students and teachers who either escalate the tension or don’t. The dialogues show why problematic reactions to students only make the situation worse. Other dialogues show educators how to de-escalate those same insulting or disruptive situations, without adding their own anger’s fuel to the fire.

Clearly, retributive or insensitive habits must be confronted, broken and re-learned.

If educators don’t face their beliefs and reactions, “they no longer benefit from more experience. Such teachers may claim to have ten, twenty or thirty years of experience. What they really have is one year of experience thirty times. Teacher growth, like student growth, is the result of learning and practicing new behaviors. It is only when learning is at hand that growth appears. … As teachers deepen their self understanding they are less and less likely to demonstrate behaviors which are hurtful to themselves, their students and others.”

Educators, like anyone, have a right to their feelings, whatever they are. But indulging in making negative comments can wreck the potential of precisely the students we most want to reach. We all hate facing ourselves and our flaws. Still, this powerfully destructive adult habit must stop.

In Memorium:

As I was drafting this column, Dr. Haberman died. Such a loss. I will continue to learn from him through his work. Still, new expressions of his commonsensical, practical attitude toward teaching will be sorely missed. May he rest in peace.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

“IT CAME FROM THE MAIL ROOM,” BY FLICKR USER LAST MARINER. USED UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.

Ah, the quiet week, the post-holiday pause. The gifts have been purchased, wrapped and unwrapped. The house is returning to normal. Most of the nation’s children are busy with new goodies from under the tree. Most will spend their vacation downtime hunched in front of some sort of screen. Some might actually be physically active, using a Wii to simulate an outdoor activity in a messy bedroom.

Consumer Christmas jumped to light speed with TV, of course. Before then Christmas was a time to spoil the children A LITTLE BIT with a doll or a toy car, chocolates, and a sweet collection of myths and magic. Solstice, Hanukkah and the Nativity are all celebrations of the waxing of the light as we face the dark of the season. But who notices that anymore? The season’s holy days are now fully transformed into a toy orgasm, in a triumph of mass advertising over cultural tradition.

So let’s head over to the Geek Dads column in Wired Magazine to see if your kids got the hottest must-have item. The columnists home-test toys with their very own children, or geeklets. These tech-heads know whereof they e-speak.

Jonathan Liu puts it right out there with “The 5 Best Toys of All Time.” And they are:

Stick, box, string, cardboard tube and dirt.

Hmmmmm. Not exactly sophisticated, cool, “the latest,” or advertised as educational.

Some readers objected to his priorities, so Liu included a few more in a subsequent column. They are:

Bubble wrap, rock, ball and water.

Once I got over the shock of the refreshing lack of batteries needed, I wanted to add doll, sand and clay.

But whatever. For once I am at one with hip, young super-sophisticates. Liu acknowledges that his choices involve a bit more risk than video games, and thus need some unintrusive supervision. But adults should be doing that anyway.

Still, the contrast between super-absorbing electronic entertainment and the traditional elements of play raises the question: What is a toy?

While researching children’s play and its relationship to academics, I found this oft-repeated saying: A good toy is 90 percent child and 10 percent toy.

A video game, or a movie-character doll, have plot lines already laid out. A kid “plays” by doing the plot correctly – finding the right pre-made path through the video adventure, or following the movie character’s story line precisely. Zero creativity.

Three important qualities characterize traditional play materials. (Ropes and blankets that make up indoor forts are hard to call toys, exactly.)

First, a good toy brings out the personality and passions of the child. What does he like to do? What does he repeat so he can get better and better at it? Is he a builder? Game-player? Adventurer? Pretender? Children are always telling us what skills and interests they want nourished, if we listen.

Secondly, traditional playthings are the way the child’s brain uploads the features, benefits and liabilities of the world around her. Sticks, for example, can be anything. (Which is why forbidding toy guns always seems to me like a losing proposition.) They can dig, be weaponry, scepters, farm tools. But they can also poke, hit and hurt. They come from trees, which are giant jungle gyms when frightened adults aren’t looking.

In a video game, the weapon in the avatar’s hand has no weight, length or other properties that might inform a kid’s later encounter with, say, tools. Playing with play stuff gets the kid ready to handle real stuff.

Because third – and this is a point almost entirely lost on adults – play is a way of getting ready for work. As kids get older, their traditional toys increasingly mimic adult work. Kids like to pretend to be adults. They want to tinker, build or cook, like the adults. Cars and roadways are dangerously adult, but kids can reproduce them in a sandbox.

On a fact sheet, The Alliance for Childhood recommends that you “bring back the art of real work. Believe it or not, adult activity – cooking, raking, cleaning, washing the car – actually inspires children to play. Children like to help for short periods and then engage in their own play.”

This is huge. If children learn to work through their play, later when they’re adults, they’ll look for work that has an element of play in it for them, hopefully. If play is just about being passively entertained, even with “interactive” features supplied by a keyboard, then work and school will just be boring drudgery because they’re not entertainment. Lots of essential work is tedious, but playful people can find the game aspect and make it work for them.

Honestly, I believe that the key reason we’re struggling to raise our kids’ academic achievement is that we’ve sucked play out of learning and work. Our work can look like such a drag to kids. We come home, plotz in front of the TV, and make it seem like there, on the screen, life finally has some juice.

Surely Geek Dads get their fill of playing with screens when they work. So no wonder that when they get playthings for their kids, they want to go retro with dirt, water, and totally fun cardboard boxes.

But theirs shouldn’t be the only such lucky kids.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

The all-purpose room at International Charter School (ICS) crackles with excitement.

Along the walls are the final exhibitions for “Documenting Cultural Communities,” an annual third-grade social studies project. Each child has chosen three of their own photographs, a self-portrait and two others that document a moment emblematic of their family’s culture. Each wrote two pieces about what we see in the pictures, one in English and one in Spanish.

The displays open surprisingly clear windows into the kids’ hearts and homes.

The author/photographers are supposed to be stationed next to their work to answer visitors’ questions. But they can manage it only for a moment, trying to be official for a question or two. The gravitational pull to their swarm of friends is too great. They’re proud, excited. Their families are beaming. They’re mostly dressed to the nines. One twirls in her glittery purple dress, making the fringe fly.

ICS is a two-way bilingual school. Tonight celebrates the English/Spanish exhibition, but there will be another for the school’s Portuguese program.

After doing this project for three years, the teachers, Brooke Odessa and Rose Santamaria, no longer have the children write straight translations of their first piece because it’s too boring to read. The two writing pieces reveal different details.

While the quality of the writing varies, the sentiments are inspired. The children photograph whatever represents their culture, so the pictures only show what they care about. The school lends a digital camera to each child. Their families help them take excellent care of the equipment because this project is about them.

The pictures are intriguing. You’re drawn to the details.

One boy had himself photographed with his legs over his head in a spaghetti of limbs, and describes himself as “flexible.”

A girl photographed and wrote about the highly-decorated sea shell that had been used for her baptism in Mexico.

The pictures show us dads fixing cars, moms cooking, and backyard celebrations. We see a place set for dinner heaped with favorite foods. A dance band plays at a child’s church that looks to me like a hotel meeting room. The children in ICS’ Spanish/English classes are predominantly Hispanic, of course, so you can see how much closer Grandma, Auntie and Uncle are to the daily life of the households than you’d probably see in most Anglo families.

Most pictures show humble homes in Pawtucket, Providence and poor Central Falls, now famous for its bankruptcy. So one photograph of a grand, beachside outdoor space seems very out of place. The story explains that this child’s mother cleans this vacation home of wealthy people. He describes how the paper towels smell of Windex.

Several years ago, the teachers at ICS complained that typical social studies programs were totally lame as compared with what their diverse population could teach one another. The Rhode Island Foundation gave the teachers a grant to develop a school-wide curriculum of their own. Kindergarten begins, appropriately, with “me,” and each grade level expands the child’s social horizons outward to family, community, culture and finally to global citizenship.

The teachers explain that their curriculum is keyed to the national standards for social studies. But whenever possible, they ask the children to find examples of culture in their own lives and in the world around them.

As the third-grade teachers were developing their program, one of their parents happened to be Mary Beth Meehan, a professional photographer. Funded by another grant, she began teaching the children “narrative story-telling” in pictures. To prepare to make a picture, kids first walk about peering through rectangles cut out of black construction paper, learning to see the world as composed inside a frame.

Meehan laughs, “The first thing they have to do ASAP is to get over the posing thing. Here’s Mom with my sisters smiling at the camera. That’s fine, but it’s not a candid moment in a story.”

Meehan says, “My favorite part of the project is when the pictures come back.” She loads them onto her computer and prints out contact sheets. Kids start making decisions about which pictures to highlight. They work together editing.

A kid will passionately defend the picture of a beloved cat. With their new sophistication, the other kids might reject the picture as ill-composed. They decide together. Meehan herself didn’t much like a picture of a soda can from Colombia, but the kids talked her into it. “And they were right. It does represent a cultural artifact.” Its aesthetic is not at all American.

Head of School Julie Nora reports that at the four national conferences where they’ve presented this project, everyone loves it, but wants to know if it would work without a professional photographer. Well, sort of. But not at this level of quality. The kids get a full-on art lesson in the midst of rich social studies and writing. They won’t forget what it means to frame a composition or the difference between an authentic moment and a staged shot. They care to do their best work.

Since 2008-09 to 2010-11, ICS’ 5th-grade writing scores have improved from 36 to 57 percent, almost reaching the state average – in a school where by design, half the children are English-language learners. Not surprisingly, 59 percent are eligible for subsidized lunch.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have great riches in their lives to share with us.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, seejuliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.