Swimming With Sharky

Ernest Jackson remembers readingto his class for 30 seconds last fall.

The freshmen in Strategic Reading were on a chapter called "Going for It!" in Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. That day's passage was "The Boy Who Talked With Dolphins," about a kid named Jeff who feels rejected by his peers.

Jeff finds his first friend in a dolphin named Sharky at Sea World, and for the first time in his life, Jeff's confidence soars.

Jackson felt stupid. Two students were staring at him blankly. The rest were looking down at their desks. He could tell the class would be wasted.

But Jackson, a young teacher who'd been recruited to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District (he asked that his real name not be used for this story), tried to keep an open mind. District administrators had decided to try these lessons at his school only two years ago, in an effort to help students who had fallen several grades behind. Something about the curriculum must be helping them, Jackson thought.

His school is in a rundown section of the city; gang members had recently spray-painted the name of their crew across one side of the building. Jackson knew most of his students lived close to the streets and didn't care about school. He wanted to inspire them.

A boy in the back pulled two chairs together and started to lie down. Jackson read on.

Sharky dived a foot or so below the surface, pulling Jeff's hand and arm underwater. He laughed and pulled back without letting go. The dolphin dived again, deeper. Jeff pulled back harder.... When Sharky surfaced to breathe, boy and dolphin faced each other for a minute, Jeff laughing and the dolphin open-mouthed and grinning.... Sharky circled back and put her tail back in Jeff's hand.

Jackson asked his students where they thought the story would go next (a question the lesson plan had scripted for him). He was supposed to pause frequently during a passage and ask questions to make sure his students were learning.

His class answered with silence.

Now all the students were staring down at their desks. He asked again what they thought would happen next. "They're going to die," someone blurted out.

Anyone else?

"It's going to be good," another said.

Jackson continued reading, but now he felt even more stupid.

His biggest frustration was knowing there were books these students could relate to. Once, when he was leafing through the thick binder full of lesson plans that district administrators had put together for teachers, he saw a reference to the Langston Hughes poem "A Dream Deferred." But when he got to the page where it was supposed to be, he found a notice in block letters: "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK." The lesson planners hadn't secured the copyright to reproduce Hughes' work.

So he was left with Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. But Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul is made for suburban mothers, Jackson points out. How does it relate to the kid who just taught his teacher a gang handshake?

Jackson knew that only two of the students in this particular class were likely to pursue college degrees. He estimated another eight or so had the potential to make it in college. They just needed to be inspired. If kids see some value in what they're learning, they'll be motivated to do well in school, Jackson says.

For instance, there was the girl in his class who was filled with rage. When something set her off, she was quick to yell at peers in the middle of class, "You fucking bitch! I'll fucking kill you!" She was 14. This girl was the one who probably wouldn't climb out of the hole life had put her in. But she could if she tried. And though she yelled at the other students in the class, she had always treated Jackson with respect. He had made it that far in connecting with her. Now the curriculum was rebuilding the wall between them.

"She is a smart girl," Jackson tells the Pitch. "There are things going on up there. But she doesn't see anything she does in the classroom as being of value because she doesn't see how it connects to her in any way."

Over the past few weeks, headlines have focused on parents' fury over Kansas City School District Superintendent Bernard Taylor's plan to consolidate schools in an effort to save $3.2 million from a budget that needs to be cut by as much as $20 million. Meanwhile, a school district that's desperate to show the progress required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act has spent millions on a reform effort that forces teachers to read dumbed-down literature to their students -- and be timed by stopwatches while they're doing it.

Long before January 2002, when President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, student performance overall had been declining in the Kansas City, Missouri, School District. That's partly because so many students at inner-city schools are falling behind.

In October 1999, the district lost its accreditation after failing state standards. (It has since achieved a provisional accreditation. Poor achievement at the schools continued to prevent the district from receiving full accreditation last year; its next chance for reinstatement is in 2007.) Kansas City administrators saw that something needed to be done to raise students' test scores. Dianne Cleaver, who is set to resign as the district's chief administrative officer on March 4, says the district reached a level of "urgency" three years ago.