Frederick Douglass High School was the focus of an HBO documentary that showed Douglass to be representative of the country’s failing inner-city schools. The documentary, “Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child left Behind Report Card,” was filmed four years ago but it aired this summer.
Robert Balfanz, a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University, has been working the past year to improve Douglass. Balfanz is also associate director of the Talent Development Middle and High School Project, which is working to improve more than 50 of the nation’s high-poverty, urban schools.
What has changed here since four years ago when the HBO documentary was filmed?
There’s been a tremendous change in the climate. The first day of school was basically a calm and collected atmosphere. An unreformed, struggling school, you would have seen lots of kids milling out in the hallway, you would have seen a hundred kids here without a schedule. You didn’t see any of that.
How do you create that climate?
One of the things we do is to create this idea of teacher teams. The fundamental idea becomes four teachers working with 90 kids and that’s a much more manageable ratio. Maybe some teacher is better at calling parents, they can be the parent caller. Maybe some teacher is better at solving student problems. That’s much more effective than the standard model.
How else does Hopkins help?
We have what’s called report-card counseling. Typically, in high school, kids get a report card and they get no individual feedback on it. What we found is that by having a report card conference where the kids get to sit down and talk to an adult who cares about them, who is not their teacher, they can be open and honest. The key thing is they say, ‘Now, what are we going to do about that D? How do we turn that D into a B?’
