The Washington Examiner
Seeds of reform grow winners at Anacostia High School
By Harry Jaffe
Friday, March 5, 2010
Melanie McKie lives around the corner from Anacostia High School. When she entered the ninth grade, she had few illusions.
"I expected to get shot and jumped," she tells me.
Her friend, Patrice Haney, chimes in:
"I wanted to go to Dunbar. Anywhere but here. My mother said, 'Prepare for the worst.' "
Corey Rogers was prepared; Anacostia High was infamous. "Everyone was in the halls," he says. "It was a party all the time. We could do anything we wanted. But nobody was learning anything."
Melanie, Patrice and Corey -- three Anacostia juniors -- gave me a glimpse of what Anacostia was and what it could become. Under new management for less than a year, Anacostia High appears to be rising from the ashes of its past as D.C.'s worst and most violent high school. Will it succeed in teaching the city's least teachable? Or will it fail, as so many high schools have in the past?
As a test case for education reform, Anacostia High is ideal. Let's start with the teachers.
"We had teachers who didn't care," Corey says. "They didn't teach us anything. They had the mentality 'I'm still getting paid, whether I teach you or not.' "
Patrice says her algebra teacher was so clueless, she would ask Patrice to explain math problems to her classmates.
One of Melanie's teachers would sleep at her desk. "If she caught anyone standing up near her when she got up," she says, "they would get an F."
Last year Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee put an end to the lassitude. She put Friendship Public Charter Schools in control of Anacostia High. Its Collegiate Academy, not far from Anacostia High, was turning out young scholars. Why not give it a shot at turning around Anacostia?
Just over halfway through the school year, Anacostia is a hybrid. Shanika Hope and Marcus Moore, working for Friendship, manage the school. They hire and can fire the principals. Otherwise, the school is run under the D.C. Public Schools system, subject to its rules and union contract.
Much has changed; much has not.
"Now the teachers care more," Melanie says. Take her Advanced Placement English teacher, Lisa Sterner, who's teaching "Macbeth." "She interacts with the students; she makes you want to learn."
The three students confirmed Michelle Rhee's basic principle: It's the teachers. Hope kept fewer than a dozen of the teachers she inherited; of the 50 she hired, many were rookies from Teach for America.
"We had no clubs and no yearbook," she says. "Now we have a yearbook and a dozen clubs. That comes from the energy of the new teachers. The kids have seen it."
And benefitted. Melanie, Patrice and Corey have been awarded Achievers Scholarships by the Gates Foundation, which pays for college.
I ask Hope what percentage of Anacostia students come with the trio's desire to learn. "About 20 percent," she said.
If the hybrid Anacostia can educate some of the other 80 percent, it will be a game changer. Let's keep an eye on it.