Every Student Deserves a Legacy 2007:
Real-life stories from the front lines of high school reform

By Hook or By Book

Brookhaven High School, Columbus, Ohio
Teachers in all core subjects share one strategy: making time for students to read every day

In 2002, Brookhaven High School was troubled. Its test scores and graduation rates routinely came in at the bottom of Columbus Public's nearly 20 high schools, while it managed to rack up athletic honors. In an effort to bring the school's academic performance up to the standards of its athletic ability, a group of administrators and teachers restructured the building into three small schools. In 2004, the freshman and sophomore classes were initiated into the new model, phasing in the process.

The 2006-07 school year was the first in which all four grades were separated into small schools. But it was also a school year that began with major challenges. The previous spring, nine of the staff members who had spent many hours in professional development meant to help them carry the small school reform process left the building or the district because of massive budget cuts.

Still, there were areas of growth. Student advisories, sessions set aside to allow for close interactions with teachers, became a routine part of the schedule for the first time. And several of the teachers who had been on board with small schools since the beginning worked on a literacy team that became so creative and efficient, peers around the state began to take notice.

By the first day of school in late August, the wall in front of English teacher Joleata Howell's room has two questions taped onto the glass: "Is freedom dangerous?" and "What does it mean to be enslaved?"

Students at Brookhaven are required to read one of three books during the summer and keep a "dialectical journal," a notebook in which they record quotes from the book and reasons they think the quotes interesting or meaningful.

They will talk, write and think about an "essential question" as it relates to the books. Every class has its own selection of books and its own essential question, which students will continue to use as a way to think about every subject, from math to drama, until they graduate. For the class of 2008, the question is: "Is freedom dangerous?"

The head of the building's English department, Howell also became the leader of the literacy team last year. Teaching kids the basic skills of reading, writing and thinking is something she's passionate about.

"We have had no intervention plan for a kid reading on a second-grade level, and the (Ohio Graduation Test) just stops them," she says. "I feel so bad - when you can't read and I can't do anything to help you, it hurts."

Howell is right for the job. She worked on other literacy initiatives in the district before coming to Brookhaven to be part of the small schools transformation in 2005. But mostly, she was just the person most willing and able to take on the responsibility.

Howell decided to become a teacher when she was working as an assistant to detectives in the Crimes Against People unit of the Columbus Police Department.

"There was one boy who killed another boy. Here, one boy was dead, but when the family of the boy who killed him came in, they were crying like he was dead, too," she says. "I thought, 'Two lives were lost here.'

"I saw so many people get caught up in that lifestyle, and the common thread seemed to be that they had so little education. That's what made me want to go back to school."

Literacy is a key component of KnowledgeWorks' small schools initiative. Each small school is charged with improving "students' ability to read, write, speak and listen," and given funding to help achieve that goal. Involved teachers, who meet once or twice a week after school, are paid for their time, like athletic coaches. For Brookhaven's team, the ultimate goal is to come up with ways for teachers to increase literacy across the curriculum, designed and provided by teachers.

For Brookhaven's students, literacy is not a given. Of the ninth- and 10th-grade students who took an assessment test in fall 2006, only 33 percent were at or above a ninth-grade reading level. The largest portion (46 percent) read at a fourth- to eighth-grade reading level, and 21 percent were below a third-grade reading level.

Howell, herself a product of Columbus Public Schools, worries about students' low expectations for themselves. "Our culture here is failure. Kids are more likely to admit F's than A's," she says.

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