Can Hartford Schools Learn Their Lesson?

By LISA CHEDEKEL
This story ran in the Hartford Courant May 9, 1999

 Mrs. Winn has made it clear a half-dozen times this morning that she is running behind, that the class must stay on task if she is going to get through the lesson plan prescribed in the day's ``instructional schedule.'' Surely, Guillermo Quiroz must have noticed her fast-forwarding through the passage: ``Grasshoppers had landed in their fields and were chewing up the whole crop . . .''

 Still, he cannot help himself.  ``Mrs. Winn,'' he interrupts. ``Mrs. Winn? What is a crop?''

 Silvia Winn looks up, locks eyes with the 9-year-old, shakes her head. A month ago, she would have fielded the question without hesitation. A month ago, Guillermo's curiosity -- sometimes endearing, sometimes excessive -- was welcomed in this third-grade classroom.  That was a month ago, in an era that some of Mrs. Winn's colleagues at Barnard-Brown School now dub ``B.A.'' -- for ``Before Amato.'' In the post-Amato world, with its Power Hour of scripted reading lessons and drilling on basic skills, curiosity can throw off an entire morning.

 ``Mr. Quiroz,'' she tells Guillermo, ``we have 15 minutes to finish this up. Can we please put that on hold?''

 Guillermo, cowering a bit, nods his head. Ultimately, where Mrs. Winn is concerned, he wants nothing so much as to please her. He still gets giddy when he recounts the day in April when she had summoned him to her desk, draped an arm around his shoulders, and told him that his reading score on a practice Connecticut Mastery Test had shot up to 43 -- just seven points shy of passing. He would give up being curious for an entire week to make her that proud of him again.

 So for the rest of Power Hour and into the afternoon, Guillermo buckles down. When other students drift off during a writing assignment, he fills an entire page. When they complain that Mrs. Winn is heaping too much math homework on them, he says, ``She's doing the best thing for us.''

 And by the end of the school day, as he crams reading passages and math problems into his knapsack, he has forgotten what had once seemed so vital:

 ``What is a crop?''

They are both under the same kind of pressure, teacher and student. But while she can articulate it, he can only feel it.
Even before her third-graders took the practice CMT in early April, Mrs. Winn knew that Guillermo would come close to passing the reading section, a comprehension test known as the DRP, for Degrees of Reading Power. After 20 years of teaching, she had a sixth sense about which students were absorbing information and which were not.

 Guillermo was a human sponge.

 He had not spoken a word of English when he arrived from Peru three years ago to live with his father and stepmother, and they had enrolled him in a bilingual first- grade class at Barnard-Brown. His younger half-brother, who spoke only English, was his first teacher. By third grade, he was ready for Mrs. Winn's all-English class, for students moving out of bilingual programs.

 ``The only problem with this boy,'' says his father, Guillermo Sr., ``is he wants to know everything.''

 The day the DRP scores came back from the district's testing office, Mrs. Winn felt contrary emotions. First, relief: Guillermo and nearly all of his 15 classmates had improved dramatically since the last practice test in October, when the entire class had scored ``well below'' the state goal of 50 points. Second, anxiety: Only one student, William, had surpassed the goal, and he happened to be her only third-grade repeater.

 ``OK,'' she swallowed hard. ``One down, 15 to go.''

In a normal year, the springtime crunch around the CMT would not fluster Silvia Winn; it is, for every teacher and student in grades 3, 5 and 7, a rite of passage in Connecticut. But this year's crunch, coinciding with the hiring of a new superintendent, had taken on entirely new proportions in Hartford.

 Anthony Amato's hand was already reaching into her classroom -- in the form of two new practice tests, in April and June; the mandated Power Hour, an extra hour of reading on top of the existing 75- minute reading period; an explicit curriculum in math and written communication; even the way in which students' DRP scores were ranked on reports.

 Guillermo, Mrs. Winn knew, was no longer one of 15 who had failed to meet the state goal. She had pushed him into what Amato termed the ``Golden Band'' -- a range within 10 points of the goal -- and she would be expected to hoist him up over that line in the nine weeks remaining in the school year.

 It was a numbers game. Over the line, he would be worth more points on a statewide scoring index that had Hartford in last place.

 It was a learning game. There could be no extra points unless he continued to absorb.

 ``You want me to keep this private, or tell the whole class?'' she had asked in a whisper, after showing him the 16-point jump in his DRP score.

 ``Tell them,'' Guillermo said. So she did. And the clapping ricocheted down the hallway.

  The judges are watching them, always.

 They hovered over the spring vacation classes that Guillermo attended -- three half-days of instruction in reading, writing and math that had him huddled with 12 other Golden Band-ers drawn from the school's three third grades.

 ``Don't forget, the judges will be looking for details, order,'' teacher Donna Caldeira had told the group one morning, as they worked on Writing Assignment #1 in Amato's ``Spring Power School'' packet.

 ``Remember the rubric we talked about? To get an 8 on the CMT, the judges will want to see detail, sequencing, whether the story flows. . .''

 Guillermo is used to these judges. They haunt Room 208, Mrs. Winn's classroom. They are relentless.

 ``No, no, no,'' Mrs. Winn insists, leaning over Guillermo's desk one afternoon as the class does a CMT practice exercise on graphing. ``If they tell you to draw a ring, you draw a ring. You don't draw a face or a square . . . You have to do exactly what they say. Exactly. They will take away points if you don't.''

 Guillermo is not exactly sure why Mrs. Winn is so worried about ``them,'' but he knows it stems from the CMT. Not a day goes by lately that she does not remind her students about the test.

 Everyone in the class knows his or her scores. They are fluent in CMT-speak: ``DRP''s, ``writing prompts,'' ``rubrics.'' They have been grouped by ability for the regular 75-minute reading classes, based on assessments early in the year.

 ``We gotta pass that CMT so we can pass to the next grade,'' is Guillermo's take on the test, his version of school Principal Miriam Morales- Taylor's recent caution to students that bad marks on practice exams could mean retention. ``That's why I wanted to come to the vacation school, so I can pass. I got only a little ways to go to get to 50.''

 A little ways or a lot, every student in Mrs. Winn's class is getting a heavy regimen of test-related instruction. Amato has every teacher in grades 3-8 following a schedule that covers nine reading-comprehension strategies in nine weeks, involving dozens of practice drills that mirror the test.

 The strategies come fast and furious: Skim and scan. Look for nouns and verbs in a sentence. Look for likenesses and differences between ideas. Read all the way to the end of a passage before you start to fill in the blanks. They are the same strategies that Mrs. Winn has taught all year, but now they have names -- ``key words,'' ``signal words'' -- and orders on how and when they are to be dispensed.

 Some moments, she is teaching them to read.  Others, she is teaching them to take a test.

 She is forever straddling that line, which is not so much a line as it is a philosophical abyss: Do skills ensure understanding?

 ``Now, you'll have to bear with me, boys and girls, because this is new to Mrs. Winn, too,'' she says one morning, in the middle of delivering a lesson from Amato's ``Literacy Enhancement and Test Sophistication Plan, Level 3,'' a three-inch thick binder balanced against her hip.

 ``OK, right,'' she continues. ``This is the concept of time -- words that convey time. Remember what we call those words?''

 ``Signal words,'' Guillermo calls out from his seat in the second row.

 ``Very good,'' she says smiling, extending one hand in his direction for her trademark ``air handshake'' of congratulations. ``And can you find one of those words in the passage we just read?''

 Guillermo, kneeling in his seat, scans the paragraph, index finger tracing every word. There is no ``before'' or ``after,'' ``then'' or ``now.''

 He comes up empty. ```Once' is a signal word,'' she rescues him. ``You knew that.''

 Translation: He'd better know that. Guillermo is among her top five students in reading, writing and math. If she's losing him, she's losing the rest of the class.

 She has been troubled, on several occasions, that some of the new material seems suited to the high performers, not those well-below the Golden Band. For all their gains so far, 11 of her students still scored below 40 in reading on the practice test. In all of Barnard-Brown, only eight of the 60 students who took the third-grade test were above the state reading goal.

 ``Did anybody get 100 percent on No. 5?'' she asks the class after they have gone over a DRP exercise in the spring-vacation homework packet. Not a single hand goes up.

 ``Some of this is very hard,'' the Cuban-born Mrs. Winn, who came to this country at age 5, confides later. ``Sometimes I feel sorry for them.''

 Inside the Golden Band, so much can go wrong.

 How many times had they already gone over CMT math objective No.21: measure and estimate length?

 And yet there sat the Golden Boys, Guillermo and his best buddy, Edgar, stymied by Mrs. Winn's challenge. She had held up a yardstick and asked the class to estimate: ``About how many yards high is the ceiling?''

 They had already learned that Mrs. Winn herself stood less than two yards' tall. The ceiling was an equal distance away -- about two Mrs. Winns high.

 ``Mrs. Winn, can you put the yardstick on the floor?'' Guillermo pleaded.

 The piercing glance. ``Use your brain,'' was all she said.

 Guillermo guessed 7 1/2 yards; Edgar guessed 10. When Mrs. Winn climbed on a chair to measure, they hung their heads.

 This, from two boys who had mastered 23 out of 25 math objectives on the April practice test, scoring well above the state goal.

 This, the Black Hole in the Golden Band.

 Their little synapses misfire. They space out. They short-circuit. A hundred thoughts parade through their brains at once, trampling the learning.

 ``You can drill them and drill them,'' Mrs. Winn says of her students, many who come from poor, one-parent families, ``and still there are no guarantees when it comes to the test.''

 She can help them out of the Golden Band, but she cannot guide them all the way. Their ability to reason, their self-confidence, their focus -- all those intangibles come into play.

 ```They began to run,''' Guillermo reads aloud one day in Mrs. Caldeira's vacation class, ```and soon the Hare was way ahead of the . . . the . . .''' He comes to a dead stop. The plug has been pulled. A word he doesn't recognize blocks his way.

 ``Can we sound it out?'' Mrs. Caldeira encourages him, breaking the word into fragments of sound on the blackboard. The whole Golden Band looks on, perplexed.

 ``Tor-toys,'' Guillermo says, cautiously. ``Tortoise.''

 He is far braver now about reading out loud than he used to be. Let any teacher ask for volunteers, and his arm is immediately stretched high, followed by an ``oh, oh, oh!'' as he twists in his seat.

 He has learned to take risks. When he stumbles on a math question about telling time, he flings his hand in the air for another chance.

 ``Please, Miss,'' he says. ``I need practice.''

 Where he used to venture only a few short sentences on his writing assignments, he now lets the words tumble out.

 ``My teacher tells me that the xtranauts were taking me to the moon,'' he writes for a CMT practice assignment titled, `The First Child on the Moon.' ``Without my mom knowing I was going. I was feeling happy. Finally, they gave me the suit to where on. I seen the rocket. The rocket was so huge. When I got to the moon, the moon was so bright. I said to the xtranauts that it was the best day in my life.''

 He would rather be publicly humiliated than ignored. In third grade, that is the working definition of self-confidence.

 Still, he can be thrown off track in a split second. When Kathiana teases him about a cowlick in his hair, he spends five minutes slicking it down, missing the first part of a lesson on commas. He will lose another five fixated on the eight butterfly barrettes decorating Jennifer's hair.

 And when Elsa sidles up to him during an after-school homework club he attends in the cafeteria, he abandons math and grabs the colored blocks she is playing with. They chase each other around a table.

 ``Does all his work. Needs to improve behavior,'' is the notation on his homework club file.

Bloody, bloody city, spending bloody, bloody money, comes the reggae song blasting from a van that passes by Barnard-Brown on a recent afternoon.

 Guillermo, in his Tommy Hilfiger sneakers and jeans, is lined up on the sidewalk with the rest of his class, a silhouette against the downtown skyline. In the blinding sun, the Golden Boy has become an anonymous blur, lost among the other 450 schoolchildren who have been evacuated from the old brick building because of a post-Littleton bomb threat.

 Up close, he is frowning. He is missing music, a once-a-week class. The fire alarm went off just as Mrs. Lumpkin was teaching the class a sign-language song.

 Music, one of Guillermo's favorites, has taken on new import in the Amato world. So have art and phys ed, or the daily 15-minute recess.

 They are a departure from the drills, a break from the basics -- a mental intermission.

 ``Sha Ba Doo Bap, Doodilee Doo, Sha Ba Doo Bap,'' Guillermo sings full-volume during twice-weekly chorus practice. Engage him in a song, and he is hypnotized, emptying his lungs with every note.

 ``He's always singing,'' says his stepmother, Margarita Torres, a computer operator at Aetna. ``A music video comes on, and he's off.''

 ``Music and sports, those are his loves,'' says his father, who works for a moving company.

 But there are fewer hours these days for such luxuries, at school or home.

 Mrs. Winn already has scrapped social studies and computer classes to make extra time for ``Power Hour.'' Daily spelling lessons have been dropped. Science, which fell by the wayside months ago because the project kits never arrived, does not have a chance of a comeback now.

 Mrs. Winn has tried not to draw attention to what has been lost. She starts the scripted reading and writing lessons with an upbeat ``Let's rock and roll!'' and doles out Skittles as rewards when the pace starts to lag.

 But the camouflage is not kid- proof.

 ``We can't do science anymore because they got us doing the CMT,'' Guillermo has figured out.

 At home, too, Guillermo has felt the pinch of time. Homework -- nightly and over the spring break -- has cut down his playing time outside, in the lot behind the family's apartment on Albany Avenue. There are times he envies his brother, a second-grader at Barnard- Brown, whose squeals drift through the windows.

 Guillermo Sr. and Margarita, who also have a 16-year-old son, like the recent changes in Guillermo: He's reading more, writing better, taking school more seriously. Margarita, herself a graduate of Hartford public schools, has faith that the system will eventually turn around.

 But as with most city parents, talk of ``Golden Bands'' and ``Power Hours'' is lost on them. And a mention of Superintendent Amato stirs only slight recognition in their eyes.

 ``Oh,'' Margarita wants to know, ``did he start already?''