Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Saturday, October 10, 2009 7:02:37 PM
I heartily recommend that you take time to get to know Dr. Ben Chavis, former principal of the inner-city, Oakland, CA, American Indian Charter Public School (AIPCS), by reading his book, Crazy like a Fox. This book is especially for all those who are concerned and saddened about the current abysmal performance of so many U.S. K-12 schools. This book will either confirm your belief that we can do better educating our children, or it will—if you keep an open mind—challenge your progressive beliefs about the ingredients required for a successful school. It will either confirm your belief that performance is about more than money, food, computers, empathy, self esteem, and politically correct nostrums; or it will hopefully shatter those progressive beliefs which have so clearly failed our failing children.
Ben Chavis has now taken his education model public, after turning around AIPCS, turning it around with family, good books, good teachers, a back-to-basics focus, structure, discipline, high expectations, a taste of free market capitalism, accountability and his unique disdain for educational orthodoxy: “Multicultural specialists, ultraliberal zealots, and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply [for teaching jobs].” But success was not foreordained for his school. In fact, it was just one vote away—within days of Dr. Chavis taking over as principal—from being ordered closed by the school board. I invite you to follow his rescue and recovery, as he replaces a broken faculty, and fixes a dysfunctional curriculum, and imposes structure and discipline on a school without either. On his journey, Dr. Chavis will take away student computers and refuse to offer the federal school lunch program. He will take mirrors out of the student restrooms and require students and parents sign contracts. He will emphasize perfect attendance for all students, paying students at year end if they have zero unexcused absences, and his attendance rates will climb each year from around 65% to about 98%. He will require teachers focus on teaching language arts (reading, writing, grammar) and math each class day, allocating 90 minutes to each subject. He will adopt an educational model that focuses on the student, requiring approved texts, retaining only quality teachers, administering a program of accountability with an emphasis on rewards for achievement and punishment for misconduct.
And during that time, gradually building on success, his middle school’s performance results will slowly climb from subterranean levels to the top of the performance charts, reaching the magic 800, the benchmark of excellence on the California Academic Performance Index, subsequently with breakneck speed the scores climb above 900, distinguishing the school as one of the top 10 in the state, garnering national recognition for his Oakland school. And along the way he sets Olympian goals for his students. Eventually, he expands his model, adding an AIPCS high school and a second middle school in Oakland: both schools continuing to excel.
It is a redemptive journey and there are now AIM-Ed (AIM to Educate) models of Dr. Chavis’ program being replicated in CA and elsewhere in North America. Besides the story about turning around a troubled, dysfunctional school, this book is also an intriguing story about the life of Ben Chavis, a North Carolina Indian, a story about how he came to challenge just about every politically correct, educationally popular elixir in education today. Mr. Chavis learned from his own life lessons what works: focus on teachers in the classroom—eliminate the bureaucracy and ancillary staff positions; focus on teacher-student relationships—require that a teacher be assigned to the same middle school class for all three years and emphasize core subjects; and focus on discipline—breaking down students that are discipline problems and building them up again. And Dr. Chavis blends all of these ingredients into an educational philosophy that works—works with exceptional results, at both the middle school and high school level.
And when you read this book, you will cry the next time you read about the chaotic, inner-city schools with their 50% flunk-out rates, with students graduating who cannot read, and with the huge waste of so much talent. And when you think about what these youngsters from Indian, Asian, and Hispanic poor families in Oakland accomplished, you might just wonder if the education lobby—consisting of too many left wing fantasy ideologists—is so committed to its religious orthodoxy that it would prefer the current school model over academic justice for students? Would they really prefer a model that just keeps plodding along with more failure over a school system that is successful beyond their dreams? In fact, a model that is so successful that every child in the first high school graduating class takes AP calculus and AP literature, 100% of the 2008 - 2009 seniors are accepted to four-year colleges and universities, and every middle school gets test results placing the class in the top 10 in the Academic Performance Index in the State of CA. And if they would prefer dogma over academic justice, then finally we will know that for some: the schools exist for everyone but the students.