A School Succeeds With Extra Study and Little Homework

[flashl]

George Leonard, the principal of the Bedford Academy High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, used to take a straightforward approach to ensuring that students at the school he founded showed up for after-school tutoring when he or their teachers thought they needed it.

“We’d block the exits,” Mr. Leonard said. His background as a star educator qualified him for the job of principal; his hulking six-foot frame qualified him for the job of reverse bouncer, a position he would still have if Bedford Academy hadn’t relocated shortly after its first year in 2003, moving to a building where the doors outnumber the teachers who could block them.

Mr. Leonard is a man of many solutions, many of them innovative, many of them, apparently, also effective. In New York City, only about 50 percent of students manage to graduate in four years. At Bedford Academy, 63 percent of the students qualify for free lunch, a majority are being raised by a single mother and another significant number are being raised by someone other than a parent. Yet close to 95 percent of students graduate, and virtually every one of those goes on to college.

Mr. Leonard does not achieve those results by stocking the school full of nothing but high-testing students, an option he has had since 2004, when thousands of students started applying for just over 100 slots at the school each year. To the contrary, he has committed to keeping a third of the entering slots open for students who previously tested in the city’s bottom half on statewide math and reading exams.

NY Times

[old mark]

1. I hope someone in the Philadelphia school system reads this

if they have someone who can read.

FWIW, in the Philly city school system over 30% of all students are illegally absent every day.

mark

[mac2]

3. I grew up in rural Western NY State...

very few students skipped school at that time. The law would have come after the families. Now they don't bother?

[mac2]

2. They learned that from one of those Scandinavian countries.

They ranked best in the world. Good that someone learned from it.