Charters improve discipline

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 1, 2009

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In education, the right small changes can pay big dividends.

Earlier this year, Dorothy Brown was teaching every subject to her fourth-graders at Dalton Elementary School.

This is her first year as a teacher. She graduated from college in California and was recruited and brought to Baton Rouge by Teach For America, or TFA. And her inexperience showed.

“The first time I went in there, I don’t remember her or her instruction because of the disruption I saw there,” recalled Hank Shepard, chief executive officer for Advance Baton Rouge, or ABR, a nonprofit charter school management organization.

Brown’s class was not an isolated case. State monitors in September visited ABR classrooms, many of them led by young teachers like Brown, and found many problems.

For instance at Dalton, while the school’s climate was welcoming, many students exhibited “extreme off-task behaviors and a lack of effective redirection and behavioral interventions significantly impeded the learning process,” according to the report.

On Tuesday, Shepard walked through classrooms at three of the five schools he oversees, a monthly ritual. As he stood in the back of Brown’s previously unruly class, Shepard was heartened to find a tranquil room and a teacher transformed.

Since Shepard’s last visit, Brown and the other two fourth-grade teachers had “departmentalized.”

So, rather than teaching every subject, the three teachers divided up the subjects with each focusing on her strongest areas.

Principal Ronnie Harrison has resisted such moves at other schools he’s run, worried that changing classes would waste too much instructional time. But this time he relented.

Brown now handles social studies — she’d majored in history in college — and science. Fellow teachers Kyra Taylor and Hope Lenoir split up the other subjects.

On Tuesday, Brown’s class were intently creating maps. To keep the children moving from one activity to the next, Brown regularly employed a special snapping clap that worked with military precision.

Outside in the hallway, Shepard shared his impression with Harrison.