Grade School Goes Corporate
Businesses want to build better employees, but will that really mean a better education for your child?
In Mobile, CEOs' calls for change first started gaining headway in the spring of 2001, when voters, facing $15 million cuts in state funding, chose to raise taxes that pay for schools for the first time since 1945. As part of the raise's promises of equity, the system's five worst-performing schools, Brazier Elementary among them, became the $25 million hike's first beneficiaries. And, in line with the desires of state businesses, certain policies-like salary bonuses tied to test scores, more frequent standardized testing, and less time on social studies and science-were the first reforms.
At Brazier, changes began with human resources. Merrier Jackson was the first new hire. A tall woman with neatly polished fingernails and carefully cropped black hair, Jackson seems born for the job. After attending the University of South Alabama in Mobile on a basketball scholarship, she'd built a 10-year career in human resources, working for a healthcare nonprofit, a Target store, and the Internal Revenue Service. She has a businesswoman's approach, but her bottom line is not a dollar value. "I'm a servant here," she says.
In addition to improving the school's facilities, Jackson wants to transform her students' expectations about the types of jobs they can pursue. Earlier this year, when she saw a boy marching quietly in line behind his classmates, perfectly in order except for a rogue corner of his polo shirt, she excused herself from a conversation with visitors to pull him aside. "I've always thought of you as a little attorney," she said, peering way down into the boy's face, "but I don't know if I would trust my freedoms or my rights on someone whose shirt is untucked." Her message of aspiration is literally plastered on Brazier's walls, where students' handprints sit beneath the title "When I Grow Up These Hands Will Become." Entries include teacher, doctor, and nurse (as well as queen).
But because Jackson (and those Mobile businessmen) can never know for sure what the little hands will become, she obsesses over the next best stand-in: test scores. Because the two most important subjects-the ones that determine whether Brazier meets federal adequate yearly progress standards-are reading and math, Jackson overhauled her curriculum around them, shoving science and social studies into one period to allow 2 ½ hours each day for reading drills and 1 ½ for math. Each week, students take an assessment test in each subject to track their progress.
So far, at least one half of her goals have been accomplished. Test scores have never been higher. In 2003, 7 percent of Brazier fifth graders passed a state writing test; in 2005, 74 percent did. That pleases not just Budweiser but Brazier's other designated stakeholders, who include church leaders, youth mentors, and a local housing activist. According to Kati Haycock, director of Education Trust, it's no wonder both sets are happy. "What's morally right," she says, "is also economically right."
A more pressing question for Lawrenesha Williams's family is: What comes next? "Brazier test scores have changed overnight," says Leevones Dubose, the local housing activist who is one of Brazier's stakeholders. "But the older brothers and sisters are in middle school and high school-why can't theirs change as well?"
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