Super long post warning!
Below are excerpts from the book
Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and found in the Mississippi Delta written in 2015 by
Richard Grant, a Londoner who lived for a time in the Mississippi Delta. He's a journalist who currently writes for Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Telegraph UK, Aeon and several other publications. Grant shows his view of why this impoverished part of the world has failing schools, and I imagine much of the same problems hold back other impoverished school districts. I value many of Grant's insights, but do think his perspective was limited in that he didn't have much interaction with working class Southern blacks and whites in integrated environments outside the Delta. Grant's white friends were upper middle class for the area and his black friends were poorer so some of his perspectives are shaped by those limitations. He did, however, get it right when writing about failing schools in the area.
I think Grant's observations apply to outside the impoverished, rural South. In every geographic region of the US there has historically been white flight in cities whether the moves were to private schools or to the suburbs. The US freed slaves but then by Sundown practices outside the South or white flight said "We really don't want to
be with you..." and also did not provide the tools to move people from enslavement for hundreds of years to personal autonomy. I talked with a black former IBM executive in the early 90s who left his job to work in the inner city of Birmingham. His observation was that, left alone, appx 25% of people from the inner city will land on their feet through hard work overcoming the environment and that about 25% will fail regardless of opportunities. He said with proper resources for the remaining 50%, black inner city success statistics move to that of any average working class regardless of racial composition.
Excerpts from Chapter 12 (covers school problems in the Mississippi Delta)
There was a sweet spot in the 1970s, when most Delta public schools managed to deliver a good education to black and white students, but that all changed in the 1980s. The balance of black and white reached a kind of tipping point. White parents and grandparents could tolerate a certain number of black students in the classrooms, and the bathrooms, but once black students were in the majority, and black administrators started hiring black teachers, it was too much for them, and that’s when whites fled en masse to the academies. ...
...In rushed the influence of poverty. The Delta public schools started to experience similar problems as schools on Indian reservations, in crime-ridden inner cities, and the poorest, most isolated counties in Appalachia.
All of the worst schools in America, without exception, are located in the highest areas of poverty, just as all the highest-performing schools are in the wealthiest zip codes. Statistically speaking, poverty produces bad parents and bad students, and the good ones are exceptions.
...One famous study on the subject found that poor children on average hear thirty million fewer words than rich children in the first four years of their life. Closing that gap is extremely difficult, especially when you factor in all the social ills associated with poverty in America. The poorest Americans have the highest rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse of children, neglect of children, illiteracy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, delinquency, incarceration.
...More than 80 percent [of the Delta's public school students] qualify for the federal free lunch program, meaning that they live below the poverty line. Some children are arriving at kindergarten not knowing how to hold a pencil, not knowing their colors or their numbers, and in a few cases, not knowing their names. Poverty, and the culture that poverty builds around itself, is the biggest challenge faced by Delta educators, but persistent funding shortfalls by the state are certainly not helping. Neither are the chronic problems with mismanagement, nepotism, and corruption in the Delta school districts.
In F-rated Leflore County, things got so bad that the state board of education had to take over the school district and fire the superintendent and all five school board members. “I’ve never in my life seen anything like this,” said Robert Strebeck, the veteran conservator sent in to straighten out the mess. The school district had almost twice as many employees as it was supposed to have. The district had been without a business manager for seven months, and its finances were in complete shambles. “They just continued to spend, spend, spend without any knowledge of what they had,” said Strebeck. While fighting a legal battle against the takeover, the school board hired yet more people and awarded a round of pay increases. One thing they did not spend money on was maintenance of the school buildings, many of which were in terrible condition. In a long speech to the county school board and its employees, Strebeck had to stress several times that the purpose of schools was to educate children, not provide jobs to adults.
The Yazoo City school district also appeared to be bloated. It was spending $8,841 per student, well above the state average, and almost double what the private academy spent per student, yet only 43 percent of its employees were teachers. Meanwhile, the ex-superintendent of the Greenville school district, Harvey Andre Franklin Sr., was going to prison for embezzlement. He agreed to pay his friend and former colleague Edna Goble $1.4 million of the district’s budget to get her Teach Them to Read program into the Greenville schools. In return for this huge overpayment, she agreed to pay off $36,000 on his truck loan, $9,400 on his home improvements, and $1,900 on his American Express bill.
THE SCHOOL THAT gave me hope was up in Quitman County, one of the poorest, most depopulated counties in the Delta. Only eight thousand people were left in the county, with a median household income of $20,000 a year. ...
A few miles south of Marks, on a highway dotted with abandoned buildings and front-yard junk shops, was Quitman County Elementary School, “Home of the Wildcats.” It was a low-slung red brick building put up in the 1950s, and in bad need of structural maintenance, or tearing down and replacing. Rainwater seeped into the classrooms, and the interior walls didn’t reach the ceiling properly. One hundred percent of the students were poor enough to qualify for a free federal lunch, and 97 percent were African-American. Three years ago, the school was a borderline F, and the state was ready to take it over. Test scores were abysmal. A fifth of the students had been retained in their grades. The school had gone through four principals in five years, and the staff was thoroughly demoralized. Teacher absenteeism was a big problem. Much as the students disliked going to the leaky, old, failing school, they had a better record of attendance than some of their teachers.
Into the breach stepped an Oxford-based organization called the Barksdale Reading Institute (BRI). Founded in 2000 by Jim Barksdale, the billionaire CEO of Netscape, its mission was to raise educational standards in his home state of Mississippi, with a particular emphasis on reading. Barksdale himself had difficulty learning to read as a child, until an inspirational teacher came along and turned him into a lifelong book lover.
In return for autonomy in running the school, BRI offered to pay the salaries of a new principal and vice principal, and bring in other staff and supplies. This was a new approach for the Barksdale do-gooders, born of disappointment. They had tried putting reading coaches in schools, and setting up model classrooms, in the hope they would inspire and replicate. The limited impact of these programs persuaded them that you couldn’t change a school without a change of leadership.
“One night I woke up and said, ‘Let’s do this,’ ” said Claiborne Barksdale, Jim’s brother and CEO. “Let’s go hire some really good principals. Let’s grab these schools by the throat and see if we can do it.”
For the beleaguered, perennially broke Quitman County school district, the Barksdale offer represented a huge budget windfall and a way to avoid state takeover. The new principal, chosen by Barksdale, was Michael Cormack, an African-American educator from Oregon, highly trained, motivated, and energetic. His vice principal was Cytha Stottlemyer, a white woman from Pennsylvania with similar qualities. In less than two years, they turned the school around.
When they arrived, 38 percent of the students were at the national average for reading. Eighteen months later, that number had jumped to 59 percent. The improvement in math was even more dramatic, rising from 30 percent to 83 percent. The overall index of academic achievement at the school rose from 104 to 151. The state raised the school’s grade from borderline F to C, and standards continued to improve.
HOW DID THEY do it? Could the same methods be replicated in other schools? If you could improve a school that quickly and dramatically in the Mississippi Delta, it seemed to me, you could do it anywhere. I walked up to Quitman County Elementary School’s front door, where BOIL WATER ALERT signs were taped on to the glass. Basic infrastructure was disintegrating all over the Delta, and these signs were commonplace, indicating that the water supply was contaminated. Inside the lobby was another sign: “If you live in any of the following situations: in a shelter, car, park, abandoned building, you may qualify for certain rights or protection.”
By the front reception desk, a big colorful Mood Meter chart invited children to identify their happiness and energy levels every morning. It was part of the Barksdale push for “emotional literacy” among the students. They’re taught how to recognize their emotions, understand where they come from, and regulate their moods as a way to break the cycle of acting out and getting punished. Teachers also encourage them to show compassion, at school and at home, and reward them for acts of kindness and understanding of others.
As I chatted to the friendly secretaries and waited to meet Cytha Stottlemyer, a first-grade class exited a classroom and came down the hallway. They were strikingly well behaved, walking in single file at a medium pace, with their hands in their pockets (reducing the temptation to poke, grab, etc.), and bubbles of air in their mouths (to keep from talking, shouting, etc). Pawprints painted on the floor indicated the correct path of travel, on the right-hand side of the hallway.
The school was orderly without being strict. The overall atmosphere was happy, fun, welcoming, full of pride and enthusiasm. Looking into classrooms, I saw rapt young faces, hands shooting up to answer questions. Despite the shortcomings of the building, great care had been taken to decorate it. There were photographs on the walls of high-achieving students, and frequent reminders of the school slogan, “We are Readers, Writers and Problem Solvers.”
The children had made posters illustrating and describing the books they had read, and these were all over the school. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for example, had carefully handwritten entries under headings of plot, characters, setting, publication date, purpose, tone, conflict, and resolution. When the new regime took charge, very few children enjoyed reading. Now the whole school is excited about books. The revamped library is one of the most popular places to hang out during recess, and the children covet the special red T-shirts they get for reaching their reading goals. When the new Book of the Month is announced, the whole school and many parents and grandparents assemble for a rally. Children perform a play based on the book, and there are dance performances, competitive cheering contests, prizes awarded to the best readers.
Ms. Stottlemyer sat me down in her small windowless office behind the secretaries and poured some coffee. She was in her early thirties, I guessed, with an air of calm assertive confidence, and absolute dedication. “What, out of everything you’ve done, has made the most difference?” I asked.
“We have very high expectations for all our students, and a real sense of urgency to get them there,” she said. “They understand that we really care about them. All that makes a big difference, but there’s no magic bullet. It comes down to the effort we’ve put in. People have worked tirelessly in the face of very real challenges, and we’ve done it as a team, which wasn’t always the case here.”
The first step was to motivate the teachers. Rather than fire most of them, based on their poor performance, Michael Cormack took them away on a team-building retreat and got to know them. He discovered that most of them were perfectly competent, a few were outstanding, and all of them felt underappreciated. The administrators, they said, were in the habit of mocking and belittling them. Bitterness was the prevailing mood at the school, trailed by hopelessness. The state and federal government were imposing more and more tests, as if more testing was the way to improve test scores, and the school had lost sight of any larger purpose.
Cormack brought new energy and vision. He was able to inspire the teachers with a sense of mission, and he was nice to them. He remembered their birthdays, and kept track of their health concerns and family members. He invited them to break bread together at staff dinners and weekend barbecues, and rewarded their achievements with small prizes and acknowledgments.
He also required them to work harder, with more discipline and urgency. Two veteran teachers, stalwarts in the local community, refused to work harder, and he had to fire them, which cost him a lot of political support. A few more teachers didn’t renew their contracts, and he hired some replacements from outside the school district, losing a little more support. ...
Instead of beating badly behaved children with a paddle, the new administration took away their privileges and socially isolated them. They lost recess time. They were banned from talking to other students at lunchtime. Each student’s behavior was tracked throughout the day on a multicolored board. At the top was black, indicating perfect behavior, and reinforcing the idea that black is beautiful. At the bottom was the red zone, where students lost all their privileges. “I was skeptical at first, but the kids have bought into the system, and there’s no question that it works better than the paddle,” said Sacks. “I would say discipline has improved dramatically.”
All over the school, small, clever ideas have been put into action. Colds and other illnesses have been greatly reduced by installing hand sanitizers and giving frequent reminders to “wash your paws.” When the bathrooms got dirty, the school held a contest between boys and girls to see who could keep their bathrooms cleaner. It worked like a charm, and the boys won, which shamed the girls into trying even harder. In addition to sending notes home if a child has done poorly or behaved badly, the school started sending positive notes home with children who’d had a particularly good day at school.
Meanwhile, the Barksdale institute was pumping in money for library books, computers, learning software, reading coaches, speech and behavior therapists. A prekindergarten program was introduced and expanded with federal funding, and this has made a big difference in kindergarten. Some children arrive knowing almost nothing. A nine-year-old showed up who didn’t know his name properly, and he was a joy to the teachers, because no one else made so much progress or was so pleased about it. The transition from second to third grade is proving problematic, as books get longer and more difficult and social life gets more involved and distracting, so the school is now working on building up more “reading stamina” in second grade.
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE has been political, and it has come from the school’s own board. When Michael Cormack announced that he was leaving the school to become the new CEO of Barksdale, the school board was expected to approve Cytha Stottlemyer as the new principal, in order to continue the partnership with Barksdale and keep the progress going. But the board members voted against Stottlemyer by a majority of 3 to 2. They gave no reason for the decision, which took place in executive session, but it was an open secret what lay behind it.
The three board members, and a faction of the community, were resentful of the well-heeled outsiders who had come in and taken over their school. The autonomy required by Barksdale, especially in hiring and firing, was a direct challenge to the traditional power of the school board. For one member, this resentment was severely aggravated by the fact that Cormack and Stottlemyer hadn’t picked her granddaughter as Homecoming Queen. Not only that, but they had reduced Homecoming from a week of celebrations, in which no learning took place, to less than a full day. Perhaps inevitably, Stottlemyer’s race was also a major factor. During one of the meetings, someone came right out and said it, “We don’t want white people telling our children what to do.”
Most parents and teachers, however, supported Stottlemyer, and they raised such an outcry that the board was forced to hold an emergency hearing. More than a hundred people attended. The board refused to let any parents speak, but Cormack was able to show a video reel of testimonials about the progress the school had made. Again, the board voted no, even though it meant saying good-bye to approximately $400,000 a year from Barksdale at a time when the school district was deeply in debt. Families camped out on the lawn of one of the school board members and refused to leave. Stottlemyer supporters wouldn’t stop calling his phone. They wore him down, essentially, until he agreed to change his vote to yes. That gave Stottlemyer majority support on the board, and she was duly sworn in as the new principal. It was a hurtful experience for her, but she dusted herself off, and according to everyone I talked to at the school, she has done a fine job, and increased her support in the community.
“First, God made idiots,” wrote Mark Twain. “This was for practice. Then He invented school boards.” When I offered this quote to Stottlemyer, she smiled politely and changed the subject.
THE STORY PROVES that money and leadership can transform a Delta school, but Quitman County Elementary is a small island in a rough sea. These eager, well-behaved, book-enthused children will move on to middle and high schools that do not have the benefit of private money or principals trained at the nation’s top academies. Expectations are lower, urgency is less, corporal punishment is the main disciplinary tool, and the trials of adolescence will be taking place at the same time. Stottlemyer, recently married and getting used to the last name Guynes, is trying to build bridges to those schools, and help them improve, a process that requires delicate political footwork. If the perception builds that she’s a bossy white lady who thinks she knows better, she’s not going to get anywhere.
Some of her students will hopefully make it through and go on to college, and then you have to wonder if they’ll ever come back to Quitman County. At present, the biggest employers in the area are the state penitentiary at Parchman, the big private prison at Tutwiler, and the floating casinos at Tunica on the Mississippi River, all of which lie outside the county limits. Inside the county, the biggest employer is the school district.
As I drove home through torrential rains, I pondered the economic significance of the schools. In the Delta, where poverty is so extreme and job opportunities are so scarce, people look at schools as a source of employment, first and foremost. School board members and superintendents run for election, and once in power, they tend to distribute jobs as patronage within local kinship networks, shoring up their support for the next election. Educating children becomes a secondary concern.
Outsiders had come in and transformed a school, filled hundreds of children with new enthusiasm for learning. A majority of the school board saw this as a threat, and an echo of white supremacy. How dare they come in here, to our community, and tell us what to do? The most encouraging thing about the whole story was the persistence of the parents and teachers, who kept tugging and pulling at the school board until it came plopping out of the mud.
Grant, Richard. Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
