A student waits outside the main doors of Marshall High School. John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative
On an April morning last year, more than 200 juniors took their seats at Marshall High School for the Prairie State Achievement Examination, a measure of whether their school had prepared them to meet basic state learning standards.
When the results came in for Marshall, only three students had met the standards for the math part of the test. Eighteen had passed the reading part. No students had exceeded state standards in reading or math.
The test results were but one indication of a high school in trouble. For years, many Marshall students have been ill prepared to enter college or the job market, and the school’s long history is also marked by frustration and failures that often have little to do with math or reading.
The dismal statistics have made Marshall a target for turnaround in the next school year, along with Phillips High School and three elementary schools. Turnaround is an intervention promoted by the Obama administration that involves firing a school’s current staff, committing resources in the form of building upgrades and new curriculums, and training new teachers.
The plan, if approved by the Chicago Board of Education, seeks to clean the slate for students, giving them a new school experience when they return in September.
The doors cannot open next school year without some change — on that much administrators, local residents, parents, students and teachers agree. No one defends a school in which only 4 percent of the students pass the state exam and only 41 percent graduate. Marshall has been on the district’s probation list for as long as some freshmen have been alive, and it is also plagued by poor attendance.
Those parties, though, disagree on the level of intervention needed. School officials say any plan must give students a fresh start, and they support the turnaround solution. A public hearing was held Feb. 1 to gather community reaction, which will be passed on to Ron Huberman, the public schools’ chief executive. Mr. Huberman will then recommend to the school board whether to begin a turnaround. A decision from the board could come as soon as the end of February.
But some parents and education advocates — scarred from previous false starts and harboring feelings that Marshall has long been denied adequate financing and staffing — bristle at the turnaround concept. They see it as “downtown” taking over a West Side school that, with its maroon-and-gold hallway of basketball trophies, still has strong neighborhood ties. Despite Marshall’s state, parents say they value the relationships students have established with some staff members — in some cases the only adults the teenagers trust.
“If Marshall had been getting the persistent help it should have been getting, Marshall would not be on probation,” said Felicia Smith, a parent.
On most days, staff members struggle to get students into classrooms. Daily attendance last year averaged 54 percent, according to data from the State Board of Education.
At a recent hearing on the proposed turnaround, Pamela Olguin, attendance coordinator, said absenteeism was rooted in larger challenges: Homeless students, female students with babies who are on waiting lists for day care, guardians with disconnected phone numbers or incorrect addresses, incarcerated students still on the school’s rolls and worries about gang violence.
The attendance rate is a good barometer of students’ mental state, said Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University. “Attendance tells you about despair and depression,” Ms. Radner said. “Kids are saying there’s no point in being there.”
Donald Fraynd, the public schools’ turnaround officer, said previous reform efforts had attacked only parts of the problem, like the curriculum. He said the district’s turnaround model offered a systemic approach for struggling high schools.
“We’ve made mistakes as a district, as every district has,” he said. “This is the full package.”
Mr. Fraynd said the district, which would oversee a Marshall turnaround, would try to deal with outside obstacles that keep students from the classroom.
“We can solve that by going to the home and having programs that figure out what it would take to get you back to school,” he said.
If Marshall is approved for turnaround, the district would signal the change to students by making building improvements. The school would get new textbooks, technology and supplies. In some cases, the curriculum would be replaced. Any student reading below a sixth-grade level would be placed in an intensive reading program. Community organizations would be invited to help with mentoring, counseling and other needs.
Current teachers could reapply for their jobs, a mechanism for removing ineffective teachers. At other turnarounds, 15 percent to 20 percent of staff members return, Mr. Fraynd said. All staff members would undergo training, including three weeks of instruction on a new discipline program designed to help students understand how they have misbehaved rather than being purely punitive.
Donald Baumgartner, a math teacher, said current staff members could improve the school themselves if given the resources the district was proposing.
“If they want to give mentors, tutors, counselors, give it to us,” Mr. Baumgartner said. “Don’t give us a second chance: Give us a fair chance. If we had all that stuff, we’d be different.”
Discipline problems take far too much time away from instruction, said Carol Williams, a teacher. “We have a group of students in serious need of intervention,” she said. “They need a lot of social and emotional support. They don’t get it, so they’re disruptive in the classroom.”
The district said it had given extra support to Marshall and provided oversight on budgets and leadership. In 1996 and 2006, principals were removed because of their inability to make improvements. During the 2007-8 and 2008-9 school years, the central office brought in an experienced administrator to serve as a coach to Juan Gardner, the principal.
Mr. Gardner was replaced this school year with Sean Clayton, whose absence at the board’s hearing on the turnaround proposal was noted a few times by a hearing officer. Mr. Clayton did not return calls requesting a comment.
The state has put Marshall on probation because of problems with its delivery of special-education services.
In Classroom 216, which was sweltering on an early February day, Jim Dorrell, a literature teacher and co-coach of the debate team, has tried to build expectations. College posters hang at the front of the room, and Mr. Dorrell works with students after school on debate skills for a team that ranks seventh in the city. Privately, students said they turned to him as they would to a relative, and worried about losing that connection next year.
With the school in its third year of a new curriculum provided through the public schools’ high school transformation plan, Mr. Dorrell and other teachers hoped those changes would lead to improvements in this year’s test scores. But changes could be coming and no one will have had a chance to notice, he said.
“We’re not seeing the results of this plan before a new one is starting,” Mr. Dorrell said.
Derrick Harris, president of the North Lawndale Local School Council Federation, said that he worried about the loss of institutional memory at Marshall and that the district would not involve the community in the turnaround. “There are people in that building who know the social land mines of the student population,” Mr. Harris said.
Sue Sporte, associate director for evaluation and data resources at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, said something must change, given Marshall’s alarming graduation rate.
“Each year you wait,” she said, “a different cohort of kids are being lost.”
