Manual Principal Rob Stein jokes with a student during the last week of school 

Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network of schools, has a favorite simile he uses to describe his program’s reason for starting its middle schools for low-income kids with fifth grade:

Recently, Feinberg was in Denver to give a luncheon talk to a group educators and school reformers. During the question and answer session, Rob Stein, principal of the newly-reopened Manual High School, asked Feinberg how, then, he would describe a reform effort for kids far below grade level that began with ninth grade instead of fifth.

Feinberg, tall and a bit manic, scratched his shaved dome ashe paced the room. Well, he said, that would be like being down by a touchdown with no timeouts left and time about to expire. “It’s a Hail Mary pass into the end zone,” he said.

Stein, a slight fellow and an avid cyclist, doesn’t much resemble Doug Flutie, the Boston College quarterback who threw perhaps the most famously successful Hail Mary pass in history. (OK, for you University of Colorado football boosters, this one isn’t bad either). 

But if Feinberg is right, then Stein will need that rare combination of Flutie’s luck, gumption and skill to transform Manual into the “premier high school” that Denver Supt. Michael Bennet promised the northeast Denver community in 2006. Bennet shuttered Manual for the 2006-07 school year, after the once-proud school had descended into dysfunction and abysmal performance. 

Stein, itching for a challenge after five years running the toney Graland Country Day private school, volunteered for the assignment of resurrecting Manual, his alma mater. And a challenge is what he got. 

When the school reopened last August, with 160 ninth-graders, almost all of them low-income, the average student was reading and doing math at a fifth-grade level. Many were deeply disenchanted with the concept of schooling, and arrived at Manual with a substantial chip on their shoulder. 

Data suggest that began to change over the course of Manual's first year. One piece of evidence that Manual did something right in its first year is the school's attendance rate -- 88 percent for the just completed school year. By contrast, the Denver Public Schools attendance rate across its 10 comprehensive high schools was 79 percent in 2006-07, the most recent data available district-wide.. Only three other high schools had attendance that topped 85 percent, and those three are magnet schools -- the Career Education Center, the Denver Center for International Studies and Denver School of the Arts. 

Attendance is a key indicator of student engagement. If student don't show up regularly, they won't do well in classes and are much more likely to drop out.

Now, a year into the grand Manual experiment, Stein and his exhausted teaching staff will take a breather before launching a freshman academy for incoming ninth-graders in early August. A summer school program for 29 of this past year’s struggling students, beginning in late June, will be run by an outside contractor. 

So, how did the first year go? There is no simple answer to that question. But Stein would begin by rejecting the “Hail Mary” analogy as simplistic. 

“Feinberg also said at that luncheon that you have to have different expectations, that you can’t expect these kids to achieve real high school level, college readiness proficiency if you’re getting them in ninth grade, that you have to modify your expectations,” Stein said the week after school let out for the year.

One piece of evidence that Manual did something right in its first year is the school's attendance rate -- 88 percent for the just completed school year. By contrast, the Denver Public Schools attendance rate across its 10 comprehensive high schools was 79 percent. 

“I prefer to draw an analogy to healthcare. You never give up on a patient. You treat every patient as if you expect them to survive. But at the same time, there are certain conditions for which the cure rate is not very high. That’s a statistical truth, an empirical truth. 

“So we owe it to our students to provide other milestones than ‘I’m going to get into a selective four-year college.’ But at the same time we don’t want to give up on any student. We want to keep pushing them as hard as we can to achieve that goal.” 

Preliminary impressions 

Because I  played the role of fly on the wall sporadically throughout the new Manual’s first year, people frequently asked me “how’s it going at Manual?” My answer was that it’s much too early to answer that question. 

But I’d like to share briefly some of what I saw and learned. These observations should not be regarded as conclusions set in stone, but rather as impressionistic snapshots of a complex and multi-faceted undertaking. 

To be sure, bits of early data exist, and you can see some of it below. An additional chunk of data will drop in July, when the 2007-08 Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) results are released. 

So, here are some observations: 

This is hard work:  

By and large, Manual students are not kids who come from “Leave it to Beaver” homes. We all know that; yet listening to specific stories is like taking an ice bath. Here’s what I wrote in an e-newsletter after attending a 90-minute Student Intervention Team meeting late in the spring. The SIT meets each week to discuss students about whom the staff has concerns. 

• A girl, M, has run away from home. Unless she reappears immediately, she could lose her baby to social services. The baby currently is with the father’s family, but that is not a healthy situation. M is failing science, math and English. Unless she shows up and agrees to attend summer school, she will be back in ninth grade come fall.

• Another girl, L, is a bright student but more often than not shows up at school high on marijuana. L lives with her grandmother. WhenL’s teachers called a conference with the grandmother recently to express their concern and urge Grandma to get L some help, the grandmother showed up “in a drunken rage.” According to the teachers, she seemed to more interested in discussing the injustice of a past DUI conviction than her granddaughter’s issues. “Lock her up, I don’t care,” the grandmother said. “I’ll sign anything” to make that happen. L is failing science, but has an A in math. She has no major “skill deficits,” but needs to attend summer school to bolster her writing skills.

• A is a girl who had been a decent student. But her family was thrown into upheaval when her father was shot and killed over spring break. She fell far behind in her work, and needs to attend summer school to move on to 10^th grade. Her English teacher argues that “summer school is not in her interest because she wouldn’t come and then she’d really be in a hole.”

• W is a girl who normally is quiet and withdrawn. But she and another girl, Z who is pregnant, have a long-standing feud. In fact, the feud extends back to the two girls’ mothers, long-time enemies. Recently, Z’s mother got a restraining order against W after a near-fight at school. The order requires W always to stay a proscribed distance from Z, in school and out. The school leadership team called a conference with W and her mother, to explain the situation, and to devise a pattern of movement within the school that would keep the girls always apart. The principal explained to the mother that this was a court order, that violation of it could land W in serious trouble. “We want to work with you so that we can make this work,” the principal said. “Would you like to change anything? We’ll do anything we can to accommodate you.” The mother stood and walked out of the room. When she reached the doorway, she turned around and said “I’ve got nothing to say.” End of conference. W withdrew from the school a short time later.

Manual High school earth sciences teacher Lizzie Krueger at the end of the year

The teaching staff ended the year committed and generally optimistic:   

Sure, Manual’s teachers have bad days when the kids’ attitudes drive them crazy and doubts gnaw at them, about their effectiveness and their students’ commitment. But as the year ended, they felt at least a gentle tug of forward momentum. The best measure of this is that the entire staff is returning next year -- not a single teacher is leaving

It wasn’t always so positive. Earlier in the year, some of the teachers, overwhelmed by the challenges posed by their students, felt close to the breaking point. One autumn morning, a group of teachers and instructional coach Mario Giardiello met for a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at a Le Peep restaurant not far from Manual. As they slammed watery coffee and devoured eggs, they discussed how they were feeling two months in.

“I was done with middle school. That’s one reason I came here, but we’re a middle school right now. The model, the way the kids are behaving, everything,” one teacher said. “And I don’t feel good about my teaching right now. When you feel bad about your teaching, it pretty much ruins your life.”

Another teacher patted her arm. “Is that because you spend 10 hours a day doing it?” she asked.

“Yes,” the first teacher replied. “You just put so much into it and then you feel you’re getting nowhere.”

“I know how you feel,” the second teacher said. “I was down in Mario’s office bawling my eyes out a couple of weeks ago.”

Fast forward seven months. The day after school ended for the year, that first teacher, with a much sunnier demeanor, told the assembled staff that she was looking forward to the new school year starting in August. “I’m ready to leave behind the old frustrations about student motivation and failure. I’m ready to be excited about teaching next year,” she said.

Late in the year, Giardiello asked teachers to complete an online survey about students, teaching and the culture of Manual. During a professional development session shortly after the end of the year, the staff dissected the results.

What teachers found most revealing, if a bit cringe-inducing, was that they rated their own teaching prowess higher than their students’ performance and attitude. They wondered whether they were, perhaps, blaming students, at least in part, for their own shortcomings.

Earth sciences teacher Kent Hups said there were legitimate reasons for frustrations with some students. He described one student whose grade was on the cusp of an A late in the semester. Then the student failed to show up at school for his demonstration project or final exam.

“He left 500 points on the table, and wound up with an ‘F,’” Hups said. “It’s just so damned frustrating.”

The school culture was slow to coalesce, which frustrated staff and students alike:

Adolescents are as adept at exploiting inconsistencies in rules enforcement as water is at finding hairline cracks in a dam. At Manual, students worked diligently to subvert the dress code (‘business casual’ attire) and ultimately succeeded. Discipline policies weren’t enforced uniformly, and teachers had widely divergent philosophies of classroom management.

Some allowed kids to do class work while listening to music on MP3 players. Others confiscated any electronic device at the door. Some tolerated a certain level of chaos in their classrooms, while others tried to maintain strict order. Some were quick to send disruptive students to the office for discipline. Others almost never banished a student. (One teacher issued 75 “behavior referrals” during the just-concluded school year. Another issued just nine).

During the end-of-year professional development day, teachers spent significant time discussing how to get more consistent in this area.

“Everyone is trying to enforce the rules, but people aren’t clear what the rules are,” math teacher Darren Paschall said.

“We don’t have a small number of clear, strict rules,” Sarah Evans, an English teacher, said in agreement.

The group agreed to commit to uniform and sensible discipline policies, to be hammered out over the summer and during professional development in the weeks before school resumes.

Stein ran the group through an academic presentation, based on anthropological research, that demonstrated profound culture change requires a degree of disruption – what anthropologist George Spindler calls “discontinuity.”

Many teachers feel uncomfortable imposing on their students. Yet, Stein said, this may be what’s required to establish a healthy, learning-focused culture at Manual.

“We are so apologetic about putting kids under stress,” Stein said. “But Spindler would say this is the way you have to do it. Culture in school is too often defined by the locker and the hallway rather than the classroom.”

To create commitment to a culture, Spindler posits, after creating discontinuity, you must enter a period of “cultural compression,” a basic-training/Marine boot camp-like intensive introduction to the new reality. Ultimately, successful completion of the initiation to the new culture results in “resolution of dissonance” which causes the initiates to buy into the new system.

While this sounded good in theory to the staff, science teacher Lizzie Krueger wondered how it would work in the Manual reality. “With marines, the trainers have them all day, every day. That’s the new reality. These kids go home at the end of the day. It’s two steps forward, one step back, because some of them go home to the opposite of what we’re trying to show them.”

That may be the reason “so many kids hang around here after the last bell of the day. They do not want to go home,” said Eric Posey, a JROTC military instructor whose no-nonsense but compassionate demeanor won him universal respect among the students.

As Manual welcomes a new crop of ninth-graders in August, the staff’s ability to impose a positive, consistent culture will perhaps be the school’s biggest test. If that occurs, greater academic success is likely to follow.

Manual: the challenge in numbers

Manual attendance rate, 2007-08: 88%

DPS high school attendance rate, 200607 (latest available): 79% 

Number of astudents repeating ninth grade: 16

Number of students on second semester honor roll: 22

Number of students who failed math second semester: 23

Number of students who failed English second semester: 21

Number of students who left Manual for other schools during year: 20

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