01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 19, 2006

Together, in 1995, the Main South Community Development Corporation and Clark University made a slightly outrageous promise to Worcester's low-income Main South neighborhood: We will create a school with a program so strong, your kids will go to college. Historically, college has been laughably out of reach for most urban kids like yours, some of whom don't even speak English, but we're going to do it anyway.

And they did.

Every University Park Campus School 10th grader has passed their MCAS tests on the first try. A few families have moved away from the neighborhood, but not one student has dropped out of the school. Not one. Every graduate from the three graduating classes went to college. The first valedictorian is now a junior at Brown.

Peter Weyler, a University Park English teacher, is writing a book about the school and has concluded that the reason it succeeded so well is stubbornness. Yes, he mentioned passion and the incredibly dedicated staff, but I've visited a lot of good schools and they all say that. Few point proudly to sheer pig-headedness.

In 1996, Clark and the Main South Community Development Corporation hired Donna Rodrigues, herself a native of the Main South neighborhood, to plan the school and be its principal. Weyler credits Rodrigues with setting the stubbornness standard.

For years she had been a teacher at South High, where the neighborhood kids had always gone, three miles away. In 1997, she hired two old colleagues from Main South, June Eressy, who is the principal now, and Dermot Shea, another veteran, who had been thinking about retiring because he was so sick of what high school teaching had become.

The school opened with one seventh-grade class of 38 students, over half of whom were reading at a third-grade level or below. Four kids couldn't read at all, and 30 percent had special needs. The next year, of the incoming seventh graders, 73 percent were English-language learners. The school grew grade by grade, each class coming in with its set of challenges.

To get the kids college-ready by graduation, they need to be taking rigorous college-prep or "honors" classes by the ninth grade, just like their suburban and private-school peers. From a third-grade literacy level to analyzing Shakespeare and hefty history texts is a mighty steep trajectory. They have only two years, seventh and eighth grade, to ramp up the kids' literacy, numeracy, study skills and so forth. Not some kids, not the easy smarty-pantses that you cream off after sorting them out, but all the kids. You can see where stubbornness would have to come into play.

So: University Park has the seventh and eighth grades "loop," which keeps the same teachers and kids together for the two years, to eliminate as many transitions and down-times as possible.

All the classes, 7 to 12, are in 60 or 90-minute blocks, again for fewer interruptions and longer periods in which to concentrate. They teach only a core curriculum. (Fortunately, Clark University provides a lot of extras.) Teachers teach books about which they're passionate, and which they think will work, because inevitably, teachers' distaste for a book that central office has forced on them communicates to the kids.

University Park can't afford anything that distracts or excuses the kids from the work at hand.

The two lines you hear repeated are "We're in this together" and "Whatever it takes."

Eressy says 'More than the test scores, what's important to me is maintaining a culture that keeps the kids believing they can be successful. And while money is always a struggle, my hardest job is watching over that culture. Like, we're very strict about not having street language here. But the way the culture is now, the older ones police the younger ones. That's so helpful. Because a really bad week around here can be like the one before the last vacation when a student died of leukemia, an art teacher died and a student got shot. A normal bad day is merely when the kids are nuts. You can feel it in the air.'

As we tour the building, all I can feel is bustle and activity. In Weyler's 11th-grade English class, the occasional mini-shriek of the impassioned female punctuates the chitter chatter of adolescents doing group work. The school encourages group work to get the kids in the habit of helping each other and asking for help. Each student has chosen a quote from a Flannery O'Connor's story, copied it to the top of a big sheet of newsprint that is taped to the walls so kids can write their responses underneath.

Very frequently, teachers ask kids to get back into the text, extract an important quote, own it, be able to explain why they chose it and why it's important. In this way the kids take each other into the text -- which they usually start off hating -- until it is familiar, alive and full of places where they have made strong connections.

University Park has no single, formal reading program. Teachers use all sorts of literacy supports for the kids. But no packaged program got to what they felt was the heart of the matter, which was that this demographic needed to read more, more often, more deeply, with more connections, more discussion, just more.

Weyler says, "Reading and writing is communicating. I tell the kids, you're actively making meaning when you interact with the text. To be human is to think and to interact with each other. When we reach out of ourselves, we encounter other people's thoughts. When you write, you extend yourself to them. When you write essays, you are making meaning. I feel like our ultimate job is to teach the kids to think deeply, to challenge their experiences by understanding other people's experiences. I don't have a passion for the MCAS and I don't have a passion for sentence structure. I do have a passion for making meaning, and since the most important parts of the MCAS are the open-ended questions, our kids do pretty well."

So, despite the evidence of their testing success, University Park is not training test-takers. They don't drill-and-kill with the teacher-proof curricula common in urban schools. They depend on talented, well-trained and well, stubborn teachers. Eressy says that the kids she rode the hardest are the very ones who come back and thank her most profusely.

UPCS only has 12 regular teachers, so they can't afford a klunker. (What school can?) Once, a teacher with seniority in the Worcester system legally won the right to teach at University Park, against the school's wishes. Presumably he thought it would be a cushy job because he behaved like a disengaged, union-protected job-occupier. His students hounded him to teach them with the same rigor and caring as their other teachers. Indeed, as the kids got nasty, he filed a grievance with the union. The union was not interested in compromising the quality of the school or the kids' education and so asked the teacher whom it was they would grieve. The kids? He was gone soon after.

I'm inclined to agree that all the "best practice" in the world can easily fail if the people involved are inclined to let it. In this case, no one would have thought twice if University Park had achieved much less, where so many other well-meaning efforts have also missed the mark.

Pig-headed, they took on the obstacles confronting every kid, one at a time, and solved, mitigated or bypassed those problems. The promise to the neighborhood was that they would teach the kids the skills that would give them opportunities that had been unavailable to their parents. And they did.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.