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Chapter 14 – Section 2

Education and Social Issues

REPORTER HARRY SMITH: This is Barclay Public School in inner-city, Baltimore, its students among the cities poorest. Ninety percent are black; eighty percent live below the poverty line. Just twelve blocks, and a world away is Calvert School. It’s one of Baltimore’s most exclusive private schools. Tuition here runs up to $10,000 a year. By all rights the two schools and their students should have nothing in common, and they would not, if it were not for one exceptional woman.

Gertrude Williams is Barclay’s Principal. In the mid 1980s her students test scores had sunk to the 20th percentile.

GERTRUDE WILLIAMS: I was quite upset, because we just couldn’t get them off ground zero.

HARRY SMITH: So Williams decided to make a drastic change. Dump the city’s curriculum and find something better. What she found was Calvert School is demanding back to basics program, heavy on reading, writing and arithmetic, but when she tried to implement it at Barkley she was told her kids were not up to the challenge.

GERTRUDE WILLIAMS: It was like they can’t do it you know, it’s a rich man’s curriculum, these kids can’t do it.

HARRY SMITH: It took four years of fighting the system, but Gertrude Williams got her rich man’s curriculum.

GERTRUDE WILLIAMS: The first year that they were in the curriculum their scores shot up.

HARRY SMITH: Barclay test scores rose to the 70th percentile. They have stayed at or above the national average ever since. Barclay’s kindergarten class reads at a first grade level. First graders write long compositions in script. Third graders take advanced subjects like mythology.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s a very happy story.

HARRY SMITH: Sam Stringfield of Johns Hopkins University has been evaluating the program since it began in 1990.

SAM STRINGFIELD: I think this is the most important thing that Barclay demonstrates. It is that the inner-city children of America are intellectually capable of achieving at very high levels.

ANGELA BROOKS: The stuff that they were doing in first grade there, they did in third and fourth grade with my other two kids.

HARRY SMITH: Angela Brooks had to fight to get her daughter Janice into Barclay because they live outside the school district.

ANGELA BROOKS: They told me that she couldn’t go to that school and I told yes she was.

HARRY SMITH: Like other Barclay parents, Angela reads with Janice for a half hour every night. It’s part of the program.

ANGELA BROOKS: This looks like an A to me, I know you probably meant for that to be an O.

HARRY SMITH: Perfection is part of the program too. At a correction class each day students have to fix every mistake they make, no matter how small. Both schools hope to do more than just teach children how to read and write. The idea is to train future leaders of America. That’s why every morning Calvert students must look the headmasters straight in the eye and greet him with a handshake.

GERTRUDE WILLIAMS: We do it too, we need it more in the school because these children are used to looking down.

HARRY SMITH: What’s happening at Barclay takes devotion and money and it’s still too new to have convinced all the skeptics, but the Barclay experiment is succeeding where so many other inner-city schools have failed, offering these students a real education and with it a way out.

GERTRUDE WILLIAMS: We are giving them a chance to be whatever they want to be in life developing a desire to shoot for the stars.

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