A Tale of Two Schools is a movie about two schools, Walton Elementary and Bearden Elementary, that are failing to meet the state set standards for student progress and achievement.
Bearden Elementary is located literally in the middle of a cotton field. Teachers are low paid and usually don’t stay there for more than a year. Some students are illiterate. When we join Bearden Elementary they have just received a grant to help pay for a reading program that should help their students make better progress. As we follow them through the school year concerns are constantly voiced about the lack of training the teachers have been proved with to implement the new program. Teachers fear that they are not doing it right. Added into the concerns about implementation, the supplies for implementing the program are slow to come in. The justification behind the delay in supplies is that the coordinators wanted to make sure they were spending it on quality supplies and things that were the most needed.
Walton Elementary is located in the heart of the Fort Worth area in Texas. Walton seems to be the picture of what Bearden could be in a few years. Although Walton is not located in the best area, near the interstate, they seem to have a found a way to make things work. In fact, others are coming to their school to see exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. The educators at Walton are working to teach reading in a different way. They are using a structured program to teach students how to read through letters and sounds (phonemic awareness).
The Tale of Two Schools was an extremely moving school. As silly as it sounds, I actually found myself tearing up slightly towards the end when the schools anxiously waited the results for their school in the statewide test. Coming from an intercity failing school myself, I can understand the desperation these schools voiced about wanting to find something that works to help their students. I think that failing schools and passing along students that are illiterate is unacceptable. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. But when it comes down to it, some times schools are failing because they just don’t have the ability to make things work. It might be a money issues, a staffing issues, or a programming issues. Regardless of what the issue is, it is something that we as a nation need to address. Although it might be the cheesy line that is always thrown out there when people are fight for education but it’s true, child are our future and if we fail with them then we are setting ourselves up for a future of failure.
Let me step off my soapbox now and address the issues of failing schools. Obviously failing at anything is not something we want in life, so what can we do it stop failing and start succeeding? If you goggle “solutions to failing schools” you don’t come up with many suggestions. So what can you do as a parent or an educator? There are steps you can take to head in the right directions. Things like Response to Intervention (RTI) programs that check progress of students and from there help determine in students are falling behind because of poor instruction or some sort of cognitive deficit. You can look into programs like the one that Walton used to help students who continue to struggle. These programs address the issue of poor instruction and figure out what the things are that need to be focused on for each individual student to be able to grasp concepts.
Helpful Resources:
http://www.pbs.org/weta/twoschools/ (Link to A Tale of Two Schools)
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