Darling-Hammond discusses achievements, challenges of charter schools effort
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
Linda Darling-Hammond
Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, delivering a public lecture last week that focused on Stanford's community-service efforts through its partnership with the Ravenswood City School District, chose the metaphor of tending a garden to convey the nurturing taking place in the nearby community.
But Darling-Hammond stressed that such community service must be more than just well intended—it also must be truly meaningful. The occasion for her April 19 talk, titled "Tending Our Gardens: Transforming Schools, Communities and the Futures of Children," was the 2007 Miriam and Peter E. Haas Centennial Professorship Lecture on Public Service and the Community.
"This work is both important and delicate," said Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and a top scholar in the fields of teaching quality, school reform and educational equity. "I look at the work of public service from the perspective of a dilemma."
No doubt the partnership has blossomed. Since East Palo Alto Academy High School opened in 2001—the first public high school to serve the community in more than 25 years—more than 100 students have graduated. And in August, East Palo Alto Academy Elementary School opened its doors to 60 kindergarteners, 40 first graders and 50 sixth graders.
Both schools are chartered by Ravenswood and operated by the nonprofit Stanford Schools Corporation, and together they form the East Palo Alto Academy, of which Darling-Hammond is the founding faculty member. The academy simultaneously benefits the university by serving as a training ground for graduates of the School of Education's Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP).
The dilemma, Darling-Hammond explained, lies in avoiding the pitfalls of "naïve" community-service efforts. Examples of that include grand starts that leave behind little infrastructure, which the professor said deflects attention from systemic improvements in policy and practice, or "feel good" efforts that simply come off as condescending.
Although now undergoing some gentrification and conversions from high-density housing to lower densities in some neighborhoods, East Palo Alto remains home to many low-income Latino, African American and Pacific Islander families, and problems with gangs and street violence persist.
"True responsibility has to be, first of all, responsible," said Darling-Hammond, who sprinkled such ethical imperatives throughout her PowerPoint presentation and reiterated them during the lecture. "Charity is no substitute for justice."
In her presentation, Darling-Hammond first set the stage by providing context in the form of data illustrating the disparity between affluent and less affluent public schools in per-student spending and in achievement. She said the achievement gap is caused, in part, by the fact that large numbers of underprepared teachers work in high-poverty schools.
That leads to a "significantly lower achievement in reading and mathematics," as well as perpetuating a parade of unskilled novices that pass through poorer schools as underprepared teachers leave and are replaced by more, according to Darling-Hammond.
Most of the teachers at the high school are fully credentialed STEP graduates and become National Board Certified. Each classroom has fewer than 25 students, and total pupil load per teacher is under 100. The curriculum itself is geared toward college preparation and requires the application of knowledge through project-based learning. And instead of traditional grading, passing is dependent on performance-based assessment.
The results? Of the first graduating classes, in 2005 and 2006, more than 90 percent were admitted into postsecondary education. More than one-third of the students were admitted to four-year colleges, including campuses throughout the UC and CSU systems, as well as many private institutions, Darling-Hammond said.
But she also invited students and teachers from the high school who attended last Thursday's lecture to give their own testimonials. Teacher Rebecca Padnos Altamirano said that in talking to her students, she hears time and again that they want to come back after college and work in the community.
"It is very important for East Palo Alto to have a public high school in the community because it keeps kids off the streets," said Fabiola, a sophomore at the high school, adding that she hopes to attend a good university. "For example, to come here to Stanford."
And while Darling-Hammond didn't spend much time on it, one slide in her presentation spoke to a critical question that has bearing beyond East Palo Alto—that the efforts occurring locally might have a ripple effect and impact educational programs elsewhere.
On that slide, a chart showed nine schools in a redesign network that had some connection to STEP but overall fell under the rubric of "Stanford's Teaching Schools Strategy." Among them are three large high schools undergoing restructuring and four new small high schools. (Darling-Hammond's full presentation eventually will be available on the Haas Center website, http://haas.stanford.edu/.)
When one audience member asked if the partnership with East Palo Alto was something that could be duplicated in other communities, part of Darling-Hammond's reply was, "We get a lot of people visiting us."
