The percentage of middle school students in Baltimore City’s public schools who flunked a grade but overcame that deficiency in summer school has increased sharply in the last three years, since the district has partnered with a program that makes learning more fun, the Baltimore Sun reports.
“These were the kids during the school year who were causing mayhem, and we don’t play that here,” the paper quoted Damon Johnson, who runs the program at William C March Middle School, as saying. “We have kids who are parents, who have charges and have to come to school with the ankle bracelet monitors on, kids who are 18 in the eighth grade. But they’re here, and they’re learning.”
The program, known as the Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) summer program, seems like a regular summer school program: kids go to school on a schedule similar to a school day during the regular year. But what you might not see is that students are actually engaged in their classes, single-sex classrooms of no more than 22 students led by one teacher and one assistant.
This summer, nearly 500 students enrolled in the program. Yesterday was their last day. “It doesn’t even feel like summer school,” the Sun quoted one eighth grader as saying. “It’s just a different experience. You think you’re just going to do work all day because you’re dumb, you’ve failed. But we actually get to talk to our teachers about what we’re doing, and it’s fun. It feels like home school.”
School officials expect good results, and since the program has established itself at two middle schools in 2010, they have seen some promising gains in student performance over the summer.
The BELL program, based on comments, provides students with more individualized instruction than they get in Baltimore’s schools during the school year. Some success can be attributed to just the lower class sizes, but the program also gives students a dose of higher standards. They’re expected to succeed because teachers set higher expectations and goals.
“A lot of them start by saying, ‘I can’t do this because I’m stupid,'” the Sun quoted one literacy instructor as saying. “Once they see a little level of success, they’re willing to try a little bit more. For the post-assessment, I ask if they want me to read to them, and they say, ‘I got it.’ They build so much confidence.”
For kids who were held back in a grade, that extra confidence can be meaningful, as it helps them feel better about learning. So they learn more.
“Sometimes the work at school was tricky, and the teachers just gave it to us and didn’t tell us how to do it,” one eighth grader told the Sun. “At BELL, they make it fun to do the work, and they help us out if we need it.”
