In June, BASD selected Broughal MS for a Comprehensive Support & Improvement (CSI) plan, based on the school’s three-year average of math and English Language Arts (ELA) scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests administered annually to eighth-graders. Broughal’s CSI plan, using $545,000 of Title I federal funds, encompasses three main areas: culture and mindset; instruction and assessment; and professional development. Today’s feature – part three in a series about the CSI plan – looks at the changes from the perspective of Broughal parents, with additional commentary from a local literacy advocate.

‘The success plan’

Kumari Ghafoor-Davis has a son in seventh grade.

“I actually drive my son here,” she says, explaining that she withdrew her son from another BASD middle school last year. “I saw my child dimming [at his previous school].”

At Broughal, however, “he was here a month and they saw his talent. [The teachers] are interested, they’re invested, and they care.”

During the enrollment process at Broughal, she discussed her son’s challenges in meeting his academic goals with the guidance counselor, who worked to determine appropriate supports and put them in place rapidly.

The counselor’s responsiveness impressed Ghafoor-Davis.

“In my work,” she said, “I want to know, What is the success plan? And [the guidance counselor] wanted my son to have a success plan.”

One of the teachers helping her son succeed is math instructor Michael Weiss. Part of the learning environment at Broughal is the teachers’ clearly expressed belief that “you can get this,” Ghafoor-Davis asserts-a belief that contrasts with expectations other teachers have had for her son.

“They just assumed he’d do the wrong thing,” she said.

Another component of Weiss’s success in teaching math is a policy that encourages skill-building by allowing students to earn credit by making up missed assignments. In contrast to punitive, permanent grade-docking, incomplete work can be completed later, so students are encouraged to stay on top of the skills they’re learning.

“He comes home and does IXL [math problem sets] himself,” Ghafoor-Davis marveled.

‘Teaching them to problem-solve, so they’re ready’

Josephine Young also enrolled her son at Broughal after an unhappy beginning at another middle school. She explained that she took advantage of open enrollment, but found that the other school ultimately didn’t work for her son, who is now an eighth-grader at Broughal.

“As parents,” she said, “we’re raising men.” She notes that at Broughal, all cultural heritage is deemed worthy of honor and recognition, and contrasts that attitude with a world that often sees only color.

Young praised the social and emotional learning that goes on at Broughal.

“They nip things in the bud here,” she explains. However, teaching young teenagers to behave appropriately doesn’t come at the cost of circumventing parents, she continued. “Teachers and parents play very strong roles – when athletes and movie stars thank people for their success, they thank their teachers and their parents. This school honors who I am by asking me to be part of it.”

The changes in math instruction are also hitting home for Young and her son.

“They’re teaching them to problem-solve,” she asserts, noting some schools “manage to the numbers.” As educational consultants explained, exploration before formalization is a more challenging way to teach math than process memorization, but it allows the students to own the skills they develop. BASD administrators deliberately selected a math professional development program for Broughal teachers that would improve students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. District officials hope to improve students’ rapid recall of math facts, but more importantly, teach them how to use what they already know to tackle math problems posed in new and unexpected ways.

Rachel Vaughn, mother of a sixth-grade girl and two former Broughal students who are now at Liberty HS, concurs. If students just memorize steps, she says, they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. Vaughn said she sees the value of the students problem-solving out loud and in teams in the classroom.

“You have to learn from each other,” she asserted, pointing out that solving a math problem can take many different paths. “One way doesn’t work for everyone.”

The problem-solving skills taught at Broughal go beyond math. Young believes the school’s holistic approach to education is exactly what’s needed.

“I just go around bragging about the school to people who don’t know it,” she said with a smile. She reflected on her knowledge, as a parent, that her children have different personalities. At Broughal, she said, “they care about the whole child… the family.”

Being seen as an individual has encouraged Young’s son to do what it takes to be successful in school.

“It’s a great feeling,” she said, “when your son comes home and says he recognized he needed extra help” and proudly reports, “I brought a C up to a B.”

‘You’re not in it for what I’m

in it for’

Ghafoor-Davis, Vaughn, and Young are united in their praise for Principal Rick Amato.

“It starts with leadership,” Young said. “It starts from the top.”

Indeed, the “culturally responsive teaching” that Ghafoor-Davis sees her son receiving follows the tone set by Amato, who became Broughal principal in 2016.

“I realized my son loved [chorus director Amy] Putlock when he told me she read “The Hate U Give” and said, ‘She gets it, Mom.’” “The Hate U Give” is a 2017 novel that covers issues like “code switching” (changing between dialects of English based on one’s setting or audience) in the African-American community, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other urban themes.

“It’s the difference between knowing you teach students of color,” Ghafoor-Davis said, “and getting it. Having low expectations is just as bad as no expectations.”

Vaughn concurred.

“For young kids, it’s easy for their minds to be trained in a direction,” she contends, including an unproductive direction of low self-esteem and low personal expectations.

Vaughn’s conviction that Broughal is the right place for her daughter testifies to the alignment of her own goals and the teachers’ goals. She helped Ghafoor-Davis and Young put into words the disconnect they experienced at their children’s former school: “You’re not in it for what I’m in it for.”

Amato’s gift is wanting to know about students’ lives and cultures, while never using environmental challenges as an excuse for low expectations. His bookshelf contains both “The Wisdom of Wooden” (by legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden) and Christopher Emdin’s “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood.”

In his 2016 book about the “pedagogy of poverty,” Emdin talks about the practice, deeply ingrained in education, of rewarding docility. Students who sit quietly and appear to listen are treated well; students who ask questions or display their lack of engagement are reprimanded or punished. The educational consultants interviewed for this series called the problem “playing the school game,” and noted that children from privileged backgrounds may appear to do well because they’ve trained themselves to sit still and be quiet, but the inappropriate pedagogy and lack of engagement sells them short too.

Amato and his faculty are working on changing all that by building a program that neither ignores students’ lives outside school nor uses cultural factors as an excuse for low achievement.

‘The taxpayer … doesn’t recognize the impact this is going to have’

The educational transformation at Broughal coincides with a larger community effort to improve academic achievement at all area schools. Tim Fallon, CEO of the Lehigh Valley Public Telecommunications Corporation, is leading an initiative called Lehigh Valley Reads. The goal of the program is to have 75 percent of local students entering fourth grade reading proficiently by 2021, and 100 percent grade-level reading proficiency for entering fourth-graders in 2025.

Lehigh Valley Reads is focused on primary-grade literacy, but Fallon sees the project growing.

“When we achieve that goal [of 100 percent literacy at the end of third grade], does it make sense to expand beyond it? Of course,” he said. He points to other investments in education made by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, such as the American Graduate program, aimed at increasing high school graduation rates and helping high school graduates get the additional education or training they need to find gainful employment.

Fallon said he recognizes that investments in primary and secondary education can yield economic returns-something he thinks many Americans are too short-sighted to notice.

“I don’t think taxpayers recognize the impact that this is going to have,” he laments, “but they are going to pay less in taxes, because we’re going to have lower school costs going forward, and most importantly, we’ll have kids who will graduate, and be ready to go to work or college.”

Nonprofit programs like Lehigh Valley Reads and BASD initiatives like RBG3, the district’s phonemic-awareness-centered approach to elementary-grade literacy, as well as the Broughal CSI plan, are investments in the human assets of the Lehigh Valley. Fallon is adamant that they’re not just the ethically right thing to do, but also the pragmatic choice – a view that is a stark counterpoint to the short-termism that plagues both corporate and public investment decisions.

“Spend the money now so you don’t have to spend 10 times that amount later, is not something we as a society are particularly attuned to,” he says.

‘You have to equip the teachers’

Math consultant Jason Adair describes the challenge of modern education this way: “I use a piece of data: the future jobs report that comes out every five years. In 2020, [the number-one skill that will be needed] is problem solving, number two is critical thinking, and number three is creativity. ‘I do, you do, we do’ does none of that. We have a generation of kids who look like good math students, but really, they’re just good memorizers.”

Broughal parents see the change happening, and welcome it.

“You have to equip the teachers so they can work with the children,” Ghafoor-Davis said.

Challenged by the high expectations their parents and teachers have for them, and nurtured by a faculty that uses trauma-informed practices to make sure each child is positioned to learn, Broughal students are actively engaged in their own academic and personal growth. The children of these three parents are involved in the drama and music programs. Their favorite teachers are music instructor Adam Stoltz, vocal music instructor Amy Putlock, and math teacher Michael Weiss.

Vaughn’s daughter has a passion for the arts and is considering a future in fashion design. Young’s son has a “creative eye” and a vocal talent that earned him a solo at the recent Festival UnBound in Bethlehem. Ghafoor-Davis’s son has an affinity for Dr. Phil McGraw and an interest in medicine that may lead to a career in psychology or psychiatry. Their parents and their teachers are united in their efforts to help them realize their potential.

This is the third part of a four-part series on the Comprehensive Support & Improvement plan at Broughal MS. Part one outlined the CSI plan; part two looked at the plan from the perspective of teachers and consultants involved in its implementation; part four will revisit Broughal at mid-year to evaluate the school’s progress.