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The Charter School Academy of Learning and Leadership Fails to Meet Federal Standards

Posted on: Tuesday, 26 July 2005, 15:00 CDT

Leland Williams hadn't walked far from his school's front door when he found himself in the midst of trouble.

Summer school had just let out for the day at the Academy of Learning and Leadership, and the 12-year-old was about to take his usual shortcut between two houses when plainclothes officers emerged from unmarked squad cars.

Wearing bullet-resistant vests and with guns drawn, the officers shouted to Leland: "Get back!"

Leland had stumbled into a drug raid.

For Leland, an aspiring rapper who goes by the names "City" and "Mil-Town Server," it was a familiar scene. It reminded him of the day U.S. marshals raided his own residence several years ago in search of a relative. Just three blocks from the school, the father of a 6-year-old girl who attends A.L.L. was killed last month in an attempted armed robbery.

Such is life for Leland and other students at A.L.L., 1530 W. Center St., a fledgling kindergarten-through-eighth-grade charter school that recently was cited for not meeting federal reading and math standards established by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law calls for all students to eventually be proficient in reading and math.

A.L.L. is far from reaching that goal. Among fourth-graders at the school, only one in five students is proficient in reading, and only one in 20 is proficient in math, based on state tests given this past school year.

At the eighth-grade level, only about one in four students at the school is proficient in reading, and none is proficient in math. A.L.L., which had 200 students last year, is one of 40 schools in the city that failed to make enough progress.

While there are many reasons children struggle in school, and the poverty and violence around the kids who attend A.L.L. are a major factor, says Clifford Vogl, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at the school. A.L.L. is in one of Milwaukee's deadliest neighborhoods.

"It's a war," Vogl declares.

If the school is to satisfy the requirements of the law, it must be able to reach students like Leland, a self-described "hood-type person" who wears his pants sagging, refers to his friends as "my niggas" and resists being and talking "all proper" as his grandmother would have him do.

Although he speaks of getting out of the ghetto and going to college, he is enthralled with street life, as evidenced in his strikingly sophisticated lyrics about crime and violence.

"It's like I got a book in my head," he says. "My mind writes my lyrics for me. I just memorize them."

Leland who transferred from nearby 21st St. School, a public school is taking summer classes because of what his grandmother, Lee Thompson, describes as a lackluster performance in the sixth grade. She has him taking the drug Concerta to deal with attention deficit disorder, although Leland says his hyper-activity is "normal" and that the drug makes him feel "high."

Hopes are high

Educators and some parents are optimistic A.L.L. can turn things around, but they believe the job will be easier with students who have been with A.L.L. from the start.

"We make no bones about the fact that our kids are low," founding director Camille Mortimore said. "That's one of the major motivations for opening the school. We're making progress."

Tarji Pollard, 38, a home-based day care provider and vice president of the school's parent leadership council, believes the school has the potential to do well.

"I think the kids that started off in the beginning will make a difference," says Pollard, who has enrolled her son, Tarjirion, 5, and her niece, Ahrianna, 6, in the school, where they both will start first grade in the fall.

She likes that school officials call parents if students are not there by 9 a.m. She says more parents should get involved.

"They don't want to come out to the school," she says. "But if you say, Let's go to the club,' they're ready to go."

The Academy of Learning and Leadership, which is connected to the LaVarnway Boys & Girls Club, is in one of the most violent areas in the city. There have been nine murders within a half mile of the school so far this year. The estimated median household income in 2004 for a one-mile radius around the school is $18,926, compared with a citywide median household income of $32,644, according to estimates from the market research firm Claritas.

Ahrianna's father, Leo Pugh Jr., was shot to death last month in the attempted robbery three blocks from the school. Now, the little girl's wardrobe includes a memorial T-shirt to the man she considered her "best friend." Ahrianna plays on a block not far from a makeshift shrine to her father. The shrine includes everything from the innocent, such as a large yellow Winnie the Pooh doll, to the not-so-innocent, such as bottles of Seagram's gin.

Vogl, a towering, dread-locked, former professional rugby player and U.S. Air Force officer, does his best to fill in where parents are unwilling or unable.

He visited a student at the boy's home the other day to help him with homework; it's on the same block where Vogl grew up.

The two of them studied for an hour at nearby Kilbourn Park. They read a book called "The Masai and I," which seeks to draw parallels between the life of an African tribe and a black child who lives in an American city. A main lesson from the book was overcoming adversity.

The boy told Vogl he felt like he wasn't very smart.

"You're not dumb," Vogl said, recounting how he didn't get good grades himself, but is now working on a master's degree in urban education. "You just haven't had people to teach you how smart you are.

The Academy of Learning and Leadership is one of 136 schools nationwide that uses the "Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound" program, an educational approach that has students do field studies and group projects based on various expeditions, although such expeditions have taken a back seat this summer, as educators deal with a select group of students who they felt needed help in reading, writing and math.

The four-week summer school session, which ended Friday, is part of what the school is doing to keep from being cited again for failing to make what the federal government calls "adequate yearly progress." It's also a reaction to the experience some teachers had last fall when students came back and needed lots of review.

"It's amazing how much they forgot," says Stacy Peterson, who teaches 5-year-old kindergarten and first grade.

Former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent Howard Fuller, director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University and chairperson of the city's charter school review committee, says one of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind is it can cause start-up schools that take students who are behind to land on the list of schools that failed to make enough progress.

"In some ways, it puts a chilling effect on people who want to start new schools and take on kids who are way behind, because you're not going to catch them up in two years," Fuller says. "But we still have to address it. All we can do is begin to talk about how you're going to get off the list."

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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