By Dana Goldstein | Posted Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012 by Slate

As a child growing up in Arizona and Georgia college towns during the 1980s and 1990s, the filmmaker Astra Taylor was “unschooled” by her lefty, countercultural parents. “My siblings and I slept late and never knew what day of the week it was,” Taylor writes in a new essay in the literary journal N+1. “We were never tested, graded, or told to memorize dates, facts, or figures. … Some days we read books, made music, painted, or drew. Other days we argued and fought over the computer. Endless hours were spent watching reruns of ‘The Simpsons’ on videotape, though we had every episode memorized. When we weren’t inspired—which was often—we simply did nothing at all.”

A deal to keep Highland Park students in the classroom was near completion at the state Capitol on Thursday afternoon.

Legislative leaders said they had reached an agreement on a way to keep the schools open under new management, under the auspices of another school district, charter school or intermediate school district.

Highland Park current employees probably can’t avoid a payless payday Friday, but the measure should allow students to remain in Highland Park school buildings and under the tutelage of their current teachers if they wish to do so.

Both the House and Senate are expected to take up the legislation this afternoon and it could be on Gov. Rick Snyder’s desk before the end of the day.

Highland Park Schools came under state scrutiny in August, after multiple years of operating in a deficit. Although the district has shrunk from some 3,179 students in 2006 ago to 989 in January, spending per student has outstripped revenue and many of the district’s children are residents of Detroit.

On Jan. 27, Gov. Rick Snyder appointed Jack Martin, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Education, to run the district. Several days later, a school board member filed a suit alleging that meetings held by the financial review team that recommended an emergency manager were in violation of the open meetings act.

Last Wednesday, a Lansing judge agreed with that assessment, invalidating Martin’s appointment. Lawyers on both sides are still trying to iron out the details of the ruling. In response, the state held a public meeting Wednesday for the financial review team to go over its findings again, and the team again recommended an emergency manager be placed over the district.

At the meeting, members of the financial review team said that without an emergency manager, the district may not make it through the school year.

Also read: ‘Distressed District’ bill to save Highland Park students passes House, needs Senate approval

So Doug White, principal of Garfield Elementary School in inner-city Kansas City, was relieved when his school, like many across the country, began offering dinner to students enrolled in after-school child-care or tutoring programs.

With breakfast and lunch already provided for poor students, many children now are getting all their meals at school.

“When you know about those situations those kids are bringing into the school and we are asking them to sit down and concentrate and do their work, and they might be hungry and we haven’t been made aware of it yet – we definitely want to do everything we can to help the kids,” White said.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2010, provides federal funds for the after-school dinner program in areas where at least half the students qualify for free or reduced price lunches. Before the change, the program was limited to 13 states and the District of Columbia. Most states had provided money for only after-school snacks.

Since the change, districts have started rolling out dinner programs both in states newly able to offer them and states like Missouri where funding was available previously but districts didn’t always know about it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates there will be almost 21 million additional suppers served by 2015 and that number will rise to 29 million by 2020. The added spending would total about $641 million from 2011 to 2020.

Advocates for the poor praise the program, but there have been complaints from conservatives who question whether the schools should be feeding kids three meals a day. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh asked on-air in November, “Why even send the kids home?”

Dinners are funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Child and Adult Care Food Program, which also helps feed people enrolled in child and adult day care programs and emergency shelters. The number of dinners served through the program has grown over the past decade, although the USDA doesn’t currently break out how many meals are served through after-school programs specifically.

“The USDA has done a lot to streamline the requirements and made it easier for people to apply and participate,” said Crystal FitzSimons, who researches and advocates for after-school meals for the anti-hunger nonprofit Food Research and Action Center. “Before, we did outreach in the states that allowed it. There were programs participating. But I think it has gained a lot of momentum and a lot of visibility because it has been expanded nationwide.”

In California, the Oakland Unified School District started a pilot program in October, dishing up dinner in 11 of its 101 schools. The district plans to expand the program in 19 more schools by the end of the school year.

“There are some of these kids who you know just don’t eat when they go home,” said Jennifer LeBarre, nutrition services director for the district, where about 70 percent of its 38,000 students qualify for subsidized meals.

In Tennessee, Memphis City Schools are serving about 14,000 after-school meals daily. About 84 percent of the district’s 110,000 students qualify for free- or reduced price lunches.

Kate Lareau has mixed feelings about the program even though her first-grader enjoys eating dinner at her Memphis elementary school’s after-school program. As a grant-writer for a nonprofit that works with people in a south Memphis housing project, Lareau said she can afford to feed her daughter, but knows that a lot of children go without.

“Do we need to provide all three meals? I’m not sure,” she said. “But I personally know children who don’t get any food after they get home. I don’t want those kids to be hungry for sure.”

The district began offering the meals, featuring entrees such as Cobb salads and ham and cheese sandwiches, in 70 of its 200 schools in November and plans to expand to the program in 30 more school by year’s end.

“In a perfect world, June and Ward would grab the Beav and Wally and give them a great big breakfast with a hug and kiss and send them off,” said Tony Geraci, executive director of child nutrition for the district. “There would be pot roast wafting through the living home when they show up at home. But that’s not how it is.”

Besides addressing hunger, the program also draws children into after-school programs that can help children learn, said FitzSimons.

That was the case in Kansas City, where 86 percent of students are so poor they qualify for government-subsidized meals. The district expanded its after-school meal program into Garfield and six other schools in January. The district now serves dinner to about 1,700 students in 18 schools each weeknight, about 10 percent of the district’s enrollment, said Ellen Cram, the district’s director of child nutrition services.

“If that meal gets the parent and child in the door for the opportunity to study I’m happy to offer that carrot, so to say,” Cram said over the din of elementary students eating a dinner of turkey and cheese sandwiches, baby carrots and raisins. “Offering this supper meal is just huge for the parent. They know they’ve got something good, basic here to start with. So if they are going home to a meal of pasta then at least here they had milk, they had a fruit, a vegetable.”

Published: February 20, 2012 by the New York Times

LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday officials in Adelanto, a California desert town, are set to consider whether parents there can be the first to take over a failing public school under a new state law that is being closely watched around the country.

The Hollywood version? It’s already a done deal.

In a rare mix of hot policy debate and old-fashioned screen drama, 20th Century Fox is preparing a September release for “Won’t Back Down.” The film heads smack into the controversies around so-called parent trigger laws that in California and a handful of other states allow parents to dump bad teachers and overrule administrators in bottom-ranked schools.

Viola Davis, an Oscar nominee as best actress for “The Help,” plays a teacher who risks career and friendships to join the revolt. Maggie Gyllenhaal is the single mother who sells cars, tends bar and rouses parents to take charge of their grade school.

Holly Hunter, the union rep, loves her teachers and so she fights the takeover with a ploy you might expect from a corporate villain.

“When did Norma Rae get to be the bad guy?” Ms. Hunter mutters. Her role recalls the title character in the pro-union film “Norma Rae,” as she navigates the ferocious politics of education reform’s nuclear option, the trigger laws.

These measures have backers on both ends of the political spectrum and on both economic extremes: from Bill Gates, whose charitable foundation supports the takeover movement, to the poor or working-class parents of Adelanto. But they have also pushed unions and school administrators into an unwelcome role as opponents of change.

Now the trigger laws have connected with a movie culture whose new preoccupation with timeliness lends urgency and risk to reality-inspired dramas that in the past were usually set safely in the past.

“Won’t Back Down” describes itself as being “inspired by actual events.” But it portrays a fiercely contested school takeover — set in Pittsburgh, though Pennsylvania does not have a trigger law — before any has occurred in real life.

Texas, Ohio and Connecticut are among states that now permit a trigger process. But a take-over in Adelanto would be the country’s first, according to Ben Austin, the executive director of Parent Revolution, which promotes the tactic with backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“I thought it was a prank,” Mr. Austin said of his surprise at a call in which he learned that Walden Media, backed by the conservative-leaning billionaire Philip Anschutz, was shooting a drama in which teachers and parents aim to take charge.

For Walden, the film is a second shot at an education-reform movie. With Mr. Gates and the progressive-minded Participant Media, Walden was among the financial backers of the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman.’ ”

That film, released in 2010, advocated, as potential solutions to an education crisis, charter schools, teacher testing and an end to tenure. But it took in only about $6.4 million at the box office and received no Oscar nominations after union officials and others strongly attacked it.

“We realized the inherent limitations of the documentary format,” said Michael Bostick, chief executive of Walden. Now, he said, the idea is to reach a larger audience through the power of actors playing complicated characters who struggle with issues that happen to be, in his phrase, “ripped from the headlines.”

“Detachment,” by Tony Kaye, another film set in troubled schools, is set to open in New York and Los Angeles next month.

Daniel Barnz, the director and a writer of “Won’t Back Down,” said he had wanted to recreate the thrill of past action-inspiring social dramas without being snared in partisan debate. Working from an earlier script by Brin Hill, he introduced the parent-trigger mechanism as a plot device but insisted that the character played by Ms. Davis be a teacher, thus bringing teachers into the reform process.

“I am extremely pro-union,” Mr. Barnz said. In the movie’s fictionalized law for Pennsylvania (which, because it was shot there, helped subsidize the film’s $20 million budget with a tax credit), a school takeover could occur only if a majority of both parents and teachers were to demand it, rather than parents alone, as in California.

Wythe Keever, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, a teacher’s union, said his organization, though wary of existing trigger laws, would look more kindly on a system that included teacher input. But he cautioned against another premise of “Won’t Back Down”: that union contracts have sometimes impeded reform.

“Collective bargaining is not the problem,” Mr. Keever said in an interview on Friday. “It produces protections not only for the teachers, but for the students.”

Mark Johnson, who produced “Won’t Back Down,” said the film’s humanity might outshine its politics. “With issues movies, some of those you remember best you remember for the people, not the issues,” he offered.

For Ms. Davis, certainly, the appeal is personal. In what she called her first real leading role — in “The Help,” she fronted an ensemble — Ms. Davis described her character as wrestling personal demons while fighting for something that does not involve race. “I’ve never had that,” she said.

As for education, she added, experience persuades her of the need for teachers and mentors who can operate outside the system. “I’m sorry, I just know if you don’t have a strong advocate for a child, they’re not going to make it,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Gyllenhaal framed her character, a frustrated parent, as “someone who doesn’t think of herself as an activist at all,” but “gets radicalized by the situation she’s in.” She is much like Meryl Streep in the activist thriller “Silkwood,” Ms. Gyllenhaal noted, or the flawed, sexy legal crusader played by Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich.”

Events in that film occurred in Hinkley, Calif., which, coincidentally, is near Adelanto, the town where a trigger petition will be reviewed on Tuesday at a school board meeting that could match a big moment in “Won’t Back Down.”

“Next Tuesday night’s board meeting will see a show of force” by both parents in favor of the takeover and the California Teachers Association, whose Adelanto chapter has helped those opposing it, said an internal memo circulated among Parent Revolution executives last week. The memo predicted confrontations between supporters and opponents and said that “a range of provocative techniques” would frame the session.

If teachers were included in a trigger attempt — as happens in “Won’t Back Down” — the California Teachers Association, which has avoided taking a formal position, would look more favorably on the action, suggested Frank Wells, a union spokesman.

Still, he voiced surprise that the parent trigger laws should become a subject for Hollywood at all. “I can’t wait for ‘Vouchers 3-D: The Movie,’ ” he said.

On Thursday, the New York State Department of Education and the state teachers union came to an agreement on revising the teacher evaluation process to include students’ standardized test scores.

Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, New York’s highest court ruled that New York City’s Department of Education could publish the ratings of 12,000 teachers, which are also based on standardized test scores.

Both developments are part of a push to use gains made by students on tests (so-called “value-added data”) to determine which teachers to promote, fire or simply keep on the job. This is in contrast to the more traditional, principal-led evaluations that critics have long charged are too subjective.

Those critics have won, but I doubt our schools will benefit. I doubt, also, that this new system will last.

As a veteran teacher, I cringe when I hear politicians say that current evaluations do not include student learning as a factor. When my principal observes my class, he will witness student learning in many forms. For example, he might see me call on a student who has been struggling.

Perhaps that student will not be able to answer the question perfectly, but he will be able to do it far better than he would have at the beginning of the period. My principal is a veteran and knows learning when he sees it. I trust his judgment.

The new evaluations hinge on a flawed notion of student progress. This will lead to their downfall.

One reasonable way to determine if, say, a fifth-grader has progressed would be to, at the beginning of the year, administer a pretest that is identical to the test she will take at the end of the year and then compare the two results.

But this is not what happens. Instead, students take the fourth-grade test at the end of fourth grade and the fifth-grade test at the end of fifth grade. Since the fourth-grade test is easier, scores often go down on the fifth-grade test. To see if this decrease on the harder test still qualifies as “progress,” evaluators compare the fifth-grade scores of all the students in the state who got the same score on the fourth-grade test. From this, they attempt to calculate student gains.

If it seems confusing, well, it is. And this is an oversimplified explanation of how value-added data works.

Even some of the experts who created value-added measures admit they are not very reliable. Error rates of over 30% mean that even an effective teacher could be deemed ineffective, and vice versa. That is why, as a safeguard, according to New York State law, value-added data cannot be used to count for more than 40% of a teacher’s entire evaluations — the other 60% is still based on principal observations.

Forty percent is still way too high, but things just got worse. According to the state Education Department, under the new system, “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.”

In other words, if a teacher gets a low enough student performance score, he will get an ineffective evaluation regardless of how well he does on the other 60% of the evaluation.

In essence, then, the student performance score is not weighted as a maximum of 40%, as required by state law, but 100% for certain teachers. This loophole makes New York, for all practical purposes, the only state in the country that ignores the myriad experts who say that evaluation is to be based on multiple measures, not solely on test scores.

This is also why the last seven New York State Teachers of the Year have written a letter opposing these evaluations. These are the teachers who would, if the measures were accurate, have the most to gain (at least financially) from such a system. But they oppose it because no one should be judged by such flawed measures.

As disappointed as I am that inaccurate ratings are going to be published and that similar ratings will be used to unfairly fire or reward teachers, there is one fact that makes me optimistic: New Yorkers are a demanding bunch.

When value-added gets the opportunity to take center stage, all eyes will be on it, much as they are on every new pitching prospect touted by the Yankees.

I predict that soon enough, under the sort of intense scrutiny that comes with the implementation of a major data system like this, New Yorkers will have definitive proof of how flimsy of a statistical tool this really is — and how much of a disservice the new rating system is to the men and women who educate our children.

Rubinstein is a two-time recipient of the Math For America master teacher fellowship.

Reblogged from School Finance 101:

Lately it seems that public policy and the reformy rhetoric that drives it are hardly influenced by the vast body of empirical work and insights from leading academic scholars which suggests that such practices as using value-added metrics to rate teacher quality, or dramatically increasing test-based accountability and pushing for common core standards and tests to go with them are unlikely to lead to substantial improvements in education quality, or equity. Rather than review relevant empirical evidence …

I was at the height of my senior year. Elected vice president of my class and voted “Most Likely to Succeed” for the yearbook. Accepted into every college to which I had applied, and in a close race for the coveted title of Valedictorian. I was on top of the world—unstoppable. But LaMont Jackson, who was in my division, was not impressed.

“You ain’t that smart,” he told me, out of the blue. “You’re smart in this school full of blacks, but wait until you go to college with all those white kids. Their high schools are way better, and you’re going to see just how dumb you really are.”

With scathing indignation, I told him not to project his self-esteem issues onto me. He had an inferiority complex and I felt sorry for him, I said. But truth be told, LaMont had actually exposed me. He had unleashed my deepest, darkest fear about my brassy bright future. How would I fare in the white world of higher education?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, spending food stamps at the grocery store. Every year my birthday gift was the cake. And the only time I went to a museum or to the zoo was during school field trips. My mother loved her eight children, but she never read books to us or volunteered at our school. She spent most of her time cooking, cleaning, and managing the home. She bought a set of World Book encyclopedias for us and took us to church twice a week to study the Bible. She relied on the school to provide the academics, and she took care of everything else. She did a wonderful job with what she had, but I wondered how my white professors would perceive her, and me.

I recently read a moving piece by a budding journalist named Natasha Santos, and all my memories of LaMont came rushing back. With a couple of years of college under her belt, Santos grapples with whether her violent, impoverished neighborhood exists because of racism or because of the lack of personal responsibility. She wonders if being black will stop her from achieving success.

Little kids struggle with this, too. One year, I took my third grade class on a trip to Navy Pier. We waited about 20 minutes for our bus to arrive to take us back to school, but when it came my student Malik (not real name) was visibly upset. “Why were all the buses that picked up the white kids clean and shiny, but the bus that came to get us is all dirty?” he asked. Our yellow school bus was the only one out of dozens that was covered with dirty snow and salt. I didn’t know how to answer him.

LaMont’s words followed me to Dominican University, a beautiful, Catholic, liberal arts college surrounded by mini-mansions in suburban River Forest, Illinois. My parents dropped me off with a single suitcase and a small black trunk. We watched white students unload their possessions from U-Haul trucks. I made friends soon enough, but we lived as strangers beyond the school walls. Over Spring Break they literally went on vacation while I racked up more hours at my part-time job.

Academically, I was always playing catch-up in math and science classes. My professors assumed I came in knowing many things that I had never even heard of, despite the fact that I had taken honors physics and biology in high school. I thought my science teachers had been rigorous but I had no one to compare them to. I often felt bewildered and discouraged in my college-level science courses. I was embarrassed at first, and then I got angry. I entered college thinking I would eventually become a doctor, but I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. (I later learned this is a national trend among all races.)

LaMont was right: I was not as “smart” as I thought I was. Many of the white kids at my college had more opportunities to learn than I had. They had better schools, better teachers. They had tutors. They traveled to tourist destinations. The expectation that they would go to college began at birth.

LaMont was wrong: He thought the inequity would make me give up. He thought the unfair game of education meant black girls like me were destined to lose. Instead, it made me all the more determined to find a path to success, to chart my own course. I was not a member of the race at the top, but I clung to the belief that there was room at the top for me.

I wish LaMont could read this blog. I wish he was here. In the summer after we graduated from high school, LaMont was gunned down in a drive by shooting. It hurt me deeply, but it didn’t even make the local news. I dedicate this post to him, to Santos, and to the millions of minority students in America who are fighting to believe they can succeed.

Marilyn Anderson Rhames is a science teacher at a charter school in Chicago and holds masters degrees in education and journalism. A former reporter for People and Time, she also won various awards while at Newsday and The Journal News in New York. An educator for eight years, Marilyn is currently a Teaching Policy Fellow with Teach Plus and the founder of a start-up nonprofit called Teachers Who Pray. This blog offers her perspectives on health and wellness in the classroom, charter schools, and the need for education reform.

Despite tough economic times and a hostile political environment, immigrant rights activists are forging ahead, and having success, pushing a pro-immigrant youth agenda at the state level. And while many other pro-immigrant state policies fall to the wayside, state bills granting tuition equity to undocumented college students have yet to be sidelined. In fact, in several key states, they’re on the move.

It may seem improbable, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric which has spewed forth during the GOP primaries, and the devastation wrought by laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56. Immigrants make for easy scapegoats when politicians want to unite their base on fear-based rhetoric.

Yet immigrant youth will testify in the Florida State Senate today in their ongoing, uphill battle to reverse the state’s ban on allowing undocumented students and the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants from accessing in-state tuition. Meanwhile in Colorado, a tuition equity bill which would allow undocumented immigrant youth raised in the state to pay the same tuition as their fellow Colorado residents faces a possible House vote on Friday after having cleared the Senate with ease.

Tuition equity bills have also been introduced in Arizona, Hawaii, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia. Still other states, like New York, are pushing for bills to grant undocumented students access to financial aid and scholarships so they can pay for school.

Because undocumented students are not considered residents of the states where they live, undocumented immigrant youth who get to college are charged out-of-state tuition prices that are sometimes three times what their resident student peers pay. In the 11 years since Texas passed the first tuition equity bill, a dozen states have passed similar laws to eliminate this disparity.

Four states—Florida, Colorado, Georgia and Indiana—ban undocumented immigrants from accessing in-state tuition. And in Florida, it’s the immigration status of a student’s parents which determines what a student must pay to go to school. Even U.S.-born citizen children of undocumented students must pay out-of-state tuition.

SB 106 is Florida’s attempt to rectify that. A bill which would have helped just the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants failed in the Senate but SB 106 would allow both undocumented students and U.S.-born students to pay in-state tuition. That bill is scheduled for a committee hearing later this week.

Felipe Matos, a Miami-based activist and organizer with the Latino online advocacy group Presente.org, acknowledged that the bill faces tough odds. The Hispanic Caucus has yet to come out in strong support of the bill, and Matos said especially because the Black Caucus has already come out in strong support of SB 106, the immigrant community has been especially disappointed in Latino lawmakers.

“We are fighting against a supermajority in the Senate, a Republican governor who ran on bringing SB 1070 to Florida,” Matos said. “But we cannot give up on our home. This is our lives.”

In Colorado, the picture looks rather more hopeful.

“We’re so close to passing it this year,” said Carmen Medrano, an organizer with the Metro Organizations for People, a Denver-based group that’s formed a coalition with other immigrant rights groups to win tuition equity this year. “It’s the first year where it’s so close I feel like we can actually touch it.”

Medrano said that activists are furiously trying to secure more Republican votes in the House, where Colorado’s ASSET bill is headed. In order to pass, the bill needs two Republicans to come onboard. They already have the commitment of one.

There are two big reasons why tuition equity bills remain compelling policy that can still attract bipartisan support, says Tanya Broder, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center who has tracked tuition equity bills across the country. The first is that tuition equity bills “work,” Broder said.

States reap the economic benefits when they encourage high-achieving students to continue their education. Fiscal impact studies of tuition equity bills show time and time again that allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition actually generates revenue for a state. Because undocumented immigrants are barred from accessing federal loans and grants, college can become prohibitively expensive, and often, students who can’t afford school simply don’t continue their studies at all.

“And the other is that students themselves are not only organized and inspiring, but they have an appeal that crosses party lines,” Broder said.

Matos, who is undocumented, has another explanation: “The people who are mainly pushing for [tuition equity bills] are still undocumented youth, and undocumented youth are just relentless, you know?”

Indeed, after the swell of an aggressive national movement ended with the narrow, bitter defeat of the federal DREAM Act in 2010, activists pivoted to their home states to push a separate, smaller legislative agenda. Last year, Rhode Island passed a tuition equity bill. California activists won a bill that allows undocumented immigrant youth access to state-funded scholarships and beat back a repeal effort in the same year.

“The appeal of the story of a child who has grown up in this country and thinks of it as her home, and her future is very difficult to look good arguing against,” Broder said.

That doesn’t mean some lawmakers aren’t still trying to do just that.

“[T]he other part that bothers me is, why would we give favor to children of illegal aliens over children of legal, out-of-state, longtime American citizens?” Florida State Sen. Steve Oelrich in a hearing before the Senate version of the bill was killed, the Tampa Bay Times reported. “That just wasn’t right.”

Activists say these sorts of arguments do not deter them, and that they’re ready for a multi-year fight.

“Education is a human right,” Matos said. “It’s different when you’re fighting for something because it’s right, versus when you’re fighting for something because it’s your life.”

 Thirty years ago, the school district tried and failed to bring black and white students together. Will its latest effort undermine one of the city’s most successful schools?

Manassas High School students peruse books during a Reading is Fundamental rally. (AP Photo/Jim Weber)

Samantha Crawford, an 18-year-old high-school senior, doesn’t like to use the word “ghetto” to describe her neighborhood in the center of Memphis, Tennessee, but she can’t think of a better one. In Binghampton, people drink and hang out. They are transient, moving from apartment to apartment and job to job. Many don’t work at all. Samantha speculates that few have finished college, or even high school.

In the past two years, though, Samantha has begun to look at her neighborhood as an inspiration. “It’s not about where I stay, or wherever I come from, but what I’m going to make of it,” she says.

Samantha once earned only Bs and Cs. Now, she makes straight As. She had dreamed of college, but wasn’t sure how she’d get there. Now, she’s feeling overwhelmed by the choices available to her. In the past few months, she received five college acceptance letters, along with a scholarship to a local community college.

She attributes her success to her family, by which she means her mom, but also her teachers and principal at Manassas High School, located across town in North Memphis. “If you fail at Manassas…” she says, before stopping herself. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

The reforms that drove her school’s success are now up in the air, however. A contentious merger plan with the suburban school district surrounding Memphis has roiled the city, jeopardizing an effort to overhaul the struggling district and setting up a potential clash between the two leading approaches to school reform.

Manassas, an all-black, nearly all-poor school, has a lot going for it: a new building, a new set of intensely dedicated teachers who willingly work on Saturdays, and the attention — and money — of national foundations and advocacy groups, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The principal, James Griffin, is a soft-spoken former football player who wears rectangular glasses and immaculate suits and spends his days in classrooms, monitoring and helping teachers. He makes personal calls to students who fall behind.

The school could be a poster child for the “no-excuses” education reform movement, which argues that schools and teachers should be able to help all students succeed, regardless of the challenges they face outside of school — including broken families, violence and poverty. Last year, 111 of 131 seniors who applied to college were accepted. (The graduating class was 150.) The previous year, only 25 graduating seniors had been accepted.

Manassas is among a handful of schools in Memphis that have successfully piloted reforms based on the no-excuses ideas that have also driven the charter-school movement. Administrators expect the success to spread this year, following a full slate of changes, including a new intensive teacher-evaluation system with multiple classroom observations per year that was rolled out in the fall. Indispensable to the project has been a $90 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, supplemented by funding from local donors. The money has paid for consultants who helped hire new mission-driven principals and teachers like Griffin, and new technology, including video cameras to record teachers in the classroom. It will eventually fund bonus pay for teachers who raise student achievement.

But last winter, the Memphis school board essentially gave up, endangering the reform work when they voted to dissolve the school district into the whiter, wealthier suburban district that rings the city. The merger means the city school board will have to disband and be replaced by a joint city-suburban board. The administrators who initiated the reform effort may be removed.

City voters upheld the move, which was partly about money. The suburban county that encompasses Memphis has always helped fund education within the city. Although the suburbs run their own schools, they are not completely autonomous. A state law passed in 1982 banned them from breaking away into an independent school district — something many suburban areas were interested in doing in the aftermath of school desegregation, when white families fleeing from cities and towns filled up suburban neighborhoods.

Until now, this meant that Memphis could benefit from suburban funding while maintaining its own board and making its own decisions about how the money would be spent. But when Republicans took over the state assembly in 2010, it seemed likely they would repeal the 1982 law, making it possible for the suburbs to finally create their own district and withdraw their fiscal support. The Memphis school board acted before they had a chance to do so: By choosing to dissolve into the wealthier surrounding district, the board essentially decided to give up the school district’s autonomy in order to keep the funds rolling in.

Memphis school board members and administrators cite another reason for the merger, however. For the district to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students, school officials say they need to share not just funding with middle-class schools, but also, if possible, students, teachers, and the involved parents who help drive suburban success. “We know that if there’s diversity, and it’s socioeconomic diversity, those students tend to perform better. It’s less homogenous,” says Tomeka Hart, a school board member and president of the Memphis Urban League.

Consolidating with the county schools is not just about protecting funding. It’s a last-ditch effort to revive the goals of the school desegregation movement from a half-century ago. For two decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the Memphis schools remained starkly segregated. In 1973, a federal court ordered Memphis to integrate its schools using busing, but the program met with massive resistance from whites. Many fled for the suburbs or private schools. “Clearly people feel like this is a continuation of something,” says Daniel Kiel, a law professor at the University of Memphis who has studied school desegregation in Memphis. “In many ways it is, from an ideas standpoint.”

Now, the two reform movements — one that argues schools should be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and improve on their own, and another that argues schools are constrained by conditions beyond their control like poverty and segregation — are on a collision course in Memphis. The merger, which will be completed by next year, has led some to worry that Gates could pull its funds and the reforms could come to a halt, while suburban residents have protested against joining their school district with the high-minority, high-poverty Memphis schools. Although Memphis leaders have said a revival of busing for either white or black students is highly unlikely, fears among parents persist. Some towns in the suburbs are now talking of setting up their own separate districts. Both opponents and advocates have warned that many white families could move out of the county altogether.

Despite the obstacles, school leaders are hoping the merger could present a third way to the warring sides in the larger debate about how to reform education. The Memphis school superintendent, Kriner Cash, who has led the teacher-focused reform effort, is excited about the city-county merger — even though it could mean he loses his job.

“This is controversial,” he says, acknowledging that his views on the merger may clash with the no-excuses doctrine that has defined his tenure in the district. “The gap closes when folks go to school together, when they play together, when they’re in afterschool programs together, and when they live in the same communities together,” he says. “It’s a both-and. It’s not an either-or. That is the vision of this new district for me.”

*     *     *

Memphis is a place of contrasts. It’s the poorest large metropolitan area in America, according to the latest census data. Inside the city limits, rundown houses and liquor stores barricaded behind iron bars make the poverty palpable. The city spans a lot of land, and in many places it is sparsely populated, with empty lots stretching across multiple acres.

Education researchers have long known that poverty is linked to low student achievement, and Memphis hasn’t been an exception. The city schools are the worst in Tennessee, which in turn ranks near the bottom on national achievement tests.

Beyond the city limits, however, new suburban malls bustle with activity. Housing along the inner ring is showing its age, but large houses with sweeping lawns have gone up on the outskirts. Shelby County encompasses the city, but has its own semi-independent school district covering the suburban areas. (Some tax funding is shared, but the school districts are run separately.) It is one of the wealthiest districts in the state. The percentage of students who pass state exams in the suburbs is more than double the percentage in the city.

The city’s deep divides are partly a function of a previous effort to unite it 40 years ago. In 1968, the city’s schools were two-thirds white and a third black. Just five years later, once the busing initiative began, the ratio flipped: Two-thirds of students were black, and a third were white.

In the first year of busing, the old Manassas High School was refitted with air conditioning and enrolled some white students, but integration didn’t last long. When Samantha Crawford’s mother, Quintonia, attended Manassas in the mid-1980s, only two white students were enrolled, and both lived in the neighborhood. It was a good school then — discipline was strict, she says — but it’s even better now.

“When Mr. Griffin got there, he promoted college a lot more than it had been promoted,” says Crawford, who didn’t go to college herself and who now works as a hotel banquet server. “And they have some great teachers.”

The school, now in a brand-new building paid for in part by suburban tax dollars, stands on a desolate stretch of road in northern Memphis. Nearby, an abandoned chimney reaching out of an empty field is all that remains of an old Firestone factory. The only other signs of life are a Baptist church and a liquor store. The 550 students at Manassas don’t fill the cavernous space, which has room for twice as many. Even during class changes, the school has a hushed, empty feel to it.

Manassas was built on what used to be housing projects, meaning a major source of students no longer exists. But the small size allows for Griffin, the principal, to pay close attention to the remaining students. After calling a child who has fallen behind, Griffin often brings in the family to see him in person. He once traveled to the workplace of a mother who couldn’t make it to the school.

Griffin — trained by one of the private groups that have flocked to the city in the last three years to help improve its struggling schools — has been on the job a year and a half. Many of the teachers are also new after Griffin replaced nearly half the staff. Classes of 15 students spread out in classrooms big enough for 40, with banks of computers lining the walls. Empty rooms have been converted into a student “dorm room,” where seniors research colleges, a “data lounge,” for the teachers to study student progress on weekly tests, and a museum to commemorate Manassas High’s century-long legacy as an all-black school. “Find a way, or make a way” is Griffin’s slogan.

Griffin’s belief that teachers alone can raise the achievement and aspirations of children who live in poverty is based on experience. He was born when his mother was in eighth grade and lived with his grandparents after they kicked his mother out of the house. They were solidly working-class; his grandmother was a school custodian and his grandfather a factory worker. They spoiled him, but weekends at the house often got out of hand. He remembers his grandmother playing dice with the neighbors, and lots of alcohol. On one occasion, his mother stopped by to see him and found him drunk. He was four.

After a court battle, his mother gained custody and took him in, but she also struggled to provide a good home. She already had another baby, and soon had three more. She was illiterate, so Griffin read the mail out loud to her every afternoon. The family lived on $260 a month, and often slept on relatives’ couches. They also spent time in a homeless shelter. On at least one night, they slept on the street. By the time he reached 12^th grade, Griffin had attended 11 different schools. He was often in trouble, and barely passing his classes.

In his last year, one of his teachers pushed him to try for college. He did extra-credit assignments to bring up his grades, and took the ACT six times before he scored high enough to be eligible for admission. The University of Tennessee-Martin accepted him on a football scholarship. From there, he eventually earned his master’s degree and became a teacher. He’s now working on a doctorate.

Griffin says his childhood mirrors that of many of his students at Manassas, where 95 percent of students are poor and 99 percent are minorities. In Memphis as a whole, 87 percent of students are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized school meals. Two-thirds come from single-parent families. Nearly a third of students change schools each year. Griffin often uses his life story to remind his teachers and students that people who believe poverty is an excuse for failure are wrong.

“They say you’ve got to have a middle-class parent to make sure a child is successful, but what about me? Was I an anomaly?” he says. “I had teachers that kept me in the game and got me to stay in school, and that’s what it takes.”

Quincy Hassell lives in a working-class black neighborhood in East Memphis and moved around to various schools within Memphis before ending up at Manassas this year. Already he has internalized Griffin’s message. Quincy went from a 1.8 grade-point average last year to a 3.5 this year. He’s aiming for a 3.8, and out of the 10 colleges he applied to, five have already accepted him. “At this school, they woke me up,” Quincy says. “Do you want to be on the corner begging for money, or do you want to do something with yourself?”

Griffin’s conviction that all children can succeed with enough teacher attention and skill is also grounded in necessity. After busing failed in Memphis — and many cities like it — teachers and principals in urban schools were left to make the best of very difficult student populations. Although research has shown that the more concentrated the poverty in a school, the worse children perform, the latest generation of education reformers has seized on evidence that teachers are the single greatest factor affecting a child’s learning in school.

Memphis appears to be further proof that segregated urban schools can improve despite the odds. In 2011, the school district posted the biggest test-score gains in the state.

Josh Edelman, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation, said the progress on adopting reforms in Memphis is “exciting.” Although the merger vote prompted some Memphis leaders to worry that Gates would pull its funds, the foundation has said it will stay committed to the city, “as long as effective teaching and improved outcomes for all students remains a top priority.” Edelman says he’s hoping the merger of the two districts will allow the teacher-focused work to expand to a larger number of students.

The suburban district is pursuing its own programs to improve teaching. The merger has pitted the two bureaucracies against each other, however, and administrators in both systems have become defensive about their reform strategies, and dismissive of the other side’s efforts.

“I think the achievement gap takes a lot of different approaches to close. It starts with great teachers and great leadership,” Edelman says. “And I do think kids learn a lot from each other.”

Griffin and his supervisors in the Memphis district offices argue that this mixing of students is what is missing in their efforts. What if the barriers between inner-city and suburban schools were broken down, so students could learn from one other? And what if then, Manassas could combine its intensive academics with another sort of education, in which students pick up the social and cultural tools they will need to negotiate the outside world they’ll someday encounter? What if the struggling schools in Memphis didn’t have to turn themselves around alone?

“It’s not that children are smarter” in the suburbs, says Cash, who studied integration as a master’s student at Stanford University and led the schools in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., for nine years. “They’ve had more exposure to the things that equate to school-smart … concepts, words and experiences that equate to book-knowledge, and to test-knowledge.”

Integrating schools isn’t enough to completely close the achievement gap, but research has also found that mixing students by race and class can significantly improve their outcomes. “We ought to have the best ingredients for our students,” Griffin says. “That mixing would enhance their world.”

After taking over at Manassas last year, Griffin tried to add in that missing element to his school. Most of his students have never left the city limits, and many have never left their immediate neighborhood, he says. Few have had exposure to adults with white-collar jobs besides their teachers. Even if his students do well in high school, it’s unclear they’ll make it through college, where they will have to fend for themselves in a more diverse environment. Nationally, only 40 percent of black college students graduate from college, compared to 60 percent of whites. Minority graduation rates are the worst at public universities and community colleges — the types of schools where most Manassas students go.

Griffin talked to a private school in the suburbs about creating an exchange, so the students could meet occasionally to talk about where they were from and learn from one another. The planning was going well, until, Griffin says, the private-school administrators realized his vision included not just trips to the suburbs for his students, but trips to Manassas for the white students. The private school backed out.

The Memphis merger could present a new opportunity to continue the reforms introduced by Cash, while also allowing city schools and their more affluent neighbors to exchange resources, teachers and perhaps, someday, students. Irving Hamer, a deputy superintendent in Memphis, says that the “unspoken intent” is to “attempt to do some reconciliation between race and class here.”

When the district expands to encompass the entire county, students both inside the city limits and out in the suburbs will ostensibly have wider choices about where to go to school, which could provide opportunities for voluntary student mixing. For years, the city has been able to retain its small proportion of white students largely through a set of selective magnet schools that are attractive to middle-class families. In a joint suburban-city district, poor students from the inner city might also have the option of choosing a suburban school instead of the one in their neighborhood. (Manassas, for example, has attracted students from all over the city district because of its improving reputation.)

But Hamer says a new round of busing is a very unlikely outcome of the merger. “We’ve had our busing episodes, and we’re not reinventing those,” he says. “It’s not coming back.” Instead, he predicts the merger could lead suburban areas to separate from the consolidated district and white families to move away.

Last November, more than 100 residents of Bartlett, a small city situated just over the county line from Memphis, gathered for a town meeting in a converted church. Nearly all were white, although the number of black residents in Bartlett has increased to 16 percent in recent years. (The racial make-up of the suburbs has changed significantly in the past decade as many black middle-class residents of Memphis have moved in, often in search of better schools.) After a long prayer by a local pastor, the mayor, Keith McDonald, told the crowd that more than 1,000 students had left the local schools since the Memphis school board voted to dissolve itself the previous year.

“The people in Memphis don’t get it,” he said. “If these people leave, the burden goes up on all of us.”

Bartlett, along with two other towns in Shelby County, is now considering whether to create a separate school district — under the same state law that prompted the merger — before the two districts join next year. A consultant released a report this January suggesting a new district wouldn’t put too great a burden on the towns’ taxpayers. It is unclear if they will have to buy the school buildings from the county, however, which could be costly. And the state law is likely to face challenges in court by advocates of the consolidation.

Many residents believe the cost will be worth it. “I would rather the decisions about our schools be made by my neighbors, rather than an entire metro area that maybe doesn’t have the best interest of my kids at heart,” said Chris Huffstetler, 43, a 14-year Bartlett resident and father of three, at the town meeting. “I trust you guys. I trust my neighbors.” The audience broke into applause.

Later, his wife, Lisa Huffstetler, 46, explained that while she understood that difficult home lives of students are a challenge for Memphis, the district has a history of corruption and misspending money. “We’ve watched them make ridiculous decisions, one after the other,” she says. “We’re terrified for the education of our kids.”

Samantha Crawford, who wants to be a criminal profiler, a career she learned about on TV, hopes the suburban towns won’t secede. She has studied the merger, and thinks it could lift Memphis schools to new heights. “Some people don’t know this, but schools in Cordova and Germantown, they challenge them harder than they challenge us,” she says, referring to the suburbs. “If we all get together and become as one, we’ll get a better education.”

The merger seems to have inspired school reformers in Memphis to broaden their hopes about what’s possible in school reform, but Manassas’s gleaming but half-empty halls may never be filled with a blend of middle-class and lower-income students. “If we’re going to get the kind of pop where the Memphis city schools aren’t the bottom percent of schools in the state, which … they will always be because of the poverty,” says Cash, “then what you have to do is you have to get kids into the same classes.” Without that mix, some now say, the achievement gap may shrink, but it won’t close completely.

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report.