This is a story about a high school in Missouri that should have been on the U.S. News list of the best high schools in America. The teachers are dedicated. Many of the kids are beating the odds against them. They are hard-working. They have grit and perseverance. They will make great contributions to society.
Ray Hartmann of the Riverfront Times tells an inspiring story of students, teachers, and administrators at Normandy High School who are succeeding despite the mainstream narrative that writes them off.
Ninety-seven percent of its students are black, and a stunning 92 percent of the 3,100 kids residing in the district’s 23 municipalities are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced student lunches. The median household income in the district is $30,100, and the median home value is $69,700.
Perhaps even more daunting…the district has a 40 percent “mobility rate.” That means, unlike your Claytons and Ladues, nearly half of the kids in the district are either homeless or moving between homes in the school year.
Many people look at these numbers, writes Hartmann, and think “failing school.” But when he visited, he saw a different story.
He saw teachers who care about students, and students who are proud of their school.
He attended graduation ceremonies and wrote about two students.
Meet Kayvion Calvert, one of the privileged few. Thanks to his own initiative — and to the fact that he went to a high school that cared about him and afforded him the chance to make the most of his abilities — Kayvion is off to Alabama A&M University to major in political science and minor in secondary education, with a résumé that’s almost ridiculously impressive.
He was class president as a senior, serving all four years in student government. He was also a four-year member of the school choir, a passion he pursued while singing in both the choir at his church and another one in the community, as well as acting in drama club productions.
Obviously, Kayvion Calvert is not your average kid. And, admittedly, maybe it helped that he didn’t come from just any public school district.
Then there’s Gabrielle Brown, Kayvion’s classmate. She was class valedictorian, with a GPA of 3.96. But, in fairness, she too was a bit privileged: Not only did her high school launch her to a college scholarship in computer science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, but it provided an opportunity to supplement her high school studies in an associate degree program at St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley.
So, in addition to graduating as class valedictorian, Gabrielle is already a member of the Phi Theta Kappa college honor society, which honors students at two-year colleges. She was also a member of the high school band. And she had an internship at Centene.
You could forgive Gabrielle if she were a little boastful about all this. But she’s not, deflecting credit to the fact that she was one of the fortunate ones who attended a high school that, in an email, she termed “a critical factor” in her success.
“At my school, you establish so many connections and develop so many relationships, you meet people from so many diverse backgrounds it’s honestly astonishing,” she wrote. “The people you meet don’t just fade out of your life, either. They are present and encourage you [to] continue on your road of success.
“When I was little, going to my elementary school as a child, they had programs to help children succeed. Whether the child was advanced or a little behind, they are capable of supporting children on a more personal level and really connect with them. They influenced me to become the person I am today, and I intend to continue giving back.”
That’s not your everyday loyalty from a high school student. But kids like Gabrielle and Kayvion didn’t go to your everyday privileged high school.
No, they graduated from Normandy. Yes, the same Normandy Schools Collaborative often presented as the symbol of all that’s wrong with public education in St. Louis and the nation.
Why isn’t this heroic school on the U.S. News list as one of the best high schools in the nation, instead of all those public schools in affluent neighborhoods and charter schools that cherrypick their students?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think most of us know the answer to the question. Too easy.
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I think most people don’t know the answer.
Congratulations to the 2 students who survived thus far.
There is not enough relevant data to assess the school’s performance.
While most are hoping for the best, it can only happen when the entire community (including the district’s 23 mayors, business leaders, UMSL, Beyond Housing, and clergy) holds the school board (Missouri Sate appointed board) and superintendent accountable for presenting timely,verifiable, relevant facts on the district’s performance. Stop accepting one or two examples as indicative of the the district’s overall performance.
Words can be complimentary.
Facts present truth.
Get out and vote in every election, especially in school board elections whenever the state decides to rid itself of Normandy. After many year of failing to turn around the small school district of Wellston the state school board forced them on the failing Normandy School District.
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Data are not truth. Data are only based on flawed standardized tests.
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What happened to my reply?
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Here is what happened to your reply. I am on vacation in Italy. I am in Florence. I went to the Uffizzi Gallery to view great works of art. I was not sitting by my computer. So I did not approve your comment, which was in moderation.
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Data that is not truth is based on flawed standards or measurements.
When decisions are not based on truths or facts, there is a higher probability of failure.
Decisions on educating school children should not be based on gut feelings, hearsay, or lies, like the decisions of the idiot in the White House.
It’s great that you are trying to enlighten citizens about the atrocities of the Charter movement led by deceitful people like Betsy Devos.
FYI. Normandy could be prime for falling into the hands of a charter scheme.
Normandy has not been fully accredited since at least 1993.
look at Normandy’s ACT scores to get a vague idea of Normandy’s performance. Normandy s probably still the worst performing district in the state and there is only a handful or two of districts in the state that are excelling.
Enjoy your visit.
I was fortunate to visit the Uffizzi Gallery last spring.
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Thank you.
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This story is really about the success of all the schools in the district. They have established a culture of care and support for their poor students. Many of their students are succeeding because the system looked after its students despite the many challenges their families faced. It reminded me of my old district. While we did not have as many poor students, we basically tried to meet students where they were and did our best to help them prepare for the future. In one of our elementary schools we also introduced some MAC (multi-age) classes in which students remained in a cohort for elementary school. Since we had three elementary schools that fed into the middle school, students were mixed with other schools during this transition. However, those students entered a “house” in which students mostly stayed with the same classmates and teachers during middle school. The teachers also changed grade level with the students in a three year cycle. This model allowed the teachers to better understand the students and their families. Parents seemed to like the continuity it provided to their children.
We are too preoccupied with rating and ranking in this country. There are many quality public schools that do not get acknowledgement for their outstanding work. Any metric is only as good as the person that creates the metric. A biased programmer will write a biased algorithm. We saw this when VAM misrated so many teachers. The same can be said of the ratings of schools.
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“We are too preoccupied with rating and ranking in this country..”
To say the least. It is a cancer. It takes the tendency for Americans to compete and exploits it in ways detrimental to society.
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Years ago, I got my first teaching job, just out of college, at a school serving an economically depressed one-factory town in northern Indiana. There were rampant problems–drug addiction and alcoholism, broken families, lack of education among the parents, teenage pregnancy. There were five remedial English preps in the school, and as the new teacher–the lowest on the totem pole–I got ALL OF THEM. A tiny little 9th grader in one of my classes left school because she got pregnant. Another of my 9th graders–14 years old–stole his father’s car and ran away with his girlfriend. They were apprehended by police three states away. One of my junior girls was tried as an adult for beating up another girl, kicking her repeatedly in the head, and sending her to the hospital. One of my junior boys was subdued by a phys ed teacher who caught him with a gun up against another kids’ head, yelling at him, “I’m gonna blow your f-ing brains out.” One of my sophomore boys slashed a teacher’s tires. One of my sophomores, who had been held back a couple times, didn’t like what some kid in the class said to him, so he got up, picked up his desk–his whole desk, and threw it across the room at the kid. You know, that sort of thing.
I had seen a touring production of Jesus Christ superstar. There’s a scene in that in which lepers are crowding around Jesus and he is overwhelmed. It is just too much. He can’t handle it. Once during that first year of teaching, I awoke from a nightmare in which I was that character–all those people crowding around, with all their problems–too much, too much, too much to deal with.
That dream taught me an important lesson. As a middle-school or high-school teacher, you will have over a hundred and fifty kids in your classes. Each one of those kids has major issues. To be a teenager is to have issues. Many of them have no adult in their lives who has a significant, positive emotional connection to them and can serve as a guide and mentor. And as a teacher of that many kids, there is never, never, never enough time.
And so, you try your best to do well by all of them, but there is never going to be enough of you to go around. You have to cultivate a kind of Buddhist detachment–a calm at the center of the storm, an ability to stop, breathe, and think. And it really helps if you take courage from your successes–from the ones you were able to reach and turn around and give them belief in themselves. Maybe it’s one or two kids a year, but those MATTER. And that courage gives you the energy to get up and do it the next day–to meet their sullenness and pent-up anger and frustration with kindness and encouragement, with the little personal connection–How did the game go? I heard that your grandma was hospitalized? How’s she doing? That was a really smart question, it got me thinking. I’ve got a book I think you might be interested in.–that shows them that you recognize them as a fellow human being, that you see them, that you give a damn. You should NOT try to be their friend, but these little connections matter. They matter a lot. And sometimes, you can change the whole trajectory of a life. Doing that, day in, day out, is like casting seed on the ground. Some of it lands in the right place and grows.
In a better world, class sizes would be really, really small, and teachers could know all their kids pretty well. Anyone who tells you different hasn’t a clue.
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Good stories, Bob. Great points, too. There is a tremendous difference between being someone’s friendly contact with a distant world and being their buddy. All children need to experience friendly, business-like contact with adults, and those who come from backgrounds sown with discord need it the most.
This morning on NPR there was a woman in the oral history booth telling of the aunt who was her source of the stability of a positive adult relationship. We all have to have these. Good communities give them to all the citizens thereof.
When I was a boy, there was a man about ten years my elder who was running a hay hauling crew. In those days, the old trucks that people used to load with hay were the ones from the 1930s, the 1940s being so dominated by the building of armaments for the war that there were no trucks made. They had this big international with dual axels and a beautiful, long-nosed, red cab. I was a very skinny and under muscled twelve year old. There was one man who treated me like I was a man. I never forgot that. I kept that memory as he grew older and I grew up. I kept it when I taught his daughters, when he got a kidney from his brother that extended his life a decade, and when we went to the funeral home.
This is important. And unmeasurable in its value.
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Wonderful story, Roy. Yes. This mentoring and modeling makes worlds of difference for kids.
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Here is another article on this high school from the St. Louis Dispatch:https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/a-senior-year-mostly-lost-for-a-normandy-honor-student/article_ce759a06-a979-53b6-99bd-c87a430dc339.html
The school district was the subject of the two part series The Problem We All Live With: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one
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TE, why is every comment by you a negative one? Are you trying to prove your mental superiority? Did you know that such posturing is a sign of insecurity?
The point of the article posted was to demonstrate that the reality of a state-assigned grade based on data is very different when you go inside the school and meet the students and teachers. You sneer by posting the cold bloodless data that the article undermines.
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Dr. Ravitch,
I posted links to stories done by people who went inside and meet the students and teachers and parents in the Normandy School District. Did you find their descriptions negative?
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Sorry, I did not see those links. Did you find this account to be not credible? The author thought it was an amazing school. Have you visited?
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“Why isn’t this heroic school on the U.S. News list as one of …?”
Ooh! Ooooh! I can answer that! Pick me!
A. Because it does not fit with the narrative of failing public schools in tough area.
B. Because journalism now consists of re-broadcasting stories found on-line because journalists are so underpaid that they cannot go around as witnesses to events themselves
C. Because standardized testing did not turn up the Normandy school on anybody’s radar due to the shortcomings of these atrocities as they relate to identification of good schools, teachers, and communities.
D. All of the above and more
The answer is D! I always choose the All of the above choices
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Because journalism now largely consists of barely reworked press releases, opinion pieces, and opinion pieces masquerading as research reports from PR firms and billionaire-funded “think” tanks
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This was accomplished without an elected school board….they lost their power in 2008, and now that they have two teach for America members……the legislature is considering giving them power again. The size of the student body has dropped from close to 35,000 to 23,000, unless you count the 12,000 in charters…..information is incredibly difficult to get(you do have access to every classroom teacher’s salary at the Post Dispatch). I am barred from making comments after PD articles, but I am allowed on the current affairs forum…..I use the letter Peter Downs sent to make the case to let them continue the progress they were making after replacing Mayor Slay’s charter advocates in my signature…….a phony history is routinely offered, but I am glad to hear this story about Normandy, no matter how it was achieved.My signature: This is a letter from Peter Downs to William Danforth , December 13, 2006. It provides an explanation of how the last 2 SLPS elected boards were cleaning up a mess, before the mistake of the state takeover. http://www.stltu.org/readmoredownsletter.html
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I think there is a factual error about the number of students in the district. Wikipedia lists the as having 3,300 students. Perhaps an extra 0 was mistakenly added. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_School_District
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