Does NY City Principal Have Bar Passage Answer?

I've always said that if you want to know where the cutting edge in education is, head over to your local grade school. That's certainly true of emphasis on learning styles and introduction of teaching technology. But I wonder if it might also be true of bar passage at law schools.

There's a great story in the NY Times about a high school principal, George Leonard, who has succeeded in creating a system in which previously-unsuccessful students could succeed.

Mr. Leonard is a man of many solutions, many of them innovative, many of them, apparently, also effective. In New York City, only about 50 percent of students manage to graduate in four years. At Bedford Academy, 63 percent of the students qualify for free lunch, a majority are being raised by a single mother and another significant number are being raised by someone other than a parent. Yet close to 95 percent of students graduate, and virtually every one of those goes on to college.

That's exactly the turnaround some of us want in our bar passage rates. And many students at law schools of access struggle to surmount many of the same lifelong hurdles that Mr. Leonard's students struggle with. So how did he turn it around? In part, he uses the same strategies that many schools with low bar passage rates use: requiring that at-risk students participate in more education that focuses on the test itself. But he also approaches things from the teaching side, something that law schools are often loathe to do.

As all-powerful and bureaucratic as the Department of Education appears to so many parents, it allows room for carefully chosen educators to call their own shots, particularly in Empowerment Schools like Bedford Academy, where principals have an unusual amount of control over budget matters.

For Mr. Leonard, that autonomy means insisting that all entering students spend their Saturday mornings in preparatory classes the summer before they enroll.

“We tell them they can’t enroll in the fall unless they come over the summer,” said Mr. Leonard. “It’s not true, but we lie anyway.”

Autonomy also means an automatic weeklong suspension for any student who “disrespects a female,” said Mr. Leonard. [Wouldn't it be glorious if law school discipline policies that claim "no tolerance" of racism and misogyny actually worked this way?] It means requiring struggling students, in the weeks before the Regents exams, to attend studying sessions on Saturday from 9 in the morning until 9 at night. It means the most senior, experienced teachers, including Mr. Leonard, teach not the school’s academic jewels, but the most struggling students.

AND it means the school’s teachers administer almost no homework. “We found it was a waste of time for the teachers and the students,” said Mr. Leonard. Instead, they emphasize after-school tutoring where the teachers can keep a better eye on whether the student is actually grasping the material.

Quality control is all — quality of the teaching, that is, not the students. The exacting Mr. Leonard has let half his teaching staff go every year. His mandatory teaching technique involves constant testing, not to keep the students on their toes, but to let teachers know whether they’re getting through.

“Quiz them to death,” Mr. Leonard was advising a group of prospective principals in his office this week. “You need ways to monitor their progress that don’t depend on what they’ll just tell you. A kid can go to school all day and not remember a thing he’s learned except what he had for lunch.”