The education saga of Thaddeus Lott
You may not have heard of him, but most professional educators have, and they would prefer you never did. In a unicorn nation devoid of an honest education establishment, the story of Dr. Thaddeus Lott, past principal of Wesley Elementary School in Houston, defies convention wisdom and exposes the sociological-education complex for what it is, a con game. Well over ten years ago, Lott took a 99% minority school situated in a drug-infested neighborhood and achieved a 100% passing rate for his third-graders on the Texas state reading exam. When he first took charge of the school, only 18% were passing. His fifth graders, each one on the free-and-reduced lunch program (the official education metric for poor folks) like every other Wesley student, were performing 8th grade math and reading Shakespeare and Steinbeck. Yet he almost got fired, and were it not for fortuitous media intervention, the erudite Superintendent of his Houston school district would have removed him from Wesley.
Wesley Elementary is a throwback school much more reminiscent of the unapologetic Eisenhower era than the detached submissiveness of the Obama administration. Lott’s faculty maintained strict discipline, used old-fogey phonetics to teach reading, and drilled students in arithmetic tables. Crude techniques, boring tactics, but effective procedures for kids.
‘It’s a myth,’ says Lott, ‘that if you are born in a poor community and your skin is a certain color that you cannot achieve on a higher level.’ Wesley is one of Texas’ first charter schools. Dr. Lott purchased the Direct Instructional System for Teaching and Remediation (DISTAR), a program developed at the University of Illinois during the 1960’s. (Read Education’s Dirty Little Secret Mar, 23th) In a school district that routinely condemns over 10% of its students to Special Education hell, and that is what it is in poor, black schools, Lott’s special placements were under 3%.
Lott held steady and blocked the whole-language barbarians when they stormed his gate in the form of a hostile school superintendent. She abhorred the quiet rows of children executing academic drills instead of flitting about the room waxing eloquently in wacky half sentences. When she challenged his test results and implied he was cheating, ABC’S Prime Time Live was invited in and cast a national spotlight on his students’ success, his veracity, and his bosses’ predisposition for rabbit holes. An aroused community not only rallied around him and protected his program, but local residents petitioned the Houston School Board to allow Lott to mange three neighboring schools. In three years, the fourth-graders in Lott’s four schools went from a 37% cumulative passing rate on the state reading exam to 100%. Thus, for you eggheads and statisticians levitating in university laboratories, his methods were replicated on a small scale in an environment he controlled.
The unicorn superintendent was let go and Rod Paige was hired to replace her. Lott’s achievements may well have propelled Paige into the White House as Secretary of Education under George W. Bush. At any rate Lott and Paige are friends. When queried as to why Lott’s tactics, techniques, and procedures were not more widely replicated, Paige responded: ‘The error in your premise is that it is the methodology that makes Lott succeed. If I had to choose any single foundation for his success, it is his intense desire to cause children to learn.’
Whether it is Houston’s Wesley Elementary, Marva Collins Chicago Prep, or Baltimore’s Barclay School, there is plenty of evidence in isolated pockets across the country that minority children can be taught when there are adults in the school that believe they can learn and those adults administer curriculum methods that have proven to be successful. Arne Duncan does not have to waste billions of our dollars seeking chasing white rabbits and destroying careers, closing school buildings, and experimenting with students’ lives in the generic hope that enough cash, elbows, and you know what flying around will improve American education. The basics work when administered to children by adults who give a rabbit’s ear
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