Free The Prize by Dale Russakoff Page B

somewhere along the line he had fallen far off the track, and now, on the verge of becoming a teenager, faced maximum peril.
    â€œI just started looking out for him and wanting to figure out what had happened,” Weidman said.
    Part of the explanation was in Alif’s cumulative record—known in the school district as a cume card—an oversized, vanilla-colored chart with handwritten notations added year by year, listing his teachers and grades beginning in kindergarten. Every year through third grade—years when he should have learned to read—he got mostly D’s and F’s. By his own admission, he was a hellion. “I was bad then,” he said. “I used to just sit in class and do no work. I was not acting right.” Looking back, he couldn’t explain why, nor could his mother. Lakiesha Mills said she had assumed that Alif simply wasn’t trying. A cousin who was an aide in Alif’s third-grade classroom told Mills that he refused to pay attention or do his work. Mills said it didn’t occur to her that his teachers could have been responsible.
    But it is hard to separate a discipline problem from a teaching problem, especially in a classroom of young children. The BRICK team took the view that effective teachers were a powerful antidote to most misbehavior—teachers who captured and held children’s attention through a combination of strong pedagogy, empathy, and leadership. Even reluctant learners tended to get caught up in the positive flow. As it turned out, Haygood and Lee determined that Alif had almost uniformly weak teachers in those years. Asked what he thought of the teachers, Alif said he liked most of them, but he recalled that his classes were full of disruptions, and he always joined in. “If other kids were talking, I always went along with them,” he said.
    In those years, Avon had four certified teachers on the payroll asfull-time tutors to support struggling students, thanks to the New Jersey Supreme Court’s landmark
Abbott
v. Burke
decisions. In a series of rulings in the 1990s, the court ordered the legislature to equalize the funding of New Jersey’s poorest and most affluent districts in the name of guaranteeing educational opportunity to the state’s poorest children. But Alif and his mother said he never was offered tutoring.
    Required to repeat third grade, he landed the second time around in the class of Sharon Rappaport, one of Avon’s finest and firmest teachers. His reputation preceded him. “I saw his name on my class list, and I just took a deep breath and thought, ‘We’re going to work this out,’” Rappaport recalled.
    A mother of five who demanded the same respect and cooperation from pupils that she got at her dinner table, Rappaport was meticulously organized about reaching all her students, from stars to strugglers. Raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, she felt connected to them as a fellow child of what she called “the ghetto,” who grabbed education as her ticket out. She immediately noticed that Alif had almost no foundation in reading. She also recognized that he needed tremendous emotional support just to bring himself to try to learn.
    â€œYou could tell he really wanted to do well, to be proud of himself,” she said. “He would get this little glow if you praised him.” She sat with him during independent-reading periods, reading aloud to him, asking questions about the texts and working on letter sounds. She praised every positive step he took—a word he spelled correctly, a neatly written sentence. She developed relationships with his mother and father, talking often about how he was doing at school and at home.
    Rappaport also noticed that Alif was relatively strong in math and asked him to stay after school to help tutor students who were failing. His attitude changed dramatically, and his mother was stunned.
    â€œThat was one of his