Catching Failures in Time

Students may fail to live up to their potential in early grades for complex and varying reasons, but that very failure often triggers a common result: the pupil steadily slides farther behind, gets tagged as a dullard, loses confidence in his ability to compete. In a drastic attempt to check that slide, North Carolina's public-school system is pulling such "underachievers" out of their home schools and into a costly public boarding school in Winston-Salem --with remarkable success.

The school's first eleven-week class of 140 boys is about to graduate. All are eighth-graders-recommended for the training by their local principals or superintendents because despite signs of roughly normal intelligence they were either failing or were at least a grade behind in reading. In fact, 80 of the boys were 31 grades behind. They come from such varied backgrounds as affluent suburbs, private schools, impoverished rural or mountain areas, and Negro slum areas in such cities as Charlotte and Durham (20% of the class is Negro).

"Crazy as Hell." The boys live in groups of six or fewer in a remodeled city hospital, with one counselor assigned to each 15 students for 24-hour guidance. Class sizes range from 20 down to individual tutoring. Reading clinics never have more than five students. The concentrated instruction is confined to basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, relies on oral explanations, uses no standard texts. The school's accent is on the positive: boys earn merits, never demerits, are rewarded progressively with a school jacket, pins for the jacket, a school sweater.

When the school's boyish-looking director, Dr. Gordon McAndrew, 38, a University of California Ph.D. who had headed a $2,000,000 project for the slum kids of Oakland's public schools, first heard of the North Carolina plan, he scoffed: "Anybody who'd get involved in that must be crazy as hell." But he did. Now he calls it "the most exciting experiment in education in America today." The thrill, he explains, comes in plucking the slipping student out of his failure-filled environment at the eighth-grade level--"about the last point of intervention where you can hope to make a difference"--and helping him discover that "the experience of success is exhilarating."

Teachers Who Explain. Some of the boys dropped out, one because he missed his hunting dog. Of the 140 who stayed, only ten showed little or no improvement in their 3-R skills. The progress of 55 boys was classed as "extremely positive." McAndrew reports that "the vast majority" grew in "poise and responsiveness." A retiring 14-year-old with a thumb-sucking habit turned into a conversational leader. Wrote one mother about her son: "It seems hardly possible how much he has matured. He has found himself." Says Student Dewey Long: "The teachers here explain a subject so that I can understand it. There were lots of things I never did understand at home."

The school's real test will come when the boys return home. "It is naive to think all will make good," admits McAndrew, "but I'm now convinced some of them will." Not the least of the school's results is that its current supplementary staff of 16 visiting teachers shares McAndrew's enthusiasm, expects to spread new attitudes among other teachers in their home schools.

One such attitude is a new skepticism over any attempts to classify children rigidly by intelligence ratings. This practice, says McAndrew, leads many teachers to "consign kids to an educational trash heap." The North Carolina experiment--now set up on a permanent basis with more applicants, girls as well as boys, than it can handle--has shown that the attitude of both the teacher and the taught is far more meaningful than a student's IQ.

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