Donna Gentile O'Donnell: Discipline, results in charter school

I had my civil rights violated all the time in elementary school. My first grade teacher, Mother Saint Gerald of the Sisters of Notre Dame, was "The Law" in her classroom. She took away my red Duncan yo-yo, my stack of bubblegum and, worst of all, my large pack of Beatles cards -- my most prized possession. She never held them hostage for ransom (which I would have gladly paid from my paper route tips). They were gone. Just gone.

Mother St. Gerald was not interested in discussing my feelings. The only thing she was interested in was why I wasn't applying myself in the one subject that I was not doing well in (arithmetic): Why was I not memorizing my times tables? In the few lame instances in which I tried to ask about the return of my Beatles cards, her reply was a question: "What's seven times 12?" If I answered correctly, she would follow with another: "What's nine times six?" and on, until I would make a mistake ... then she would say: "Never mind those cards ... you learn your times tables!"

So when I read the recent story about allegations of violations of the civil rights of students at the Multicultural Academy Charter School by Headmaster Vuong Thuy (pronounced "Twee"), Mother Saint Gerald and the rule of law in her classroom were very much on my mind. (Disclosure: the writer's husband, former House Speaker Bob O'Donnell, introduced the first charter schools bill in the Pennsylvania legislature. He is chairman of the Charter School Resource Center).

In Thuy's school, no gum or cell phones or beepers are allowed. If you chew gum and get caught three times, you're out. You bring a cell phone to school, and it costs you $50 to get it back -- at the end of the school year. If you don't meet the academic criteria on a year-to-year basis, you'll be asked to leave. Forget your textbooks? You're sent home on an unexcused absence. And to maintain a safe and orderly environment, the possibility of random searches is written into the policy of the school and exercised at the discretion of the school staff.

Headmaster Thuy means business.

Thuy runs one of the most successful charter high schools in the city. In educational terms, it is the leading charter school in achieving academically with kids who are set up to fail. According to The Philadelphia Daily News, 94 percent of seniors graduated in 2003, and 100 percent of those went on to college. From 2002 to 2003, the percentage of 11th graders testing at or above the basic levels for reading increased from 19.2 percent to 48.4 percent in one year -- almost a 30 percent improvement. He runs a tight ship, and his methods have become somewhat controversial. But this guy gets results. And even the students, who admit he's tough, say that he delivers for them in the way that matters most: academically.

Thuy understands something very important about kids succeeding in school. School discipline is more than a set of independently evaluated social transactions. It is a culture that must be created and sustained by dramatically decreasing the nonacademic "noise," the distractions that interrupt learning.

Thuy is not the first (nor, God willing, the last) education leader that forces us to confront the fact that we must choose. Contemporary movies introduced us to Principal Joe Clark, calculus teacher Jaime Escalante and his principal, Henry Gradillas. Their less-than-conventional approach to less-than-conventional kids forces us to ask ourselves, "Do we want our kids to learn more than we want to micromanage the decision-making of proven educational leaders, despite their unconventional approach?" And if we choose micromanagement, don't we relinquish the right to complain when the kids put into their academic keeping fail?

I still haven't entirely forgiven Mother St. Gerald for the Beatles cards. I imagine how much they're worth in the collectibles market now, not to mention the sentimental value. But I did learn my times tables. And I've since learned another important lesson, one that was more implicit than the answer to seven times 12. Maybe Headmaster Thuy's approach is unconventional. Maybe he's not a graduate of a politically correct charm school. But he is asking his students -- and their parents and families -- to make a set of choices.

Choose between discipline and learning, or bedlam and bad test scores. Choose between a future of promise or a present of permissiveness. If we force Thuy into a more politically correct engagement with his students, we're trading a more conventional and acceptable social context for lesser learning with a group of students that fail much more often than they succeed.

So maybe they don't get their cell phones (or their Beatles cards) back.

But I bet they learn their times tables.

Donna Gentile O’Donnell is a Ph.D. candidate in health policy history from Philadelphia, Pa. vox populi... appears on alternate fridays.

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