Dream Makers

On a Friday afternoon in February, the auditorium of Gloria R. Davis College Preparatory Academy is filled with seventh- and eighth-graders and some of their parents. Excited chatter bounces off cold, hard surfaces, and little siblings tumble in the aisles. The cheerful gathering is the Bayview school's end-of-semester awards ceremony to honor its best, in both athletics and academics.

The kids wear uniforms: burgundy blazers, white shirts with collars, black ties, and black slacks. Even though a few have managed to sneak in hip hop-inspired accessories -- a pink hair extension or rhinestone-studded belt buckle -- they are still very much children. Their features are round, their voices high-pitched, and they're not old enough to be too cool for school. Athletic coaches announce the winners of the Most Inspirational and Most Valuable Player awards, and the students hoot and squeal. They spontaneously applaud their principal, Matthew Livingston, when he comes onstage to announce the academic honorees.

But the 35 members of the honor roll will have to wait their turn. First, Livingston calls up the "Rising Scholars." These are kids who have improved their grade point averages -- even a tiny amount, and even if the result is an average grade of 1.5, or C-minus -- since their last report cards. There are 61 of them.

"These kids are on their way to the honor roll!" Livingston crows into the microphone.

As their names are announced one by one, the Rising Scholars climb the stage; most wear expressions of embarrassed pride. Those who have parents in the audience get their picture snapped. Friends scream encouragement from below. Livingston hands each Rising Scholar a certificate, then attempts to put a necklace made of nylon cord -- a sort of extended key chain -- around his or her neck. Some of the girls coyly twist away to avoid physical contact, in which case Livingston hands the gift to them. But most stand still, proudly, as if receiving an Olympic medal. They even allow Livingston to give them an affectionate pat on the shoulder before darting down the stage stairs.

It's a touching scene, but one that raises questions. Many of these kids are being publicly recognized and applauded for doing work that is barely passing. Unlike the honor roll kids, who hold a B average or better, Rising Scholars didn't do particularly well on their tests and almost certainly didn't complete all their homework. In the larger educational picture, a C-minus average will do nothing for them. It certainly won't get them into a four-year university. Davis is, ostensibly, a college-prep academy. You might wonder if it's sending the wrong message to its students.

But, as Livingston and other Davis staffers are often heard repeating, "You have to start somewhere."

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This past fall, Davis reopened its doors as one of San Francisco's first three "Dream Schools" -- the name for a controversial reform initiative spearheaded by the San Francisco Unified School District's superintendent, Arlene Ackerman. The idea behind the program is to transform some of the city's lowest-performing schools in some of its poorest neighborhoods into high-achieving "academies" whose graduates go on to college. Three Bayview schools, including Davis, were selected as the initiative's first, with seven others in the pipeline for this fall.

Davis and its fellow Dream Schools, Charles R. Drew Elementary School and Twenty-First Century Academy, a former middle school, underwent many big changes. They were partially restaffed and their grade levels rearranged. In Davis' case, it went from being a middle school to only seventh- and eighth-graders. But one new class will be added each year until the school has grades seven through 12.

Student uniforms were made mandatory, the school day extended by two hours, and Saturday school offered. New resources were poured into the schools, including electives such as art and music. Full-time child psychologists, nurses, and parent liaisons were hired. Potholes were filled and walls painted.

For each sweeping change, there were scores of other, subtler ones. For instance, parents and students were asked to sign a contract at the beginning of the school year, binding them to the schools' stricter rules, dubbed "non-negotiables." Teachers were required to talk up the concept of college and refer to students as "scholars."

But for all the improvements made at the Dream Schools, they are not yet dazzling college-preparatory academies to which San Francisco parents will be clamoring to send their kids next year.

The reality is that underneath the campus facelifts and burgundy blazers that give the Dream Schools a veneer of success, there are deep problems that will take years to work out -- assuming they ever can be.

As Davis celebrates its six-month birthday as a Dream School, it's impossible to know whether it will ultimately become the impressive institution the district envisions. But it's clear that if effort and dedication are any measure, then Davis may eventually succeed. A passionate group of teachers, parent volunteers, and local school administrators have taken the district's dream and made it their own. They're stubbornly determined to rebuild Davis, step by tiny, difficult, frustrating step.

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The San Francisco Unified School District has some of the highest test scores in California when compared with cities of similar size, such as Oakland or Fresno. But its African-American and Latino students score at rock bottom. This is a decades-old trend that was supposed to have been reversed long ago.

In 1983, the district settled a lawsuit alleging its African-American students were segregated into poorer-performing schools than their white counterparts. Under the terms of the settlement, the district promised to fix the problem. Besides busing children to counter school segregation, the district also tried to revamp bad schools using a controversial then-new method of reform called reconstitution.

Detested by many teachers and the teachers' union, reconstitution swapped out the entire staff of a failing school for another staff, in order to give a new team a try. But reconstitution, as originally conceived, was never shown to be effective. Few of the reconstituted schools exhibited any lasting improvements.

Mostly, the educational performance of San Francisco's African-American and Latino kids got worse. At Davis, for instance, only three African-American students tested at the proficient level on the state's standardized language arts test in 2003. That same year, a single African-American scored as well on the standardized math test. Yes, one.

Besides having, as Superintendent Ackerman is fond of saying, "a moral imperative" to improve its failing schools, the district has other reasons to do so. Most compelling among those is the No Child Left Behind Act, which empowers the federal government to monitor low-performing schools, to punish them if they do not improve, and if they stay bad enough long enough, to intervene in the administration of the schools; the act requires states to do the same. One of the schools slated to become a Dream School next fall, Treasure Island Elementary, is already under state monitoring after failing to meet its test-score targets for several years in a row.

The inspiration for the Dream Schools as a method of reform is a wildly successful public sixth-through-12th-grade school in Harlem, the Frederick Douglass Academy. Founded in 1991 by charismatic former New York City Board of Education Chancellor Lorraine Monroe, the academy has been described as a "Catholic school without the crosses." Monroe imposed strict order and discipline via school uniforms and a set of "Twelve Non-Negotiable Rules and Regulations," any of which, if broken, could get students expelled. Parents have to sign off on the non-negotiables, which include getting to class on time and respecting others, and they are strongly encouraged to participate in their children's education. Classes are rigorous, and after-school tutoring is available to students who fall behind. Upon graduation, at least 90 percent of the academy's students are accepted into colleges and universities, many of them in the Ivy League.

The San Francisco Dream Schools differ from the Douglass Academy in several significant ways. Monroe created her academy from scratch in an abandoned school building and handpicked her staff and the promising but financially disadvantaged students who filled the school's ranks. The San Francisco school district decided to let students from the old schools stay, if they wanted. But when it came to staffing the Dream Schools, the district required all teachers and administrators to reapply for their jobs. Of the 36 teachers who chose to do so, 22 were rehired. Thirty-six came from outside the district.

As it had to past reconstitution efforts, the teachers' union responded with vitriol, condemning the process and saying it unfairly blamed teachers for the schools' poor performances.

Last fall, the district announced its plans to turn seven other schools, many in the Mission District, into Dream Schools. But an ensuing blitz of negative publicity generated, largely, by the union (which filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the district) had its intended effect. The announcement was met with intense opposition from some parents and advocacy groups in the Mission. The school district agreed to start from scratch, with input from the community, in developing models for these so-called "Phase II" Dream Schools.

Curiously, in the debate between the teachers' union and the district, there was little mention of the three original Dream Schools themselves, perhaps because the schools' early failures and victories were regarded as not yet dramatic enough to help either side's argument.

---

Matthew Livingston roams the halls and schoolyard of Gloria R. Davis like a tall, pale ghost, his green eyes scanning for tardy scholars.

"Where ya going?" the principal calls, spotting one. It's a small African-American boy with a rumpled, untucked shirt and no tie.

"Class," the boy replies grumpily.

"Whose class? Ms. Hendricks?" asks Livingston, rapid-fire.

"Yeah," mumbles the boy.

"Well let's get movin'," says Livingston, personally escorting him up the stairs. "You're 10 minutes late." He eyes the boy's shirt and adds, "And tuck in your shirt."

With a few halfhearted swipes of the hand, the shirt goes in.

The changes made to operations of the three Dream Schools -- for example, longer school days and mandatory uniforms -- were neither intended nor expected to constitute a quick fix. That's something that everybody from Ackerman on down agrees upon. Rather, they were tools that staff and students are now expected to use to build the schools into Dream Schools. It's a building project of exhausting proportions that consumes most of Livingston's waking hours.

Livingston is a lanky 6-foot-5, with patrician good looks, dark hair swept back with product, and a cautious, politic speaking style that rarely goes negative or veers off-message. Except for when he filled in for the principal of Charles R. Drew while she was on maternity leave for a semester, he had not been a principal until this year. Also, he is just 29 and a white administrator on a mostly black campus. When asked if his race presents any challenges for him, he emphatically says no, then laughs nervously and adds, "To my knowledge."

Ackerman had her eye on Livingston during his previous stints as assistant principal and interim principal at several district schools. Much to his pleased surprise, she offered him the top spot at Davis even though he hadn't applied for it. From the start of his career as an eighth-grade math teacher at Aptos Middle School in Potrero Hill, Livingston has chosen to work with students who are at risk of not making it.

"He has a wonderful attitude for the work we're trying to do, and I felt he'd be a good role model for these young people," says Ackerman.

Livingston takes a mother hen approach to his job. He knows every student's name, where each lives, and the names, he estimates, of 75 percent of their parents.

"It's extremely important for me to know everything about them," Livingston says. He constantly roams the campus with his walkie-talkie, popping in and out of classrooms to observe teachers, accosting kids trying to sneak off campus.

"He has a relationship with my child," says Renita Jones, whose son, Evan, is in the eighth grade. "When I show up at the school, he knows who I am, who my child is, he interacts with me and tells me what my son has done wrong, what my son has done right."

Livingston goes beyond the call in other ways, sometimes far beyond. He used his own money to buy more than 40 pairs of regulation black shoes for students who couldn't afford them. And though it's not required of him, he teaches a math class at the school's optional biweekly Saturday sessions, for which an average of 50 students show up.

"At least if they're with me, I know they're learning," he says.

Livingston has invented a raft of incentives to motivate kids to raise their grades. The Rising Scholars program was his idea, as were lunchtime "hot chocolate Fridays" for honor roll students. There have been pizza parties and ice cream feeds, and there's a Dream School store, where kids can earn Monopoly money-esque notes to purchase notebooks and pencils.

These stratagems seem to have worked. The number of honor roll students and Rising Scholars has doubled since the beginning of the year. The incentives have also made Livingston quite popular.

"A lot of people like the attention they get through assembly," says eighth-grader Theresa Sagaaau.

Teachers, students, and administrators who were at Davis before Livingston came on board say the school has become a calmer, more orderly place than it was last year. Per the Dream School doctrine, kids who fight get sent home immediately; hence, there are fewer fights. Attendance has gone up from last year's 93.2 percent to 97 percent -- slightly higher than the district average. But Davis is far from being the "Catholic school without the crosses" many Bayview parents had hoped for.

"You can hear in the hallway if a visitor's here, it's quiet," says seventh-grader Keyana Taylor.

"And they think we're the sweetest little things!" says her friend Erica Banks.

But when no visitors are in sight, screaming and horseplay break out between periods. Uniform ties are often left at home, shirts go untucked, and to many parents' frustration, nothing seems to be done about these infringements on discipline.

"If the discipline is what it is, it has to be what it's going to be, and don't waver," says parent Omar Khalif. "When I, as a child, come in not in uniform, and know that maybe something will happen, then nothing is ever said, that means nothing. That means you as an adult have backed down again, and I see I have worn you down."

But finding ways to enforce the so-called non-negotiables is no easy task for Dream School principals. Livingston lacks the autonomy that Lorraine Monroe had at her academy. Whereas she could -- and did - expel kids who failed to follow the program, no SFUSD principal can expel a student without the approval of the district's Peer Services Division. Even lesser punishments can get nixed by the higher-ups. In the beginning of the school year, for instance, Livingston created a detention room where he sent students who were not in full uniform. The district put the kibosh on the detention room.

"It sends the wrong message," says Ackerman. "Is the goal the uniforms, or to get the kids in class to teach them?"

---

On the whiteboard, seventh-grade social studies teacher VanCedric Williams has written "Do Now: Define Samurai, Shinto, and Shogun, then use the three words in two sentences." Most of his 18 students scribble quietly, consulting their textbooks. Others fiddle with their pencils or stare off into space.

Williams, 36, has a shaved head and a soul patch and wears a yellow card on his tie that contains the word "Ensure." In an imitation of the Douglass Academy, Davis' walls are covered with vocabulary words that will appear on the state language arts tests. Today, Davis' staff is covered, too.

Next to the "Do Now" exercise, Williams has written out today's lesson plan. These step-by-step classroom instructions that the kids can clearly follow each day are one of the few teaching innovations initiated by the Dream Schools program. They were developed by Lorraine Monroe, and are referred to as the "Black Board Configuration," or BBC for short.

"Beep beep beep beep!" goes Williams' timer, and the kids put down their pencils.

"Now can someone tell me again what shoguns do?" asks Williams.

"They battle for the nobles!" pipes up a girl in the back.

"So if there was a mayor of Bayview, he would be like the noble," says Williams, pacing back and forth energetically. "He would hire some cats from Big Block or West Mob to defend him."

"And then they'd end up shootin' each other," astutely points out honor roll student Mister Simmons Jr.

Williams is one of the Gloria R. Davis veterans. He's been at the school for four years and was one of only two teachers who chose to reapply for their jobs and got rehired. Williams admits that teaching at Davis isn't easy.

"Just trying to deal with survival is more important to some of these kids than their educations," says Williams.

Most of the school's 185 scholars live in the Bayview and qualify for the free lunch program, meaning that they are economically disadvantaged. Many come from single-parent households; often the absent parent is incarcerated. Delinquency is caused more often than not by students staying home to help care for little sisters and brothers. The students live with the constant threat of drive-by shootings; many have had family members or friends murdered.

"The kids have an edge, and a hard crust that's difficult to break through," says another veteran, reading and band teacher Jill Hendricks.

"Our students have a lot of impulse-control issues," says Wendy Snider, the school's learning support consultant, and a marriage and family therapist. "It comes from having more responsibilities than the average student, and having to protect themselves. Nobody has taught them how to express feelings of anger, grief, and loss appropriately."

As part of Davis' Dream School makeover, the district hired Snider, who had been at the school part time, on a full-time basis. Now teachers can come to Snider if a student's grades suddenly drop, or there are problems at home, and Snider has more time to investigate. She sets up a meeting with the student and his or her parents, makes house calls, or refers families to outside social services agencies. A full-time therapist is a step in the right direction for the Dream Schools, but no solution.

"You have no idea of the magnitude," says Twenty-First Century Academy's principal, Kanani Choy. "We need 10 therapists!"

Both Williams and Hendricks say the controversial Dream School reapplication process really did help bring in more committed, better-qualified teachers. (Of the 15 on staff, only four have fewer than five years' teaching experience, Williams being one of them.) But some teachers are still struggling to gain the control and respect of their classrooms that Williams commands in his.

"One day I went by a room and heard a child screaming at the top of his lungs," says one mother. "I wanted to go in there and say, 'Shut up!' The poor teacher!"

On top of challenging students, Davis teachers have long work hours. Per the Dream School extended day, school starts at 8 a.m. and goes until 5 p.m. During two extra periods, students either participate in new electives like cooking, dance, choir, or martial arts, or get tutoring in their academic subjects, depending on which day of the week it is. Teachers receive additional compensation for the longer day.

Although teachers and administrators who spoke with SF Weekly agreed with the principles behind the longer day, they said it exhausts many teachers. "I would like to see [the day] structured differently ... maybe only go to 4:30," says Hendricks.

Since the start of the year, three Davis teachers have resigned. Livingston declines to say why. This isn't unusual for the school. Traditionally, two-thirds of its staff has turned over each year, with one or two people departing while the school year is still in session.

"It's a really tough environment," says Hendricks. "You don't just snap your fingers and it becomes college prep."

That may be so, yet teachers and administrators at Davis are nonetheless under intense pressure to significantly raise students' test scores in not quite a snap, but by April 19. That's the date for the California Standards and Achievement Tests, known collectively as the STARs. Davis' results on these tests will determine its state and federal rankings pursuant to No Child Left Behind.

Davis' teachers must devote one class a week to basic test-taking techniques, such as how to eliminate obviously wrong answers on a multiple-choice test. These are things most of the kids have never been taught.

"We learned last year, but they really didn't care what we did," says eighth-grade honor roll student D'Janea Bolton. "They weren't like, 'To do good on the test, you have to do this.'"

Much to the distaste of some students, there are weekly mandatory STAR practice tests. So far the average scores on these warm-up acts have risen from 30 to 50 percent. Livingston needs them all to be at 60 percent in order to bump up the school's API, or state ranking.

"It's going to take years to overcome the fact that for years this school's been mired in mediocrity," says Hendricks.

---

One evening in February, 10 parents sit in the Gloria R. Davis library munching on pizza, trying to figure out how they can get other parents involved in the school.

Derrick Eva, who heads up the comparatively successful parent organization at fellow Dream School Charles R. Drew, has been invited to lead the discussion. A compact, businesslike man, Eva slashes a marker down a giant tablet of paper and prints on one side "haves" and on the other side "needs."

"When you're talking about the Dream School, the Lorraine Monroe model, you're talking about a model institution," he says crisply. "Gloria R. Davis is a real school with some deficiencies. ... Now when you look at Gloria R. Davis right now, what can parents do to enhance the quality of the school?"

"More parental presence throughout the day," says one parent.

"Someone who oversees dress codes," suggests another.

Eva writes these things down on the "needs" side.

"What can we do to involve the community? I believe it takes more than just parents," prods Eva.

"Let's do like the Jehovah's Witnesses do and go door to door," says an older woman who volunteers almost every day at the school.

"To do what?" asks a slightly baffled Matthew Livingston, who is sitting off to one side of the room.

"Invite them in."

"I challenge you to come up with two innovative goals tonight," begs Eva, snapping the cap back on his marker. "If the Dream School fails, it's because of the parents," he says. "I'm sorry. It's a big burden. You have the opportunity to create a community-based school. ... How that happens, you determine."

Research has shown that how active a role a parent takes in a child's education has a lot to do with how well the child does in school. But the reality of the Bayview is that many parents are enmeshed in personal struggles that don't leave much time to be eager PTA types. With the Dream Schools, the district has challenged school staff and those parents who are involved to change that picture. To help them, it has hired a full-time parent liaison at each Dream School.

Peggy Gash, Davis' parent liaison, often reaches disconnected number after disconnected number when she tries to call students' homes. Meetings like this one are underattended. There are, after all, 185 students in the school, and only 10 parents are here. Many parents want nothing to do with schools, period.

"You're talking about people who are victims of the system," says parent Omar Khalif. "All of them have been through the public schools, which was probably the worst time of their lives."

Eva remembers lobbying hard to get one mother to come to a meeting, only to see her peer in the window, then run away.

The district has sponsored job-training workshops and computer classes in an effort to lure adults into the schools. "We asked ourselves, 'What would make that parent comfortable on campus ... so that they can just feel good about schools again and impart that feeling to their child?'" says Deena Zacharin, the district's director of the office of parent relations, which put together the workshops. So far, the turnout has been small.

Before it became a Dream School, Davis rarely had parent volunteers. Now, at least four can be found on campus at all times. Lorraine Hanks, a parent of a seventh-grader, runs the campus snack bar every Monday.

"There's people everywhere now," says eighth-grader Shakeyla, who wouldn't give her last name. "You can't cut or nothin'!"

At the same time, it's infuriating for the "usual suspect" parents who always show up at school functions to know that there are some parents who have never once appeared at school. And not surprisingly, these parents say, the children of missing-in-action parents are, more often than not, the kids disrupting classes.

"Some of these parents aren't even going to see their parole officer," says student adviser Vernon O'Gilvie. "How are they going to see the school?"

"I would venture to propose four events, two per semester," says Livingston, taking over at the large paper pad. "A talent show or concert. These events should be huge! It should be a given that everyone is there."

The parents murmur approvingly.

"I don't think there's a parent that won't come out to see their kid in a talent event," agrees Eva.

Livingston writes "community event, 4-6." Then he points the marker at the room. "OK, who's my committee? Are you the committee? I want names!"

There's a pause, during which you can feel frustration and resignation pass through the room like a shared heat flash. "It's always the same," someone murmurs. The usual suspects raise their hands.

---

Despite the cold, Livingston won't let any of the honor roll students wear their coats on the motorized trolley. It would cover their blazers, and he wants them to look sharp for the public. In one of his ongoing attempts to reward good grades, Livingston has taken $1,000 of his own money and hired the trolley to drive the honor roll members around town. For an entire Friday, they get to play hooky.

The kids, especially the girls, are freezing, but they're also smiling. As the trolley pulls away from Gloria R. Davis, the kids shriek with glee. Some of them were on the honor roll last year, and they certainly never got to do anything like this. Many have never been on a cable car, motorized or not.

Livingston promises the shivering students that they'll stop for lunch and eat hot clam chowder at Pier 39. He even lets them have control of the radio dial, which quickly gets tuned to commercial hip hop station KMEL.

As they motor down the Embarcadero, a few of the girls amuse themselves by screaming "Hi!" at people walking on the street. Each time, an unsuspecting working slob looks up, startled, then cracks a huge grin. It's hard not to smile at a trolley full of beaming 12- and 13-year-olds dressed for success.

First it's SBC Park, then a pass by the Transamerica Pyramid, and on to Lombard Street. Many of the kids have never seen the city's crookedest lane, and they beg the driver to actually navigate its curves. He ignores them.

At Pier 39, Livingston can't find a chowder stand that can accommodate 34 and buys the students burritos instead. After a breezy jog across the Golden Gate Bridge, the trolley heads back to the Bayview. As the familiar torn-up environs of Third Street come into view, Livingston talks of stressful, irritating realities.

He frowns and clings to the brass pole of the trolley.

"You know," he says, "you can say, 'Oh [Davis] looks better. It's quieter. The kids are more on task.' You can feel that, but you can't measure it."

"Hey!" the girls shout at somebody on the street, and Livingston corrects: "Hi."

The Dream Schools' success, Livingston frets, will be measured ultimately by the results of the STARs. It's the only grading system that's quantifiable, not "an opinion."

But that doesn't make the standardized tests a true measure of what has happened at Gloria R. Davis. "Everybody is looking at our school," he says, as the trolley full of happy honor students rolls home. "But they don't see this."