It was intensely boring. And, frankly, it seemed redundant because all this information was already available on the students’ online dashboards. Moreover, many of the people in that room had been teaching for decades. They didn’t feel like they needed piles of cards to tell them what was going on in their own classrooms. But an order was an order, and so they went into the data room every other week. “The rule was that everyone had to actually handle the cards, physically move them around,” Johnson said. “Everyone hated it, at least at first.”
Then one day a third-grade teacher had an idea. Since he had to spend so much time transcribing test scores, he decided to also note on each student’s index cards which specific questions they had gotten wrong on that week’s assessment exam. He convinced another third-grade teacher to do the same. Next, they combined their cards and made piles by grouping students who had made similar mistakes. When they were done, the piles showed a pattern: A large number of students in one class had done well on pronoun use but had stumbled at fractions; a large number of students in the other classroom had scored the opposite way. The teachers traded curricula. Both classes’ scores went up.
The following week, someone else suggested dividing cards from multiple classes into piles based on where students lived. Teachers started giving everyone from the same neighborhoods similar reading assignments. Test scores ticked up. Students were doing their homework together on the bus rides home.
Johnson began putting her students into work groups based on the piles of cards she was making in the data room. Handling the index cards, she found, gave her a more granular sense of each student’s strengths and weaknesses. She found herself going into the data room a couple of times a week and putting students’ cards into smaller and smaller piles, experimenting with arranging them in different ways. She had felt, before, like she knew her class pretty well. But this was a far deeper level of understanding. “When there are twenty-five students and just one teacher, it’s easy to stop seeing them as individuals,” she said. “I had always thought of them as a class. The data room made me focus on particular kids. It forced me to look at them one by one and ask myself, what does this kid need?”
Midway through the year, some of Johnson’s colleagues noticed that a small group of students in each class were struggling on math questions. It wasn’t a big enough trend that any one teacher would have noticed on their own, but inside the data room, the pattern became clear. That’s how the school-wide Hot Pencil Drills started. Soon, students such as eight-year-old Dante were spending each morning filling out multiplication tables as fast as they could, and then speed-walking to the main office to have the fastest test takers’ names read over the PA system. Within twelve weeks, the school’s math scores were up by 9 percent.
Eight months after the Elementary Initiative was launched, Johnson’s class sat for their yearly assessment exam. By that point, she was visiting the data room all the time. She and her colleagues had created dozens of piles of index cards. They had tested various lesson plans and were tracking results on long strips of paper torn from rolls and taped to the walls. Columns of numbers and scribbled notes filled the data room.
The test results came back six weeks later. Johnson’s students scored an average of 72 percent, almost double her class’s result the previous year. The school’s overall scores had more than doubled. In 2009, Johnson became a teacher coach, traveling to other schools in Cincinnati to help instructors learn to use their own data rooms. In 2010, she was selected by her peers as Cincinnati’s Educator of the Year.
IV.
Delia Morris was a high school freshman when Cincinnati launched the Elementary Initiative, and so she was too old to benefit from the reforms occurring at places such as South Avondale. And by the time city officials began expanding the program, it seemed too late for her in other respects. Delia’s father was fired that year from his job as a security guard at a local grocery store. Then he got into a fight with their landlord. Not long after, Delia came home to find an orange sticker and a padlock on the apartment’s front door and everything she and her seven siblings owned stuffed into black garbage bags in the hall. The family was able to stay with people from their church for a while, and then crowded into the apartments of family friends, but from that point on, they moved every few months.
Delia was a good kid and a hard worker. Her teachers had noticed she was unusually smart—gifted enough, they felt, to make it out of Cincinnati’s bad neighborhoods and into college. But that didn’t mean escape was guaranteed. Every year there were a handful of students who seemed destined for something better until poverty pulled them back down. Delia’s teachers were hopeful but not na?ve. They knew that even for gifted students, a better life was sometimes out of reach. Delia knew that, as well. She worried that even a whiff of homelessness would change how her teachers perceived her, so she didn’t tell anyone what was going on at home. “Going to school was the best part of each day,” she told me. “I didn’t want to ruin that.”
When Delia started her sophomore year at Western Hills High in 2009, the city began expanding its education reforms to high schools. However, some early results among older students proved disappointing. Teachers complained that innovations such as the data rooms were a start but not a solution. Older students were already too hardened, their teachers said; their timelines for intervention were too short. To change kids’ lives, they argued, schools needed to help students get better at making the kinds of decisions that offered few opportunities for experimentation. They needed to help teenagers decide between going to college or getting a job; whether to terminate a pregnancy or get married; how to pick among family members when everyone needs your help.
So the school district shifted its focus for high school students. Alongside the Elementary Initiative, the district began creating engineering classes within Western Hills High and other schools in partnership with local universities and the National Science Foundation. The goal was “a multidisciplinary approach to education that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real world problems,” a summary of the program read. Ninety percent of students at Western Hills lived below the poverty line. Their classrooms had peeling linoleum floors and cracked chalkboards. “Leveraging technology” was not what most students worried about. Delia signed up for an engineering course taught by Deon Edwards, whose introductory remarks reflected the reality that surrounded all of them.
“We’re going to learn how to think like scientists,” he told his class. “We’re going to leave your parents and friends behind and learn to make choices with clear eyes, without the baggage everyone wants to put on you. And if any of you didn’t have anything to eat this morning, I keep energy bars in my desk and you should help yourself. There’s nothing wrong with saying you’re hungry.”
The real focus of Mr. Edwards’s class was a system for decision making known as “the engineering design process,” which forced students to define their dilemmas, collect data, brainstorm solutions, debate alternative approaches, and conduct iterative experiments. “The engineering design process is a series of steps that engineers follow when they are trying to solve a problem and design a solution for something; it is a methodical approach to problem solving,” one teacher’s manual explained. The engineering design process was built around the idea that many problems that seem overwhelming at first can be broken into smaller pieces, and then solutions tested, again and again, until an insight emerges. The process asked students to define precisely the dilemma they wanted to solve, then to conduct research and come up with multiple solutions, and then conduct tests, measure results, and repeat the procedure until an answer was found. It told them to make problems more manageable until they fit into scaffolds and mental folders that were easier to carry around.