LEARNING Curve Martha Rial, Post-Gazette

The Test: The future looms large as Minnie Harris walks her son Yamin to Robert L. Vann Elementary School on the fifth grade's first day of state testing. She feels that their Hill District neighborhood threatens his chances for success, but the family can't afford to leave. "I just hope he doesn't give up easy." The school faces its own challenges. Vann Elementary, once considered a national model for other schools in high-poverty communities, has failed for several years to meet new state math and reading standards required under the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act and soon could face harsh penalties. Click image to photojournal "Learning Curve -- Day One." LEARNING CURVE The Series Day One Education resources Day One: A Photo Journal About the author and photographer Day Two Middle school is the next big step Finding a good middle school Chat archive for 6/20/05 session with 'Learning Curve' series Day Two: A Photo Journal Day Three A week of testing puts a school and its students on the edge of their seats Tracking the turnaround at Burgwin Elementary Day Three: A Photo Journal "Learning Curve" chat transcript for 6/21/05 Day Four Graduation a time of celebration, but also of worry, uncertainty Resources for volunteering, mentoring and learning more about school standards Day Four: A Photo Journal "Learning Curve" chat transcript for 6/22/05 LISTEN TO AUDIO CLIPS Voices on the Learning Curve Amy McConnell Schaarsmith: Series Overview: The Learning Curve Preview of Day One: Welcome to Vann Elementary Martha Rial Photographing and researching the Learning Curve Capturing the student's view of life at Vann Elementary Balancing the struggles and strengths in the lives of Vann Elementary's students YOUR VOICES, YOUR VIEWS Join an interactive chat session with the author and the photographer of, "Learning Curve" tomorrow, June 20, from noon to 1 p.m. To log-in for the session: click here Can't make tomorrow's session? The team will be available again Tuesday, June 21 and Wednesday June 22, also from noon to 1 p.m. You can also email them about the series at school@post-gazette.com

Yamin Harris, the man of the house at age 11, pulled on his puffy winter coat 20 minutes early and stood watching, waiting, as his mother brushed out his little sister's hair.

Now he is leading the way to school as they walk together through the chilly April morning. He is scowling, thinking about the fifth-grade math exam he must face in a few minutes.

The family heads up Webster Avenue past empty beer bottles, drifts of discarded candy wrappers, dumped Christmas trees. They pass the condemned row houses, quiet and blank at that early hour, where men will tie their pit bulls at the door when the day warms up and duck into open car windows to sell drugs to wan-faced addicts.

Outside Robert L. Vann Elementary School, Minnie Harris and her kids pause at the front steps. She kisses her daughter, third-grader Yazmin, then kisses Yamin and teases him about his frown. "What?" she says.

"I want to see my future when I'm an adult," he says, looking up into her face.

"Don't worry," she says.

"It will come real, real fast."

For many of the kids at Vann in the Hill District, the future is hard to see, caught between great and sometimes extravagant dreams -- "I want to be a doctor. I want to be a chemist. I want to sing on 'American Idol'." -- and the unrelenting pressure of poverty and family upheaval that has shaped many of their lives so far.

Vann, where 78 percent of students are classified as low-income and just 12 percent live in two-parent homes, has struggled for decades under an extra burden to provide the structure and support that many of its students' families cannot. For years, the school has been a safe place where kids can count on some constants: breakfast before school and lunch at noon, a hug to help soothe the pain of a loose tooth or a quarrel with a friend, a reprimand for speaking out of turn or forgetting to do homework.

But while Vann is trying hard to teach its students to become successful adults, the school -- like 415 other schools throughout Pennsylvania and thousands more throughout the nation -- itself is failing, at least by many of the standards the government now uses to define success. Three years of sub-par scores on state math and reading tests have put its very survival at stake.

Just 8 percent of fifth-grade students at Vann were proficient in math, according to test results last year, falling far short of the state's requirement of 35 percent and making Vann the worst elementary school in Pittsburgh in fifth-grade math performance. Only a quarter of fifth-grade students were proficient in reading -- far less than the 45 percent the state required last year.

If you watch Terea Pope teach fifth-grade math or Sherrian Mitchell teach fifth-grade reading and writing, however, it's difficult to reconcile those statistics with the scene in the classroom where their students -- hands raised high, fingers fluttering with anticipation -- are begging to answer questions.

Just a decade ago, in fact, teachers like Mitchell and Pope had given Vann a reputation as a model of student discipline and academic achievement not only among Pittsburgh schools, but also among high-poverty schools throughout the country.

But even then, the standards had changed and Vann's scores already had plummeted. They soon would carry the school's reputation with them.

What happened?
In 1995, Doris Brevard was serving her 26th and final year as principal at Vann, and she recently had hosted visitors from around the world who wanted to see how she made an inner-city elementary school work so well. Vann had been featured a few years before as part of a video documentary by Indiana University on schools around the country -- from those on Native American reservations to ones in impoverished urban neighborhoods -- that were beating the odds.

"At Vann, we had the approach that every child could learn," Brevard said recently. "When a child entered the school door, he wasn't poor, he wasn't black and he wasn't deprived. He was just a student and he could learn, and that made the difference."

Until the early 1990s, Vann routinely scored high -- with more than 80 percent of its students scoring at or above the performance of their peers across the country -- on the California Achievement Test, according to school district officials.

Those scores prompted the district to include a picture of Brevard, with her intense gaze and wry smile, and her uniformed students on its publicity posters. One of those posters praising the performance of Vann's students still hangs in the district's administration building in Oakland.

Despite Vann's solid reputation, its test scores already had begun to slip under Brevard after a new testing system, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, was instituted in 1994. The new test measured students' performance against state criteria, which tested the skills students should know in specific grades, rather than measuring their skills against those of their peers throughout the country.

In 2001, Congress approved the No Child Left Behind Act to strengthen the federal government's oversight of education and to push for greater achievement. For the first time, the federal government required Vann and other schools to meet certain standards, or face increasingly stringent punishments.

By then, the percentage of poor children --defined as those receiving federally subsidized lunches -- at Vann had dropped a little since Brevard served as principal. Its new principal, Martin Slomberg, had adopted the latest teaching methods, making classroom lessons more intensive and more flexible to help struggling students catch up and to give advanced students more challenging work.

But the test scores still languished.

	Online Graphic: Click image to graphic snapshot of Robert L. Vann Elementary School

Vann got a warning from the state in 2002, then its first penalty in 2003, forcing the district to let Vann's students transfer to schools that were meeting state standards. Test scores worsened in 2004, and the state knocked the school again, pushing the transfer option or requiring the district to pay for students' tutoring. No students transferred, however, and few took advantage of the free tutoring, according to school officials.

This year, the state thresholds for passing scores rose again, from 35 percent of students proficient in math to 45 percent, and from 45 percent of students proficient in reading to 54 percent.

Another failure on the state tests given in April and reported to the public in September would force the district to get even more serious at Vann and at 18 other city schools that repeatedly have fallen short of state standards. School officials would have to overhaul Vann's curriculum or extend its school day or year.

Next spring, another round of bad test scores could force the district to replace Vann's teachers and principal, appoint an outside expert to advise the school, turn the school's management over to a private company or close the school altogether.

Big dreams for Eric
Over the same 10 years of Vann's decline, its students and their families have had their struggles, too.

Back in 1995, when Vann was still considered a model school, Dawna Biggs had just become a single parent at the age of 32, after her relationship with her baby's father ended.

Dawna's mother and sisters and girlfriends -- several, like her, graduates of Schenley High School -- had thrown her a surprise baby shower after luring her to a friend's home by promising dinner at Red Lobster, her favorite restaurant.

Pictures of the shower show a radiant Dawna resplendent in a purple and gold dress, gasping in shock and then smiling widely at the cascade of baby clothes, teething rings, toys, blankets and diapers that kept her from having to buy a single item for her son for the first nine months of his life.

Even as a baby, Eric Biggs looked just like his father, who held him once when he was about a year old, according to Dawna.

At about that time, she said, friends introduced her to crack cocaine one day while they were hanging out together, smoking pot. Dawna quickly became addicted to crack, beginning a battle with the drug -- a fight she sometimes won for 18 months at a time while in treatment -- that would continue over the next decade, even as she also tried to give her son a good life.

Eric was a happy baby, always smiling, but he grew more rebellious, tougher to handle, as he got older.

On his first day of kindergarten at Vann, at age 5, he ran through the school's hallways after his mother dropped him off, escaped out a back door and headed home, back to their housing authority apartment building on Chauncey Drive.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
	Silent reading time isn't always completely peaceful. In one of many distractions, fifth-grader Rande Carter playfully reaches over Eric Biggs to tweak Yamin Harris during their pre-lunch reading period in the cafeteria. Amy McConnell Schaarsmith: Eric Biggs is thinking ahead Martha Rial: Eric likes to help classmates Eric Biggs The gifted class

Dawna corralled him and took him back to school. He stayed that time.

Extremely bright, Eric always was pushing adult limits: He spent a lot of time running under desks, defying teachers and picking fights with other students during those first years at Vann.

"Oh, the times I had to carry him and Yamin [Harris] through the halls like babies, kicking and screaming," said Mary Skinner, the school's longtime social worker.

Dawna did everything she could think of to channel Eric's energy into something productive.

She enrolled him in a mentoring program sponsored by Vann, trying to give him a male role model -- although his role model stopped going to the sessions after a while, so Eric stopped going as well. She sent him to a computer camp at Carlow University during his summer vacation. She got him into the school district's gifted program.

She bought Eric books about history and science and medicine, trying to encourage him to aim high: Robert Morris University, Michigan State University, Yale University. Higher than she had, sometimes tending bar, sometimes working as a home health aide, sometimes not working at all. She told him not to have sex until he was ready to support a family.

And although he continued testing Dawna and his teachers, Eric mostly succeeded. By fifth grade, he was earning nearly all A's and had established a 3.8 grade point average.

After finishing his schoolwork early, Eric often helped his fellow students with their assignments or read one of the thick Harry Potter books he lugged around.

He continued daydreaming about his dad through all those years, though, even calling him a few times to ask for money. But he said no one ever answered the phone.

Tresa's family ties
Tresa Green was the baby in the family, born 10 years after her sister and 12 years after her brother. At 30, her mother hadn't exactly planned to have another child, but Tresa was always a sweet baby, always a pleasure to be around. Her family cherished her, spoiling her with toys and presents and clothes that filled her bedroom to overflowing.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
	Tresa Green and her classmates go to gym class twice each week but get less time to blow off extra energy at recess because Vann Elementary must spend more time preparing them for state tests. Amy McConnell Schaarsmith: Tresa Green is a bundle of energy Tresa Green: I love my neighborhood Tresa Green: Reading favorites

When Tresa was 6 weeks old, her mother, Valerie Green, placed her at a university-sponsored day-care center in Oakland and went back to work at the Three Rivers Employment Service, after which Tresa was named. As a single mother with three little kids, Valerie had to have that paycheck.

"I knew no matter what happened, I had to take care of my babies," Valerie said. "I had to maintain."

From the time she was a baby, Tresa went to church with her family, first to Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Hill District, where her mother was a member, then to an East Liberty church where Tresa's father, Marvin Murphy, was a youth pastor.

When Tresa was 4, the family moved to save on rent to an apartment building across the street from a bar on Webster Avenue, a rougher neighborhood than their former home on Burrows Street.

The next year, Valerie started dating Monte Jackson, whom Tresa calls "Mr. Q," a nickname he earned during his past life as a New York City deejay.

Tresa didn't take to Jackson right away -- she had liked her mom's previous boyfriend -- and she made fun of Jackson's brown boots, the ones with the slight heel. "Girl boots," she said.

But Jackson's cooking -- shrimp and barbecued chicken and butter pecan cake that "is so bomb" -- won over Tresa in time, and so did his steady, patient affection. With two incomes to cover costs, the family moved off Webster and into a duplex in Sugartop, a quiet neighborhood in the Upper Hill District.

"It's a good place to finish raising my Tresa," Valerie said. "I don't want nobody corrupting my Tresa."

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
	Principal Martin Slomberg tells a joke to Yamin Harris and his classmates during a high-pressure week of exams that will help determine the struggling school's future. "If they want to try somebody else to see if they can do better, God bless 'em. After all these years of being told I'm a good administrator, now it's like I must be doing something wrong," Slomberg says later.

Tresa still attends her father's church, in addition to her after-school program at Grace Memorial Presbyterian Church, where she reads books with a tutor and finishes her homework, ever-anxious to keep her spot on the honor roll. She spends time with her dad one or two weekends a month.

And now Jackson is family, too. He and Valerie aren't married, but Valerie considers him her husband.

"She has her dad, but she calls me 'Pops' and that makes me feel good," said Jackson, eyes serious under thick brown hair now streaked with gray. "They have their dad, but I just try to be there for them. There's a lot of love and respect there."

Yamin's journey
In 1995, Yamin Harris was just a few months old, living with his mother in a government-subsidized house in Erie, tucked into baby clothes Minnie had bought with money from her welfare checks and from her after-school job cleaning cages and feeding dogs at a nearby animal shelter.

Until 1989, when Minnie was 13, she had lived in the same house with her mother. But that year, her mother left Minnie there by herself two weeks before Christmas.

She promised she would come home soon, but she went to live with a new boyfriend in New York City, and she never did return.

Minnie kept the place by telling the housing authority her mother still lived there. She went to school and basketball practice as usual, washing dishes in a restaurant and working at the animal shelter and sometimes bagging marijuana to pay the $50-a-month rent.

Sometimes she would go into her mother's closet and inhale her scent, still lingering on her abandoned blouses, and cry.

Her mother's friends, feeling sorry for her, fed her when they could. She ate as much as possible at school and sometimes stole food to take home. She ate a lot of toasted cheese sandwiches, hundreds of them, during those years, and smoked the pot and drank the beer that her older friends were giving her.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette

Yamin Harris, left, tries to get math teacher Terea Pope's attention as she teaches calculator functions to the rest of his class, including fellow fifth-grader Caleb Perry, right. Some students struggle to focus on lessons, hindering their -- and sometimes their classmates' -- understanding of the material. Amy McConnell Schaarsmith: Yamin Harris loves science and art Martha Rial: Yamin is thoughtful of others Yamin Harris: We want to move from where we live now

When she got pregnant at 17, Minnie tried to ignore her swelling belly, thinking maybe her mind was playing tricks on her. When she couldn't pretend any longer, she thought about getting an abortion -- she could have afforded it -- but she decided to keep Yamin.

She didn't want to be alone anymore.

Minnie dropped out of high school in her junior year and stayed home to take care of Yamin, although she earned her General Educational Development, or GED, diploma a few years later.

By age 2, Yamin's face was already somber, a little man trying to stand firm as he clung to a child-sized plastic chair.

When Yamin was 4, Minnie discovered that his father had another girlfriend, and she broke up with him.

His father showed up at their house, beating and kicking at the front door and yelling to be let in, then crawled through a window, pinned Minnie against a wall and started choking her, she said.

Yamin did his best to defend his mother against his father.

"I just picked up the metal bat I had because I was always practicing swinging, and I heard my mom screaming and yelling." Yamin said. "So I picked up my bat and I hit him and hit him in the back."

Yamin's dad let Minnie go and ran away.

A year later, according to his mother, Yamin was watching TV news at a baby sitter's house when he saw his dad being taken to jail -- for 25 years to life, as it turned out -- for selling drugs. The sight sent Yamin into hysterics, she says, and after that he began to cry more and more often.

Minnie, running from a subpoena in her ex-boyfriend's arrest, moved her children to New York but eventually returned to Erie, and then moved to Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh, she didn't want to live in the West End with her father, who had three young children of his own.

So Minnie and her children stayed with a family friend, then at a women's shelter, then at St. Clair Village in the South Hills. Finally, when Yamin was in second grade, they found a Section 8 subsidized apartment down the street from Vann Elementary.

Sometimes she worked -- for a few days in a lawyer's office, as a cashier at a Sunoco gas station where she was robbed at gunpoint one Sunday morning -- and sometimes she attended classes toward her associate's degree in criminal justice. At other times, she did neither, and collected welfare.

At first, it was difficult to get Yamin to focus on his schoolwork. He cried. He got into fights. He got suspended. Eventually, though, he calmed down and began doing better in class.

"I was scared for him for a long time," Minnie said. "He wasn't a bad kid, just confused and crying and throwing stuff. I think he was crying for help, but nobody knew what was wrong."

A class of their own

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
	Teacher Sherrian Mitchell pushes her students to determine the main idea of a story and back up their claim with examples, a skill they'll need to pass the state reading test. "You can't just say it. You have to support it."

Now together in the fifth grade, now all on the verge of adolescence and middle school and the test that will help determine their school's future, Eric and Tresa and Yamin are classmates in a pivotal year at Vann. Eric and Yamin land Mitchell as their homeroom teacher, their home away from home. Tresa gets Pope, younger but equally stern.

But by this point, nearly every teacher at Vann has taught them, and can lay down the law whenever necessary.

In the third week of school, Tresa's class incurs the quiet wrath of Robert Muchow, who has taught them science and social studies and remedial math since fourth grade.

Several students, he says during their 15 minutes of recess -- held inside as punishment for misbehaving at lunch -- were talking and arguing in the cafeteria when they should have been reading silently.

He is disappointed in them, he says, as they look down at the floor or sneak sidelong glances at each other. They are fifth-graders now, the leaders of the whole school.

There is a better way to handle troublemakers than to fight back, Muchow says. What are some examples?

Count to 10, they say. Tell a teacher. Ignore the student causing the problem.

Exactly, Muchow says. So try that tomorrow.

"I still believe in you, but you've got to believe in yourselves," Muchow tells them. "You've got to believe you can set an example for the rest of the school and that you can make people think back and say, 'That's the best fifth grade that ever came through Vann Elementary School.' "

Tomorrow: Vann's fifth-graders and their families look ahead to middle school and beyond