Caution: Students soaring ahead

Date: 1/18/2009

By DORIE TURNER
Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA (AP) — The seventh-grade students are playing a round-robin trivia game, excitedly naming the countries on a blank map showing on their classroom's overhead projector. Burkina Faso. Cote d'Ivoire.

Justyn McGowan does a dance each time he gets an answer right and remains standing as one-by-one his classmates sit down, disappointed.

Ghana. Togo. Benin.

Faster and faster, the teacher goes around the room until it's just Justyn and another boy.

The tallest mountain in Africa? Mount Kilimanjaro. The tallest mountain range in South America? The Andes.

And then it's over. Justyn doesn't win the game but he's still smiling, showing off the deep dimples in his cheeks. His 25 classmates erupt into cheers, applauding both students.

This is how it works at the extraordinary Ron Clark Academy, a private middle school tucked among boarded-up houses and graffiti-peppered walls in Lakewood, one of Atlanta's poorest neighborhoods.

Ron Clark isn't just the name behind the school — he teaches mathematics and global politics, plays basketball and spends many evenings on the phone with boys and girls who need help with homework.

Going over a test, the lanky 37-year-old quickly covers members of the U.S. Supreme Court and the presidential line of succession. Amid the questions, Clark utters the magic words that send his students into musical overdrive.

"It's easy," he says.

"It's so easy, easy," the students sing in unison, swaying their hands back and forth, ending with a "Bom, bom."

These children know a collection of songs written by Clark, ditties that help them remember everything from algebra to political platforms. He wrote many of them while teaching in New York City schools, a unique strategy that helped him win the Disney American Teacher of the Year title in 2000 and inspired a TNT movie, "The Ron Clark Story."

Seventh-grader Ajee Jenkins says music helps her connect with what she's learning in a way she's never experienced.

Indeed, music has made the children overnight stars. Last fall they scored millions of views of their YouTube video featuring an infectious election rap called "Vote However U Like," which led to Justyn and his classmates performing on "Good Morning America," CNN and BET.

Each appearance, the children discussed political platforms for Republicans and Democrats, talking about capital gains taxes and the war in Iraq with the composure and maturity of grown-ups.

They've written a follow-up song called "Dear Obama" that some students will perform at the inaugural celebration for the new president.

On the way to class each morning, Justyn passes a sign in the lobby at the foot of a blue plastic slide that curls from the second floor down to the first.

"Caution: People flying!" it warns.

It's not merely a warning that students might come shooting out the mouth of the slide. The sign is the unspoken mantra in the halls of this unique school, where students say "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir" and look you in the eye while giving a firm handshake.

They wear their uniforms with pride: khaki pants, light blue shirts and navy blue blazers — girls have the option of wearing skirts. Their navy blue ties are trimmed with the colors and crests reflecting which of the four houses they belong to: Isibindi (Zulu for "courage"), Reveur (French for "dreamer"), Amistad (Spanish for "friendship") or Altruismo (Portuguese for "altruism").

From fundamental discipline to essential courtesy, these children are learning what it takes to succeed, and they're soaring.

"I don't care if you have a problem with your parents, your brother, your cousin. I don't care if things are tough at home," says Clark, a white man looking at a sea of black faces in his global politics class. "You have no excuse. You have got to find a way to rise above that and be successful."

Debate is a key to what the students learn here, and it spills over into their personal conversations.

At lunch, Justyn and his friend Willie Thornton are deep in a discussion over which kind of pilot is more important to his country. Justyn dreams of flying for a commercial airline, Willie wants to be an Air Force fighter pilot. The 12-year-olds volley back and forth like seasoned politicians on the stump.

"People are depending on us to take them from one country to another country. They need us," Justyn says.

"We have missiles, we have guns, but all Boeings have are peanuts and crackers," Willie retorts.

Just one day at Ron Clark Academy reveals how these boys and girls from mostly working-class families in Atlanta are changing perceptions — and beating the odds. They come from some of the city's toughest neighborhoods. They could be joining gangs, failing out of school. They could easily become tragic statistics.

Instead, the 80 students who attend this academy in a renovated 100-year-old warehouse have gotten a chance at something most urban students can only dream about. They are attending a private school carrying a price tag of $14,000 a year per student, a bill paid almost entirely by donors.

Oprah Winfrey's foundation sent the school a $365,000 check for Christmas, a gift that can pay for 26 students to attend the academy for a year. She calls Clark a role model and applauds the "profound difference you're making with your passion for teaching."

The children each have their own donated Dell laptop and sit in classrooms decorated with colorful mosaics painted by Atlanta graffiti artist Totem. Instead of chalkboards, teachers use interactive projection screens that respond to touch like an iPhone.

The bathrooms feature flat screen TVs broadcasting CNN, a strategy Clark says keeps students preoccupied in the place where most school fights break out. They take trips abroad thanks to Delta Air Lines, traveling to countries most of their parents couldn't afford to take them — the Netherlands, England, France and Australia. It's part of the school's curriculum to escort students to six of the seven continents by the time they finish the eighth grade.

"We're not just teaching math and reading for a test. We're teaching life," says Clark. "We want kids to have appreciation of other countries and religions."

Many days, teachers from school districts across the globe visit the academy, observing classes and learning techniques to take back to their schools. About 3,000 teachers visit each year, a way for Clark to reach beyond the students he teaches.

The school was founded on one basic principle — any child can learn. Clark was tired of the excuses he was hearing for children he taught in his home state of North Carolina and in a Harlem public school.

They're too unruly. They have a hard home life. They're a lost cause.

He created a set of rules called "The Essential 55," which became the title of his best-selling book, aimed at creating a structure that promotes a mix of creativity and discipline. He teaches classes with animation, doing impressions of presidents Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

He marches around on the desktops, crouching down to make eye contact with each child as he lectures on Supreme Court cases and sings about algebraic equations. Students must sit up straight, pay close attention and answer "yes, sir" or they could face detention.

"If there's no structure, you end up with chaos. That's how creativity gets a bad name," said Kim Bearden, an English teacher who co-founded the school with Clark in 2007. "We teach them how to have organized creativity."

For students like Justyn, who lives with his mother, her boyfriend and his 6-year-old half-sister, Taylor, in a Habitat for Humanity house not far from a federal prison, the school is a lifeline. He likes school now, has fewer discipline problems and is more respectful, his mother, Shaewana Johnson, said.

He likes to wear his glasses in class, something that might have gotten him picked on at his old school. He doesn't talk back to adults. He stopped mentioning wanting to be a basketball player when he grows up, shifting his focus to becoming an airline pilot so he can see more of the world.

"He would have fallen into that peer pressure trap. I can't afford to supply him with the shoes these students have," said Johnson, 32, who works full-time at a daycare center and takes college classes in hopes of becoming a school counselor. "He would try to fit in and he would be an angry child."

Justyn has a daily checklist he must complete, with tasks for the morning and evening.

Wash face. Brush hair. Iron clothes. Put book bag by door. Make up bed. Organize desk.

School is his magnet now, a place where students aren't allowed to tease each other.

"I want to get up in the morning and go," he said as he stood in his bedroom, which was recently redecorated courtesy of Delta after he won a school essay contest. "It's just something in me. I want to go to school."

In each classroom, around every corner, along the corridors countless surprises emerge.

Life-sized cardboard cutouts of the students hang from windows, hover over door frames and smile down from the upper balcony. Walls are decorated with brightly colored graffiti murals of city skylines, football games and the Seven Wonders of the World.

In the student garden, they're helping to grow carrots, potatoes and spinach for the school cafeteria. The stairwell is lined with coins from every country in the world — among them the Japanese yen and Italian lira (now defunct).

One classroom is dedicated to The Gauntlet, an academic obstacle course where children are tested on what they learn during the year. Students run from station to station, only moving on once they've answered the math problem or geography trivia question correctly.

Classrooms burst with song, drumming and dancing. Cheers of students applauding each other's correct answers echo in the hallways.

"We teach them how to represent themselves in society, how to be articulate," Clark said. "We still are struggling with prejudices in our country. I never want to give anyone an opportunity to deny my students a chance because they don't know how to present themselves or act in a certain situation. We're taking away excuses from people."

The 2-year-old school serves fifth- through eighth-graders, though the first class of eighth-graders won't start until next year. Once the children graduate, Clark and Bearden hope to get them into some of Atlanta's private high schools.

In math class, Justyn's worst subject, he is using Life Savers, mints and licorice to graph out the concepts of greater than, less than and equal to. He gets the first few wrong but doesn't give up.

"I'm gonna get this one," he says under his breath, determination in his eyes.

He does, and the dimples sink even deeper into his cheeks as a grin lights up his face. The next problem proves even tougher than the last, and just when hope seems lost, his buddy Jalen Tyler pipes up.

"You got it, Justyn!"

Even the crowd at the football game painted on the classroom walls seems to cheer him on.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.