Detroit Public Schools, Houghton Partner to Boost Student Learning
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By Shanti Menon -- School Library Journal, 02/15/2010
Detroit Public Schools and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and have joined forces to improve student learning with a program that combines technology, customized lesson plans, and teacher training.
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Houghton volunteers spent a day with students from Detroit's Remus Robinson Academy. |
Detroit now joins other large districts across the country that use similar Web portals to help teachers evaluate students’ needs and identify students at risk.
“This is going to bring a world of trackable, actionable data to educators and help them engage kids in learning,” says Joe Blumenfeld, Houghton’s vice president of communications.
School administrators hope that the technology will help turn things around for the debt-ridden district, which plans to close 40 schools this year and has been plagued by years of corruption, mismanagement, and urban flight. Last year, district students—who once went on strike to protest the lack of textbooks and toilet paper—had the lowest scores ever in the history of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test.
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Houghton's Mike Smith reads with students from Remus Robinson Academy. |
The system also gives parents a line into classrooms, allowing them to see their children’s test scores, the week’s vocabulary list, and even download supplemental materials.
For the recent kick-off, more than 200 top executives at Houghton fanned out to 23 of the neediest Detroit schools to help train teachers, paint classrooms, and reorganize libraries.
“Some of these schools don’t even have librarians anymore because of funding cuts, and their libraries were just shut down,” says Blumenfeld. “Our volunteers helped clean them out and reorganize them, and that afternoon they were open for business.”
Houghton donated more than 1,000 new titles to school libraries, some of which had not seen new books for more than a decade.
