Port Chester Middle School

       The area that surrounds Port Chester, New York, is the part of Westchester County sardonically referred to by some as “up there in God’s Country,” where lawns are measured in acres and houses known by their architects. Port Chester itself has always been a blue-collar town within wealthy Westchester County, its small homes and large apartment houses occupied first by Irish and German, then Italian, and now mostly Latino immigrants.
            About 65 percent of Port Chester’s students are Latino and about the same percentage of students qualify for free and reduced-price meals. (About 20 percent of the students are white and 12 percent African American.) In the 2006-7 school year, Port Chester will spend roughly $14,500 per student per year, which is about the average for New York State but thousands of dollars less per student than most of its neighboring districts – many of the Westchester districts spend anywhere from $18,000 to $24,000 a student. What this means is that teachers in Port Chester could move to schools just a few miles away and make $10,000 or even $15,000 more a year in schools where the students are much wealthier and most have college-educated parents. Why do they stay? “We’re successful here,” said Neil Nostro, head of Port Chester Middle School’s social studies department. “And it’s like family.”
            “Successful” and “like family” are not words teachers use to describe Port Chester Middle School in the early 1990s. Back then it was a low-performing school where discipline was a big problem and many teachers hoped to escape after a year or two to teach elsewhere. The story of how Port Chester Middle became a school where rates of student proficiency match that of Westchester County as a whole (exceeding it slightly in math) and teachers look forward to coming to work is one that offers important insights into some of the more difficult problems bedeviling education today, from questions about how to prepare students for state assessments without “narrowing the curriculum” to figuring out what do to about the puzzle of middle school.

To read the whole story about Port Chester Middle School, go to: http://www.achievementalliance.org/files/PortChester.pdf