teaching me. brendon s mother believes if brendon has more confidence you need to be doing the right thing 100% of the time. he ll be better behaved. brendon, you may line up. chamar, you may line up. let s talk about who we are and what we represent. this isn t just a pep talk everybody say, no excuses! no excuses. mastery s principal is laying out the philosophy of the school. everybody say, growth mindset. it s a theory developed by a stanford psychologist about 40 years ago. the growth mind-set is the idea that the mind is like a muscle, and the harder they work, the smarter they get. and so it s important in particular in working with african-american children, because they ve been told over and over again that they have an inferior innate intellectual ability. mahmoud says it s key to
a longer school year, an afro sent rick structure and lots of testing. all that has critics charging that he s teaching to the test. i don t think we want people to fill in the correct bubble. that he s segregating. devastating for low-income children. and his model just can t last. can those teachers stay at a school for 10, 15 years? ahead, our year-long journey at mastery. can mahmoud win his battle? levon, i m up here, son. and if he doesn t, what happens to boys like levon? i don t know how to do this. i m tony siragusa and i m training guys who leak a little,
than the school next door. mastery school has lots of rules. there are two teachers in levon and chamar s class. terrence price and jason burns, making the student-teacher ratio 1-14. the public schools have an average of one teacher for every 26 students. at mastery, the boys and girls are educated separately. what s the value of a single sex education? boys are a lot more immature than girls, so they get the behavioral referrals and the special ed labels. so by having the boys in an environment where the expectation is that they can move around a little bit, we can focus on their needs. brandon montgomery is also a 2nd grader.
thought you had a free day, huh? it s easier to get him versus him miss a day. if that happens, then we have to kind of reteach what they missed out on. petina england has been volunteering at the school. she s been unemployed for six months. i have a gas bill, electric bill, water and trash. about $2,000. you want to help me with the eggs today? is there a point you had to send chamar off to his uncle s? one weekend. you can t explain to a child we don t have any food, so we can t eat again. thank you, jesus, forgiving us this food morning. there s a theory that says kids in poverty can t learn because there s just a lot of stuff that goes along with poverty. can t make your bills, you worry about the water being shut off. sometimes there s no food to
should be, about in october, november of kindergarten. kinder garden, levon is nearly two full years behind. levon. to get on level, he needs to cram three years of learning into 195 days of 2nd grade. it may seem impossible. question mark. you knew it was that bad? i didn t know it was exactly that bad. i had been helping him at home. levon s mother, erica, says she s been teaching levon and reading with him since he was a baby. but since kindergarten, school has been a tortureous experience. the teacher said i m one teacher with 26 students. have you considered holding levon back? holding him back is not going to help him. helping him now will help him.