BALANCING THE EQUATION
THE BRICK FACADE OF MERAMEC
Elementary in Dutchtown is 111 years old, speckled, dignified, and offers no hint that the public school behind it is listed by the state as one of Missouri’s worst performing. Or that more than 90 percent of the students there have fallen behind grade level in math and reading. Or that Meramec is now in the third year of a pilot turnaround effort that appears to be helping some students catch up-and that may soon be discontinued.
Pablo Ramos greets me there just inside the front doors. A compact 33-year-old with an unruly beard, Ramos is both a Meramec teacher and an alum: He attended second grade upstairs. “Product of the district,” he says, meaning Saint Louis Public Schools. Ramos leads us down a hallway, into that classic potpourri of radiator heat, industrial cleaner, cafeteria cooking, and warm bodies. We enter his classroom. Over the door is a stained-glass window depicting a German castle-presumably a nod to the immigrants who once filled this neighborhood. Today, by contrast, more than 90 percent of Meramec’s student body is African American, as are 11 of the 12 fourthgraders who begin filing into this room that everybody calls “the STEM lab” (STEM being the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The pupils rush into seats and grab tablets.
“Class, class!” Ramos calls out.
“Yes, yes!” they respond.
“Get on Kahoot.” They use their tablets to log onto that learning platform. This launches a game-show-like review exercise in which Ramos poses multiple-choice questions drawn from previous lessons-what’s the meaning of “algorithm,” “debugging,” “sequence,” or “finite loop”?-and the kids tap in their answers, hoping to light up the scoreboard on a monitor facing the room. (For the record, Dennis crushes it with 12 of 12 correct; Cyneise and Fahid aren’t far behind.)
Meanwhile, four girls at a table chatter and fidget nonstop, despite Ramos’warnings. But even they quiet down and watch when he places apiece of paper on the carpet in the middle of the room. The challenge: Write code to make Dash, a small remote-controlled robot on wheels, travel around the paper three times. The kids break into groups. Organized chaos ensues.
The remarkable thing about the STEM lab is not any empirical record of success. The lab is a “specials” class, like music or gym, that the kids attend twice a week or so. It’s designed to complement (and whet young appetites for) math and science classes rather than substitute for them. What’s remarkable is how the lab
