Today, the rules for teachers at Highland are clear: Ignoring struggling students is unacceptable. The drive to teach even those children who regularly disrupt lessons is apparent in a February visit to Karen Crawford's second-grade class. Crawford has gathered seven "brinkers"--children on the verge of passing the state tests. The group begins to read a passage on dinosaurs. One student, Glen, starts looking around. Crawford asks him to focus. It works for a moment: Glen offers that "germs" may have killed the dinosaurs. Then he starts pestering the girl next to him. Crawford has him move back to his own desk, which is turned backward to deter him from constantly rummaging through it. But she doesn't just leave him there. As the others reread the dinosaur passage to themselves, Crawford crouches beside Glen, talking to him about listening and self-control. "Glen," she concludes, "you are a smart boy."

Unfortunately, the attitudes Highland has worked hard to stamp out still linger in many D.C. classrooms. Like most educators, Lucius Stephenson, an eighth-grade teacher at Washington's R. H. Terrell Junior High, says he believes all students can learn. With high-achieving kids, Stephenson pulls out all the stops, working with students during lunch and after school on extracurricular projects. But, on one recent morning in his second-period science class, he is ignoring the students who ignore him. In the middle of the room, a group of girls discusses a flower one of them received for Valentine's Day, their science books untouched. In the back of the class, another student pounds on his table, talks to himself, and then puts his head down to sleep. Stephenson directs his attention almost exclusively to the three students who sit up front and gamely answer his questions. Stephenson complains that teaching at Terrell is harder now than it was when he started at the school a decade ago. "This neighborhood has gotten worse; there is killing all around," he says. "There are no parents to support you."

All that is true, but an increasingly influential group of tough-love reformers says it doesn't help for teachers to focus on it. "It is pretty clear the achievement gap has roots in school and nonschool factors," says Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an organization that works to improve minority education. "But if you tell teachers the gap has two sources, they want to fix the out-of-school stuff first. They never get around to doing the things they can do."

Teachers can start by setting high goals for all students, Haycock says. But reforms that do not provide at least simple incentives to meet those expectations will inevitably fall flat. Take, for example, the efforts of Terrell Junior High to give all students a new word to learn each day. On the morning of February 13, Principal Francis Nicol announced that day's word: "tawdry." The word was supposed to be discussed and used in classes, and perhaps it was. But the only obvious appearance of "tawdry" at Terrell was on an easel in a lonely corner of a language-arts classroom.

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