Patrick Welsh on Why Repeated School Reforms Fell Short at T.C. Williams

At T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, the churn of education reform often consumed attention without solving the school’s hardest problem: how to reach students who arrived underprepared and needed more support. Patrick Welsh, who taught English there for 43 years before retiring in 2013, saw initiatives arrive with new terminology, consultants and promised fixes. His account points to a persistent gap between reform plans and the daily work of helping students see why their studies matter.

The issue wasn’t a lack of resources or effort. T.C. offered more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, and more than 80 percent of its graduates went on to college. Yet the school struggled to serve students facing poverty, gaps in prior preparation and other challenges that classrooms alone couldn’t resolve. Welsh’s criticism is directed at reform programs that promised to address such disparities but too often distracted educators from instruction.

One school, many needs

In 1971, Alexandria combined the 11th and 12th grades of its three high schools at T.C. Williams. The move aimed to integrate Black and white students while avoiding a contentious debate over student busing. It also reflected the “comprehensive high school” model promoted by former Harvard president James Conant: one school intended to serve students bound for academic study as well as those pursuing vocational training.

Welsh found that the merger did not produce the racial conflict later dramatized in Disney’s “Remember the Titans”. He recalled fewer discipline problems at T.C. than at the Catholic school in Rochester, New York, where he had taught before moving to Alexandria. But the school’s scale and broad mission did not deliver equal results for every student. Self-motivated pupils and those with engaged parents tended to benefit, while many students from lower-income households and less involved families fell behind.

That imbalance became harder to ignore as the school’s demographics changed. More students entered with significant academic gaps, and their performance affected test results and graduation rates. The underlying challenge had persisted since the merger, Welsh argued, while the number of students needing substantial help grew.

Reform arrives with a new vocabulary

The 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” warned that American education was in decline. Welsh saw the report’s alarm help expand the market for consultants and quick fixes. At T.C., one early program was “Effective Schools,” presented to teachers in 1984 through an auditorium banner and a one-page handout listing seven characteristics. The ideas included a non-oppressive school climate, a principal acting as instructional leader, and sufficient time for students to learn.

What the presentation lacked, in Welsh’s telling, was practical guidance for applying the principles in classrooms. There was no follow-up. The next initiative, Madeline Hunter’s SPONGE model, sought to fill class time with short activities designed to keep students engaged and on task. Welsh objected to the expectation that students should be occupied every moment, especially when that meant busywork. Administrators monitored whether teachers followed the approach, and one warned him that departing from it could put a teacher at risk unless a “teachable moment” justified the change. The program, he recalled, lasted no more than two years.

Standards-based education brought another round of training in the 1990s. During two days of presentations in 1999, teachers were told to identify what every student needed to know and to follow a “drive-train sequence” for instruction. Welsh remembered a colleague walking out before the afternoon session, objecting to the material. The episode captures his larger complaint: elaborate language and packaged methods could take center stage without giving teachers a convincing reason to change how they taught.

Plans for a new, $100 million T.C. Williams building in 2005 came with a different promise. Backed in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s support for smaller learning communities, the design was meant to organize students into academies for more individual attention. When the building opened in 2007, the academies had largely failed to materialize. Counselors and administrators were divided among areas for different grades, but the intended structure for grouping students across classes was absent.

Welsh thought the idea faced a basic problem at T.C. Grouping students by academic level could have created a separate academy for those taking Advanced Placement courses. In a community wary of tracking and separation by ability, class or ethnicity, such an arrangement was unlikely to gain acceptance. The initiative’s promise had collided with local conditions.

Transformation without a clear direction

In March 2010, federal education officials placed T.C. on a list of “persistently lowest achieving” schools, making it eligible for grants intended to support transformation. Welsh had hoped the designation would prompt a serious rethink of how to teach students who read well below grade level or struggled with basic arithmetic. He had previously described the designation as a wake-up call.

Instead, he argued, school policy lowered expectations. Under Superintendent Morton Sherman, students generally could not receive less than 50 on homework or an exam unless they did no work, in which case they could receive a 40. They could submit late assignments through the end of the quarter and retake exams. Welsh recalled students checking a difficult test and asking when the makeup would be.

Teachers also faced familiar classroom requirements: write an “essential question” on the board, begin with an “activator activity,” and close by asking students to repeat what they had learned. Welsh saw these steps as another version of SPONGE, adding prescribed routines without addressing the challenges students brought into class.

The grading rules could affect students in both directions. Teachers felt pressure to pass pupils who had not met course expectations, while higher-performing students could calculate how little work they needed to earn an A. Eleanor Kenimer, a 2011 T.C. graduate who later attended Duke University, said the system made it easy for students to stop challenging themselves.

Consultants added to the confusion. Welsh recalled that a Harvard consultant received $10,000 for a one-day visit. Students later evaluated teachers through a survey based on seven qualities: care, control, clarify, challenge, captivate, confer and consolidate. Teachers never received the results, and Welsh said the consultant did not return.

Erika Dietz, a young English teacher at T.C. who received a state-funded Titan Transformer Award in June 2012, described a similar problem. She wasn’t overwhelmed by teaching or by connecting with students. The volume of consultants, jargon and new initiatives was what wore on her. “It felt like every buzzword or trend in education was being thrown at us at once,” she told Welsh after moving to Texas. When a program did not work quickly, she said, it could be discarded the following year or even midway through the current one.

Dietz had taught in California before joining T.C. Though Alexandria offered more money and resources, she felt that abundance could sometimes get in the way. She said she had done more with less at her previous school, partly because she had to focus on the basics of teaching.

What teachers can carry forward

Welsh’s account doesn’t suggest that schools should ignore evidence or refuse to change. His point is that a program’s labels and implementation requirements don’t guarantee that it will help students learn. Some initiatives failed to fit Alexandria’s students; others repackaged familiar ideas as new discoveries. Across four decades, he found that none solved the central task of helping students care about a subject and connect it to their lives.

The professional development he valued most came from fellow English teachers sharing what worked in their own classrooms, with an important qualification: “This works for me; it may not work for you.” The exchange respected the differences among teachers and gave them ideas they could judge against their own students and circumstances. Welsh found those conversations energizing because they grew from a shared commitment to teaching rather than a demand to adopt the latest method.

That commitment, he argued, rarely appeared on the 74-item classroom observation checklist used by Sherman to evaluate faculty. Yet Welsh saw a teacher’s passion for communicating a subject to the next generation as central to good teaching—and as something that can sustain educators through the next round of reform. The lasting question for school leaders is whether each new initiative gives teachers more help with that work, and whether its value can be seen in students’ learning.