Over the summer, to create a sense of unity in the Math Science expansion, school leaders adopted a new motto: “Together We Achieve.”

These days, if you’re a public school in Pennsylvania, your worth is measured in colored shapes—squares, triangles and stars. Of these, the triangles come with the most drama. Either they’re pointing upwards and blue, which means you’re succeeding, or they’re pointing downwards and are yellow or red, depending on the depth of your failure. A square is usually indifferent, referring to missing data, unless it’s green, in which case you’re middle-of-the-road—an assessment that, in a world obsessed with constant improvement, is its own quiet condemnation. Stars, which indicate surpassing perfection, are rare.

The shapes correspond to test scores and other measures released by the state Department of Education under a program that began last year. Harrisburg’s public schools got their first set of shapes in the fall of 2013—mostly triangles, of the yellow and red, downward-pointing variety. But one school, the Math Science Academy, stood apart. In the box for its overall performance stood an upright triangle, bold and blue, corresponding to a score of 92.2 out of 100—a rating on par with the best public schools in the commonwealth.

The Math Science Academy opened in 1994 as a specialized program where gifted students in the district could excel. In its first year, MSA enrolled one section each of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades. At the core of its philosophy were two main ideas: one, that teachers should work as a team, coordinating lesson plans and student interventions; and two, that the teaching should be “project-based,” with hands-on assignments, often involving multiple grade levels. The program also featured frequent field trips, a “looping” model under which teachers taught the same students for two years, and, as the school’s name suggests, a curricular focus on science and mathematics.

Requirements for entry to MSA were rigorous. Teachers, parents and students who sought to join were all interviewed. Teachers, in particular, faced higher than usual expectations. Maureen Dunbar, who has taught in the district since 1985 and who joined MSA in its second year, recalled that the administrator who launched the program, Dr. Gail Edwards, had a message for teachers who applied: “This is going to be taxing on you. You have to put in extra time.”

This year, MSA became the subject of an ambitious experiment. Throughout the school’s existence, there have been leaders in the district who felt an MSA-quality education ought to be made available district-wide. At the start of last school year, the district shuffled its building plans, breaking up some of the K-to-8 “neighborhood” schools. As part of the transition, MSA was moved from its previous home, at the Ben Franklin School on N. 6^th Street, to the Marshall School on Hale Avenue, behind the high school. Meanwhile, Marshall, formerly a K-to-8 school, was converted to a 5-to-8 middle school “academy,” much like MSA.

Last spring, the district began implementing a plan to merge the schools. The short-term goal is to double MSA’s size from 200 to 400 students; if the expansion is successful, it’s possible the MSA program, or something like it, will be brought to additional schools. But the plan also raises uncomfortable questions. MSA has always been predicated on high standards for admission. Are there sufficient numbers of so-called “gifted” students in the district to fill an expanded program? Or will MSA’s expansion simply mean its excellence gets diluted?

The district is also carrying out the plan in a period of intense scrutiny. In late 2012, the state declared the district to be financially distressed. Under the auspices of a law passed earlier in the year, the education secretary appointed Gene Veno, a private consultant and the CEO of a trade group for public insurance adjusters, as its chief recovery officer. His primary task was to get the district’s finances in order, but his recovery plan, released in April 2013, also spelled out benchmarks for academic improvement. If the district doesn’t meet them, it might be placed under even deeper state control.

In this environment, asking whether MSA’s success can be replicated is really a way of asking a larger question: can the district be saved?

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Maureen Dunbar teaches fifth-grade math at MSA. A native of upstate New York, she has short hair, glinting eyes and an unharried air. The first time I met her, I was escorted to her classroom at Marshall, where her fifth-graders were working quietly. She was content to do the interview there, at the front of the classroom, prompting me in a whisper to start asking my questions.

As a college student, Dunbar wavered between art, mathematics and teaching. After deciding she couldn’t make art into a profession, she settled on math and education. Her first teaching job was in San Antonio, Texas, as a volunteer teacher at a private school. After two years there, she moved to a public middle school. “I loved it,” she said. “I found from that early age of my teaching career that you could see the camaraderie between the staff members and even the administration, and what they did for the kids, and how the kids responded to it.” In 1985, Dunbar returned to the East Coast, taking a job in Harrisburg, and she has remained in the district since.

When MSA opened, the city had one large middle school teaching the sixth through eighth grades. The program was originally located there, but it quickly became a nomad within the district. Dunbar joined the team in its second year, when it was moved to a school called Riverside. (Both the old middle school building and Riverside are gone now.) That year, its enrollment was doubled to 200 students, in two sections each of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades. The following year, it lost favor with the superintendent and was disbanded. When it reopened, a few years later, it moved from one school building to another, until finally landing at Ben Franklin, where it remained until the move to Marshall last year.

All of this movement may have contributed to MSA’s sense of itself as off-beat, doing its own thing—as being what a former MSA teacher, Judd Pittman, described to me as “a school within a school.” Pittman, who has a blond buzz cut and a toothy grin, joined MSA after one year at the high school, where his methods, as he put it, were “too free-flow.” The principal walked into his classroom one day to find his students kneeling over a blue tarp, searching for life forms in a mound of dirt he’d brought in. But his style was a perfect fit for MSA, where, as he put it, the kids were “just old enough and just quirky enough” to get on board.

In the summer of 2013, the superintendent, Dr. Sybil Knight-Burney, and the assistant superintendent, Barbara Hasan, spoke with Dunbar, Pittman and a third MSA teacher, Kelli Recher, about expanding the school. It wasn’t the first time the idea of duplicating the program had come up. A year or two before, the principal at Ben Franklin had asked the same three teachers to write up a draft document outlining the school’s policies and methods. They prepared a write-up, but, according to Pittman, the district never did anything with it. Now, however, with the upcoming move to Marshall, the district was revisiting the idea of expansion.

In one sense, expanding MSA was about providing equal opportunities. If some students in the district enjoyed hands-on projects and field trips, shouldn’t they all? But the motivation may also have had a harder edge. Both Pittman and Dunbar spoke of perceptions that the MSA program was “elitist”—that it skimmed the best students from the district and set them apart from the rest. “There was something in the community that wasn’t fond of it,” Pittman said. “There’s a view that every child should have an opportunity for everything.” In addition, the prevailing atmosphere in public education, in which schools and teachers are measured by students’ test scores, tended to breed resentment for a program that attracted the district’s top performers.

In a way, however, the aura of elitism was a sign of the program’s success. At one point, Dunbar told me that she embraces the “elitist” label. “I think they should believe in elitism, actually,” she said. “Why not? There’s a Harvard. There’s great basketball teams. They don’t take every kid that tries out for the team.” The idea that some students could be turned away was part of what gave the program its prestige. Pittman, too, invoked the Ivy League analogy. “I was in the top 10 of my graduating class, but even then I’d never get to go to Harvard,” he said. “Does that mean there shouldn’t be any Harvard?”

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Throughout last year, Marshall and MSA operated side by side in the same building. They had different teachers and different school colors, and they ate lunch separately. Banners for each year MSA had made “adequate yearly progress”—a federal accountability measure, which no other Harrisburg school met in 2012—hung in the MSA hallway. “It created a natural divide,” Ryan Jones, a former English teacher at Marshall who was dean of students last year, told me. MSA also had a tradition of purchasing school T-shirts, which students wore on certain days. “Marshall kids didn’t have them, and they’d kind of point that out. Like, ‘Why do they get to do that?’” he said.

Jones, who was promoted to assistant principal this year, gave me a tour of the Marshall building during a visit in early September. A former employee of a record label, where he planned tours for musicians, Jones has pomaded brown hair and a laid-back, raffish manner. On his arm, exposed by a rolled-up sleeve, is a tattoo of a Tarot card, labeled “Le Fou.”

Jones explained how, before the start of this school year, he and the principal, Marisol Craig, formed a leadership team to help brainstorm how to make the building more unified. Under the expansion plan, the programs were combined over the summer into one school, Marshall Math Science Academy. “We broke everything down,” Jones said. They combined Marshall’s colors, yellow and black, with MSA’s green and silver, arriving at a new color scheme of yellow and green. Out of Marshall’s prior mascot, the Lions, they fashioned a new mascot, the Pride: “We’re multiple lions, we’re coming together,” Jones said.

They also worked to create a sense of unity among teachers. The day of my first visit, a staff member in the IT department was putting some final touches on a short video that Craig and Jones had directed. Set to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” the video traces a path through the school’s hallways, passing a succession of teachers who each hold up signs explaining who they are, what they teach, and how long they’ve been in the district. It concludes with a shot of the entire staff in school colors posing in front of the building, shouting Marshall Math Science Academy’s new motto in unison: “Together We Achieve.” Watching it, Craig and Jones exchanged a high-five.

After the video, we sat down in a conference room. Craig, a tall woman with light brown hair and a calmly enthusiastic bearing, has worked for the district since 2003 and was most recently a principal at the high school. She became Marshall’s principal in 2013, overseeing its first year as a fifth-through-eighth academy with the MSA program in its halls. She began by saying she was happy to have me there, because she felt the MSA expansion was a positive step for the district. “We always invite media and community folks to come in and kind of see what we’re doing, but it seems like they never come unless we have an issue,” she said.

Cosmetic changes, like the ones made to the mascot and colors, are important to the school’s image and morale. But the most substantive aspects of the expansion relate to academics, where the hopes and challenges inherent in the plan come more clearly into view. In the past, students applying to MSA were scored on a rubric that takes into account test scores, grades, recommendations from past teachers and an in-person interview. According to Craig, there were “more kids out there” in the district ready for the rigors of MSA. “It’s really hard when you’ve got one slot left, and you have to choose between 10 kids,” she said. Doubling the program would “provide the same opportunities for more students who could meet the same criteria.”

The reality, though, is more complicated. Starting last spring, all of the Marshall students went through the traditional MSA application process, but only some scored high enough on the rubric to be admitted. Over the summer, the school sent out copies of an unusually gentle rejection letter. It explained that, though the student hadn’t been admitted to MSA, he or she would still be invited back to the building next year, and would be able to partake in all the same opportunities as the regular MSA students. The result is that this year, “Marshall Math Science,” though portrayed on the district website as a single school, is actually two schools on paper: Marshall, with two sections each in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, and Math Science, with two sections in each of these grades and four in fifth.

Partly, the school retained Marshall students to appease parents, for many of whom Marshall was the neighborhood school where they had sent their children for years. When Craig and Jones announced they could stay, the parents “were like, ‘Oh, my God. Thank you, thank you, thank you,’” Craig said. Under the expansion plan, the Marshall school will be “phased out” over the next three years, as the Marshall classrooms age out of the program.

But the decision also foreshadowed a challenge that will face the school in years to come—and one that has implications for the school’s state rating. Contrary to what Craig suggested, at least in the initial year of expansion, the district simply didn’t have enough students who could “meet the same criteria” as the smaller MSA core. Up until last year, the minimum score on the rubric for admitted MSA students was 80 out of 100. This year, in order to fill the available MSA classrooms, the school had to lower the threshold to 70—and that’s for students admitted to the program, not the ones enrolled as Marshall students, who scored even lower.

Dunbar, acknowledging the change, was not particularly dismayed. Referring to the expanded fifth-grade class, she said, “Are all 100 of our kids at the level our 50 were? No. But we still have enough that there’s more than the 50. It’s not like there’s 50 great and 50 that are not great.”

Additionally, for students who are new to the program, its reputation can be a powerful incentive to better performance. Craig told the story of one child who struggled as a Marshall student all through last year. As a student at Marshall Math Science, however, he’s flourishing. “He’s like, ‘Mom, I gotta be straight, because I’m Math Science,’” she said. “I gotta do this, and I need you to be doing this for me, and getting me here on time, because I can’t be late for school.”

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Last summer, the Harrisburg school district relocated its offices from Front to State Street, inside what used to be the Lincoln School. On the morning of Friday, Sept. 26, district leaders gathered for a press conference in the building’s gymnasium, which has served as a venue for school board and other public meetings since the move. They sat at a long table at half court, basketball hoops and steel mesh-covered windows to either side and a projection screen on a dark stage behind them.

The purpose of the conference was to discuss district schools’ scores on last year’s state assessments, which the state originally planned to release to the public on Sept. 24. In the end, the release was delayed, but district officials, who had seen the scores privately, went ahead with the conference anyway. At least in theory, a great deal was riding on the results. In an update to his recovery plan last April, Veno set new goals for improving district test scores. Some people, most notably Harrisburg’s new mayor, Eric Papenfuse, criticized the targets as too low, but they were still ambitious. Veno wanted to see average gains in proficiency of around 4 percent in each subject area tested.

Superintendent Knight-Burney began the Friday conference by saying there was “no good way to share bad news.” Though she was forbidden from revealing the actual scores, she could describe them in general terms; the overall results, she said, were “very disappointing.” As she later confirmed to reporters, it wasn’t just that district test scores had failed to climb as high as Veno wanted—they had actually fallen from the previous year.

Then the conference took a curious turn. Despite Knight-Burney’s disappointment, neither she nor the other district officials showed any urgency about what the low scores might mean. In fact, Knight-Burney said, the results were “not unexpected.” The scores were explained, she said, by Harrisburg’s extraordinary rate of turnover in recent years. (According to figures later provided by the district’s public relations officer, since the 2012-13 school year, 247 teachers and 28 administrators have either resigned, retired or been furloughed.)

The conference illustrated the peculiar disconnect between the things district leaders identify as key to their success and the steps they actually take to achieve them. At no point did Veno, in releasing his updated benchmarks, couch them with the anticipation that the district would perform poorly because of high turnover. Nor did his plan take any steps to retain or identify top teachers. (To the contrary, the likely explanation for at least some of the turnover was the 5-percent pay cut for teachers implemented in his plan.) The district mentioned the turnover rate as an excuse for past scores, but it ought to have been a warning. However impressive the recovery initiatives look on paper, they are meaningless without skilled teachers to implement them.

This is particularly obvious at MSA, whose curriculum depends heavily on exceptionally committed teachers. Judd Pittman, the former MSA teacher, told me that, during his seven years at the school, it “defined” him. One Saturday per month, he led students on what were called “inner-city outings”—outdoor excursions like hiking or canoeing, often funded by donations or grants that the teachers pursued themselves. “Working at MSA, it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle,” he said. “The academy is a family.” Last spring, after his wife gave birth, a group of former students showed up on his doorstep in Midtown, saying “We heard Mr. Pittman has a little Pittman.”

On a follow-up visit to the school, I met Sue Gibson, a Marshall teacher who has been with the district for 27 years. Last year, when MSA entered the building, Gibson resented it. “There was a lot of jealousy from the other teachers,” she said. When the school announced the expansion, which initially seemed like it would exclude her Marshall students, “My feet were stomped so far down on the ground you couldn’t see them,” she said. “‘Cause I was pissed. I’m like, ‘If I’m not part of Math Science Academy, I don’t want to play.’”

When she learned about the plan for the combined Marshall Math Science Academy, however, her attitude changed. The message to her, as a teacher of the “Marshall” sections of sixth grade, was “Get your butts down here, you are a part of Math Science Academy. You may not have the top-level children, but you have children here who want to learn.” In her first week, she stayed an extra two hours after school, working with the fifth- and sixth-grade team on lesson plans and objectives. “We literally have everything already planned til May. Everything! Projects, lessons, things you wanna focus on for the whole year.” Where she used to be out the door at 3:36, now she routinely stayed til 5 or 6. “It’s the best year I’ve ever had,” she said.

Characteristics like these may be less quantifiable than test scores, but they can still be detected and, in some rough way, measured. At one point I asked Dunbar about MSA’s identity. In addition to having a new principal and assistant principal, it had lost a core teacher in Pittman, who left to enroll in a professional development program through the state. Was the MSA culture still intact after all the changes? “No,” she said. But, she thought, it could be built back in the next four years. “I also think that the kids rise, if the expectations are up there,” she said.

The great thing about Math Science, she said, was the feeling of collaborating as a team. “You build it with the teachers, with each other, and then the kids build it, and the kids build it with the teachers. And it goes from fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade to eighth grade.” When her students go on to high school, she said, their new teachers report back to her: “All of your kids aren’t the smartest,” they tell her. “But they know how to work together.”