Whenever I hear sentiments like that, I think of what teachers and principals in high-performing and rapidly improving urban schools have to say. For example, Barbara Adderley, the principal of Stanton Hall Elementary in Philadelphia, made some compelling observations when she accepted an award at the Education Trust's national conference a few weeks ago. She talked about driving to work every day through blighted neighborhoods and seeing the drug dealers on the corners, and dealing with a situation in which children walk to school past crack houses and hear gunfire many nights. (As the Philadelphia Weekly describes it, "On her first day in September 2002 Adderley was greeted with madness: children running and screaming, teachers showing up late if at all, parents cussing and students overwhelmingly failing. Surrounded by drugs, neglect, poverty and violence at 16th and Cumberland in North Philadelphia, Stanton was one of the city’s worst-performing schools.")
Her response, Adderley told the conference crowd, was not to adjust academic expectations downward and focus exclusively on caring and nurturing, but instead to re-build her school around the assumption that its students were destined to become the next generation of business and civic leaders---the future Director of the Education Trust, the future U.S. Secretary of Education, etc. (she was citing the “big names” in attendance at the awards ceremony to add rhetorical flourish)---rather than the next generation of neighborhood drug dealers and addicts. Then she and her teachers began to TREAT THEM LIKE THAT by fashioning a new school culture and a new set of educational practices around that assumption. “Drugs are worse, guns are everywhere,” she told the Weekly, but "We can’t worry about any of that. We can only make this a climate where kids wanna be here, and where they’re learning."
Similarly, when Goodman asks "How do we convince 'corner boys' to pass Regents exams?" I think of June Esserly, principal of the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts. At a session hosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education last year, Esserly talked about a three-week long August Academy she and her teachers provide for entering middle school students. (Contrast that with the chaos attending the first day at The Wire's Tilghman Middle School when the doors opened and kids simply swarmed into the hallways.)
The Academy helps kids bone up on study skills, she said, "But the most important thing is they get to understand the culture of the school. They get to understand that we are serious about education and that we are serious about them going to college. They need to start thinking about it now to get where they need to be." The Academy accomplishes that in ways both overt and subtle. For example, "I wanted the kids to be reading a book they could finish in three weeks, because in my experience a lot of urban kids don't finish what they start, so I want them to learn right from the get go, you start it, you finish it."
Adderley and Esserly recognize that "the culture of the streets" is out there and that their students, for now, must live in it, but also believe they don't have to go to school in it. Excellent schools for poor, urban students (public schools, not just charters like KIPP), purposefully shape the culture inside the school and wield it in very instrumental ways to influence expectations, aspirations, and behavior. In that sense, the culture becomes a tool in the educational toolbox, not something that is accidental or random or---as Goodman seems to imply---something that just inexorably seeps into the hallways and classrooms through the school's doors and windows.
--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald
No comments:
Post a Comment