Yesterday I wrote a response/comment to the Opinion Piece in the N&O by Christopher W. Marsch entitled “A System Trying to Hide Its Failures.” By the time I winnowed my already-brief response down to the requisite 1000 characters, it became pretty cryptic. Here’s a more useful response:
Marsch’s piece was one of a pair: His pointed out the fact that Wake Schools are failing large number of students. The companion piece was justifying school busing for the sake of diversity, and arguing that improved average test scores prove the value of this policy.
I come down on Marsch’s side. It doesn’t matter how good the averages are if significant numbers of students aren’t being helped. (Remember the statistician who was lying with his feet in a fire and his head on a block of ice? He said that, on the average, he was quite comfortable. Perhaps the Wake Schools are “quite comfortable.”)
What’s the point of diversity? At heart, it’s this: Children (like adults) are influenced by the culture around them. If a school is predominantly poor (by which we might mean, variously, economically disadvantaged, with poorly educated parents, in a run-down community, minority, etc. -- take your pick), then the dominant school culture may be (but doesn’t have to be) one that tells the kids, “Don’t go to school every day, don’t do your homework, don’t speak up in class -- it’s not cool.” Most kids in that environment (like most of us in ours) are looking for rewards. And where do they get them? Most likely, from their peers more than from the school. Doing well in school will seem to offer little pay-off, and will cost them the support and respect of their peers.
School busing tries to counteract this culture. The rule of thumb is that if this defeatist culture is promoted by no more than 30% of the students, then the other, the middle-class, culture and values will prevail. Maybe. But there are at least two problems: 1) Many of these kids now exposed to middle-class values may already be so far behind academically that catching up would require more effort than they think possible. And 2) at the end of the day, these kids return to their own neighborhoods, where they have plenty of incentives to return to the values they have been bussed out of. So diversity, in the form of busing, is not a magic cure-all. And if we look beyond the gross (“average”) statistics to the kinds of issues Marsch is talking about, it might turn out that busing-for-diversity is counterproductive
I think one argument for busing has been that no other policy can combat the failure-culture of schools in poor neighborhoods. But I’d like to suggest another approach, one that works at changing that failure-culture in place.
Many years ago in a disadvantaged school in Charlotte I conducted a program called Project Opportunity, funded by the Ford Foundation and operated in a total of eleven schools around the South. Its plan was to select the top 10% of 7th graders each year for six years, and work with each group until they graduated, doing everything possible (not defined at first) to prepare them for college. I urge you to read in detail about the program and its results on my website, www.csanford.com (click on “This I Believe,” then on Project Opportunity). In a nutshell, virtually no one dropped out, most participants attended college, those that didn’t went to community colleges, and -- significantly -- the school’s previous failure-culture changed.
The key reasons for these successes were, I think, not even intended but just happened: (1) The enrichment activities -- field trips, tours of factories, attending plays and concerts, book-discussion groups -- were considered fun. The kids (at first) weren’t there to learn things, but to go on trips, to have a good time. But the learning took place. And non-participants heard about the fun and wanted to get in too. (2) Non-participants who asked were told that if they did well in school,they could get in next year. Many did. Many more started doing their school work because they wanted to get into the Project.
These are simple ingredients. But they can change a school -- and the lives of kids.
