WRITERS ON EDUCATION

By Stephanie Reitz,
Associated Press Writer  |  October 29, 2007

HOLYOKE, Mass. –When Jessica Burgos entered Holyoke High School, more than 460 fellow freshmen crowded its halls, homerooms and cafeteria.

Four years later, about 260 graduated in the Class of 2006. The
classes dwindled and the desks emptied over the years as many of
Burgos’ classmates moved away or dropped out, often to get jobs or care
for unplanned babies.

"There were definitely a lot of people who were there in the
beginning, and then as the years go by, you’d go, ‘Hey, where’d that
person go?’ " said Burgos, a 19-year-old sophomore at Westfield State
College.

At Holyoke High and 22 other Massachusetts public high schools, no
more than 60 percent of students who start as freshmen make it to
seniors in an average year. Nationwide, about 1,700 schools fit that
criteria, according to an analysis of U.S. Department of Education data
conducted by Johns Hopkins University for The Associated Press.

Lawmakers are considering tightening the federal No Child Left
Behind Act to put more pressure on these schools, dubbed "dropout
factories" by some education researchers, to retain students and
improve graduation performance.

Some of the Massachusetts schools have boosted their mentoring
programs and opened alternative schools with smaller class sizes.
Others are intensifying their elementary and middle school curricula to
prepare students for a smoother transition into high school.

Gov. Deval Patrick also has proposed raising the age when Massachusetts students can leave school from 16 to 18.

Many of the state schools with high dropout rates are in
lower-income, urban communities, where a teen’s academic success can be
influenced by poverty or social problems in their families and
neighborhoods.

Some schools, recognizing the need for some students to help support
their families, have boosted their work-study programs so teens can get
jobs without dropping out. Several also have thriving General
Equivalency Degree (GED) programs, a chance for dropout teens and
adults to get diplomas while still working.

In Springfield, which has four high schools on the dropout list,
middle school and the period between eighth and ninth grade is
considered key — especially because frustrated, underachieving
ninth-graders often comprise many of the dropouts once they reach 16.

Now, summer-school sessions are mandatory for incoming Springfield
ninth-graders whose skills are at the seventh-grade level or lower. The
district also is considering adding more hours and days to that summer
school program.

About 2,000 Springfield children are enrolled in each grade level
except its freshmen class, which had almost 2,700 students in the
2006-07 school year.

Springfield Superintendent of Schools Joseph Burke said that bulge
– caused partly by a large group held back from progressing to 10th
grade — represents students at a critical crossroads.

"Lots of these students are ninth-grade repeaters who are staying in
school and trying to move forward, and the good news is that lots of
them eventually do," Burke said.

Burke and several other educators say getting students to feel
involved and interested is critical, and that schools should be centers
of encouragement and high expectations rather than frustration and
anonymity.

Kevin McCaskill, principal of Putnam Vocational-Technical High
School in Springfield, said separating the 1,500-person student body
into smaller groups — each with their own teachers and administrators
– has made a significant difference.

In the last three years, Putnam’s graduation rate has increased from
about 27 percent to 49 percent and daily attendance has jumped
significantly, he said.

"I think for years, students may have felt they were just numbers,"
he said. "When teachers and administrators know you by name, when
you’re in a smaller learning community where an adult is responsible
for you, school becomes personal again."

by Steven Wolk
Phi Delta Kappan, May 1, 2007
 
If
the purpose of our schools is to prepare drones to keep the U.S.
economy going, then the prevailing curricula and instructional methods
are probably adequate. If, however, we want to help students become
thoughtful, caring citizens who might be creative enough to figure out
how to change the status quo rather than maintain it, we need to rethink
schooling entirely. Mr. Wolk outlines what he considers to be the essential content for a new curriculum.

LAST
YEAR my son’s homework in second grade was 400 worksheets. The year
before, in first grade, his homework was also 400 worksheets. Each day
he brought home two worksheets, one for math and one for spelling. That
was two worksheets a day, five days a week, 40 weeks a year.

The
math was little more than addition or subtraction problems. The other
worksheet was more insidious. My son had 15 spelling words each week.
On some days his worksheets required him to unscramble the spelling
words. On other days he had to write a sentence with each word. And on
still other days he had to write each spelling word five times. The
school was teaching my 7-year-old that the wonderful world of learning
is about going home each day and filling in worksheets.

Actually,
that was his "official" homework. We were given permission to give him
alternative homework. In place of his spelling worksheet, we set up a
writing workshop at home in which he was free to write something real,
such as a letter, a poem, or a story. Unfortunately, this was often a
struggle because Max wanted to do "school." He learned at the ripe age
of 7 that he could whip out those spelling sentences without a single
thought, so that’s what he usually insisted on doing.

My
son’s worksheets are a symptom of a far graver educational danger. More
than the practice of a few teachers, they represent the dominant
purposes of schooling and the choices of curriculum in our nation. We
are engaged in fill-in-the-blank schooling. One of the most telling
statistics about our schools has absolutely nothing to do with
standardized test scores: on a typical day most Americans 16 years
oldand older never read a newspaper or a book. (1)

My
son’s experience of school is little different from my own whenI was
his age. My schooling was dominated by textbooks, teacher lectures,
silent students, and those same worksheets. And it is identicalto what
my current teacher education students endured when they werein school
and also to what they see today in their clinical experiences. My
college students are, by their own admission, poster childrenfor our
factory-model 400-worksheet schools and their superficial and sanitized
curricula.

We are living a schooling delusion. Do
we really believe that our schools inspire our children to live a life
of thoughtfulness, imagination, empathy, and social responsibility? Any
regular visitor to schools will see firsthand that textbooks are the
curriculum. A fifth-grader is expected to read about 2,500 textbook
pages a year. For all 12 grades that student is expected to "learn"
30,000 pages of textbooks with a never-ending barrage of facts, most of
which we know are forgotten by the time the student flips on his or her
TV or iPod after school. Far more than reading to learn, our children
are learning to hate reading. More than learning any of the content,
they learn to hate learning.

Will those 30,000
pages of textbooks and years of sitting at a classroom desk inspire a
child to be a lifelong reader and learner and thinker? Who are we
kidding? I’m inside schools a lot, and I usually see what John Goodlad
described a generation ago in his classic study,A Place Called School.
After observing classrooms across the countryand more than 27,000
students, he wrote, "I wonder about the impact of the flat, neutral
emotional ambience of most of the classes we studied. Boredom is a
disease of epidemic proportions…. Why are our schools not places of
joy?" (2) Our nation is afflicted with a dearth of educational
imagination, a lack of pedagogical courage, and
rampantanti-intellectualism. Our schools should be think tanks and
fountains of creativity, but most of them are vacuum chambers. Nearly
70 years ago John Dewey wrote, "What avail is it to win prescribed
amounts of information about geography and history, to win the ability
to readand write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul?"
(3)

Our textbook-driven curricula have become
educational perpetual motion machines of intellectual, moral, and
creative mediocrity. We dumb down and sanitize the curriculum in the
name of techno-rational efficiency and "American interests." It is
Frederick Winslow Taylor–theturn-of-the-century father of scientific
management–run amok. For example, when some middle school teachers
developed an inquiry-based social studies unit that required their
students to actively participate in creating a curriculum that would
make them think for themselves, the teachers were repeatedly confronted
with the silent passivity of what they called "the glaze." As one
teacher commented:

The students are so used to having the teacher spoon-feed them what

they’re supposed to know…. Students accustomed to efficient,

predictable dissemination of knowledge were confused, silent, even

hostile when told they must decide for themselves how to proceed on a

project or when confronted with an ambiguous question such as, "What

do you think?" (4)

When
our children’s school experiences are primarily about fillingin blanks
on worksheets, regurgitating facts from textbooks, writingformulaic
five-paragraph essays, taking multiple-choice tests, and making the
occasional diorama–that is, when they are devoid of opportunities to
create an original thought–we should expect the obvious outcome:
children–and later adults–who are unable to think for themselves.
None of this should surprise us. Passive schooling creates passive
people. If we want people to think, learn, and care about the many
dimensions of life, if we want neighbors who accept the responsibility
of tending to the world and working to make it a better place, then we
need schools and curricula that are actually about life and the world.
Instead, we have schools that prepare children to think likea toaster.

OFF TO SCHOOL WE GO

Each
day millions of American children enter their classrooms. Why? What is
the purpose of school? What should its purpose be? As our children
leave our classes and graduate from our schools, how do we want them to
be? Not just what do we want them to know, but how do we want them to
be? What habits of mind? What attitudes? What character? What vision?
What intellect? Yes, we want them to have acquired certain factual
knowledge, such as the dates of the Civil War, how to workwith
fractions, how to write a letter, and at least an acquaintance with the
miracle of photosynthesis. But what do we want them to care about? Do
we want them to watch TV for three hours a day? Do we want them to look
at trees with awe? Do we want them to read great books? Do we want them
to wallow in political and cultural ignorance? Do we want them to vote?
Do we want them to feel empathy for the poor and oppressed? Do we want
them to appreciate the poetry of William Carlos Williams? Do we want
them to define their self-identity by the walls of an office cubicle?
What life do we want to inspire them to live?

Of
course, my question, Why go to school? is not new; it has been
vigorously debated for millennia. Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau,
Leo Tolstoy, Dewey, Franklin Bobbitt, and Alfred North Whitehead, among
countless others, have joined the debate about the aims of schooling.
More recently, people from all over the political and pedagogical map,
from E. D. Hirsch to Alfie Kohn to Maxine Greene to James Moffett to
Carl Rogers, have argued for their vision of what and why our schools
should be. And once each of us answers that question, we are morally
bound to create curricula and classrooms that strive to fulfill those
purposes. Otherwise our words and passions are nothing but empty
rhetoric, just like so many school mission statements with their
language of "global citizens" and "critical thinkers." So we must
publicly reinvigorate what Nel Noddings refers to as the "aims talk" of
school. (5) We must deeply question the schools and curricula we have;
we must ask what it means to be educated and what it means to be human.

There
is no neutral ground here; we have decisions to make. Either we remake
our schools into vibrant workshops for personal, social, and global
transformation, or we must own up to our complicity in perpetuating a
superficial, unthinking, and unjust world.

SCHOOLING FOR WORKERS

The
real barometer of the aims of our schools today is what’s being said in
our newspapers and our legislative assemblies. These mainstream voices
and the proclamations emanating from the bully pulpit–bethey newspaper
editorials or speeches by the President–rule the public conversation
and create our national school identity. And what do these powerful
voices have to say? What is the "official" public discussion about the
aims of our schools?

If aliens from outer space
landed on Earth and read our newspapers, listened to our elected
representatives talk about our "failing" schools, and observed inside
our classrooms, what would they conclude are the aims of our schools?
That’s easy. Our children go to school tolearn to be workers. Going to
school is largely preparation either to punch a time clock or to own
the company with the time clock–depending on how lucky you are in the
social-class sorting machine called school. Why else give kids 400
worksheets? Why else give children so little voice in what to learn?
Why else teach children a curriculum that avoids controversy and debate
and open inquiry? When the United States was building up to attack
Iraq, some of my graduate students were forbidden by their school
administrators to discuss the war with their students. Not talk about a
war? How can a democracy silence its schools and teachers? What are we
afraid of?

Virtually every newspaper article and
editorial, every radio report and discussion, every political speech
and government policy that Iread or hear says, either implicitly or
explicitly, that the aim of our schools is to prepare future workers.
The specific language may differ, but the message is the same and
crystal clear. Remember the opening paragraph of A Nation at Risk:

Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce,

industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by

competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only

one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the

one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. (6)

And
there we have the primary aim of our 400-work-sheets-a-year schools:
money. The United States is the richest and most powerful country on
Earth, and our schools exist to keep it that way, even if our role as
citizens should be to question those assumptions and the exercise of
that power. Here is a typical example from an article in the New York
Times on the push to move away from so-called fuzzy math andteach more
math "basics":

The frenzy has been prompted in part by the growing awareness that, at a time of increasing globalization, the math skills of children in the United States simply do not measure up: American eighth-graders lag far behind those from Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan
and elsewhere. (7)

While
the article does quote an advocate of "fuzzy" math, the assumption that
adapting to globalization–that is, maintaining American economic
dominance–should dictate our math curriculum goes completely
unchallenged.

A recent issue of Time bore the cover
line "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century" (an unintentionally
ironic title using a 19th-century metaphor of manufacturing). The
authors of the cover story articulated their vision of the schools we
need. In the entire article,they mentioned just one purpose for school:
preparing our children to succeed in the "global economy." (8) That’s
it. The bottom line.

These economic purposes of our
schools are so entrenched that theyhave seeped into our children’s
consciousness. Ask adolescents why they go to school, and you will
almost universally hear a response solely concerned with their future
employment. What does it say about a nation whose children define
"education" as little more than preparation for work? Nel Noddings
writes:

It is as though our society has simply decided that the purpose of schooling is economic–to improve the financial condition of individuals and to advance the prosperity of the nation. Hence
students should do well on standardized tests, get into good colleges, obtain well-paying jobs, and buy lots of things. Surely there must be more to education than this? (9)

Adults
like to tell children that they will be judged by their actions. The
same is true for our schools. Here are the values of our schools based
on their actions: kids don’t need to appreciate art to compete with
South Koreans; they don’t need intellectual curiosity to sit at a desk
and do tax returns; they don’t need creativity and imagination to plan
a business meeting; they don’t need to be media literate to sell
heating and cooling systems; they don’t need to promote peace to manage
a grocery store; they don’t need to care for the environment to be a
lawyer; and they don’t need to nurture a happy family to be a chemist.
So the content that would foster these unnecessary dispositions gets
little time in school. While a thoughtful democratic nation requires
people who read widely, a nation of workers just needs people with the
technical ability to read a manual or product distribution report. A
nation of workers does not need to vote, feel historical empathy, be
informed of current events, act to end prejudice, question cultural
assumptions, or care for people in other countries. Workers just need
to produce and fulfill their role as consumers. In the end, the only
educational data that really matter aren’t our children’s GPAs, they’re
the GDP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

SCHOOLING FOR ANTI-CITIZENSHIP

While
the preparation of "citizens" may be in every school mission statement,
our performance in that area is dreadful. We barely get half of our
citizens to vote, and our youngest voters–18- to 24-year-olds right
out of high school and college–continually shun the ballot box in the
greatest numbers. In 2000, only 36% of that group cast a ballot for
President; in 2004, only 47% voted; in our most recent 2006 midterm
elections–with a war raging in Iraq–only 24% of 18- to 29-year-olds
voted. (10) In one survey less than 10% of American 17- to 24-year-olds
reported they "follow public affairs." (11) In anothersurvey barely 13%
of 18- to 24-year-olds agreed with the statement "I am interested in
politics." (12) In yet another survey almost twiceas many Americans
could name the Three Stooges (73%) as could name the three branches of
government (42%). (13)

My college students know
virtually nothing of current events. Evenmost of those who do vote
admit they do so with little understanding of the issues and the
candidates’ positions. I assign my social studies methods class to
write an "ideology paper" setting forth their personal opinions on
three controversial political issues. I tell them they cannot inspire
their students to shape their ideologies if they are not actively
shaping their own. My students fret about this assignment; they don’t
know what to think. As one student blurted out in class, "But I was
never taught how to do this!" And we wonder why so few Americans read a
newspaper or understand foreign policy. It’s the schools, stupid.

Why
are there no blazing headlines condemning our schools for failing to
prepare an educated and active citizenry? Because, contrary tothe
political and educational rhetoric, civic engagement for
"strongdemocracy" isn’t really an aim of our schools. (14) If it were,
thendramatically different things would be happening inside our
classrooms. Rather than reading the Disney version of our democracy in
a textbook, our students would be living the complex and "messy"
realities of democracy in their classrooms. Rather than being places
where students sit in silence as their teachers talk all day, our
classrooms would be dynamic public spaces where the authentic and
vibrant discourse of daily democracy would be an essential part of the
school experience. (15) Rather than providing all of the "answers" in
the form of textbooks, our schools would use critical and moral inquiry
as a way to shape individual identity, build a better nation, and
create a morecaring world. Our schools would be helping students to ask
the questions and then to seek out–as true communities of
learners–the possibilities.

WHAT DOES SCHOOL NOT TEACH?

Over
20 years ago Alex Molnar asked, "Are the issues studied in school the
most important issues facing mankind?" (16) He surveyed teachers and
administrators and asked them to list the most important issues facing
our world and to indicate whether they were studied in school. They
listed nuclear disarmament, environmental destruction, poverty, racism,
sexism, genetic engineering, and "alternatives to existing forms of
U.S. political, social, and economic organization."

Overwhelmingly the
respondents felt these topics should be an important part of school,
but not many felt they were a significant part of any curriculum. Why
not? How can a nation as "smart" as the United States ignore the
knowledge and dispositions essential for creating a thoughtful, just,
and joyful citizenry? How can adults allow such a superficial and
damaging vision of what it means to be "educated" to persist?

To
see the gaping holes in the curricula of most of our schools, we need
to get specific. I’ll now offer a brief overview–quite assuredly
incomplete–of what our schools choose not to teach because of their
unquestioned devotion to preparing workers, rather than
educating people. Of course, all across our nation there are heroic
schools and teachers that make this neglected content a vital part of
their students’ school experiences. Unfortunately, these are the
exceptions tothe rule, and they usually exist within a system of
schooling that is hostile to those who question the status quo and the
economic purposes of our schools. Creative and critical teachers are
working more often in opposition to the system than with it.

There
are several ideas common to all of the following suggestions for content
schools should be teaching but aren’t. First is the idea of making
school inquiry-based. A curriculum built around inquiry–that is,
questioning, investigating, and analyzing our lives and the world in
depth with authentic resources and projects–makes the inquiry process
itself part of the content to be learned. By doing "inquiry" across the
curriculum, children learn to ask questions, seek knowledge, understand
multiple perspectives, and wonder about the world. Second, this content
is not just for middle school or high school but should be an important
part of every grade beginning in kindergarten. And third, we must honor
our children’s uniqueness. There is not justone way to learn anything.
The fact that our schools take children who are very different and seek
to force them into the same schooling and learning mold is just further
evidence of their disrespect for children as individuals.

Self.
Who are you? What defines you? If your entire being were turned into a
list of ingredients, what would be listed first? Parent? Veteran? Poet?
Pacifist? American? Artist? Friend? Or would it be Employee? I doubt
many people would list their job first. While our jobs are important to
many of us, they do not define who we are; they are just one part of
our being. Yet our schools operate as if the only part of us worth
educating is the part that will determine our future as an economic
cog. When Johnny graduates, do we really know Johnny asa distinctive
being? Did we appreciate his unique self? Have we helped Johnny to know
Johnny at all?

Patrick Shannon writes that schools
are in the "identity creation business." (17) We may think school is
about math and history, but it’s equally about shaping who we will be
and who we will not be. Ask Johnny what school is about, and he will
list school subjects like math and reading, but what he will never say
is that school is about me.The identities that our schools purposely
shape are directed by the demands of American capitalism rather than
the needs of human beings.School defines people by test scores,
stanines, and GPAs. Johnny thefourth-grader is no longer Johnny; he is
4.3 and 3.9 and 5.2.

In contrast, schools could
help children explore the questions "Who am I?" "How did I become me?"
and "Who do I want to be?" Then the most important "subject" in school
is no longer reading or science, but Johnny. Environmental educator
David Orr writes, "We must remember that the goal of education is not
mastery of knowledge, but the mastery of self through knowledge–a
different thing altogether." (18) If school is not helping children to
consciously shape their cultural, political, and moral identities, then
we are failing to educate our children to reach their greatest
potential.

A love for learning. Is it really
possible to inspire people to live a life of learning and wonder, if
throughout their schooling children are always told what to learn, when
to learn, and how to learn? How will we ever own our learning–and even
own our mind–outside of school if we are rarely allowed to own either
inside our classrooms? If we’re serious about nurturing lifelong
learners, then we must allowthem some significant ownership of their
learning. This means giving students some control over what they study
and how they show their learning. Children should have regular
opportunities across the curriculum to initiate learning, explore their
own questions, and learn about their own interests. Choice and
ownership can easily be made part of every school day. We can allow
children to choose what books to read for independent reading, what
topic to research in a unit on South America, what genres to write in
during writing workshop, and what project to create to show what they
learned in their science unit on ocean ecosystems. And by allowing
students some control over their learning, we are honoring their
"intelligences" and respecting their unique strengths.

We
can also give children one hour each day to study topics of their own
choosing. I did this as a teacher, and our "morning project time" was
bustling with students pursuing their questions about the world. For
example, at one time my fourth- and fifth-graders were studying
cheetahs, the CIA, turtles, Georgia O’Keefe, becoming a teacher, the
history of pencils, architecture, bats, dinosaurs, Beethoven, pandas,
the court system, roof shingles, the space shuttle, the atomic bomb,
dolphins, artificial intelligence, jaguars, the history of pizza,Native
Americans of the Northwest, and endangered species of Africa.(19) These
projects were not done frivolously; I had high expectations for their
work. The students initiated the topics and then, collaboratively with
me, shaped them into meaningful and purposeful inquiry-based projects.
There is little that is more important for our schools to teach
children than to pursue their own intellectual curiosity about the
world.

Any school aiming to nurture a love of
learning must also aim for a love of reading. A lifelong reader is a
lifelong learner. But schools must do more than teach a love for
reading; they must reduce or eliminate practices that teach children
that reading is a laborious "school thing." I have never met a child
who ran home to crack open The Rise of the American Nation. We know
perfectly well that children hate reading textbooks, because we hated
reading them too. Using textbooks should be the exception, not the
rule; instead, students should be immersed in reading authentic,
fascinating, interesting, critical, thoughtful, and relevant texts. And
school must surround students with the astonishing children’s and young
adult literature available today, which, besides including great
stories and beautiful writing, is one of the very best ways to teach
the content advocated in this article.

Caring and
empathy. Nel Noddings has written extensively and eloquently about the
vital need to teach for caring in our classrooms. She writes that caring
should be the foundation of our curriculum and that its study should
include caring for self, family, friends, "strangers and distant
others," animals and plants, the Earth and its ecosystems, human-made
objects, and ideas. (20) What can be more essential to the health of a
democracy than caring citizens? Yet explicitly teaching "caring" rarely
goes beyond kindergarten. In schools obsessed with teaching "technical"
knowledge and questions with single correct answers, the idea of
teaching children and young adults to care is seen as not being
sufficiently "rigorous." Rather than being applauded as essential to
nurturing empathetic and thoughtful people, caring is considered a
"touchy-feely" hindrance to preparing workers who can win the game of
global competition.

Each day 30,000 children die
from poverty. Half of our planet–that’s three billion people–lives on
less than two dollars a day. Recently we celebrated our new millennium,
yet the century we left behind was easily the bloodiest and most
horrific in human history. We say we must teach about the Holocaust so
that we never forget, yet since the defeat of the Nazis we have
witnessed at least half a dozen more genocides. It certainly seems the
more "civilized" we become as a species, the more brutal we become as
people. What does the 21st century hold in store for us? Will we
survive? What are schools doing to improve our chances?

Environmental
literacy. In 2001 Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s press secretary at
the time, held a White House press briefing on American energy issues
that included the following exchange with a reporter:

Question: Is one of the problems with this, and the entire energy field, American lifestyles? Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

Mr. Fleischer: That’s a big no. The President believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. (21)

If
there is anything that should be ripe for critical inquiry inside our
schools, it is the "American way of life" and its effect on the
environment. School should be the primary place we engage children in a
collective critique of how we live. There are serious global
consequences to our "blessed" American way of life. Yet once again,
rather than helping children to analyze how we live, our schools
actuallyperpetuate–even advocate–the unquestioned habits of our daily
lives.

An honest study of the environment would
address one of the gravest dangers to our planet: rampant consumerism.
Rather than teaching consumerism as simply the good engine of economic
growth, we should engage children in inquiry about how we spend and
what we buy–both individually and collectively–and the moral and
ecological implications of our actions.

Schools
also must get kids outside. I don’t mean just at recess. I mean that we
must take children outside to experience nature. Schools should accept
the responsibility of having their students walk through forests, look
at clouds, feel the desert, wade through streams, canoe rivers, and
witness our astonishing ecosystems. The best field trip I took my
students on was to see the sunrise. My school was just a 20-minute walk
away from Lake Michigan, and about a hundred of us–kids, teachers,
some parents, a few dogs–gathered at school at 5:30 on a dark, crisp
morning to walk to the beach. It was extraordinary watching the sun
lift over the horizon.

Multicultural community. It
is essential for our schools to accepttheir role in healing our
cultural divides. Race, culture, and economic class are some of the
most dominant themes in the story of our nation, and they fuel
violence, perpetuate inequality, and tear our social fabric.

Across
our country there are schools that make multicultural education a
priority. But what makes a curriculum multicultural? We must move far
beyond simplistic notions of teaching about holidays and food. Teaching
children to appreciate cultural differences is important, but that
alone will never help us to embrace diversity. Any curriculum that does
not study prejudice in all its forms–at the individual, systemic,
national, and global levels–and that does not explicitly teach to end
intolerance is not a multicultural curriculum.

Social
responsibility. Sheldon Berman defines social responsibility as "the
personal investment in the well-being of others and the planet." (22)
This notion is connected to teaching caring and empathy. To accept
stewardship of the planet and its ecosystems, as well as a personal
responsibility toward all peoples of the planet, we must livefor the
common good over our individual gain. Needless to say, this orientation
is usually the opposite of the American way of life, which is dominated
by this axiom: Who dies with the most toys wins. Social responsibility
means understanding that a democracy is not just about our rights but
equally about our responsibilities.

While teaching
social responsibility is the job of all teachers, it is the direct duty
of social studies teachers. Unfortunately, perhaps more than any other
school subject, the social studies are dominated by textbooks, which do
an outstanding job of teaching students that studying history,
democracy, citizenship, our Constitution, and theworld and its peoples
is boring and irrelevant.

Nearly half a century ago
Shirley Engle published his seminal article, "Decision Making: The
Heart of Social Studies Instruction," which condemned textbook- and
rote-memorization-driven social studies and advocated a curriculum that
prepares children to participate in the everyday decision making
necessary to a healthy democracy. (23) Little has changed in our
schools in the intervening years.

From the day we
are born, we learn to conform to social norms. We are inundated with
conscious and subconscious expectations for how we should behave and
what we should believe. Certainly, some of these expectations are
necessary to live in a civilized society. But many become unquestioned
truths, dictating what is "normal" and "correct." School should be the
place where all citizens are helped to question assumptions. Teaching
for social responsibility is about providing children with the skills,
knowledge, and dispositions to critique today’s society and to work for
a better world. But how can we inspire students to work for a better
world without schools that help children tohonestly investigate the
world and the country we have?

Peace and
nonviolence. Violence is as American as apple pie. In 2005 there were
nearly 1.4 million violent crimes in our nation, including 16,700
murders, 863,000 aggravated assaults, 417,000 robberies, 94,000
reported rapes, and 64,000 acts of arson. (24) The U.S. has more than
two million of its citizens in prison, a much higher percentage than in
any other democracy. There is no democracy in the world as violent as
ours. Yet our curricula pretend we live in Shangrila. Open an
eighth-grade social studies textbook, and you will not see one word
about crime, violence, or our criminal justice crisis. A more peaceful
nation will not happen by magic. If we want caring and less violent
communities, then our schools must teach for caring and nonviolence.

Our
planet is ravaged by war. And though it can seem that we are powerless
to alleviate this condition, our schools can do a great deal. By
awakening children’s consciousness to the brutal realities and
psychologies of war, we can encourage them to make more peaceful
decisions, arouse their compassion for the victims of war, and help
them to make connections between personal actions and world violence.
We can also help them to understand propaganda and hypocrisy. Yet once
again our social studies textbooks are silent. In the 956-page
eighth-grade textbook Creating America, "war" is mentioned throughout
the index, yet the word "peace" is entirely absent, and "pacifist" is
listed just once–in reference to the Quakers during the American
Revolution. (25) We will never create a more harmonious world by
ignoring the realities of violence and war and silencing those who have
worked for peace throughout history.

Media
literacy. The typical American 8- to 18-year-old interacts with media
for six hours 21 minutes per day. For a quarter of that time, he or she
is media multitasking (e.g., on the Internet while listening to music),
which increases the daily media time to eight hours 33 minutes. Of that
time, about three hours is spent watching TV, which increases to four
hours a day when DVDs, videos, and recorded showsare included. The
typical American youth spends an average of one hour 44 minutes
listening to the radio, CDs, tapes, and MP3 players andis on a computer
for a little more than an hour (not including schoolwork). He or she
plays video games for about 50 minutes a day. American children spend
more time each week with media than they do in school. (26) In one year
an American child will see 20,000 television commercials. By the time
American children are 18 years old, they will have seen 200,000 acts of
violence on TV, including 16,000 murders. By the time they are 70, they
will have spent seven to 10 years watching television. (27) American
adults watch nearly three hours of television a day and get the
majority of their "news" from TV.

Our schools
operate as if none of the above were happening. Though media have
overwhelming power in every aspect of our lives (including our obesity
epidemic), I rarely meet a child or an adolescent who has participated
in any in-depth study of media in school.

Media
literacy gives us the skills and knowledge we need to critique what we
see and hear. To ignore the media in our schools is to perpetuate an
ignorant and disempowered citizenry.

Global
awareness. How much do Americans know about the rest of the world? How
much do Americans care about the rest of the world? Here’s an example
from my son’s school district. Out of the 13 years of the Chicago
Public Schools’ required K-12 social studies curriculum, only two years
have any focus on global knowledge. And in one of those years (sixth
grade), that global knowledge is limited almost entirely to ancient
history. (28) That leaves just one year of high school–180 days out of
13 years in school–for my son to explore the life and people and
problems in the entire rest of the world. Should we be surprised that
in a recent study 63% of Americans aged 18 to 24 could not find Iraq on
a map, and this was after three years of war and 2,400 American
soldiers killed? (29) There is only one solution to this crime of
rampant educational nationalism. Every school year in every grade
should have a global curriculum.

How can our
citizens possibly make decisions on American foreign policies–from
economic aid to human rights, from such health crises as AIDS in Africa
to the most serious decision of all, going to war–if they have so
little understanding of the world? The United States is seen as the
"leader of the free world," wielding a mighty military presence and
controlling unimaginable wealth. With that power comes responsibility
for us, "the people," to be involved. And of course, our daily
decisions–the cars we drive, the food we eat, the stuff we buy–have a
direct impact on the health and well-being of complete strangers across
the oceans.

Creativity and imagination. Our schools
do a negligible job in thevisual, musical, and dramatic arts. But
creativity and imagination are not just about art and aesthetics. For
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Creativity" (with a "big C") is about using
innovative thinking that nurtures cultural change. While some schools
encourage their students to "be creative," most schools do little, if
anything at all, to helpchildren think creatively. Based on his
interviews with people who are considered to have some of the best
minds, Csikszentmihalyi writes:

It is quite strange how little effect school–even high school–seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls. (30)

Elliot Eisner, one of our grand advocates for the arts in school, connects the arts to inquiry and lifelong learning:

The sense of vitality and the surge of emotion we feel when touched by one of the arts can also be secured in the ideas we explore with students, in the challenges we encounter in doing critical inquiry, and in the appetite for learning we stimulate. In the long run, these are the satisfactions that matter most because they are the only ones that ensure, if it can be ensured at all, that what we teach students will want to pursue voluntarily after the artificial incentives so ubiquitous in our schools are long forgotten. (31)

Maxine
Greene sees the arts as encouraging schools to teach socialimagination,
which she defines as "the capacity to invent visions ofwhat should be
and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we
live, and in our schools." (32) By helping children develop social
imagination, we give them the skills, civic courage, andboldness to
envision a better world. If we want better communities–from the local
to the global–then we must help children to imagine abetter world so
that we can act together to make that world a reality.

Money,
family, food, and happiness. There are few things more central to our
daily lives than money, family, and food. Yet our schools pretty much
ignore all of them. Nel Noddings writes, "Why do we insist on teaching
all children algebra and teach them almost nothing about what it means
to make a home?" (33) Sure, units on "family" and "money" are taught in
the early grades, but when do children study any of them in depth? When
do they investigate them from critical and moral perspectives? To truly
educate children on these issues would require exploring such questions
as: Why do some people and countries haveso much money and others have
so little? Do those with a lot of money have any responsibility to
those in poverty? What is life like for the poor? How much money will
make me happy? What does "family" mean?Why do the people we love often
cause us frustration? Where does ourfood come from? Why does our
country eat so much unhealthy food? Howhas industrial farming changed
our nation?

Why don’t our schools engage children
in investigating and debating questions about our present and future
well-being? Imagine a teacher first having her students write about and
debate such questions andthen having them interview senior citizens or
genocide survivors or war veterans on these same issues. Jonathan Cohen
writes that an essential factor in our well-being and happiness is
"finding a sense of meaning and purpose in life." (34) An aim our
schools should embrace is to help our children articulate the meanings
of their lives.

SCHOOLING FOR HUMAN BEINGS

It
can be overwhelming to see how much indispensable knowledge is not part
of going to school for the vast majority of American children. Yet my
list is far from complete. There is much that we can add toit.

Today
schools present an even greater insult to our children. Manyof our
schools do not allow children to play. All across our country, recess
has become endangered. This happens far more often in our urban
schools. Only 18% of Chicago Public Schools have daily scheduled
recess, and only 6% of those schools have recess for at least 20
minutes. (35) Why, in a six- to seven-hour day, do so many schools deny
children a chance to relax and play? Because there is no play in the
world of work!

As I look at our schools today, I
don’t think we have any right tocall what goes on there "education." If
we were honest, it would be called "work training." If we want the
right to claim that we are educating children, then we must honor them
as unique people and make dramatic changes to our curricula.

I
am not naive about the political realities of actually teaching much of
the content I advocate here. Many people–including some of my
education students–say we can’t teach this content because it’s "too
political" or because "schools can’t teach morals." But our current
school curricula are not somehow magically apolitical and morally
neutral. How can a nationwide system of education that
unquestioningly adopts economic purposes for schooling not be up to its
neck in political and moral beliefs?

All knowledge
inherently has moral and political dimensions because someone has to
choose what will be official school knowledge. The moment a teacher,
school board, or textbook publisher chooses knowledge to teach and to
test, a political and moral decision has been made.Having
eighth-graders debate genetic engineering or gay marriage is no more
value-laden than having a spelling bee–because by choosing to have a
spelling bee, we are choosing not to use that time to teach about peace
or global poverty.

Given that our schools have a
finite amount of time and that our teachers are already stressed with
overstuffed curricula, how are we supposed to find the time to teach
the content I’m advocating? There are at least three ways to make this
content an important part of school. First, teachers can teach this
knowledge through the content and disciplines they are already
teaching. By teaching about cultural understanding in social studies
and global awareness through young adultliterature, we will not only
bring greater and more authentic purposes to those disciplines, but we
will be making them infinitely more interesting to students. For
example, when students learn to make graphs, they could graph real data
about crime and the U.S. prison system, read multiple texts, engage in
debate, and perhaps take some form of civic action. By combining
disciplines into integrated inquiry-based units, we can help children
make dynamic connections across the curriculum.

Second,
this content can be taught as separate inquiry-based units. This means
making choices. It means eliminating some of the existing curriculum.
This wouldn’t be difficult; there is plenty filling ourchildren’s
school day that is superficial, damaging to the human spirit, and
simply unnecessary. By opening up just one hour a day, we can rotate
through teacher-created inquiry units on the environment, media, peace,
multicultural community, and so on. Imagine entire schools having
exhibitions and presentations at the end of each quarter to share their
students’ intellectual and creative work on such important issues.

And
third, schools can create entirely new classes to teach this content.
Why do schools almost universally limit classes to the standardized
math and history and language arts? Surely we can be more creative. How
about classes called "What Is Justice?" or "Who Am I?" or "Media and
Power"? And how about having electives throughout K-12 schooling?
Schools could give students choices among a variety of electives each
quarter, such as yoga or documentary photography. Of course, some
schools already have classes such as these, but they usually areafter
school when they should be school. As Stephen Thornton writes,"If we
take seriously the claim that education is supposed to prepare each
young person to realize his or her own potentiality, given their
different interests, aptitudes, and aspirations, how can a standardized
curriculum be justified?" (36)

So why go to school?
We can no longer tinker with a broken and inhuman paradigm of
schooling. We must stop schooling our children as ifthey were products
and reclaim our schools as sacred places for human beings. We must
rethink our classrooms as vibrant spaces that awaken consciousness to
the world, open minds to the problems of our humancondition, inspire
wonder, and help people to lead personally fulfilling lives. If our
democracy is to thrive, our schools must change into these exciting
spaces. Otherwise, we will not be a democracy "of the people," but a
corporate nation of workers, TV viewers, and shoppers. As professional
educators, it is our responsibility to challenge our curricula and to
create schools that are personally and socially trans-formative. That’s
why we should go to school.

1. National Center for Education Statistics, "National Assessment of Adult Literacy," available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2006/section2/indicator20.asp. See also Bureau of Labor Statistics, "American Time Use Survey," available at www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf.

2. John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 242.

3. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier, 1938),p. 49.

4.
John Kornfeld and Jesse Goodman, "Melting the Glaze: Exploring Student
Responses to Liberatory Social Studies," Theory Into Practice, vol. 37,
1998, p. 309.

5. Nel Noddings, Happiness and Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 4.

6.
National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), available at
www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html.

7. Tamar Lewin, "As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics," New York Times, 14 November 2006, pp. A-1, A-22.

8. Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe, "How to Bring Our Schools Outof the 20th Century," Time, 18 December 2006, pp. 50-56.

9. Noddings, p. 4.

10. Data available at www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/FactSheets/FS_Youth_Voting_72-04.pdf and at www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/FactSheets/FSMidterm06.pdf.

11. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, "Youth Civic Engagement," available at www.civicyouth.org/research/products/fact_sheets_outside2.htm.

12. David T. Z. Mindich, Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

13. Zogby International, available at www.zogby.com/templates/printsb.cfm?id=13498.

14.
Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984). Frances Moore Lappe calls it "living democracy." John
Dewey called it "creative democracy." You can read his essay "Creative
Democracy–The Task Before Us" at www.beloit.edu/~pbk/dewey.html.

15. Susan Adler, "Creating Public Spaces in the Social Studies Classroom," Social Education, February 2001, pp. 6-7, 68-71.

16.
Alex Molnar, "Are the Is sues Studied in School the Most Important
Issues Facing Mankind?," Social Education, May 1983, pp. 305-8.

17. Patrick Shannon, Text, Lies, & Videotape (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), p. xi.

18. David Orr, "Educating for the Environment," Change, May 1995, p. 45.

19. Steven Wolk, A Democratic Classroom (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998).

20. Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992).

21. Ari Fleischer, press briefing, 7 May 2001, available at www.whitehouse.gov/news/briefings/20010507.html.

22.
Sheldon Berman, Children’s Social Consciousness and the Development of
Social Responsibility (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997).

23. Shirley H. Engle, "Decision Making: The Heart of Social Studies Instruction," Social Education, November 1960, pp. 301-6.

24. Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Crime in the United States 2005," available at www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius.

25. Jesus Garcia et al., Creating America: A History of the UnitedStates (Evanston, Ill.: McDougal Littell, 2005).

26. Henry K. Kaiser Family Foundation, "Generation M: Media in theLives of 8-18 Year-Olds," March 2005, available at: www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm.

27. American Academy of Pediatrics, available at www.aap.org.

28. Chicago Public Schools, "Social Science Standards," available at http://intranet.cps.k12.il.us/Standards/CAS/CAS_Social_Science/cas_social_science.html.

29. "Study: Geography Greek to Young Americans," 4 May 2006, available at www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test.

30. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 173.

31. Elliot Eisner, "What Can Education Learn from the Arts?," Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, vol. 18, 2002, pp. 14-15.

32.
Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education,the Arts,
and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), p. 5.

33. Noddings, Happiness and Education, p. 5.

34.
Jonathan Cohen, "Social, Emotional, Ethical, and Academic Education:
Creating a Climate for Learning, Participation in Democracy, and
Well-Being," Harvard Educational Review, vol. 76, 2006, pp. 201-37.

35. Elizabeth Duffrin, "Survey: Recess, Gym Shortchanged," Catalyst, October 2005, available at www.catalyst-chicago.org/news/index.php?item=1775&cat=30.

36.
Stephen J. Thornton, "Forum: What Should Schools Teach? What Should All
High School Students Learn?," Journal of Curriculum and Supervision,
vol. 16, 2001, p. 131.

STEVEN WOLK is an associate professor in the Teacher Education Department at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago (e-mail: S-Wolk@neiu.edu).

By The Associated Press

Large numbers of students in United Nations-run schools in Gaza have flunked achievement tests in math and Arabic, the agency said Thursday, attributing the poor showing to violence, overcrowding and poverty.

More than two-thirds of students in grades four through nine failed math, and more than one-third did poorly in Arabic, said the UN Relief and Works Agency, which runs schools for more than half a million children of Palestinian refugees across the Arab world. Ninety percent of Gaza sixth-graders failed the math test, UNRWA said.

In contrast, Palestinian students at UN schools in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan are doing better than their counterparts in government schools, indicating that a stable environment is key to learning, UNRWA said.

The UN agency said it will try to improve results in Gaza by hiring 1,500 classroom assistants, decreasing class sizes to 30 students, adding more classes in Arabic and math, and building a teachers’ training college.

The achievement tests were administered during the summer at about two dozen UN schools in Gaza, for students in grades four through nine, said UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness.

The agency did not administer tests in the West Bank.

Shaher Said, 13, who attends a UN school in the Shati refugee camp near Gaza City, said he has been distracted by violence. ?How do you expect me to concentrate in my class?? he said. ?If it’s not an Israeli air strike, it’s a friend of our family or a neighbor being killed in the internal confrontations.?

Gaza’s children have been exposed to horrific violence for years, including gun battles fought right in their neighborhoods. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, Israeli troops have frequently raided areas of Gaza to hunt Palestinian militants, and aircraft have fired missiles at wanted gunmen driving in crowded streets.

For the past two years, the Islamic militant Hamas and the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have also waged an increasingly bloody power struggle in Gaza. In June, Hamas launched a full-scale assault on Fatah-affiliated security compounds, defeating its rival.

"The cumulative impact of years of violence and closures, of disrupted schooling and endemic poverty is clear from the stark exam results of Gaza’s school children," said John Ging, the UNRWA director in Gaza. "In spite of the challenging environment, we are determined to ensure that our reforms and our drive for excellence in UNRWA schools will be successful."

In all, about 195,000 children in Gaza, a territory with 1.4 million residents, attend UN schools.

The achievement test was administered for the first time in the summer, meaning there’s no way to tell for how long students have been doing poorly.

Without such tests, problems are difficult to detect.

As a rule, Palestinian students, both in government and in UN schools, are advanced to the next grade even if they flunk key subjects. The Palestinian Education Ministry says it wants to keep as many students as possible in school, and that teachers are therefore only permitted to hold back up to 5 percent of children per class.

Carpenter Suleiman Arafra, 38, who has five children in UN schools in Gaza, said he didn’t expect rapid changes.

"We don’t have enough room in our house for our children to have an environment in which study," he said. "We are victims of the occupation, overpopulation, political conflict and a bad economic situation."

from the NYTimes

NEWARK

STUDENTS at the Newton Street School of Humanities are told they are
better than average so they should strive for A’s and B’s. The
principal says it, and the teachers, and the mayor when he drops by to
quiz them on current events.

But Ernest Whitaker, the head science teacher at this school with
500 students in prekindergarten to eighth grade, goes even further and
bans C’s altogether from his classroom because, he said, too many
students and their parents settle for middling grades. Now a test score
in the traditional C range (70 to 79) is marked a D instead.

“Huh? No C’s?” exclaimed Algernon Gordon, 13, a self-described B
and C student, as he read the grading chart in the first class.

Mr. Whitaker was unmoved. “You have to learn now not to accept average,” he told the class.

The lessons being taught in Mr. Whitaker’s classroom have taken on
new urgency this fall as Newton’s administrators and teachers rally
behind the school in an effort to turn around its lagging standardized
test scores or risk being completely overhauled because it has been
unable to meet federal testing benchmarks under the No Child Left
Behind law. Newton is one of 4 schools in Newark, 38 schools in New
Jersey, 6 in Connecticut and 57 in New York that have faced escalating
sanctions under the law for seven years — the longest for any school —
or one year beyond the time frame for improvement mandated by federal
law.

Plagued by stubbornly low test scores, Newton has now enlisted the
help of two groups — the politically powerful Newark Teachers Union and
Seton Hall University
— in an unusual experiment that is being touted as a model for
education reform. Although the state has oversight of the Newark school
district, Newton in April formed a governance committee that gives the
teachers union and Seton Hall, along with district and state education
officials, approval of its daily operations. From academic policies and
budgets to teacher training and hiring, the committee rules by
consensus on matters that were once decided largely by Newton
administrators.

The partnership has allowed Newton to make some significant changes
and difficult decisions. For instance, with the support of the teachers
union, Newton replaced 6 of its 44 teachers — some against their will —
with teachers who demonstrated a higher commitment to change or who had
expertise needed in a particular subject. The teachers union also
signed off on a plan to lengthen the school day by an hour for students
in the middle school grades beginning in October, and has committed
more than $100,000 for teacher training, supplies and student field
trips, among other things, in the next year.

In addition, Seton Hall’s College of Education and Human Services
is equipping every Newton faculty member with a free I.B.M. laptop. It
will also station professors at the school each day to answer questions
and to provide feedback, and will dispatch as many as 50 undergraduates
three days a week to tutor Newton students in reading and math.

The “new Newton,” as it is already being called, may be the last
chance for one of the city’s oldest schools, which has evolved into a
second home for generations of black and Hispanic families in an
impoverished neighborhood in the Central Ward. If the school does not
improve its overall test scores in two years, district officials say
that it faces drastic reorganization that could lead to the removal of
its popular principal of 32 years, Willie Thomas, and many, if not all,
of its teachers.

Mr. Thomas, 65, a soft-spoken man who is tightly woven in the
fabric of Newark, said it frustrated him that people were so quick to
judge Newton. He said that Newton received a $25,000 district
achievement award in 1998, which is also the last time that its
students passed every testing benchmark. The school, with a $2.5
million budget, has rolled out enrichment programs, added reading
experts and tutors, and started homework clubs.

Though test scores have risen in some grades in recent years, the
gains have not been consistent enough to affect the school’s overall
standing. And far too many students still fall short of state
standards. On the 2006 state tests, 41.1 percent of Newton students in
grades six through eight passed reading and 25.2 percent passed math,
compared with state averages of 78.2 percent and 68.6 percent.

“It bothers me, and that’s why we’re trying a different way of
approaching things,” Mr. Thomas said. “We’re trying to find out what’s
causing it, and once we get a handle on it, those scores will go up.”

The frustration is shared by many students and parents here who say
that Newton has been unfairly branded a failing school. About 30
students transfer out of Newton every year, but nearly all of them do
so because they are moving. “I have not heard one parent tell me they
wanted a transfer to a better school,” said Roberta Singletary, a
senior school clerk who has been at Newton since 1980.

Crystal Cobb said the education her daughter, Tyjohnnah Hairston,
11, is receiving at Newton is as good as anywhere. “I’ve seen the
curriculum, and I know what my child is required to do,” said Mrs.
Cobb, 45, a parent coordinator for a community agency that runs
preschools in Newark.

Newton’s students learn their lessons in a rambling, red-brick
building dating to the 1870s. Inside, freshly painted hallways lead to
roomy classrooms papered with bright colors.

But outside, a rundown asphalt playground is hemmed in by overgrown
weeds and splotchy walls where graffiti was hastily painted over. The
school is raising money through community grants and donations, more
than $140,000 so far, to rebuild the playground. A security guard keeps
watch over the front door, and metal grates cover windows that overlook
a low-income housing project.

School begins at 8:25 a.m. with a free breakfast of cold milk and
cereal for every student, served from plastic tubs delivered to their
homerooms. About 98 percent of Newton students are poor enough to
receive a free lunch, while the rest pay a reduced price. Many are from
single-parent homes supported by welfare, some are in foster care and a
few children are homeless, though the school does not track exact
numbers.

Every year, the school organizes as many as five support groups for
students who are coping with losses, like the imprisonment of a parent
or the shooting of a sibling or a friend. A newspaper article posted in
the main office told of a former Newton student gunned down this month.

Sarah Paul, the school counselor and a former teacher, said that
she knew of a half-dozen Newton alumni killed by street violence in the
last few years. When she was teaching sixth grade, Ms. Paul said she
once had a student who kept laying his head on the desk. He told her,
“I didn’t sleep well last night because they were shooting around my
way.”

Newton teachers say they are keenly aware that such hardships can
distract their students and undermine their academic progress.

Mr. Whitaker, 45, gives out spiral notebooks and pencils at the
start of the school year because, he said, welfare and child support
checks are usually cashed for food at the beginning of the month. Mr.
Whitaker, who was raised by a widowed mother in Rochester, said he did
not want students to fall behind waiting for money to buy notebooks.

Since arriving at Newton last year, Mr. Whitaker has spent more
than $2,000 of his own money to buy supplies for his students,
including $800 for five additional microscopes. He introduced $1
quizzes in his classes (doling out cash for correct answers) and
ordered a $300 Chinese-food lunch last spring to reward eighth graders
who passed the state science test.

“Don’t put that down, my wife’s going to kill me,” he said while
setting out supplies for the nine students in his class, Properties of
Matter. Only four students showed up.

The extra incentives worked for Saweh Julu. He took Mr. Whitaker’s
class last year and earned B’s, along with $10, because he said he paid
attention. “If the students listen in class, and stop hanging around
the hallways and bathrooms, the school will get better,” said Saweh,
15. “They’re not trying, that’s the problem.”

In coming up with a plan to turn around Newton, Seton Hall’s
professors spent nearly a year observing classes, interviewing teachers
and analyzing testing data. They studied classroom strategies that had
worked in other schools, and adapted them for Newton. Last month, Seton
Hall and the teachers union sponsored five days of training for Newton
teachers that included workshops on how to manage their classrooms and
change their instruction to focus on weaknesses revealed by the test
data.

Dr. Charles P. Mitchel, an associate dean at Seton Hall and a former
elementary school principal in Newark, said, “If you go to the doctor
because you have a long-term illness and he doesn’t give you a thorough
examination, just ‘the pill of the month,’ your chances of getting
healthy are slim.”

But Seton Hall professors first had to overcome skepticism from some
teachers, and resistance from others, several of whom were eventually
moved aside.

Jerome Hancock, a math teacher at Newton for the last decade, said
that when the plan for Newton was announced at a school meeting last
year, he stood up and asked Dr. Mitchel, “What magic pill do you have?”

More than most, Mr. Hancock, 35, knows what it will take for
students here to succeed. Born to a teenage mother on welfare, he
graduated from the Newark public schools to attend Howard University on
a football scholarship. He said things would be different this time
because Seton Hall was not offering a quick-fix program but instead
building a support network for the school. “You’ve got this new fire
behind you now,” he said.

After years of promising starts, followed by disappointing test
scores, some teachers say they are looking less for a miracle than for
something to give them hope.

Tawana Watson, a second-grade teacher whose students come in at
reading levels ranging from kindergarten to fourth grade, said: “We’re
not looking for a big spike. It’s more like, ‘Let’s show steady growth
and then we’ll reach that final point.’ ”

The first day of school at Newton on Sept. 6 started much the same
as any other year, except that the teachers all wore name tags because
there were so many new faces. At a faculty meeting the day before, the
old teachers welcomed the new ones with a round of applause, followed
by yellow goody bags of vanilla chai tea.

Mr. Whitaker arrived about 6:45 a.m., after more than an hour’s
commute from his home in Beachwood on the Jersey Shore. When the bell
rang, he shepherded students up and down the halls, delivering them to
their new homerooms. He then sprinted upstairs to his third-floor
science lab.

In keeping with the school’s new focus, he said, he has adjusted
his science lessons to emphasize the basic reading and math skills
being measured on the standardized tests. For instance, he said,
students will write essays analyzing the technology shown on old “Star
Trek” episodes. They will read aloud more in class, do more
calculations in the lab, and summarize scientific research from the
Internet.

“I think it’s got a good chance if everyone steps onboard,” Mr.
Whitaker said. “And Newark is all about adapting and modifying.”

The Newton faculty members had planned to introduce the “new
Newton” to students during a schoolwide assembly in the afternoon. But
it was postponed after Mayor Cory A. Booker
stopped by as part of a tour of some of the city’s 77 public schools.
Mr. Booker bounded from room to room, dispensing $1 bills to students
who had mastered New Jersey history (what is the capital?) and politics
(who is the governor?).

Then Mr. Booker came up with a stumper, worthy of $5.

“Who is the vice president of America?” the mayor asked a fifth-grade class. “Come on, I know some people want to forget…”

“George Bush?” guessed one boy.

“George Washington?” said another.

“George Washington Carver?” a third chimed in.

Though the mayor prodded the eager students, no one could name the vice president. Finally, Mr. Booker put his money away.

“All right,” he said. “You have a lot to do this school year.”