Good manners, perseverance, and a firm handshake aren’t enough to put poor children on track to success in high school, college, and beyond. But they seem consistently to be essential ingredients in the small number of urban schools that are defying the demographic odds with high-level academic achievement among black and Hispanic students from low-income families.
That’s the message of David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, an account of the workings of six such high-performing, high-poverty US schools, including one in Massachusetts. It suggests that instilling good values and behavior goes hand in hand with good academics in closing the achievement gap, an unsettling thought to some in the education establishment — but strong affirmation for Bill Cosby and others who have been arguing for a heightened focus on social mores in poor neighborhoods.
The six schools have all notched impressive results in boosting student achievement. At Worcester’s University Park Campus School, the subject of a 2004 CommonWealth cover story, 90 percent of those in the school’s first seven graduating classes have either received post-secondary degrees or are still in college.
But it is not only their high academic standards and achievement that distinguish the schools from the dismal norm in large urban districts. Each of the six schools is also “a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think but how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values,” writes Whitman. “Much in the manner of a responsible parent, these schools tell students that they need an ‘attitude adjustment.'” The behavior molding ranges from KIPP Academy’s “SLANT” credo (Sit up, Listen, Ask questions, Nod and Track the speaker with your eyes) to University Park’s strict prohibition on swearing and any acts of disrespect toward fellow students or staff.
Above all else, the schools that Whitman profiles have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to chaos and disorder, putting a premium on decorum as well as diligent study habits. He likens it to the “broken windows” theory James Q. Wilson and George Kelling developed to explain how crime can gain a foothold in urban neighborhoods — and how residents and authorities can nip problems in the bud by paying attention to small acts of vandalism and disorder that create fertile ground for more serious offenses. With a sense of order firmly in place, the schools Whitman profiles establish an environment that takes learning seriously and doesn’t lose time to the unruly antics that can overtake big urban schools.
Whitman’s book has set off something of a backlash among an unlikely constituency. The leaders of nearly all of the schools he profiles — and praises — are put off by Whitman’s labeling of these achievement-gap-closing schools as practitioners of paternalism, criticism that he airs directly in the pages of the book. Eric Adler, cofounder of the SEED School in Washington, DC, the nation’s first charter boarding school, told Whitman, “I don’t think SEED asserts that we ‘know better,’ we just assert that we have more resources with which to teach.”
Whitman devotes a chapter to the topic of paternalism, which has an ugly history in social policy, particularly in education, where, for example, the late 1800s saw an explosion of boarding schools for American Indian children that were designed to cleanse them of their native culture. But he maintains the “new paternalism” that undergirds virtually all urban schools showing success today with high-poverty students is an entirely different thing. They are “not harsh or forbidding,” Whitman said last week at a panel discussion on the book that I attended at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “They are not glorified detention centers or boot camps. They are firm but caring.”
Indeed, schools like Worcester’s University Park, located in the city’s tough Main South neighborhood, don’t put their students in a headlock as much as a bear hug, setting high expectations for their behavior and achievement but also showing the sort of attention and concern that often comes only from family. “Am I proud? I’m beaming,” school founder Donna Rodrigues said at last week’s forum of the 90 percent college attendance rate of graduates of University Park, the only district public school profiled in Whitman’s book. (The others were four charter schools and one Jesuit-run high school.)
Whitman insisted that he used the “new paternalism” term simply “because it reflected what went on in these schools,” something the Harvard panel members had a hard time disputing, no matter how uncomfortable some of them were with the label. Thabiti Brown, the principal of the Codman Academy Charter School in Dorchester, took exception to the use of the term. But referring to a list in Whitman’s book of 20 key practices of high-performing, high-poverty schools, Brown said Codman Academy follows 15 of them entirely and the other five at least in part. “We are very intentional about building a culture of achievement,” he said.
Some of the tension with the “new paternalism” term comes from the fact that it is associated with more conservative social theories, while the leaders of the innovative schools Whitman writes about tend to be idealistic, young liberals. As Paul Tough wrote about the leaders of these gap-closing schools in The New York Times Magazine, they “sometimes seem surprised by the political company they are now keeping — and by the opponents they have attracted.”
But traditional political designations are inadequate to understand today’s divide in education thinking — and practice. The young, progressive-minded education innovators that Whitman writes about have no attachment to the liberal orthodoxies often associated with mainstream Democratic Party leaders, which shun charter schools, blindly fall in with teachers’ unions, and take a dim view of the values education that is so integral to the urban schools that are beating the odds. Yet if closing the achievement gap is, as many have declared, the civil rights issue of our time, these school leaders truly are the shock troops leading the battle.
–Michael Jonas
