Chapter 8
PART III RETOOLING SCHOOLS
ALL TOGETHER NOW:
Milieu Education
My first experience as a principal came at the Gamma Elementary School. This was a good place to start because the school had a highly professional faculty. All the details of running a school were well taken care of. There was a great esprit de corps, partly because there had been a succession of great principals.
Unfortunately, the school's better days seemed to be in the past. The teachers were still dedicated. They were digging in like beavers, working harder and harder but achieving less and less. The time had come for them to back off and see what was happening.
Almost unnoticed by the staff was the fact that Gamma's clientele was changing. The pattern of the change was a familiar one.
When white people move out of a neighborhood, there is a primary influx of upwardly mobile blacks.
They are middle class in their personal aspirations and their expectations for their children. Thus, while the change is highly visible, the impact on the achievement of schools is not very great. A secondary influx occurs when the upwardly mobile blacks move out to more integrated neighborhoods to be replaced by lower-income blacks. The new residents have suffered most from the racist society which has ground them down and suppressed their aspirations.
Gamma's faculty had come through the change from a mostly white to a mostly black school without much difficulty. But they had not been able to cope with the second change, which gave them students with learning problems. People have often said of these youngsters: They can't read. They can't learn. They are natural hoodlums. When the children, already handicapped by poverty, absorb this kind of thinking, they present a different teaching-learning problem to the school, and this was the situation at Gamma. The teachers did not know how to begin teaching their students. And their failure to teach them was beginning to affect their belief in themselves as skilled and dedicated educators.
It wasn't the time to ask them to bear down. A school is like a piece of delicate machinery: when it doesn't work, the last thing you want to do is force it. What's needed is some careful investigation followed by some gentle, if profound, retooling.
As a way of determining where we stood, it was suggested that we try something that would give us clear results, either good or bad. We planned to start with handwriting, a manual skill that is not highly related to intelligence but can be improved with practice. Some of the teachers objected that if everyone used the same technique, creativity might be stifled. Unspoken was the fear that another failure, objectively measured, would be almost too much to take.
We assured the teachers that this was just an experiment. The results would help direct all of us. They agreed to try it. Some of the system's specialists came in and helped us develop the unique Gamma School Approach. Soon, everybody was pushing and pulling and writing. Lo and behold, after two or three months, the students were writing beautifully. Even the teachers' writing improved. When the students took the city test, zoom, they made the highest scores in Gamma's history.
The teachers felt a bit of confidence. They had caused growth which was demonstrable. Anyone could look at the results and see that Gamma's students were writing better. The teachers said, If we can do that, maybe we could work in another area. The next task was another easy one-number facts and computations. Almost anyone can do simple computations with practice. It's just a matter of memorization. But to build it up, we organized the 440 Club. To get in, a student had to do forty computations-adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing-in four minutes. Our plan called for inducting new members at the Friday assembly. Initiates would mount the stage and receive the right hand of fellowship from the principal.
The first week only two students made the club. I said to the teachers: Don't be discouraged. Start where the youngsters are. Give them ten minutes to do the operations, then cut down to nine, then eight, until you reach four minutes. Accuracy first, then speed. There were certain days when the whole school practiced.
Suddenly, the children started making the club. Before the year was over, there were so many hands to shake, we had to get an assistant to come up and shake some hands too. We gave the children little pins inscribed with the numerals 440. It was a big fuss, but worth it. The children were getting to believe in themselves.
We followed up the numbers with a kind of spellin. Spelling is another subject that doesn't require genius, but it does demonstrate that the teaching-learning process is occurring. With lists organized around phonetic elements, the entire school took off on a spelling binge.
This was the buildup for the difficult thing: language skills and reading. What we had been doing was showing that if we critically reviewed our methods, and chose new ones that were better, and then went at it with the same old zeal, we would get results. Of course, we needed to believe that we could get results and that the youngsters could learn. And the youngsters needed to experience success. This is why we had spent the time on handwriting and memorizing number facts and spelling words. The new perceptions made the entire school community ready to accept the challenge of the word.
It was a great challenge. There are those who say that children from deprived communities are nonverbal. They are wrong. Such children have a rich way of expressing themselves; they have a colorful vocabulary, sometimes it is even purple. But it is their vocabulary, their style, and one very different from the process of communication used in school.
Every year at Gamma we would admit some first-graders who, for no physiological reason, did not talk in school. They were thrust into a setting that prized glibness and utilized the Socratic method of question and answer, I pitch (talk) and you catch (listen). Praise is given to the youngster who has mastered this kind of exchange. The child who has not been listened to and spoken to may not know how to play this game. Rather than risk ridicule, he quits playing. If you have ever worked in an inner-city primary school, you have met this child many times.
Our most immediate plan for helping youngsters in this predicament was to create a milieu for nurturing the development of standard English. We would bombard them with standard English. We would draw them out and let them talk and get them to speak in sentences.
This wasn't the kind of thing you could limit to the classroom. We had a whole series of strategies involving the secretaries, the custodian, the administration, as well as the teachers. For instance, if a student on an errand asked the custodian for a broom by mumbling something and pointing at it, the custodian would ask, What is it you want, son?
The student would point at the broom and say, "broom".
"Oh, you want the broom?"
"Yes, I want the broom."
"All right You may have it."
The same kind of dialogue might occur in the lunchroom or in the office. Everyone was taking part in this nondidactic conspiracy. Of course, we had to be careful. If we said, "I don't like your speech", a child might hear "I don't like you Speech", after all, is an extension of the personality. Our aim was not to crush the child but to lead him to the acquisition of new skills. To do this, a person has to be gentle and understanding. He has to accept the gifts his student brings before he enriches the language with more standard forms. The child's English is not poor english if it is nonstandard.
Our students, however, were not stopped by such theoretical considerations. Students with greater mastery of standard forms tended to ridicule the efforts of their less glib classmates. Therefore, as we tried to bring out the standard speech, we had one ground rule: students couldn't criticize each other's work, but they could knock their own brains out striving to perfect standard speech patterns. In this context, the multitude of language-learning activities had a better chance of bringing about success.
It was exciting to watch a "nonverbal" student put his fingers into the little puppet and become Mr. Potato Head, see him project himself into the puppet, and begin to say a few words. The teacher would record the thing on tape. In that warm, noncompetitive atmosphere, the student would listen to himself. "Is that me? Is that the way I sound?" He didn't have to waste energy on being defensive. He was getting ready to learn to read.
Reading involves two levels of abstractions. The spoken word stands for the thing itself. The written word stands for the spoken word. Thus, reading is two levels away from the real thing. This is why teachers must provide many concrete experiences for children and why they must lead the youngsters from experience to expression. Facility in oral language is a prime requisite for developing reading ability. It is not possible to overemphasize the importance of reading readiness.
At Gamma, the teachers would bring the little first-graders across the street to the junior high cafeteria for lunch. Here, the six-year-olds were confronted with all sorts of social decisions.
"Do I drink the juice first or do I eat the carrots?" It was something to think and talk about.
Classes were encouraged to visit the park. The youngsters would return with great big boxes of
leaves which they spread on the classroom floor. They walked on them and talked about the sounds and the smells. The leaves "crackled and crunched." It sounded like cereal. The children threw the leaves into the air and talked about how they came down. They "floated" and "drifted" and even "wafted". The children were getting at words, intellectualizing and verbalizing real-life experiences.
In the context of this approach, we reviewed our "High Roads Project", an early effort in Afro-American studies. We had dedicated a hall to the heroes, people who had contributed to society. It was wall to wall with black folks. But we soon realized that it overwhelmed the children. There was too much to talk about. We got an easel and chose a "Hero for the Week". It could be Drew or Douglass. Staff members would stop a youngster in the hail and say, "Who is the High Roads Hero of the Week?" The child would respond with the name. The teacher then would say:
"Yes, that's right. Tell me what he did".
Thus we used academic content to promote language development. We used community resources in the same way. Each month, for instance, we would invite a local black artist to exhibit his work and pay a visit to the school. Some interesting discussions took place, especially the time our community resources file uncovered a practicing artist whose son was a Gamma student.
After we had gone through these steps of getting the children ready to read, we confronted the problem of reading instruction per se. We assumed that every child could be taught to read if the method appropriate for him was used. Because the emphasis was now on the individual student and not on the school at large-as it was with our handwriting experiment-we encouraged the teachers to be as inventive and as flexible as they wished.
If the children were learning with the "basal reader" approach, fine. But they had to be really reading, not just memorizing. Some youngsters can absorb lots of words in the first and second grade, yet fail to move beyond the rote-acquisition process. If they haven't developed an inductive approach to figuring out new words by the third grade, the vocabulary load becomes too great to handle. These students appear to start failing in the third grade, but really they were behind from the beginning.
It was necessary, therefore, to scrutinize the children's reading behaviors as well as chart their test scores. Those youngsters who showed early problems were instructed in the phonics method. In other words, we were not purists. We wanted results. The total milieu we sought to establish for our students did not stop at the school's front door. It was impossible to overstate the impact, negative or positive, which the home and neighborhood had on the performance of the young people. In many poor homes, very little discussion takes place. Although there might be a considerable amount of television viewing or radio listening, the activity is likely to be undirected and with very little discussion and follow-up. The adults often do not involve the children in their conversations. Thus, there is a series of intrusions of verbiage in the youngsters' life without any specific language growth. It is this lack of involvement with adult give-and-take speech, and not a slightly different vocabulary, which makes school speech seem so foreign.
Research shows that the critical period for language development is before the age of five. Therefore, we have to intervene as early as possible if we are serious about educating the young.
At Gamma, we prepared a book "Hints for Helping the Preschool Child", in which we talked about what every preschool child should know. We included mundane things such as teaching the child his name and his parents' name. There were also basic mathematics, arts, and social studies:
Take your child on walks. Count the cars. Look at the colors and say their names. Ask your child to find all the green things in the store windows.
Middle-class people do this all the time, automatically. Yet it seemed odd that we were formalizing it in a special handbook which the staff and involved parents were distributing throughout the neighborhood. An outsider even complained, "You shouldn't get involved with preschoolers. Parents already push their kids too much".
Of course he was talking about suburban parents scheming to get their toddlers into Harvard. In poor communities, many parents are unaware of the simple things they can do to foster a child's natural desire to learn. It was our obligation as educators to help them learn how to do it.
When parents view the child's chances for success negatively, this certainly influences the child's outlook. But if there is an excitement about learning on the part of the parents, the child will catch the enthusiasm. We suggested that parents bring their child in front of the school building and talk about the school as an exciting place. Of course, it wasn't easy to convince the parents who themselves were dropouts. But you push here, you push there.
We told the parents that if they read even newspapers, the child would begin to connect the printed symbol with the spoken word. He would begin to anticipate the excitement of what's on that paper. He would be eager to learn to unlock the tiny printed shapes.
The supper table could be a forum for current events. What did you do today? What came first? What did you do next? Radio or television programs could provide the basic materials for a discussion of plot or motivation. Why do you think the hero did what he did? How would you have ended the story? How would you feel if that had happened to your
Soon, a few parents asked for books. One of our staff members had discovered that the school system financially as poor then as it is now, used a furnace to get rid of old books. And they were old. But the stories were new and alive for children who didn't have any books. We got permission to take these books and cut the pages out. With the help of the children, the staff pasted together "new" books. The children even illustrated them with their own art work Finally, the books were presented to the parents, along with instructions such as how long to read to youngsters each night or what kind of questions might be useful.
It didn't take long for the parents to understand the point of all this. Poor people aren't dumb, but they are often tired, their energies drained in the struggle to provide the basic things for their children and their household. They have little time left to sit around in a school and talk about readiness activities. When the housing is poor and people are uncomfortable, when the winter is cold and there is a problem with rats, it's not easy to grapple with strategies for changing the educational system or the social structure.
Yet, I never met a parent, no matter how poor, who didn't prize education and know that education is what his children need. The trouble is that the parent whose income is below the poverty level
often is unable physically to do the things at home that enable the child to make use of the school opportunities. But if the parent cannot effect the requisite involvement, it becomes the school's responsibility to build the bridge.
Of course, it is not done with a lot of fancy talk. When the community people come in, some professionals start to polish up their best "pedagoguese": "Well, I'm sorry, but you just don't perceive . . . in order to ameliorate the condition".
Just like our first-graders who refused to talk, the parents are put down and think to themselves, I'd better shut up; I might say something dumb.
It just will not do if the professionals see themselves as superior to the parents. The kind of involvement needed is based on parity of respect. Of course one expects that the parents, new to the experience, may do inappropriate things. But they have to make their own mistakes if they are to learn. The proper role of the professionals is to encourage and counsel and be concerned.
At Gamma, we knew that a school-bound language program was not enough. We rejected the idea that parental instruction was a bad thing and that parents would confuse their children. We wanted parents as our allies, pitching in there with visits to supermarkets and museums, with rhymes, with letters, with ideas.
Given a systematic involvement of parents, I doubt that we would have the kind of epidemic reading problems we are facing now. I know one thing: our total in-school/ out-of-school approach at Gamma made for some exciting years. Those children spurted ahead.
In time, the area surrounding Gamma came to be known, pejoratively, as "The Jungle". But I would
tell the children that many beautiful things come out of the jungle-flowers and forest products admired all over the world. This observation was meant to turn something that was negative into a positive concept. But of course, it takes more than words to do that, as the story of the 0. V. Catto School
tries to show.
