Chapter 9
THE GOOD BAD SCHOOL:
Reap What You Expect
Octavious Valentine Carro was a black man who, around the turn of the century, led the fight for black people to ride the street cars in Philadelphia. He was a member of the National Guard. When they were called out to put down a political riot, he was assassinated by a white man. Catto stumped for civil rights around the state, one of the freedom fighters who died before it became popular to be involved in the cause.
They named a disciplinary school after him; and when I came to be principal there, one of my youngsters asked, "Mr. Foster, why is it that when they wanted to name a school for a black man, they picked our school?"
This was the kind of negative perception the students, teachers, and community had about the 0. V. Catto School. Here was a school that was at rock bottom, a complete contrast with Gamma which, in
terms of staff and professional leadership, for years had had an outstanding reputation. At Catto, there was no fine tradition to fall back on. The children had been written off. Attendance was around 40 percent. Some of the teachers said: "Well, good, some of our biggest problems are outside on the street. Who needs them?" The teachers were also down on themselves. It was something of a stigma to be a teacher at Catto. No wonder. The community viewed the place as some kind of jail.
We had to start from scratch. But that didn't mean simply telling the faculty that the new day had dawned. These men and women had a world view and were expert with their familiar techniques. Sudden changes would surely threaten them and perhaps increase their resistance to change.
The staff had to discover and face the problems themselves. To start the process, special meetings were held at which the faculty talked things over. With a minimum of help from me, they began to see that, first of all, Catto was a situation requiring the most professional of teachers, people who really knew their child psychology and people who had a fundamental faith that children could be better tomorrow than they were today. These insights would be the seeds of a growing pride in one's self and one's group.
Soon, it was possible to take a look at some of the old techniques and to ask which were pedagogically
unsound. We had to go slowly because habits can be stronger than rational arguments. For instance, at one meeting the Board's new ruling against corporal punishment was distributed around the table. It said there would be no more pushing, grasping, striking, and so on
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You would have thought someone had told the teachers they would have to teach with one hand tied behind their backs. "What are we going to do now?" they asked.
There was no simple answer. They were not going to buy something like "turn the other cheek" We began to talk about the entire problem of discipline and suggested that it could be related to the total program of the school The ultimate answer would be the creation of a milieu that would accentuate the positive, thereby eliminating the negative.
Of course, we were not going to tolerate chaos. High quality learning never takes place in an atmosphere that is emotionally and physically out of control. No one wanted to accept the kind of situation, reported in the literature of ghetto schools, where teachers spend 85 percent of their time trying to establish control. When that happens, you can write the place off as a nonschool.
As the staff considered the overall problem, they came to understand that a major cause of discipline cases in any school setting is the given school's lack of sensitivity to the particular needs of students. The youngster in trouble requires extra support, trust, and understanding, but he is just the one that the school has trouble trusting or supporting. Usually, the school applies brute force to contain the frustrated student's anger. Through the use of milieu therapy, we hoped to substitute curricular and extracurricular success for most of the explicit oppressive controlling mechanisms then in use.
The trouble was that Catto did not have much of a program, curricular or otherwise. For instance, there had been no remedial reading program at the school although every study that deals with predelinquent children shows that severe reading retardation is central to their failure in school.
The staff immediately conducted a reading inventory to see where the students were. Teachers were freed up for training in the basics of reading instruction. At the same time, plans were made to establish a fully respectable academic program. Some people thought this was crazy at a disciplinary school, but the fact was that we had bright students who needed the challenge.
Instituting curriculum changes is one thing. Making teachers more trusting and hopeful about their students is something else. Everyone knows that if teachers go into a school expecting youngsters to act like hoodlums and do sloppy work or no work at all, they will begin to produce just that behavior.
Yet I never heard a teacher acknowledge that his expectations were too low. Most teachers are probably unaware of the level of their expectations. I have seen teachers hand in a requisition for replacing half the books each year and not even think about what that meant..
I would have to say to them, "This means that you don't believe in the children."
"Oh, no," they would answer, "we do believe in them. What makes you think otherwise?"
My answer was: "If you did believe in these children, you'd be bothered by having to replace half your books each year. You'd spend your time teaching these children to care for the books and you would hold them accountable for the books not taken care of."
Teachers who consciously or unconsciously expect little from their students are often experts at proving their judgment correct. On one occasion I went into a class where the teacher was berating a child. "Look at this sloppy work, Mr. Foster."
I picked up the paper. "Well, at least the alignment of the letters is good."
The teacher responded: "Oh, no, look over here. See how this word slants down?"
"Yes, but he did manage to stay on the line here." But no matter what good thing I found in the child's work, the teacher was able to find something wrong. She was completely stripping that child of every little shred of dignity. I took her out into the hall and said: "Do you know what you did to that child? You murdered him in front of his principal. I was trying to find some way to salvage his ego, to
give him a sense of accomplishment, and everything I pointed to, you tore down with a great flourish of
perceptiveness."
What a contrast to walk into our restaurant practice class. I happened to be visiting the teacher one day while the youngsters were cooking. Mrs. Brooks, a big motherly type of woman, was explaining something to me when she noticed some of the students playing a little bit. I didn't think they were really that bad, but she turned around and drew herself up to her full stature.
"Gentlemen," she said. "I am amazed." You could have heard a pin drop. Everything in her demeanor, her voice, her facial expression, communicated the same authentic shock of disbelief that these gentlemen had momentarily forgotten the proper way to behave.
She might have turned around and said, "Listen you thugs, can't you see Mr. Foster is in here and you hoods are in this disciplinary school just because you don't want to behave yourselves." She would have gotten the same response of immediate quiet.
But the students perceived her genuine disappointment. They knew that there was nothing ironic in her calling them gentlemen. She believed they could be gentlemen and expected them to behave as gentlemen.
Right away, one of the gentlemen said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Brooks."
Mrs. Brooks's class was an example of what could be done at Catto. But I knew we couldn't create the positive, supporting, high-expectation climate found in her room simply by printing memos and telling everybody to "Please be loving and please have high expectations." Attitudes would change only through active involvement and the experience of sucess. To get the most out of our achievements, we tried to use our new sense of team. Each of us could learn from the others. As it turned out more than once, breakthroughs would come from the least-expected places.
We had a boy who had witnessed his father kill his mother. He came to Catto in a terrible state. Our professionals seemed unable to reach him. The head dietitian in the school took an interest in the chap. He started going to her to help in the kitchen. We did not compel him to attend classes. The next thing I knew he was waiting at the subway for the lady so he could carry her pocketbook. At eight o'clock in the morning he would be meeting her.
I said to her: "Now look, we've got him going. Can you try to push him out of the nest? Let him go to one class a week."
Eventually this boy went back to regular school. But it had been the dietitian, not the principal or the counselor, who had got through to him. Everybody had to keep plugging and see where he could
tie in.
One day a student's mother called me. "Mr. Foster, my boy did something today he's never done before."
I was all set for the worst. "What happened?"
"He picked up the newspaper and read it."
That was beautiful.
And she continued, "I've got another son that I want you to handle now that you've straightened out my older one." She told me her younger boy was eight years old.
"He's too young," I said. 'We've got big eighteenyear-olds in here." Still, she went to the district superintendent to get her son sent to Catto. She wanted him to be part of the Catto environment. I could now say to our staff, "Look, we're beginning to have others see us in a new way." That helped us get a new view of ourselves.
We turned our attention outward to the community. Through the Community Involvement Council at the University of Pennsylvania, we got Penn students to sign "contracts" to come in and do volunteer tutoring with our students. The contract aspect was vital because nothing is more devastating in a volunteer program than to build up expectations that are dashed when the volunteers fail to come. Ghetto children are daily confronted with the discrepancy between promise and fulfillment. We wanted none of that, so we told the Penn students: "We're asking you to commit only eight weeks of your young lives to us. That's not a lot, but we want all of what you're promising. We don't want to hear excuses such as you have to get to a dental appointment or get your hair fixed up."
Those who went along with it got two weeks of training and then served in the school for six weeks. After that, we would reorganize and anybody who wanted to get out could get out then without disrupting the program at Catto.
It worked beautifully. The Penn students, being close in age to our youngsters, could empathize beautifully-even though most of them were white. What mattered was the basic human caring. Girls were afraid to come at first. But finally they joined in. Here they were, these little,. slim college students sitting down with our youngsters and trying to teach them to read.
We began to look for additional opportunities for our youngsters. We organized a work program with other schools so that our students went out in the morning and returned to Catto in the afternoon. Here was a real trust situation.
While all this was going on, we also were setting up a group that involved the community with the school. There was no Home and School Association, of course, because membership in it would be a tacit admission that your child was out of controL We gathered community leaders, ministers, and others into an organization we called Friends of Catto. Under this umbrella, the parents could come in too. They began to look at the school in a different light, to come and see what they could do to help.
After the Friends of Catto established a Boy Scout Explorer post at the school, we decided to hold a fashion show. Someone said: "Marcus, this is an all-boy school. You can't have a fashion show. You must be losing your mind!"
I said: "No, we'll have it here one Sunday afternoon. We'll build it up and get the parents all dressed up. It'll be a chance to train the boys in the social amenities."
I said to these great big guys, "I want you to stand here and help the ladies as they come down the steps." I showed them how to do it.
"All right, Mr. Foster."
The show was to come off at noon. When I got to school around eight, one of my biggest rogues was there waiting at the door. "I came to help you with the ice for the punch," he said.
This was a totally different experience for the students. Yet it was one of the most successful things we did. The parents came; the students came; they paraded around. The young men were very much fascinated by the bathing suit display, of course. They really enjoyed the show. The parents did too, and everybody was getting the idea that nothing was impossible at Catto.
People began to give us money for some of our neglected students. We started a clothes drive so that no student need be embarrassed by the way he presented himself at school. Catto's tailor shop refurbished the items we collected.
We started a night school and opened Catto on Saturdays for the community. To change the local image of our school, we invited the men in the neighborhood to come in and play basketball. We opened up in the summer and our summer school was really zooming. A lot of things were happening, but it all boiled down to this: the faculty began to believe in itself. They began to believe in the students. And the students began to believe.
Interestingly enough, we had boys who didn't want to leave Catto. And boys who wanted to come back after they left. I never will forget one incident. A man who had written about understanding children came to observe what we were doing at Catto. You would have thought someone had stacked the deck, for while this man was in my office in walked a youngster who was one of our alumni.
"Mr. Foster," he said, "I want to come back to Catto."
I said: "Wait a minute, son. You're getting an expanded opportunity back in the other school" Of course, one of our major goals was to give a youngster the strength and skills to enable him to return to his regular school.
The writer stepped up and said to the boy, "Do you want to come back here because they have the work program and the good shop program?"
The boy answered: "To tell the truth, I wasn't in shop. I was in the academic program."
The writer had assumed that, because we had programs such as restaurant practice and tailoring, only a terminal program would have strong appeal for a boy previously in trouble. But this lad wanted to return because we were teaching him to read, write, and count.
By this time a counselor had written a school song to be sung to the tune Elvis Presley made famous, "Love Me Tender." And there was a school seal made up in our shop. We instituted faculty-student volleyball and basketball games where the boys could get a chance to compete with their teachers in a legitimate way. It was a lot of fun and symbolized the new atmosphere at the school.
These changes at Catto attracted outside attention. Someone visiting us asked me, "Marcus, wouldn't you like to see a lot more schools like Catto so that boys with special problems could get the kind of intensive help you're providing here?"
I said no, I wouldn't want to see another one. The more special schools for a particular type of youngster are built, the more adept the authorities become in locating children to fill them up. If a hundred disciplinary schools were built, they would run around and find enough children to fill them.
That just starts the problem. Special schools get to thinking that their clients can only be served in the special climate they have developed. They sometimes resist giving back the children to the regular schools.
In general, children should be mixed together as much as possible and separated only for instruction in a specific area or when there is a real danger to health or safety. I regret, for example, the extensively developed programs for the so-called retarded-educable students. By confining these youngsters in special schools, the system itself makes these students see themselves as special-in the negative sense. But experiments that randomly mix these same students throughout classes in a comprehensive school show that they often perform far above expectations. In fact, many perform on a par with the average student in the school.
Even with students in disciplinary schools, the goal ought to be to return the youngsters to their regular schools. Very often their problems are of a transitory nature, a crisis in the family or a specffic, remediable learning problem that has caused a school failure and subsequent misbehavior. Temporary isolation with intensive help and support can put many of these youngsters back on the right track. But there is no question that eventually-and sooner rather than later-they must return to the heterogeneous mix of society at large.
I left Catto and went down to the planning office at the Board of Education. This was the hardest shifting of mental gears I have ever done, moving from a line job to a staff job, sitting behind a desk, writing reports-away from the students.
My job was to figure out the educational use of a building that had a million square feet of space in it. This was wild! You let your mind soar. The building was near Independence Hall. How could we use that rich historical, industrial, commercial area in an educational program? Unfortunately, the Board didn't buy the building, but the problem was good for mental gymnastics.
And then the crisis of confidence broke out at Gratz High School.
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