CHALLENGING ISSUE FACING HUMANITIES AND THE ARTS HIGH SCHOOL

High school is a funnel into college, and today a college degree is a student's ticket to the future. Though it isn't mandatory education, without a college degree, very few people will have career success, the exceptions being, of course, people with specific talents and skills such as artists, musicians, dancers, actors, carpenters, electricians, and other tradesmen and performers.

So for all those youngsters who don't fit into the category of "talented," how do we educate them and prepare them for the rigors of college when they enter high school barely reading on a 6th or 7th grade level -- what NYC educators refers to as Level 1 and 2. In the school year 2006-2007, 80% of the Campus Magnet High School incoming freshmen were reading below grade level. This is the most challenging issue facing the schools at Campus Magnet High School Complex, and the Humanities school is doing a great deal to address this issue -- and it's starting to work.

A Diversity of Students -- Sort Of
The overall racial makeup of CMHS is 88% African-American, 12% Other. Included in Other is:
- Caribbean: Haiti, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Puerto Rico
- Africa: Nigeria
- South America: Guyana, Colombia
- Asia: India, Pakistan

Though CMHS is in the center of a middle-class, African-American neighborhood, few of the students are from the area. Many of them live in poverty or foster homes, many in single-parent homes in which the custodial parent is often not around. These teens are culturally deprived in every way -- few have been to Manhattan, to a museum, or to a live show unless they went on a school outing. Their general knowledge is sparse, their vocabularies spare, and they are not given to reading novels, newspapers or watching news shows.

CMHS was recently designated an IMPACT building because of the high incidences of level 4 and 5 offenses -- weapons, assaults, grand theft -- and we have an armed police presence in the hallways at all times. The problem is a result of gang activity and many transfers into the school from Spofford Juvenile Center. Fights frequently break out in the hallways and stairwells for no other reason than "he bumped me."

But these students are not "bad" kids. When you talk with them individually, one immediately discovers they are bright, funny, frequently charming, and delightful company. But as a group they can be lethal. As one boy confided to me, "When I was in Bayside High [an overwhelmingly white school], I always got good grades. But not here. My grades are really bad."

This is a major problem at CMHS, particularly among the African-American boys. At the Humanities June 2006 graduation, there were 100 eligible graduates out of 125 seniors, and only 25 of them were boys. This is something my principal (an African-American) is keenly aware of and is addressing directly, believing that by dealing with "quality of life" issues, educational success will follow.

Humanities Principal Addresses These Issues
My principal, Ms. Qualls, is a highly effective administrator and leader, which probably explains why the Humanities school has virtually no teacher turnover despite the fact that our student population is so difficult to teach and the building is IMPACT.

Many principals rule by fear or fiat, but Ms. Qualls is a consensus builder. The framework that dominates her way of leading teachers is the Human Resource Frame which says that principals who have this style "empower [themselves] and others, ask questions and tell the truth, listen to others, attend to their feelings, concerns and aspirations, and ask for feedback." (Bolman, 2002, p. 67). To that end, Ms. Qualls seeks the opinions of her teachers, encourages them to develop ideas for their own professional development, and brainstorms with them to come up with new ideas for dealing with entrenched problems. (ISLLC Standard 2)

But Ms. Qualls is no pushover, and no Pollyanna. She knows what the issues are facing her school, she understands the politics and the symbolic meanings of her decision, but at all times, she deals with the reality. Because of that, students have made progress in many areas, both academically and socially.

When she took over this school, which had been placed on the SURR list (School Under Registration Review) in September 2003, she knew the first order of business was to remove the SURR stigma, and by June 2005, that mission was accomplished. Under her leadership, graduation rates went from approximately 45% to 70% and she's aiming for 100%. (ISLLC Standard 1)

Teaching standards are critically important for Ms. Qualls, and to that end, rather than get rid of weak teachers, she provides a mentor and carefully tailored professional development for them.

To read Leading Learning Communities: Standards for What Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do, one might think Ms. Qualls had written the book. Certainly she has internalized these standards and uses them to inform her leadership. If she has failed anyplace, it is where we all have failed -- getting the involvement of the parents and the community. Though Steering Committee meetings, which include our local assemblywoman and all four principals, address this issue, we have not been able to "actively engage the community to create shared responsibility for student and school success." (NAESP, 2004, p.2). (ISLLC Standard 6)

Most of the CMHS parents don't attend Open School Night or PTA meetings. Through the Parent Coordinators of each school, I set up meetings for the parents to show them what resources we have for their children and how we can help them succeed in school. A total of 15 showed up.

Real Results Through Tangible Efforts
Several initiatives have been put into place since I came to Humanities, because, as Vincent Ferrandino points out, "school leaders are thinking anew how to define 'quality' in schools and how to create and manage the environments that support it." (NAESP, 2004, Foreword). As mentioned above, but deserves reiterating, Ms. Qualls sees "quality of life" issues in school as the best direction for improving our students' academic performance. (ISLLC Standard 3)

SQRI Committee: Once Humanities came off the SURR list (June 2006), Ms. Qualls formed the School Quality Review Initiative (SQRI) Committee for the express purpose of improving our students' academic performance. Ms. Qualls invited several teachers to be on the Committee and I was one of them.

Sessions were spent discussing the specific problems we had in educating our students, looking at the data from the State and interpreting it, and making a list of ideas that we could implement to bring about such improvement. Ms. Qualls encouraged us to think "out of the box" and experiment with new ideas. One of the suggestions, for which I immodestly take full credit, is Freshman Tech, a brand new course that will be mandatory for all incoming freshmen in September 2007. (ISLLC Standard 2)

Freshman Tech: It was my contention that our under-performing students will never improve their writing skills unless they learn to keyboard -- the hunt-and-peck technique is frustrating to begin with, and it discourages students from rewriting and revising. I now sit on a new committee, along with two science teachers who were computer programmers in a former life, to create the syllabus and select a textbook for Freshman Tech. In one term, the students will learn to navigate a computer keyboard, touch-type, and master MS Word and PowerPoint.

To ensure that our students have access to computers at times other than during class, Ms. Qualls has applied for grant money to hire a school aide to supervise the computer lab before and after school hours.

Blogging: According to Will Richardson in his important book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,

"Today's students of almost any age are far ahead of their teachers in computer literacy…Years of computer use creates children that think differently from us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It's as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential…Most teachers in today's schools, meanwhile were not surrounded by technology growing up…The bad news is the Read/Write web threatens to make these differences between teachers and learners even more acute…All of this paints the picture of an educational system that is out of touch with the way its students learn (Richardson, 2006, pp. 6, 7).

Just observing my students in the library, I know he is absolutely correct and so this past January, I set up a professional development workshop in Manhattan with another librarian who is successfully using blogging with her students, and then brought it back to my high school. But I didn't implement this new learning technique immediately.

Not yet being tenured, and having been fired from one teaching job, and denied tenure from another, I was not about to jeopardize the wonderful situation I have in the Humanities school. But Patrick Slattery's tale of Scooter and Mike (Slattery, Rapp, 2003, pp. 43-47) reminded me of something I did in 1974 with a similar class -- 7th graders who'd been retained twice and were taught in a locked classroom; I was the third teacher as the first two had quit.

The students, mostly boys, were being disruptive and, though I tried not to laugh, very funny. Suddenly an idea hit me: I threw out the English lesson I had prepared and asked them to act out a skit in which they go into a bar and ask for milk (which is what they were clowning about). To my delight, and theirs, this blossomed into an ongoing way of teaching about dialogue, sequencing, plot structure, metaphor, foreshadowing and all the other literary techniques students need to learn in English, and for the rest of the year, this class was "mine."

Emboldened by that successful teaching experience more than 30 years ago, and mindful of the fact that Ms. Qualls welcomes experimentation, I proposed something that had never been done in school before.

I approached Camille Johnson, an outstanding English teacher who is always assigned the ramp-up classes because she is so effective, and asked her if she'd be a "guinea pig" with her 2nd period class and try something totally new and experimental.

In the computer lab which Ms. Johnson would have to reserve twice-a-week for the entire term, the students would use Google Docs for their writing assignments. Google Docs is an online word processing program that functions much like MS Word, except that the students and the teacher can share their writing with each other, it is always available online, and no one needs to ever touch a piece of paper -- literacy the green way. The results were extraordinary from the start. By the end of the first day, word had spread and Ms. Johnson's 8th period class asked to be part of the experiment as well. Below is an email to me from Ms. Johnson:

(After writing, rewriting, and the approval of Ms. Johnson, the students published their writing on Youth Voices [www.youthvoices.net] a teacher-managed blog site.)

From: cams johnson <cams.johnson@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 26, 2007 9:27 AM
Subject: Feedback on the use of technology in CJ's classes
To: barbara.mehlman@gmail.com

Hi Barbara,

Firstly, I would just like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to you for choosing my classes to participate in the Google Docs project via Youth Voices. It has been a great opportunity for the students to use technology while responding to literature on an ongoing basis. As a result of it, many of them have been actively engaged in the writing process, because they love using computers.

Secondly, I am using the technology with my ninth grade students who came to high school reading at levels 1 and 2, thus indicating that they were reading and writing below levels 3 and 4 as indicated by the New York State Standards. Consequently; they are much more resistant to the teaching and learning process, therefore I am always using hands on strategies to create engaging activities. As a result of the use of technology in the class, many more students are taking ownership of their learning.

Thirdly, I am aware that this is serving as a great motivational tool for the students, because several of them are also doing their compositions at home and are always eager for me to read and comment on them. I have also noticed that some of my more resistant students have started working much more eagerly whenever we use the computers instead of just letting them write in their notebooks. This has resulted in them begging me to get to the lab more frequently, even though it has not been feasible.

Finally, I just wanted to say that it has been a rewarding experience for me, because it allows me to log on anywhere I have access to a computer to comment on the students' works. This enables me to respond quickly without being saddled with additional papers to read.

Thanks a million.

CJ.

Jason O is one of the students in Ms. Johnson's class and his progress has been nothing short of remarkable. Jason is 17 and in freshman English -- his 3rd time taking the course. He could barely write a sentence when this project started, and now he's a veritable author, with a blog posted on Youth Voices. Visit http://youthvoices.net/elgg/jasono/weblog/ to see his beautiful thinking, and his first real attempt at writing.

What Ms. Johnson did is show her students respect by assuming that they had something important to say and their opinions were worth reading. What Lawrence-Lightfoot says about Johnye Ballenger holds true for Ms. Johnson as well: "Her respect is embedded in action, not in after-the-fact interpretation or analysis" (p.58). She understands that "respectful relationships also have a way of sustaining and replicating themselves." (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2000, p. 10). If you go to Jason's blog, you will see two comments from other students, both of them respectful and compassionate, not the usual "this is whack" or "this sucks," comments I'm so used to seeing.

This new teaching tool will be rolled out in the fall to all English and Social Studies classes. The Science teachers said they too will give it a try.

Integration of ELA and Social Studies: For the first time in the history of this school, the social studies and English teachers are meeting on a weekly basis to integrate the teaching of the two subjects. When World War II is taught in social studies, the students are reading Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl in English. The better students are reading Catch 22 when the social studies topic is the Korean War.

As the library media specialist, I put together extensive lists of books and videos whose stories and settings matched the themes taught in social studies. Finally, by the end of the school year, our students began to understand that history contains the word "story" for a reason -- it is the story of the world, and they get it when they read "story books" in English.

The Young Men's Alliance: This Alliance is a pet project of Ms. Qualls, supervised by Craig Stevens, a fine teacher with a mission. His goal is to reframe the thinking of the African-American boys in our school, and give them a new view of what it means to be a man, a student, a member of society, and a citizen of the world. Even more, he wants to show them that they're not doomed by their underprivileged, culturally-deprived history -- there's a way out.

Shari L. Thurer would probably choke at this approach but in her informative book, The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy, she writes that "queer theorists may be onto something." (p.16) This "something" is their belief that "gender categories are made, not born; that is, they are an effect of culture, not a cause" (p.15). The Young Men's Alliance is attempting to change that culture.

Violence, assault, abuse, and theft are regular occurrences among these boys, and it is getting in the way of their personal, educational and emotional success. To wit, one young man said to me, after listening to me talk with another student about schizophrenia, that he'd be interested in reading about it. I showed him Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber and he rejected it out-of-hand: "That's a girl's book," he said. On other occasions, when I correct a student's grammar, I'd be told, "I don't talk white."

These are the issues that the Young Men's Alliance is addressing, because it seems, from reading Piri Thomas' explosive 1967 memoir again, Down These Mean Streets, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

After Thomas got back from his world travels, he wrote that "any language you talk, if you're black, you're black. My hate grew within me." (p. 191) But not hate just directed at himself, for he adds, "I came back to New York with a big hate for anything white." (p. 195)

Self-hating blacks and white-hating blacks can be seen all over my school, and you can tell who they are by their jeans that hang down below their butts -- prison style, their ever-present hairbrushes constantly in motion trying to straighten their hair -- like whites, and their refusal to talk standard English because it's "white." And while they're not deep white-haters as was Thomas, they have little insight into the conflicting behaviors that drive them to both imitate whites and yet behave in anti-white ways.

To address these issues, the Young Men's Alliance has taken the boys on trips to Albany to meet politicians, to colleges to see what it's like to be a "college man," Broadway and off-Broadway shows, museums, and have conducted Saturday morning workshops with police officers, psychologists, black role models, and it seems to be paying off. There's less violence, less cutting of classes and more attention to homework and class work. These boys will be followed through their four years at Humanities and then we will know if this approach will be a lasting one.

Girlfriends: Though it may seem as if this is a response to the Young Men's Alliance, Girlfriends was started at the same time by the school social worker, at the urging of Ms. Qualls, after a scanning incident that so upset the girls that something had to be done. (ISLLC Standard 5, 6)

We've been a full-scanning school for ten years now, but since the Campus went IMPACT, scanning agents have become more diligent and less tolerant of minor infractions (read: cell phones, iPods). When one girl set off the scanner as she went through the gates, she was taken by the female security agents to a separate room where she was strip-searched.

This violating behavior set off a such a vehement protest by the girls in Humanities that Ms. Qualls called the security agents together for a conference, out of which came Girlfriends, as well as sensitivity training for security. But the security agents were acting appropriately and well within the law according to New Jersey v. T.L.O, 1985 (Bosher, Jr., Kaminski, Vacca, 2004, p.4), but this is exactly the deontological dilemma (Slattery, Rapp, 2003, pp. 41-43) that principals face all the time: the crime in my school building necessitates careful scanning, but it demeans those students who are law-abiding and trying to get an education.

Both the Young Men's Alliance and Girlfriends is dealing directly with this self-esteem issue which we believe to be essential for academic success. Without self-esteem, students will always have this pervasive unconscious sense that they "can't do" when we know they certainly can.

Campus Magnet Career Center and College Prep: Using the insights of Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling books, Blink and The Tipping Point, I convinced all four principals on the Campus that we desperately needed a Career Center. We needed to tell freshmen from the day they entered school that they were here to prepare for college.

I met with the freshmen, one-on-one, this year to show them how to use the books, how to careers and colleges, and to let them see that there is a great deal of financial aid and scholarship money for students who put forth the effort, and the result has been an exceedingly busy Career Center. These freshmen also will followed closely through their four years to help them stay on track and not to succumb to misdirected peer pressure.

Starting in September, with a list provided by Ms. Qualls, I will be inviting community members, motivational speakers, and former CMHS students to speak to the boys and girls about how they made a success of their lives, with special emphasis on their struggles and obstacles. (ISLLC Standard 4)

Why We Believe These Approaches Will Work
You can use every new teaching method available to better educate students at a 1 and 2 level, but you'll try until you're blue in the face and still get nowhere until you help them change their self-image, reframe their thinking and change their misconceptions, change the way they see themselves in relation to society, and show them tangible evidence they've got a chance. We should "teach for self-knowledge," says Nell Noddings, (Noddings, 2006, p.289) quoting Socrates, and that's exactly what these initiatives are attempting to do. (ISLLC Standard 1)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2002). Reframing the path to school leadership: A guide for teachers and principals. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.

Bosher, Jr., W. C., Kaminski, K. R., & Vacca,, R. S. (2004). The school law handbook: What every leader needs to know. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. New York: Little Brown and Company.

Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. New York: Little Brown and Company.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S (2000). Respect: An exploration. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

NAESP, (2004). Leading learning communities: Standards for what principals should know and be able to do. Washington, DC: NAESP.

Noddings, N. (2006). Critical lessons: What our schools should teach. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc.

Thomas, P. (1967). Down these mean streets. New York: Vintage Books.

Thurer, S. L. (2005). The end of gender. New York: Routledge.

Slattery, P., & Rapp, D. (2003). Ethics and the foundations of education: Teaching convictions in a postmodern world. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc..