Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Promise Alliance
Promise Alliance, a Washington-based children’s advocacy group founded by Colin L. Powell in 1997
It takes a village...
http://lessonplans.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/the-new-village/?pagemode=print
From:
September 24, 2008, 9:00 pm
The New Village
By Matthew Kay
.....
Solving our nation’s urban education problems will take more than amazing teachers and competent administration. It will take more than policy changes from Washington that bring more resources. It will take more than cooperation from local police departments and the care of social service agencies. It will take the involvement of businesses, museums, cultural institutions, churches, and hospitals. It will take high-rise offices mingling with the gritty schoolhouses in their shadow. It will take small business owners allowing 16-year-olds to file papers and answer phones.
This must be uncomfortable to many people who have chased dreams that have nothing to do with education. Who am I to begrudge them their chosen livelihood? They don’t drag me into the boardroom when their sales are down, so why should I ask for their help when I struggle to reach my students? I see and respect this point of view — but I’d like to pose a question: “Who showed you what you could be?”
For me, it was my parents — aided closely by an extensive network of family, church members, and attentive neighbors. I saw a good sampling of successful careers, some more personally fulfilling than others. There were independent businessmen, musicians, and teachers. There were soldiers and preachers. Strings of bad luck had left some unemployed. Some were lazy and had no intention of finding honest work. I saw enough to know that I had options.
Personal success often begins with someone knowing that victory is a possibility. Many students only know the two or three generations of failure that are visible in their communities. They rarely leave, so they rarely get their sampling. If you have never seen an intellectual the likes of Cornel West, you likely won’t aspire to be one. Youth who have never set foot in museums aren’t likely to develop a taste for them. Unless a small business owner sits a student down and relays her story of struggle, self doubt and eventual success — that student may never learn that dedication can eventually bring rewards.
I applaud Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute for taking the time and effort necessary to be a part of the solution. Equally worthy are the host of internship partners that set aside two hours a week to show our kids about the many options that exist. Nationwide, I’m sure that others are being equally accommodating. A new village is needed to educate this generation. Educators must build it by forming alliances with our friends in the outside world. We must put our fists down, acknowledging that loving our students and teaching them subject matter isn’t always enough to bring success. We need help. My fervent prayer is that, when approached, prospective mentors always remember the time that someone else showed them what they could be.
From:
September 24, 2008, 9:00 pm
The New Village
By Matthew Kay
.....
Solving our nation’s urban education problems will take more than amazing teachers and competent administration. It will take more than policy changes from Washington that bring more resources. It will take more than cooperation from local police departments and the care of social service agencies. It will take the involvement of businesses, museums, cultural institutions, churches, and hospitals. It will take high-rise offices mingling with the gritty schoolhouses in their shadow. It will take small business owners allowing 16-year-olds to file papers and answer phones.
This must be uncomfortable to many people who have chased dreams that have nothing to do with education. Who am I to begrudge them their chosen livelihood? They don’t drag me into the boardroom when their sales are down, so why should I ask for their help when I struggle to reach my students? I see and respect this point of view — but I’d like to pose a question: “Who showed you what you could be?”
For me, it was my parents — aided closely by an extensive network of family, church members, and attentive neighbors. I saw a good sampling of successful careers, some more personally fulfilling than others. There were independent businessmen, musicians, and teachers. There were soldiers and preachers. Strings of bad luck had left some unemployed. Some were lazy and had no intention of finding honest work. I saw enough to know that I had options.
Personal success often begins with someone knowing that victory is a possibility. Many students only know the two or three generations of failure that are visible in their communities. They rarely leave, so they rarely get their sampling. If you have never seen an intellectual the likes of Cornel West, you likely won’t aspire to be one. Youth who have never set foot in museums aren’t likely to develop a taste for them. Unless a small business owner sits a student down and relays her story of struggle, self doubt and eventual success — that student may never learn that dedication can eventually bring rewards.
I applaud Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute for taking the time and effort necessary to be a part of the solution. Equally worthy are the host of internship partners that set aside two hours a week to show our kids about the many options that exist. Nationwide, I’m sure that others are being equally accommodating. A new village is needed to educate this generation. Educators must build it by forming alliances with our friends in the outside world. We must put our fists down, acknowledging that loving our students and teaching them subject matter isn’t always enough to bring success. We need help. My fervent prayer is that, when approached, prospective mentors always remember the time that someone else showed them what they could be.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/education/09education.html?scp=14&sq=poor%20children%20left%20behind&st=cse
The New York Times
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August 9, 2006
On Education
It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs.
But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer?
The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas.
To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families.
For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate.
The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students — whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms — fail to make sufficient progress every year.
Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.
At Johns Hopkins University, two sociologists, Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander, collected a trove of data on Baltimore schoolchildren who began first grade in 1982. They found that contrary to expectations, children in poverty did largely make a year of progress for each year in school.
But poor children started out behind their peers, and the problems compounded when school ended for the summer. Then, middle-class children would read books, attend camp and return to school in September more advanced than when they left. But poorer children tended to stagnate. “The long summer break is especially hard for disadvantaged children,” Professor Alexander said. “Some school is good, and more is better.”
“Family really is important, and it’s very hard for schools to offset or compensate fully for family disadvantage,” he said.
In Chicago, a court order to empty public housing projects, which dispersed families and children into the suburbs, led to a rise in children’s academic achievement.
“The evidence is pretty clear that the better their housing, the better kids do on tests,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan group.
In his 2004 book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap,” Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.
A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children.
“I would never say public schools can’t do better,” Mr. Rothstein said. “I’d say they can’t do much better,” unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.
FOR many children in America, public schools are not lacking. A 2001 international reading test put Americans ninth out of students in 35 nations. But only students in Sweden, the Netherlands and England had scores more than marginally higher than the United States average.
More important, the average score of the 58 percent of American students attending schools that were not predominantly poor surpassed that of Sweden, the top-scoring nation.
But for the 42 percent of American students attending the poor schools that are the principal target of No Child Left Behind, the inequities remain. Blacks and Latinos lag more than two years behind white students in math on national assessment tests. In reading, which is more influenced by family background, blacks and Latinos fall three years behind whites.
Yet these gaps have shrunk considerably since 1992, when blacks were 3.5 years behind whites in math. Since 1973, when the federal government began collecting these scores, black 9-year-olds have gained roughly 3.5 grade levels in math, narrowing the achievement gap, even though white scores were also rising at the same time. The cause of these improvements is unclear, although some are most likely related to state efforts, especially in the last 15 years.
A $100 million school voucher bill sponsored by Republicans gives vouchers a prominent place in next year’s debate over renewing No Child Left Behind. But other voices are likely to call for a sense of responsibility for improving children’s academic success that does not begin and end at the schoolhouse door.
“It can’t just be a burden on the schools to do away with social inequality,” said Mr. Jennings, of the education policy center. “It has to be a burden on all of us.”
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August 9, 2006
On Education
It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs.
But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer?
The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas.
To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families.
For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate.
The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students — whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms — fail to make sufficient progress every year.
Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.
At Johns Hopkins University, two sociologists, Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander, collected a trove of data on Baltimore schoolchildren who began first grade in 1982. They found that contrary to expectations, children in poverty did largely make a year of progress for each year in school.
But poor children started out behind their peers, and the problems compounded when school ended for the summer. Then, middle-class children would read books, attend camp and return to school in September more advanced than when they left. But poorer children tended to stagnate. “The long summer break is especially hard for disadvantaged children,” Professor Alexander said. “Some school is good, and more is better.”
“Family really is important, and it’s very hard for schools to offset or compensate fully for family disadvantage,” he said.
In Chicago, a court order to empty public housing projects, which dispersed families and children into the suburbs, led to a rise in children’s academic achievement.
“The evidence is pretty clear that the better their housing, the better kids do on tests,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan group.
In his 2004 book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap,” Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.
A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children.
“I would never say public schools can’t do better,” Mr. Rothstein said. “I’d say they can’t do much better,” unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.
FOR many children in America, public schools are not lacking. A 2001 international reading test put Americans ninth out of students in 35 nations. But only students in Sweden, the Netherlands and England had scores more than marginally higher than the United States average.
More important, the average score of the 58 percent of American students attending schools that were not predominantly poor surpassed that of Sweden, the top-scoring nation.
But for the 42 percent of American students attending the poor schools that are the principal target of No Child Left Behind, the inequities remain. Blacks and Latinos lag more than two years behind white students in math on national assessment tests. In reading, which is more influenced by family background, blacks and Latinos fall three years behind whites.
Yet these gaps have shrunk considerably since 1992, when blacks were 3.5 years behind whites in math. Since 1973, when the federal government began collecting these scores, black 9-year-olds have gained roughly 3.5 grade levels in math, narrowing the achievement gap, even though white scores were also rising at the same time. The cause of these improvements is unclear, although some are most likely related to state efforts, especially in the last 15 years.
A $100 million school voucher bill sponsored by Republicans gives vouchers a prominent place in next year’s debate over renewing No Child Left Behind. But other voices are likely to call for a sense of responsibility for improving children’s academic success that does not begin and end at the schoolhouse door.
“It can’t just be a burden on the schools to do away with social inequality,” said Mr. Jennings, of the education policy center. “It has to be a burden on all of us.”
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Art before literacy
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/books/27gugg.html
The New York Times
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July 27, 2006
Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills
By RANDY KENNEDY
Correction Appended
In an era of widespread cuts in public-school art programs, the question has become increasingly relevant: does learning about paintings and sculpture help children become better students in other areas?
A study to be released today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum suggests that it does, citing improvements in a range of literacy skills among students who took part in a program in which the Guggenheim sends artists into schools. The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim program, called Learning Through Art, and others who did not.
The study found that students in the program performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including thorough description, hypothesizing and reasoning — than did students who were not in the program. The children were assessed as they discussed a passage in a children’s book, Cynthia Kadohata’s “Kira-Kira,” and a painting by Arshile Gorky, “The Artist and His Mother.”
The results of the study, which are to be presented today and tomorrow at a conference at the Guggenheim, are likely to stimulate debate at a time when the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind has led schools to increase class time spent on math and reading significantly, often at the expense of other subjects, including art.
Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.
“We purposely chose to have students talk to us instead of writing because we thought they would show language skills, not purely reading and writing skills,” said Johanna Jones, a senior associate with Randi Korn and Associates, a museum research company conducting the study over three years with a $640,000 grant from the federal Department of Education.
Ms. Jones said that the study, which graded students’ responses as they talked about the painting and the passage from the book, found essentially the same results during the 2005-6 school year as it did during the 2004-5 school year. “We really held our breath waiting for this year’s results, and they turned out to almost exactly the same — which means that last year’s don’t seem to have been an anomaly,” she said. “That’s a big deal in this world.”
While it is unknown exactly how learning about art helps literacy skills, she said, “the hypothesis is that the use of both talking about art and using inquiry to help students tease apart the meaning of paintings helps them learn how to tease apart the meanings of texts, too. They apply those skills to reading.”
The categories of literacy and critical thinking skills were devised by the research company with the help of a group of advisers from Columbia University, New York University and the city’s Department of Education, among other institutions.
The Guggenheim program, originally called Learning to Read Through the Arts, was created by a museum trustee in 1970, when New York schools were cutting art and music programs. Since it began, it has involved more than 130,000 students in dozens of public schools. The museum dispatches artists who spend one day a week at schools over a 10- or 20-week period helping students and teachers learn about and make art. Groups of students are also taken to the Guggenheim to see exhibitions.
Officials at the Guggenheim said they hoped the study would give ammunition to educators in schools and museums around the country who are seeking more money and classroom time for arts education.
“Basically, this study is a major contribution to the field of art and museum education,” said Kim Kanatani, the Guggenheim’s director of education. “We think it confirms what we as museum education professionals have intuitively known but haven’t ever had the resources to prove.”
Correction: Aug. 4, 2006
An article on July 28 about a study by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that charted improvements in literary skills among students who took part in an art education program referred imprecisely to the program’s origin. Its founder, Natalie Lieberman, started the program in 1970, merging it with the Guggenheim Foundation in 1994; she was not a Guggenheim trustee when she founded it.
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July 27, 2006
Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills
By RANDY KENNEDY
Correction Appended
In an era of widespread cuts in public-school art programs, the question has become increasingly relevant: does learning about paintings and sculpture help children become better students in other areas?
A study to be released today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum suggests that it does, citing improvements in a range of literacy skills among students who took part in a program in which the Guggenheim sends artists into schools. The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim program, called Learning Through Art, and others who did not.
The study found that students in the program performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including thorough description, hypothesizing and reasoning — than did students who were not in the program. The children were assessed as they discussed a passage in a children’s book, Cynthia Kadohata’s “Kira-Kira,” and a painting by Arshile Gorky, “The Artist and His Mother.”
The results of the study, which are to be presented today and tomorrow at a conference at the Guggenheim, are likely to stimulate debate at a time when the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind has led schools to increase class time spent on math and reading significantly, often at the expense of other subjects, including art.
Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.
“We purposely chose to have students talk to us instead of writing because we thought they would show language skills, not purely reading and writing skills,” said Johanna Jones, a senior associate with Randi Korn and Associates, a museum research company conducting the study over three years with a $640,000 grant from the federal Department of Education.
Ms. Jones said that the study, which graded students’ responses as they talked about the painting and the passage from the book, found essentially the same results during the 2005-6 school year as it did during the 2004-5 school year. “We really held our breath waiting for this year’s results, and they turned out to almost exactly the same — which means that last year’s don’t seem to have been an anomaly,” she said. “That’s a big deal in this world.”
While it is unknown exactly how learning about art helps literacy skills, she said, “the hypothesis is that the use of both talking about art and using inquiry to help students tease apart the meaning of paintings helps them learn how to tease apart the meanings of texts, too. They apply those skills to reading.”
The categories of literacy and critical thinking skills were devised by the research company with the help of a group of advisers from Columbia University, New York University and the city’s Department of Education, among other institutions.
The Guggenheim program, originally called Learning to Read Through the Arts, was created by a museum trustee in 1970, when New York schools were cutting art and music programs. Since it began, it has involved more than 130,000 students in dozens of public schools. The museum dispatches artists who spend one day a week at schools over a 10- or 20-week period helping students and teachers learn about and make art. Groups of students are also taken to the Guggenheim to see exhibitions.
Officials at the Guggenheim said they hoped the study would give ammunition to educators in schools and museums around the country who are seeking more money and classroom time for arts education.
“Basically, this study is a major contribution to the field of art and museum education,” said Kim Kanatani, the Guggenheim’s director of education. “We think it confirms what we as museum education professionals have intuitively known but haven’t ever had the resources to prove.”
Correction: Aug. 4, 2006
An article on July 28 about a study by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that charted improvements in literary skills among students who took part in an art education program referred imprecisely to the program’s origin. Its founder, Natalie Lieberman, started the program in 1970, merging it with the Guggenheim Foundation in 1994; she was not a Guggenheim trustee when she founded it.
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What every Child Needs
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28wwln-lede-t.html
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October 28, 2007
The Way We Live Now
What Every Child Needs
By ANN HULBERT
In the early 1990s, I was taken aback to overhear my 3-year-old son insisting to his 6-year-old cousin that he went to “ABC school,” not to day care, as she condescendingly referred to it. (He was spending a few sociable hours a week at a children’s center chosen because it was around the corner.) I had no idea where he got that term, or when he decided his educational credentials needed upgrading. And, given that alphabet drills weren’t in fact part of the program, I wasn’t sure what he was really boasting about.
But with universal prekindergarten (UPK) emerging as a campaign issue, it’s now clear to me that he was a kid ahead of his time. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have recently joined a chorus of early-childhood-education advocates, governors, foundations and social activists who have been promoting the cause in notably wonky, rather than warm and cuddly, terms. Calling for an overhaul of the current patchwork of uneven preschool programs, UPK proponents invoke neuroscientific evidence of brain growth rather than child-care needs. They cite the long-term economic benefits of an early investment in boosting “cognitive skills” and “school readiness,” especially for low-income children. There is little mention of, say, pretend play in the pitch for government-subsidized pre-K, which supporters argue should be affordable and available (though not necessarily mandatory) for all.
The hardheaded rhetoric conveys an important message: expanding access to early education is serious business, not baby stuff. The universal-preschool mission, too often dismissed as nanny-state meddling, capitalizes on the inclusive No Child Left Behind drive to close the K-12 achievement gap: the moment is ripe to reach downward to the post-diaper and pre-backpack stage, where disparities between white and minority students start. Yet aligning with an ethos of no-nonsense academics inspires uneasiness among UPK crusaders themselves, as the Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller points out in “Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education.” After all, for your bouncy 4-year-old — “wild and wonderful” is the epithet one classic parenting book applies to the age — how much ABC school do you really want?
It is a vexed question for liberal universalists, since the answer tends to vary by, among other things, economic class. In families at the well-educated top of the heap, where books and big vocabularies abound, parents have long gravitated to the “whole child” end of the pedagogical spectrum, as David Kirp notes in his recent manifesto for the cause, “The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics.” For their offspring, already steeped in ABC stuff, they generally favor an emphasis on individualized exploration and creative classroom collaboration to promote social and emotional growth. That entails having well-trained teachers at hand to comment and facilitate, like attentive parents, rather than overtly direct. Not cheap, it’s what many child experts consider developmentally correct.
Yet such solicitously child-centered expertise doesn’t always sit so comfortably with families on the lower end of the income ladder or from other cultures. There, child-rearing styles tend to be considerably less chatty than the middle-class norm, Fuller and others note, and parents often expect more work than play in school. Bolstering kids’ deference to adults, not just boosting kids’ confidence, is also valued in many families. Early reading and math readiness often counts most of all, and teachers hold the key. It’s an invitation to “direct instruction,” which appeals to school administrators eager for a cost-effective jump-start on “skilling” for the No Child Left Behind testing that starts in third grade.
Nobody wants a two-tiered system, which isn’t likely to narrow the achievement gap, or a rigid one-size-fits-all system, either. But the UPK mission is an impetus to notice that at each end of the spectrum there are pedagogical lessons the other end wouldn’t get otherwise and that everyone could benefit from. Kirp and others pragmatically hope that in a universal system that includes well-off families, there would be built-in demand for a developmentally sensitive preschool, which is arguably icing on the cake for the affluent but especially beneficial for those who lag behind. Those parents’ political clout, moreover, would make budgets harder to cut.
But the ABC side of the preschool spectrum — a more didactic emphasis on school readiness — also deserves its due, and not just because government financing may not always match liberal dreams. It helps give poor kids a cognitive boost early on, some research suggests, and it’s what their parents generally look to the classroom to deliver. For progressive purists, the bossiness may be a turnoff. Yet just as exposure to whole-child solicitude can benefit everybody, not least low-income kids and their families, surely so can a dose of the get-with-the-program ethos, unfamiliar though it may feel to the more affluent. Lessons in listening up and following routines deliver their own dividends. They can help convey a sense of belonging and fairness — and patience — that all kids need, not least the luckiest among them.
In retrospect, that’s what I think my son meant by “ABC school”: the challenges that felt important to him were learning not to cry when he was dropped off, not to bite other children, to wait his turn and to endure terrifying fire drills. They aren’t ingredients of future brilliance but maybe of something more important — a spirit of resilience.
Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of “Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children.”
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October 28, 2007
The Way We Live Now
What Every Child Needs
By ANN HULBERT
In the early 1990s, I was taken aback to overhear my 3-year-old son insisting to his 6-year-old cousin that he went to “ABC school,” not to day care, as she condescendingly referred to it. (He was spending a few sociable hours a week at a children’s center chosen because it was around the corner.) I had no idea where he got that term, or when he decided his educational credentials needed upgrading. And, given that alphabet drills weren’t in fact part of the program, I wasn’t sure what he was really boasting about.
But with universal prekindergarten (UPK) emerging as a campaign issue, it’s now clear to me that he was a kid ahead of his time. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have recently joined a chorus of early-childhood-education advocates, governors, foundations and social activists who have been promoting the cause in notably wonky, rather than warm and cuddly, terms. Calling for an overhaul of the current patchwork of uneven preschool programs, UPK proponents invoke neuroscientific evidence of brain growth rather than child-care needs. They cite the long-term economic benefits of an early investment in boosting “cognitive skills” and “school readiness,” especially for low-income children. There is little mention of, say, pretend play in the pitch for government-subsidized pre-K, which supporters argue should be affordable and available (though not necessarily mandatory) for all.
The hardheaded rhetoric conveys an important message: expanding access to early education is serious business, not baby stuff. The universal-preschool mission, too often dismissed as nanny-state meddling, capitalizes on the inclusive No Child Left Behind drive to close the K-12 achievement gap: the moment is ripe to reach downward to the post-diaper and pre-backpack stage, where disparities between white and minority students start. Yet aligning with an ethos of no-nonsense academics inspires uneasiness among UPK crusaders themselves, as the Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller points out in “Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education.” After all, for your bouncy 4-year-old — “wild and wonderful” is the epithet one classic parenting book applies to the age — how much ABC school do you really want?
It is a vexed question for liberal universalists, since the answer tends to vary by, among other things, economic class. In families at the well-educated top of the heap, where books and big vocabularies abound, parents have long gravitated to the “whole child” end of the pedagogical spectrum, as David Kirp notes in his recent manifesto for the cause, “The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics.” For their offspring, already steeped in ABC stuff, they generally favor an emphasis on individualized exploration and creative classroom collaboration to promote social and emotional growth. That entails having well-trained teachers at hand to comment and facilitate, like attentive parents, rather than overtly direct. Not cheap, it’s what many child experts consider developmentally correct.
Yet such solicitously child-centered expertise doesn’t always sit so comfortably with families on the lower end of the income ladder or from other cultures. There, child-rearing styles tend to be considerably less chatty than the middle-class norm, Fuller and others note, and parents often expect more work than play in school. Bolstering kids’ deference to adults, not just boosting kids’ confidence, is also valued in many families. Early reading and math readiness often counts most of all, and teachers hold the key. It’s an invitation to “direct instruction,” which appeals to school administrators eager for a cost-effective jump-start on “skilling” for the No Child Left Behind testing that starts in third grade.
Nobody wants a two-tiered system, which isn’t likely to narrow the achievement gap, or a rigid one-size-fits-all system, either. But the UPK mission is an impetus to notice that at each end of the spectrum there are pedagogical lessons the other end wouldn’t get otherwise and that everyone could benefit from. Kirp and others pragmatically hope that in a universal system that includes well-off families, there would be built-in demand for a developmentally sensitive preschool, which is arguably icing on the cake for the affluent but especially beneficial for those who lag behind. Those parents’ political clout, moreover, would make budgets harder to cut.
But the ABC side of the preschool spectrum — a more didactic emphasis on school readiness — also deserves its due, and not just because government financing may not always match liberal dreams. It helps give poor kids a cognitive boost early on, some research suggests, and it’s what their parents generally look to the classroom to deliver. For progressive purists, the bossiness may be a turnoff. Yet just as exposure to whole-child solicitude can benefit everybody, not least low-income kids and their families, surely so can a dose of the get-with-the-program ethos, unfamiliar though it may feel to the more affluent. Lessons in listening up and following routines deliver their own dividends. They can help convey a sense of belonging and fairness — and patience — that all kids need, not least the luckiest among them.
In retrospect, that’s what I think my son meant by “ABC school”: the challenges that felt important to him were learning not to cry when he was dropped off, not to bite other children, to wait his turn and to endure terrifying fire drills. They aren’t ingredients of future brilliance but maybe of something more important — a spirit of resilience.
Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of “Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children.”
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In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/09Rparenting.html
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December 9, 2007
Parenting
In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life
By MICHAEL WINERIP
THE federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing.
But how much is really the school’s fault?
A new study by the Educational Testing Service — which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT — concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.
The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.
“Together, these four factors account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states,” the report said. In other words, the states that had the lowest test scores tended to be those that had the highest percentages of children from single-parent families, eighth graders watching lots of TV and eighth graders absent a lot, and the lowest percentages of young children being read to regularly, regardless of what was going on in their schools.
Which gets to the heart of the report: by the time these children start school at age 5, they are far behind, and tend to stay behind all through high school. There is no evidence that the gap is being closed.
“Kids start school from platforms of different heights and teachers don’t have a magic wand they can wave to get kids on the same platform,” said Richard J. Coley, director of E.T.S.’s policy information center and co-author of the report with Paul E. Barton, a senior researcher. “If we’re really interested in raising overall levels of achievement and in closing the achievement gap, we need to pay as much attention to the starting line as we do to the finish line.”
What’s interesting about the report — which combines E.T.S. studies with research on families from myriad sources, including the Census Bureau and Child Trends research center — is how much we know, how often government policy and parental behavior does not reflect that knowledge, and how stacked the odds are against so many children. (The study is at www.ets.org/familyreport.)
Being raised by a single parent in itself steepens the odds considerably. Keep in mind that findings are based on statistical averages, and we all know people raised by a single parent who have thrived; I count seven nieces, nephews and cousins in my own extended family. But on average, the child with a single parent is 2.5 times more likely to repeat a grade. That child on average scores a third of a standard deviation lower on tests — the difference between 500 and 463 on the SAT.
And the demographics are not promising. In 1980, 77 percent of American children lived with two parents compared with 68 percent today. For black children the numbers are more stark: 42 percent lived with both parents in 1980, versus 35 percent today. In contrast, in Japan, 92 percent of children live with both parents.
Single parents on average will have less income and less time for a child, given all the demands. While 11 percent of white children live in poverty, 36 percent of black children and 29 percent of Hispanic children are poor. Half of black children live in families where no parent has year-round full-time employment, according to the analysis.
By age 4 the average child in a professional family hears about 35 million more words than a child in a poor family. While 62 percent of kindergartners from the richest 20 percent are read to at home every day, 36 percent of kindergartners in the poorest 20 percent are read to daily.
The report also found that 24 percent of white eighth graders spend at least four hours in front of TV on a weekday compared with 59 percent of black eighth graders.
These issues are intertwined in complex ways. A child watching five hours of TV can be a case of neglect or it may mean a single parent is trying to make ends meet by working two jobs and is not around to supervise. Absence rates are higher for poor children, whose families are more transient than wealthier families.
But whether it is a parent’s fault or the societal pressures on the parent, the results are hard on the child: The average scores for black and Hispanic children on reading and math assessments at the start of kindergarten are 20 percent lower than for white children.
And when those children are ready to apply to college, one of the surest predictors of how they will perform on the SAT is their family’s income: for every $10,000 of additional family income, the SAT score climbs an average of about 10 points, according to statistics from the College Board.
The report describes how much we rely on child care from an early age — half of 2-year-olds are in some kind of nonparental care — and how much worse that care is for poor and minority children. According to the report, poor children are twice as likely to be in low quality care as middle and upper class children, black children more than twice as likely as white children.
And it is black families who rely on day care most: 63 percent, compared with 49 percent of whites and 44 percent of Asians. Says Mr. Coley, “Our day care system may be reinforcing the gap rather than closing it.”
Another way to support parents of young children is paid leave when a child is born, which is routine in most of the world, but not in the United States.
According to Dr. Jody Heymann, director of the Institute of Health and Social Policy at McGill University, 172 of the 176 countries she surveyed this year offer guaranteed paid leave to women who have just had babies. The four that do not? Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and the United States.
The United States guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, but many parents do not qualify for even that, since employers with fewer than 50 workers are exempt.
To better support young families, California in 2004 became the first state to pass a law providing paid leave for new parents. A few more states, including New Jersey and New York, are considering similar legislation.
Mr. Coley believes this kind of government support is necessary if we are serious about closing the gap. “We don’t seem to get it,” he said. “Or maybe we think we can’t afford it, I don’t know.”
E-mail: parenting@nytimes.com
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December 9, 2007
Parenting
In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life
By MICHAEL WINERIP
THE federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing.
But how much is really the school’s fault?
A new study by the Educational Testing Service — which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT — concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.
The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.
“Together, these four factors account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states,” the report said. In other words, the states that had the lowest test scores tended to be those that had the highest percentages of children from single-parent families, eighth graders watching lots of TV and eighth graders absent a lot, and the lowest percentages of young children being read to regularly, regardless of what was going on in their schools.
Which gets to the heart of the report: by the time these children start school at age 5, they are far behind, and tend to stay behind all through high school. There is no evidence that the gap is being closed.
“Kids start school from platforms of different heights and teachers don’t have a magic wand they can wave to get kids on the same platform,” said Richard J. Coley, director of E.T.S.’s policy information center and co-author of the report with Paul E. Barton, a senior researcher. “If we’re really interested in raising overall levels of achievement and in closing the achievement gap, we need to pay as much attention to the starting line as we do to the finish line.”
What’s interesting about the report — which combines E.T.S. studies with research on families from myriad sources, including the Census Bureau and Child Trends research center — is how much we know, how often government policy and parental behavior does not reflect that knowledge, and how stacked the odds are against so many children. (The study is at www.ets.org/familyreport.)
Being raised by a single parent in itself steepens the odds considerably. Keep in mind that findings are based on statistical averages, and we all know people raised by a single parent who have thrived; I count seven nieces, nephews and cousins in my own extended family. But on average, the child with a single parent is 2.5 times more likely to repeat a grade. That child on average scores a third of a standard deviation lower on tests — the difference between 500 and 463 on the SAT.
And the demographics are not promising. In 1980, 77 percent of American children lived with two parents compared with 68 percent today. For black children the numbers are more stark: 42 percent lived with both parents in 1980, versus 35 percent today. In contrast, in Japan, 92 percent of children live with both parents.
Single parents on average will have less income and less time for a child, given all the demands. While 11 percent of white children live in poverty, 36 percent of black children and 29 percent of Hispanic children are poor. Half of black children live in families where no parent has year-round full-time employment, according to the analysis.
By age 4 the average child in a professional family hears about 35 million more words than a child in a poor family. While 62 percent of kindergartners from the richest 20 percent are read to at home every day, 36 percent of kindergartners in the poorest 20 percent are read to daily.
The report also found that 24 percent of white eighth graders spend at least four hours in front of TV on a weekday compared with 59 percent of black eighth graders.
These issues are intertwined in complex ways. A child watching five hours of TV can be a case of neglect or it may mean a single parent is trying to make ends meet by working two jobs and is not around to supervise. Absence rates are higher for poor children, whose families are more transient than wealthier families.
But whether it is a parent’s fault or the societal pressures on the parent, the results are hard on the child: The average scores for black and Hispanic children on reading and math assessments at the start of kindergarten are 20 percent lower than for white children.
And when those children are ready to apply to college, one of the surest predictors of how they will perform on the SAT is their family’s income: for every $10,000 of additional family income, the SAT score climbs an average of about 10 points, according to statistics from the College Board.
The report describes how much we rely on child care from an early age — half of 2-year-olds are in some kind of nonparental care — and how much worse that care is for poor and minority children. According to the report, poor children are twice as likely to be in low quality care as middle and upper class children, black children more than twice as likely as white children.
And it is black families who rely on day care most: 63 percent, compared with 49 percent of whites and 44 percent of Asians. Says Mr. Coley, “Our day care system may be reinforcing the gap rather than closing it.”
Another way to support parents of young children is paid leave when a child is born, which is routine in most of the world, but not in the United States.
According to Dr. Jody Heymann, director of the Institute of Health and Social Policy at McGill University, 172 of the 176 countries she surveyed this year offer guaranteed paid leave to women who have just had babies. The four that do not? Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and the United States.
The United States guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, but many parents do not qualify for even that, since employers with fewer than 50 workers are exempt.
To better support young families, California in 2004 became the first state to pass a law providing paid leave for new parents. A few more states, including New Jersey and New York, are considering similar legislation.
Mr. Coley believes this kind of government support is necessary if we are serious about closing the gap. “We don’t seem to get it,” he said. “Or maybe we think we can’t afford it, I don’t know.”
E-mail: parenting@nytimes.com
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What it takes to make a student
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=no%20child%20left%20behind%20magazine&st=cse&oref=slogin
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November 26, 2006
What It Takes to Make a Student
By PAUL TOUGH
On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.”
Bush’s Woodridge trip came in the middle of a tough midterm election campaign, and there was certainly some short-term political calculation in being photographed among smiling black faces. But this was more than a photo opportunity. The president had come to Woodridge to talk about the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation his administration had enacted after almost six years in office: No Child Left Behind. The controversial education law, which established a series of standards for schools and states to meet and a variety of penalties for falling short, is up for reauthorization next year in front of a potentially hostile Congress, and for the law to win approval again, the White House will have to convince Americans that it is working — and also convince them of exactly what, in this case, “working” really means.
When the law took effect, at the beginning of 2002, official Washington was preoccupied with foreign affairs, and many people in government, and many outside it too, including the educators most affected by the legislation, seemed slow to take notice of its most revolutionary provision: a pledge to eliminate, in just 12 years, the achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students. By 2014, the president vowed, African-American, Hispanic and poor children, all of whom were at the time scoring well below their white counterparts and those in the middle class on standardized tests, would not only catch up with the rest of the nation; they would also reach 100 percent proficiency in both math and reading. It was a startling commitment, and it made the promise in the law’s title a literal one: the federal government would not allow a single American child to be educated to less than that high standard.
It was this element of the law that the president had come to Woodridge to talk about. “There’s an achievement gap in America that’s not good for the future of this country,” he told the crowd. “Some kids can read at grade level, and some can’t. And that’s unsatisfactory.”
But there was good news, the president concluded: “I’m proud to report the achievement gap between white kids and minority students is closing, for the good of the United States.”
This contention — that the achievement gap is on its way to the dustbin of history — is one that Bush and Spellings have expressed frequently in the past year. And the gap better be closing: the law is coming up on its fifth anniversary. In just seven more years, if the promise of No Child Left Behind is going to be kept, the performances of white and black students have to be indistinguishable.
But despite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation’s black eighth-grade students were “proficient” in reading, the assessment’s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.
The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.
In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.
The two debates seem barely to overlap — the principals don’t pay much attention to the research papers being published in scholarly journals, and the academics have yet to study closely what is going on in these schools. Examined together, though, they provide a complete and nuanced picture, sometimes disheartening, sometimes hopeful, of what the president and his education officials are up against as they strive to keep the promise they have made. The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child’s life. And yet the schools provide evidence that the president is, in his most basic understanding of the problem, entirely right: the achievement gap can be overcome, in a convincing way, for large numbers of poor and minority students, not in generations but in years. What he and others seem not to have apprehended quite yet is the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place.
But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country’s students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?
In the years after World War II, and especially after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, black Americans’ standardized-test scores improved steadily and significantly, compared with those of whites. But at some point in the late 1980s, after decades of progress, the narrowing of the gap stalled, and between 1988 and 1994 black reading scores actually fell by a sizable amount on the national assessment. What had appeared to be an inexorable advance toward equality had run out of steam, and African-American schoolchildren seemed to be stuck well behind their white peers.
The issue was complicated by the fact that there are really two overlapping test-score gaps: the one between black children and white children, and the one between poor children and better-off children. Given that those categories tend to overlap — black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as white children — many people wondered whether focusing on race was in fact a useful approach. Why not just concentrate on correcting the academic disadvantages of poor people? Solve those, and the black-white gap will solve itself.
There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.
Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.
When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.
What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.
Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.
In the years since Hart and Risley published their findings, social scientists have examined other elements of the parent-child relationship, and while their methods have varied, their conclusions all point to big class differences in children’s intellectual growth. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached — all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.
Martha Farah, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has built on Brooks-Gunn’s work, using the tools of neuroscience to calculate exactly which skills poorer children lack and which parental behaviors affect the development of those skills. She has found, for instance, that the “parental nurturance” that middle-class parents, on average, are more likely to provide stimulates the brain’s medial temporal lobe, which in turn aids the development of memory skills.
Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children’s development — piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.
The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose — playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends — but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.
In her book “Unequal Childhoods,” published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, “places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence and disparage parents’ decisions.” Working-class and poor children, by contrast, “learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.” But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of “natural growth” disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.
Taken together, the conclusions of these researchers can be a little unsettling. Their work seems to reduce a child’s upbringing, which to a parent can feel something like magic, to a simple algorithm: give a child X, and you get Y. Their work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren’t primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.
What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students that would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?
There is, in fact, evidence emerging that some schools are succeeding at the difficult task of educating poor minority students to high levels of achievement. But there is still great disagreement about just how many schools are pulling this off and what those successful schools mean for the rest of the American education system. One well-publicized evaluation of those questions has come from the Education Trust, a policy group in Washington that has issued a series of reports making the case that there are plenty of what they call “high flying” schools, which they define as high-poverty or high-minority schools whose students score in the top third of all schools in their state. The group’s landmark report, published in December 2001, identified 1,320 “high flying” schools nationwide that were both high-poverty and high minority. This was a big number, and it had a powerful effect on the debate over the achievement gap. The pessimists — those who believed that the disadvantages of poverty were all but impossible to overcome in public schools — were dealt a serious blow. If the report’s figures held up, it meant that high achievement for poor minority kids was not some one-in-a-million occurrence; it was happening all the time, all around us.
But in the years since the report’s release, its conclusions have been challenged by scholars and analysts who have argued that the Education Trust made it too easy to be included on their list. To be counted as a high-flier, a school needed to receive a high score in only one subject in one grade in one year. If your school had a good fourth-grade reading score, it was on the list, even if all its other scores were mediocre. To many researchers, that was an unconvincing standard of academic success. Douglas Harris, a professor of education and economics at Florida State University, pored over Education Trust’s data, trying to ascertain how many of the high-flying schools were able to register consistently good numbers. When he tightened the definition of success to include only schools that had high scores in two subjects in two different grades over two different years, Harris could find only 23 high-poverty, high-minority schools in the Education Trust’s database, a long way down from 1,320.
That number isn’t exhaustive; Harris says he has no doubt that there are some great schools that slipped through his data sieve. But his results still point to a very different story than the one the original report told. Education Trust officials intended their data to refute the idea that family background is the leading cause of student performance. But on closer examination, their data largely confirm that idea, demonstrating clearly that the best predictors of a school’s achievement scores are the race and wealth of its student body. A public school that enrolls mostly well-off white kids has a 1 in 4 chance of earning consistently high test scores, Harris found; a school with mostly poor minority kids has a 1 in 300 chance.
Despite those long odds, the last decade — and especially the last few years — have seen the creation of dozens, even hundreds, of schools across the country dedicated to precisely that mission: delivering consistently high results with a population that generally achieves consistently low results. The schools that have taken on this mission most aggressively tend to be charter schools — the publicly financed, privately run institutions that make up one of the most controversial educational experiments of our time. Because charters exist outside the control of public-school boards and are generally not required to adhere to union contracts with their teachers, they have attracted significant opposition, and their opponents are able to point to plenty of evidence that the charter project has failed. Early charter advocates claimed the schools would raise test scores across the board, and that hasn’t happened; nationally, scores for charter-school students are the same as or lower than scores for public-school students. But by another measure, charter schools have succeeded: by allowing educators to experiment in ways that they generally can’t inside public-school systems, they have led to the creation of a small but growing corps of schools with new and ambitious methods for educating students facing real academic challenges.
In the early years of the charter-school movement, every school was an island, trying out its own mad or brilliant educational theory. But as charter-school proponents have studied the successes and learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, patterns, even a consensus, have begun to emerge. The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.
Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren’t meeting those goals. The schools’ leaders believe in frequent testing, which, they say, lets them measure what is working and what isn’t, and they use test results to make adjustments to the curriculum as they go. Teachers are trained and retrained, frequently observed and assessed by their principals and superintendents. There is an emphasis on results but also on “team building” and cooperation and creativity, and the schools seem, to an outsider at least, like genuinely rewarding places to work, despite the long hours. They tend to attract young, enthusiastic teachers, including many alumni of Teach for America, the program that recruits graduates from top universities to work for two years in inner-city public schools.
Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.
The schools are, in the end, a counterintuitive combination of touchy-feely idealism and intense discipline. Their guiding philosophy is in many ways a reflection of the findings of scholars like Lareau and Hart and Risley — like those academics, these school leaders see childhood as a series of inputs and outputs. When students enroll in one of these schools (usually in fifth or sixth grade), they are often two or more grade levels behind. Usually they have missed out on many of the millions of everyday intellectual and emotional stimuli that their better-off peers have been exposed to since birth. They are, educationally speaking, in deep trouble. The schools reject the notion that all that these struggling students need are high expectations; they do need those, of course, but they also need specific types and amounts of instruction, both in academics and attitude, to compensate for everything they did not receive in their first decade of life.
It is still too early in the history of this nascent movement to say which schools are going to turn out to be the most successful with this new approach to the education of poor children. But so far, the most influential schools are the ones run by KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP’s founders, David Levin and Michael Feinberg, met in 1992, when they were young college graduates enrolled in Teach for America, working in inner-city public schools in Houston. They struggled at first as teachers but were determined to figure out how to motivate and educate their students. Each night they would compare notes on what worked in the classroom — songs, games, chants, rewards — and, before long, both of them became expert classroom instructors.
In the fall of 1994, Levin and Feinberg started a middle school in Houston, teaching just 50 students, and they named it KIPP. A year later, Levin moved to New York and started the second KIPP school, in the South Bronx. As the KIPP schools grew, Levin and Feinberg adhered to a few basic principles: their mission was to educate low-income and minority students. They would emphasize measurable results. And they would promise to do whatever it took to help their students succeed. They offered an extended day and an extended year that provided KIPP students with about 60 percent more time in school than most public-school students. They set clear and strict rules of conduct: their two principles of behavior were “Work Hard” and “Be Nice,” and all the other rules flowed out of those. At the beginning of each year, parents and students signed a pledge — unenforceable but generally taken seriously — committing to certain standards of hard work and behavior. Teachers gave students their cellphone numbers so students could call them at night for homework help.
The methods raised students’ test scores, and the schools began to attract the attention of the media and of philanthropists. A “60 Minutes” report on the schools in 1999 led to a $15 million grant from Doris and Donald Fisher, the founders of the Gap, and Feinberg and Levin began gradually to expand KIPP into a national network. Two years ago, they received $8 million from the Gates Foundation to create up to eight KIPP high schools. There are now 52 KIPP schools across the country, almost all middle schools, and together they are educating 12,000 children. The network is run on a franchise model; each school’s principal has considerable autonomy, while quality control is exercised from the home office in San Francisco. Feinberg is the superintendent of KIPP’s eight schools in Houston, and Levin is the superintendent of the four New York City schools.
KIPP is part of a loose coalition with two other networks of charter schools based in and around New York City. One is Achievement First, which grew out of the success of Amistad Academy, a charter school in New Haven that was founded in 1999. Achievement First now runs six schools in New Haven and Brooklyn. The other network is Uncommon Schools, which was started by a founder of North Star Academy in Newark along with principals from three acclaimed charter schools in Massachusetts; it now includes seven schools in Rochester, Newark and Brooklyn. The connections among the three networks are mostly informal, based on the friendships that bind Levin to Norman Atkins, the former journalist who founded North Star, and to Dacia Toll, the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate who started Amistad with Doug McCurry, a former teacher. Toll and Atkins visited Levin at the Bronx KIPP Academy when they were setting up their original schools and studied the methods he was using; they later sent their principals to the leadership academy that Levin and Feinberg opened in 2000, and they have continued to model many of their practices on KIPP’s. Now the schools are beginning to formalize their ties. As they each expand their charters to include high schools, Levin, Toll and Atkins are working on a plan to bring students from all three networks together under one roof.
Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes. When I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted himself and pointed at me. “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” he asked the class.
They all called out at once, “Nodding!”
Levin’s contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly. And so it is a little unnerving to stand at the front of a KIPP class; every eye is on you. When a student speaks, every head swivels to watch her. To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn. (They may also like the feeling of having their classmates’ undivided attention when they ask or answer a question.) When Levin asked the music class to demonstrate the opposite of Slanting — “Give us the normal school look,” he said — the students, in unison, all started goofing off, staring into space and slouching. Middle-class Americans know intuitively that “good behavior” is mostly a game with established rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a joke.
Still, Levin says that the innovations a visitor to a KIPP school might notice first — the Slanting and the walls festooned with slogans and mottos (“Team Always Beats Individual,” “All of Us Will Learn”) and the orderly rows of students walking in the hallways — are not the only things contributing to the schools’ success. Equally important, he says, are less visible practices: clear and coherent goals for each class; teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day; careful lesson planning; and a decade’s worth of techniques, tricks, games and chants designed to help vast amounts of information penetrate poorly educated brains very quickly.
Toll and Levin are influenced by the writings of a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the author of a series of books about positive psychology. Seligman, one of the first modern psychologists to study happiness, promotes a technique he calls learned optimism, and Toll and Levin consider it an essential part of the attitude they are trying to instill in their students. Last year, a graduate student of Seligman’s named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability. Duckworth studied 164 eighth-grade students in Philadelphia, tracking each child’s I.Q. as well as his or her score on a test that measured self-discipline and then correlating those two numbers with the student’s G.P.A. Surprisingly, she found that the self-discipline scores were a more accurate predictor of G.P.A. than the I.Q. scores by a factor of two. Duckworth’s paper connects with a new wave of research being done around the country showing that “noncognitive” abilities like self-control, adaptability, patience and openness — the kinds of qualities that middle-class parents pass on to their children every day, in all kinds of subtle and indirect ways — have a huge and measurable impact on a child’s future success.
Levin considers Duckworth’s work an indication of the practical side of the “character” education he and Toll and Atkins are engaged in: they want their students to be well behaved and hard-working and respectful because it’s a good way to live but also because the evidence is clear that people who act that way get higher marks in school and better jobs after school. To Toll, a solid character is a basic building block of her students’ education. “I think we have to teach work ethic in the same way we have to teach adding fractions with unlike denominators,” she told me. “But once children have got the work ethic and the commitment to others and to education down, it’s actually pretty easy to teach them. ”
The schools that Toll, Atkins, Levin and Feinberg run are not racially integrated. Most of the 70 or so schools that make up their three networks have only one or two white children enrolled, or none at all. Although as charter schools, their admission is open through a lottery to any student in the cities they serve, their clear purpose is to educate poor black and Hispanic children. The guiding principle for the four school leaders, all of whom are white, is an unexpected twist on the “separate but equal” standard: they assert that for these students, an “equal” education is not good enough. Students who enter middle school significantly behind grade level don’t need the same good education that most American middle-class students receive; they need a better education, because they need to catch up. Toll, especially, is preoccupied with the achievement gap: her schools’ stated mission is to close the gap entirely. “The promise in America is that if you work hard, if you make good decisions, that you’ll be able to be successful,” Toll explained to me. “And given the current state of public education in a lot of our communities, that promise is just not true. There’s not a level playing field.” In Toll’s own career, in fact, the goal of achieving equality came first, and the tool of education came later. When she was at Yale Law School, her plan was to become a civil rights lawyer, but she concluded that she could have more of an impact on the nation’s inequities by founding a charter school.
The methods these educators use seem to work: students at their schools consistently score well on statewide standardized tests. At North Star this year, 93 percent of eighth-grade students were proficient in language arts, compared with 83 percent of students in New Jersey as a whole; in math, 77 percent were proficient, compared with 71 percent of students in the state as a whole. At Amistad, proficiency scores for the sixth grade over the last few years range between the mid-30s and mid-40s, only a bit better than the averages for New Haven; by the eighth grade, they are in the 60s, 70s and 80s — in every case exceeding Connecticut’s average (itself one of the highest in the country). At KIPP’s Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year’s statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located — in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx — it isn’t even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.
The leaders of this informal network are now wrestling with an unintended consequence of their schools’ positive results and high profiles: their incoming students are sometimes too good. At some schools, students arrive scoring better than typical children in their neighborhoods, presumably because the school’s reputation is attracting more-engaged parents with better-prepared kids to its admission lottery. Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for example, is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.
At most schools, well-prepared incoming students would be seen as good news. But at these charter schools, they can be a mixed blessing. Although the schools have demonstrated an impressive and consistent ability to turn below-average poor minority students into above-average students, another part of their mission is to show that even the most academically challenged students can succeed using their methods. But if not enough of those students are attending their schools, it’s hard to make that point. North Star’s leaders say this problem doesn’t apply to them: the school’s fifth-grade students come in with scores that are no higher than the Newark average. At KIPP, Levin and other officials I talked to say that their schools do what they can to recruit applicants who are representative of the neighborhoods they serve, but they also say that once a class is chosen (and at all the charter schools, it is chosen by random lottery), their job is to educate those children to the best of their ability. Dacia Toll is more focused on the issue; she says that she and her principals make a special effort to recruit students from particularly blighted neighborhoods and housing projects in New Haven and Brooklyn and told me that it would “absolutely be a cause for concern” if Amistad seemed to be attracting students who were better-prepared than average.
The most persistent critic of KIPP’s record has been Richard Rothstein, a former education columnist for The New York Times who is now a lecturer at Teachers College. He has asserted that KIPP’s model cannot be replicated on a wide scale and argues that the elevated incoming scores at the Bronx school make it mostly irrelevant to the national debate over the achievement gap. Although Rothstein acknowledges that KIPP’s students are chosen by lottery, he contends in his book “Class and Schools” that they are “not typical lower-class students.” The very fact that their parents would bother to enroll them in the lottery sets them apart from other inner-city children, he says, adding that there is “no evidence” that KIPP’s strategy “would be as successful for students whose parents are not motivated to choose such a school.”
In some ways, the debate seems a trivial one — KIPP is clearly doing a great job of educating its students; do the incoming scores at a single school really matter? But in fact, KIPP, along with Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, is now at the center of a heated political debate over just how much schools can accomplish, and that has brought with it a new level of public scrutiny. Beginning in the late 1990s, KIPP, Amistad and North Star were embraced by advocates from the right who believed in the whole menu of conservative positions on education: school choice, vouchers, merit pay for teachers. In 2001, the Heritage Foundation profiled the KIPP schools in a book called “No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools,” which set out to disprove “the perennial claims of the education establishment that poor children are uneducable.” Two years later, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the well-known conservative writers about race, borrowed the Heritage Foundation’s title (which was itself borrowed from a slogan popular at KIPP and other schools) for their own book on education, “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning”; the book used the success of Amistad, North Star and, especially, KIPP to highlight the failings of the public-school system in serving poor children. If KIPP can successfully educate these kids, the Thernstroms asked, why can’t every school?
The Thernstroms argue that if we can just fix the schools where poor children are educated, it will become much easier to solve all the other problems of poverty. The opposing argument, which Rothstein and others have made, is that the problems of poor minority kids are simply too great to be overcome by any school, no matter how effective. He points to the work of Hart and Risley and Lareau and argues that the achievement gap can be significantly diminished only by correcting, or at least addressing, the deep inequities that divide the races and the classes.
Levin and Toll sometimes seem surprised by the political company they are now keeping — and by the opponents they have attracted. “I’m a total liberal!” Toll said, a little defensively, when I asked her recently about this political divide. Many charter advocates claim that the views of Democratic politicians on charter schools are clouded by the fact that they depend for both money and votes on the nation’s teachers’ unions, which are skeptical of charter schools and in some states have taken steps to block them from expanding. In Connecticut, the state teachers’ union this year lobbied against a legislative change to allow for the expansion of Amistad Academy (it later passed), and the union’s lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request that required Amistad to turn over all of its employment and pay records. The union’s chief lobbyist told reporters in April that the state’s charter law was intended only “to create incubators of innovation. It was never to create a charter-school system.” Amistad was acceptable as a small experiment, in other words, but there was no reason to let it grow.
Even if schools like KIPP are allowed to expand to meet the demand in the educational marketplace — all of them have long waiting lists — it is hard to imagine that, alone, they will be able to make much of a dent in the problem of the achievement gap; there are, after all, millions of poor and minority public-school students who aren’t getting the education they need either at home or in the classroom. What these charter schools demonstrate, though, is the effort that would be required to provide those students with that education.
Toll put it this way: “We want to change the conversation from ‘You can’t educate these kids’ to ‘You can only educate these kids if. ...’ ” And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.
Right now, of course, they are not getting more than middle-class students; they are getting less. For instance, nationwide, the best and most experienced teachers are allowed to choose where they teach. And since most state contracts offer teachers no bonus or incentive for teaching in a school with a high population of needy children, the best teachers tend to go where they are needed the least. A study that the Education Trust issued in June used data from Illinois to demonstrate the point. Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor — where excellent teachers are needed the most — just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.
Government spending on education does not tend to compensate for these inequities; in fact, it often makes them worse. Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has compiled persuasive evidence for what he calls the country’s “education apartheid.” In states with more poor children, spending per pupil is lower. In Mississippi, for instance, it is $5,391 a year; in Connecticut, it is $9,588. Most education financing comes from state and local governments, but the federal supplement for poor children, Title 1, is “regressive,” Liu points out, because it is tied to the amount each state spends. So the federal government gives Arkansas $964 to help educate each poor child in the state, and it gives Massachusetts $2,048 for each poor child there.
Without making a much more serious commitment to the education of poor and minority students, it is hard to see how the federal government will be able to deliver on the promise contained in No Child Left Behind. The law made states responsible for turning their poorest children into accomplished scholars in a little more than a decade — a national undertaking on the order of a moon landing — but provided them with little assistance or even direction as to how they might accomplish that goal. And recently, many advocates have begun to argue that the Education Department has quietly given up on No Child Left Behind.
The most malignant element of the original law was that it required all states to achieve proficiency but then allowed each state to define proficiency for itself. It took state governments a couple of years to realize just what that meant, but now they have caught on — and many of them are engaged in an ignoble competition to see which state can demand the least of its students. At the head of this pack right now is Mississippi, which has declared 89 percent of its fourth-grade students to be proficient readers, the highest percentage in the nation, while in fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 18 percent of Mississippi fourth graders know how to read at an appropriate level — the second-lowest score of any state. In the past year, Arizona, Maryland, Ohio, North Dakota and Idaho all followed Mississippi’s lead and slashed their standards in order to allow themselves to label uneducated students educated. The federal government has permitted these maneuvers, and after several years of tough talk about enforcing the law’s standards, the Education Department has in the past year begun cutting one deal after another with states that want to redefine “success” for their schools. (When I spoke to Spellings this month, she said she would “appeal to the better angels of governors and state policy makers” to keep their standards in line with national benchmarks.)
The absence of any robust federal effort to improve high-poverty schools undercuts and distorts the debate over the responsibility for their problems. It is true, as the Thernstroms write in their book, that “dysfunctional families and poverty are no excuse for widespread, chronic educational failure.” But while those factors are not an excuse, they’re certainly an explanation; as researchers like Lareau and Brooks-Gunn have made clear, poverty and dysfunction are enormous disadvantages for any child to overcome. When Levin and Feinberg began using the slogan “No Excuses” in the mid-1990s, they intended it to motivate their students and teachers, to remind them that within the context of a KIPP school, there would always be a way to achieve success. But when the conservative education movement adopted “No Excuses” as a slogan, the phrase was used much more broadly: if that rural Arkansas public school isn’t achieving the success of a KIPP school, those responsible for its underachievement must simply be making excuses. The slogan came to suggest that what is going wrong in the schools is simply some sort of failure of will — that teachers don’t want to work hard, or don’t believe in their students, or are succumbing to what the president calls “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — while the reality is that even the best, most motivated educator, given just six hours a day and 10 months a year and nothing more than the typical resources provided to a public-school teacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers.
The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like — it might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools — but what is clear is that it is within reach.
Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail — if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the country’s poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.
Paul Tough is an editor at the magazine. He is writing a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, a community organization.
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November 26, 2006
What It Takes to Make a Student
By PAUL TOUGH
On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.”
Bush’s Woodridge trip came in the middle of a tough midterm election campaign, and there was certainly some short-term political calculation in being photographed among smiling black faces. But this was more than a photo opportunity. The president had come to Woodridge to talk about the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation his administration had enacted after almost six years in office: No Child Left Behind. The controversial education law, which established a series of standards for schools and states to meet and a variety of penalties for falling short, is up for reauthorization next year in front of a potentially hostile Congress, and for the law to win approval again, the White House will have to convince Americans that it is working — and also convince them of exactly what, in this case, “working” really means.
When the law took effect, at the beginning of 2002, official Washington was preoccupied with foreign affairs, and many people in government, and many outside it too, including the educators most affected by the legislation, seemed slow to take notice of its most revolutionary provision: a pledge to eliminate, in just 12 years, the achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students. By 2014, the president vowed, African-American, Hispanic and poor children, all of whom were at the time scoring well below their white counterparts and those in the middle class on standardized tests, would not only catch up with the rest of the nation; they would also reach 100 percent proficiency in both math and reading. It was a startling commitment, and it made the promise in the law’s title a literal one: the federal government would not allow a single American child to be educated to less than that high standard.
It was this element of the law that the president had come to Woodridge to talk about. “There’s an achievement gap in America that’s not good for the future of this country,” he told the crowd. “Some kids can read at grade level, and some can’t. And that’s unsatisfactory.”
But there was good news, the president concluded: “I’m proud to report the achievement gap between white kids and minority students is closing, for the good of the United States.”
This contention — that the achievement gap is on its way to the dustbin of history — is one that Bush and Spellings have expressed frequently in the past year. And the gap better be closing: the law is coming up on its fifth anniversary. In just seven more years, if the promise of No Child Left Behind is going to be kept, the performances of white and black students have to be indistinguishable.
But despite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation’s black eighth-grade students were “proficient” in reading, the assessment’s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.
The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.
In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.
The two debates seem barely to overlap — the principals don’t pay much attention to the research papers being published in scholarly journals, and the academics have yet to study closely what is going on in these schools. Examined together, though, they provide a complete and nuanced picture, sometimes disheartening, sometimes hopeful, of what the president and his education officials are up against as they strive to keep the promise they have made. The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child’s life. And yet the schools provide evidence that the president is, in his most basic understanding of the problem, entirely right: the achievement gap can be overcome, in a convincing way, for large numbers of poor and minority students, not in generations but in years. What he and others seem not to have apprehended quite yet is the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place.
But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country’s students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?
In the years after World War II, and especially after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, black Americans’ standardized-test scores improved steadily and significantly, compared with those of whites. But at some point in the late 1980s, after decades of progress, the narrowing of the gap stalled, and between 1988 and 1994 black reading scores actually fell by a sizable amount on the national assessment. What had appeared to be an inexorable advance toward equality had run out of steam, and African-American schoolchildren seemed to be stuck well behind their white peers.
The issue was complicated by the fact that there are really two overlapping test-score gaps: the one between black children and white children, and the one between poor children and better-off children. Given that those categories tend to overlap — black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as white children — many people wondered whether focusing on race was in fact a useful approach. Why not just concentrate on correcting the academic disadvantages of poor people? Solve those, and the black-white gap will solve itself.
There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.
Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.
When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.
What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.
Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.
In the years since Hart and Risley published their findings, social scientists have examined other elements of the parent-child relationship, and while their methods have varied, their conclusions all point to big class differences in children’s intellectual growth. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached — all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.
Martha Farah, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has built on Brooks-Gunn’s work, using the tools of neuroscience to calculate exactly which skills poorer children lack and which parental behaviors affect the development of those skills. She has found, for instance, that the “parental nurturance” that middle-class parents, on average, are more likely to provide stimulates the brain’s medial temporal lobe, which in turn aids the development of memory skills.
Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children’s development — piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.
The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose — playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends — but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.
In her book “Unequal Childhoods,” published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, “places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence and disparage parents’ decisions.” Working-class and poor children, by contrast, “learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.” But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of “natural growth” disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.
Taken together, the conclusions of these researchers can be a little unsettling. Their work seems to reduce a child’s upbringing, which to a parent can feel something like magic, to a simple algorithm: give a child X, and you get Y. Their work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren’t primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.
What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students that would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?
There is, in fact, evidence emerging that some schools are succeeding at the difficult task of educating poor minority students to high levels of achievement. But there is still great disagreement about just how many schools are pulling this off and what those successful schools mean for the rest of the American education system. One well-publicized evaluation of those questions has come from the Education Trust, a policy group in Washington that has issued a series of reports making the case that there are plenty of what they call “high flying” schools, which they define as high-poverty or high-minority schools whose students score in the top third of all schools in their state. The group’s landmark report, published in December 2001, identified 1,320 “high flying” schools nationwide that were both high-poverty and high minority. This was a big number, and it had a powerful effect on the debate over the achievement gap. The pessimists — those who believed that the disadvantages of poverty were all but impossible to overcome in public schools — were dealt a serious blow. If the report’s figures held up, it meant that high achievement for poor minority kids was not some one-in-a-million occurrence; it was happening all the time, all around us.
But in the years since the report’s release, its conclusions have been challenged by scholars and analysts who have argued that the Education Trust made it too easy to be included on their list. To be counted as a high-flier, a school needed to receive a high score in only one subject in one grade in one year. If your school had a good fourth-grade reading score, it was on the list, even if all its other scores were mediocre. To many researchers, that was an unconvincing standard of academic success. Douglas Harris, a professor of education and economics at Florida State University, pored over Education Trust’s data, trying to ascertain how many of the high-flying schools were able to register consistently good numbers. When he tightened the definition of success to include only schools that had high scores in two subjects in two different grades over two different years, Harris could find only 23 high-poverty, high-minority schools in the Education Trust’s database, a long way down from 1,320.
That number isn’t exhaustive; Harris says he has no doubt that there are some great schools that slipped through his data sieve. But his results still point to a very different story than the one the original report told. Education Trust officials intended their data to refute the idea that family background is the leading cause of student performance. But on closer examination, their data largely confirm that idea, demonstrating clearly that the best predictors of a school’s achievement scores are the race and wealth of its student body. A public school that enrolls mostly well-off white kids has a 1 in 4 chance of earning consistently high test scores, Harris found; a school with mostly poor minority kids has a 1 in 300 chance.
Despite those long odds, the last decade — and especially the last few years — have seen the creation of dozens, even hundreds, of schools across the country dedicated to precisely that mission: delivering consistently high results with a population that generally achieves consistently low results. The schools that have taken on this mission most aggressively tend to be charter schools — the publicly financed, privately run institutions that make up one of the most controversial educational experiments of our time. Because charters exist outside the control of public-school boards and are generally not required to adhere to union contracts with their teachers, they have attracted significant opposition, and their opponents are able to point to plenty of evidence that the charter project has failed. Early charter advocates claimed the schools would raise test scores across the board, and that hasn’t happened; nationally, scores for charter-school students are the same as or lower than scores for public-school students. But by another measure, charter schools have succeeded: by allowing educators to experiment in ways that they generally can’t inside public-school systems, they have led to the creation of a small but growing corps of schools with new and ambitious methods for educating students facing real academic challenges.
In the early years of the charter-school movement, every school was an island, trying out its own mad or brilliant educational theory. But as charter-school proponents have studied the successes and learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, patterns, even a consensus, have begun to emerge. The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.
Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren’t meeting those goals. The schools’ leaders believe in frequent testing, which, they say, lets them measure what is working and what isn’t, and they use test results to make adjustments to the curriculum as they go. Teachers are trained and retrained, frequently observed and assessed by their principals and superintendents. There is an emphasis on results but also on “team building” and cooperation and creativity, and the schools seem, to an outsider at least, like genuinely rewarding places to work, despite the long hours. They tend to attract young, enthusiastic teachers, including many alumni of Teach for America, the program that recruits graduates from top universities to work for two years in inner-city public schools.
Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.
The schools are, in the end, a counterintuitive combination of touchy-feely idealism and intense discipline. Their guiding philosophy is in many ways a reflection of the findings of scholars like Lareau and Hart and Risley — like those academics, these school leaders see childhood as a series of inputs and outputs. When students enroll in one of these schools (usually in fifth or sixth grade), they are often two or more grade levels behind. Usually they have missed out on many of the millions of everyday intellectual and emotional stimuli that their better-off peers have been exposed to since birth. They are, educationally speaking, in deep trouble. The schools reject the notion that all that these struggling students need are high expectations; they do need those, of course, but they also need specific types and amounts of instruction, both in academics and attitude, to compensate for everything they did not receive in their first decade of life.
It is still too early in the history of this nascent movement to say which schools are going to turn out to be the most successful with this new approach to the education of poor children. But so far, the most influential schools are the ones run by KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP’s founders, David Levin and Michael Feinberg, met in 1992, when they were young college graduates enrolled in Teach for America, working in inner-city public schools in Houston. They struggled at first as teachers but were determined to figure out how to motivate and educate their students. Each night they would compare notes on what worked in the classroom — songs, games, chants, rewards — and, before long, both of them became expert classroom instructors.
In the fall of 1994, Levin and Feinberg started a middle school in Houston, teaching just 50 students, and they named it KIPP. A year later, Levin moved to New York and started the second KIPP school, in the South Bronx. As the KIPP schools grew, Levin and Feinberg adhered to a few basic principles: their mission was to educate low-income and minority students. They would emphasize measurable results. And they would promise to do whatever it took to help their students succeed. They offered an extended day and an extended year that provided KIPP students with about 60 percent more time in school than most public-school students. They set clear and strict rules of conduct: their two principles of behavior were “Work Hard” and “Be Nice,” and all the other rules flowed out of those. At the beginning of each year, parents and students signed a pledge — unenforceable but generally taken seriously — committing to certain standards of hard work and behavior. Teachers gave students their cellphone numbers so students could call them at night for homework help.
The methods raised students’ test scores, and the schools began to attract the attention of the media and of philanthropists. A “60 Minutes” report on the schools in 1999 led to a $15 million grant from Doris and Donald Fisher, the founders of the Gap, and Feinberg and Levin began gradually to expand KIPP into a national network. Two years ago, they received $8 million from the Gates Foundation to create up to eight KIPP high schools. There are now 52 KIPP schools across the country, almost all middle schools, and together they are educating 12,000 children. The network is run on a franchise model; each school’s principal has considerable autonomy, while quality control is exercised from the home office in San Francisco. Feinberg is the superintendent of KIPP’s eight schools in Houston, and Levin is the superintendent of the four New York City schools.
KIPP is part of a loose coalition with two other networks of charter schools based in and around New York City. One is Achievement First, which grew out of the success of Amistad Academy, a charter school in New Haven that was founded in 1999. Achievement First now runs six schools in New Haven and Brooklyn. The other network is Uncommon Schools, which was started by a founder of North Star Academy in Newark along with principals from three acclaimed charter schools in Massachusetts; it now includes seven schools in Rochester, Newark and Brooklyn. The connections among the three networks are mostly informal, based on the friendships that bind Levin to Norman Atkins, the former journalist who founded North Star, and to Dacia Toll, the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate who started Amistad with Doug McCurry, a former teacher. Toll and Atkins visited Levin at the Bronx KIPP Academy when they were setting up their original schools and studied the methods he was using; they later sent their principals to the leadership academy that Levin and Feinberg opened in 2000, and they have continued to model many of their practices on KIPP’s. Now the schools are beginning to formalize their ties. As they each expand their charters to include high schools, Levin, Toll and Atkins are working on a plan to bring students from all three networks together under one roof.
Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes. When I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted himself and pointed at me. “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” he asked the class.
They all called out at once, “Nodding!”
Levin’s contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly. And so it is a little unnerving to stand at the front of a KIPP class; every eye is on you. When a student speaks, every head swivels to watch her. To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn. (They may also like the feeling of having their classmates’ undivided attention when they ask or answer a question.) When Levin asked the music class to demonstrate the opposite of Slanting — “Give us the normal school look,” he said — the students, in unison, all started goofing off, staring into space and slouching. Middle-class Americans know intuitively that “good behavior” is mostly a game with established rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a joke.
Still, Levin says that the innovations a visitor to a KIPP school might notice first — the Slanting and the walls festooned with slogans and mottos (“Team Always Beats Individual,” “All of Us Will Learn”) and the orderly rows of students walking in the hallways — are not the only things contributing to the schools’ success. Equally important, he says, are less visible practices: clear and coherent goals for each class; teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day; careful lesson planning; and a decade’s worth of techniques, tricks, games and chants designed to help vast amounts of information penetrate poorly educated brains very quickly.
Toll and Levin are influenced by the writings of a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the author of a series of books about positive psychology. Seligman, one of the first modern psychologists to study happiness, promotes a technique he calls learned optimism, and Toll and Levin consider it an essential part of the attitude they are trying to instill in their students. Last year, a graduate student of Seligman’s named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability. Duckworth studied 164 eighth-grade students in Philadelphia, tracking each child’s I.Q. as well as his or her score on a test that measured self-discipline and then correlating those two numbers with the student’s G.P.A. Surprisingly, she found that the self-discipline scores were a more accurate predictor of G.P.A. than the I.Q. scores by a factor of two. Duckworth’s paper connects with a new wave of research being done around the country showing that “noncognitive” abilities like self-control, adaptability, patience and openness — the kinds of qualities that middle-class parents pass on to their children every day, in all kinds of subtle and indirect ways — have a huge and measurable impact on a child’s future success.
Levin considers Duckworth’s work an indication of the practical side of the “character” education he and Toll and Atkins are engaged in: they want their students to be well behaved and hard-working and respectful because it’s a good way to live but also because the evidence is clear that people who act that way get higher marks in school and better jobs after school. To Toll, a solid character is a basic building block of her students’ education. “I think we have to teach work ethic in the same way we have to teach adding fractions with unlike denominators,” she told me. “But once children have got the work ethic and the commitment to others and to education down, it’s actually pretty easy to teach them. ”
The schools that Toll, Atkins, Levin and Feinberg run are not racially integrated. Most of the 70 or so schools that make up their three networks have only one or two white children enrolled, or none at all. Although as charter schools, their admission is open through a lottery to any student in the cities they serve, their clear purpose is to educate poor black and Hispanic children. The guiding principle for the four school leaders, all of whom are white, is an unexpected twist on the “separate but equal” standard: they assert that for these students, an “equal” education is not good enough. Students who enter middle school significantly behind grade level don’t need the same good education that most American middle-class students receive; they need a better education, because they need to catch up. Toll, especially, is preoccupied with the achievement gap: her schools’ stated mission is to close the gap entirely. “The promise in America is that if you work hard, if you make good decisions, that you’ll be able to be successful,” Toll explained to me. “And given the current state of public education in a lot of our communities, that promise is just not true. There’s not a level playing field.” In Toll’s own career, in fact, the goal of achieving equality came first, and the tool of education came later. When she was at Yale Law School, her plan was to become a civil rights lawyer, but she concluded that she could have more of an impact on the nation’s inequities by founding a charter school.
The methods these educators use seem to work: students at their schools consistently score well on statewide standardized tests. At North Star this year, 93 percent of eighth-grade students were proficient in language arts, compared with 83 percent of students in New Jersey as a whole; in math, 77 percent were proficient, compared with 71 percent of students in the state as a whole. At Amistad, proficiency scores for the sixth grade over the last few years range between the mid-30s and mid-40s, only a bit better than the averages for New Haven; by the eighth grade, they are in the 60s, 70s and 80s — in every case exceeding Connecticut’s average (itself one of the highest in the country). At KIPP’s Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year’s statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located — in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx — it isn’t even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.
The leaders of this informal network are now wrestling with an unintended consequence of their schools’ positive results and high profiles: their incoming students are sometimes too good. At some schools, students arrive scoring better than typical children in their neighborhoods, presumably because the school’s reputation is attracting more-engaged parents with better-prepared kids to its admission lottery. Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for example, is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.
At most schools, well-prepared incoming students would be seen as good news. But at these charter schools, they can be a mixed blessing. Although the schools have demonstrated an impressive and consistent ability to turn below-average poor minority students into above-average students, another part of their mission is to show that even the most academically challenged students can succeed using their methods. But if not enough of those students are attending their schools, it’s hard to make that point. North Star’s leaders say this problem doesn’t apply to them: the school’s fifth-grade students come in with scores that are no higher than the Newark average. At KIPP, Levin and other officials I talked to say that their schools do what they can to recruit applicants who are representative of the neighborhoods they serve, but they also say that once a class is chosen (and at all the charter schools, it is chosen by random lottery), their job is to educate those children to the best of their ability. Dacia Toll is more focused on the issue; she says that she and her principals make a special effort to recruit students from particularly blighted neighborhoods and housing projects in New Haven and Brooklyn and told me that it would “absolutely be a cause for concern” if Amistad seemed to be attracting students who were better-prepared than average.
The most persistent critic of KIPP’s record has been Richard Rothstein, a former education columnist for The New York Times who is now a lecturer at Teachers College. He has asserted that KIPP’s model cannot be replicated on a wide scale and argues that the elevated incoming scores at the Bronx school make it mostly irrelevant to the national debate over the achievement gap. Although Rothstein acknowledges that KIPP’s students are chosen by lottery, he contends in his book “Class and Schools” that they are “not typical lower-class students.” The very fact that their parents would bother to enroll them in the lottery sets them apart from other inner-city children, he says, adding that there is “no evidence” that KIPP’s strategy “would be as successful for students whose parents are not motivated to choose such a school.”
In some ways, the debate seems a trivial one — KIPP is clearly doing a great job of educating its students; do the incoming scores at a single school really matter? But in fact, KIPP, along with Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, is now at the center of a heated political debate over just how much schools can accomplish, and that has brought with it a new level of public scrutiny. Beginning in the late 1990s, KIPP, Amistad and North Star were embraced by advocates from the right who believed in the whole menu of conservative positions on education: school choice, vouchers, merit pay for teachers. In 2001, the Heritage Foundation profiled the KIPP schools in a book called “No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools,” which set out to disprove “the perennial claims of the education establishment that poor children are uneducable.” Two years later, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the well-known conservative writers about race, borrowed the Heritage Foundation’s title (which was itself borrowed from a slogan popular at KIPP and other schools) for their own book on education, “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning”; the book used the success of Amistad, North Star and, especially, KIPP to highlight the failings of the public-school system in serving poor children. If KIPP can successfully educate these kids, the Thernstroms asked, why can’t every school?
The Thernstroms argue that if we can just fix the schools where poor children are educated, it will become much easier to solve all the other problems of poverty. The opposing argument, which Rothstein and others have made, is that the problems of poor minority kids are simply too great to be overcome by any school, no matter how effective. He points to the work of Hart and Risley and Lareau and argues that the achievement gap can be significantly diminished only by correcting, or at least addressing, the deep inequities that divide the races and the classes.
Levin and Toll sometimes seem surprised by the political company they are now keeping — and by the opponents they have attracted. “I’m a total liberal!” Toll said, a little defensively, when I asked her recently about this political divide. Many charter advocates claim that the views of Democratic politicians on charter schools are clouded by the fact that they depend for both money and votes on the nation’s teachers’ unions, which are skeptical of charter schools and in some states have taken steps to block them from expanding. In Connecticut, the state teachers’ union this year lobbied against a legislative change to allow for the expansion of Amistad Academy (it later passed), and the union’s lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request that required Amistad to turn over all of its employment and pay records. The union’s chief lobbyist told reporters in April that the state’s charter law was intended only “to create incubators of innovation. It was never to create a charter-school system.” Amistad was acceptable as a small experiment, in other words, but there was no reason to let it grow.
Even if schools like KIPP are allowed to expand to meet the demand in the educational marketplace — all of them have long waiting lists — it is hard to imagine that, alone, they will be able to make much of a dent in the problem of the achievement gap; there are, after all, millions of poor and minority public-school students who aren’t getting the education they need either at home or in the classroom. What these charter schools demonstrate, though, is the effort that would be required to provide those students with that education.
Toll put it this way: “We want to change the conversation from ‘You can’t educate these kids’ to ‘You can only educate these kids if. ...’ ” And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.
Right now, of course, they are not getting more than middle-class students; they are getting less. For instance, nationwide, the best and most experienced teachers are allowed to choose where they teach. And since most state contracts offer teachers no bonus or incentive for teaching in a school with a high population of needy children, the best teachers tend to go where they are needed the least. A study that the Education Trust issued in June used data from Illinois to demonstrate the point. Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor — where excellent teachers are needed the most — just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.
Government spending on education does not tend to compensate for these inequities; in fact, it often makes them worse. Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has compiled persuasive evidence for what he calls the country’s “education apartheid.” In states with more poor children, spending per pupil is lower. In Mississippi, for instance, it is $5,391 a year; in Connecticut, it is $9,588. Most education financing comes from state and local governments, but the federal supplement for poor children, Title 1, is “regressive,” Liu points out, because it is tied to the amount each state spends. So the federal government gives Arkansas $964 to help educate each poor child in the state, and it gives Massachusetts $2,048 for each poor child there.
Without making a much more serious commitment to the education of poor and minority students, it is hard to see how the federal government will be able to deliver on the promise contained in No Child Left Behind. The law made states responsible for turning their poorest children into accomplished scholars in a little more than a decade — a national undertaking on the order of a moon landing — but provided them with little assistance or even direction as to how they might accomplish that goal. And recently, many advocates have begun to argue that the Education Department has quietly given up on No Child Left Behind.
The most malignant element of the original law was that it required all states to achieve proficiency but then allowed each state to define proficiency for itself. It took state governments a couple of years to realize just what that meant, but now they have caught on — and many of them are engaged in an ignoble competition to see which state can demand the least of its students. At the head of this pack right now is Mississippi, which has declared 89 percent of its fourth-grade students to be proficient readers, the highest percentage in the nation, while in fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 18 percent of Mississippi fourth graders know how to read at an appropriate level — the second-lowest score of any state. In the past year, Arizona, Maryland, Ohio, North Dakota and Idaho all followed Mississippi’s lead and slashed their standards in order to allow themselves to label uneducated students educated. The federal government has permitted these maneuvers, and after several years of tough talk about enforcing the law’s standards, the Education Department has in the past year begun cutting one deal after another with states that want to redefine “success” for their schools. (When I spoke to Spellings this month, she said she would “appeal to the better angels of governors and state policy makers” to keep their standards in line with national benchmarks.)
The absence of any robust federal effort to improve high-poverty schools undercuts and distorts the debate over the responsibility for their problems. It is true, as the Thernstroms write in their book, that “dysfunctional families and poverty are no excuse for widespread, chronic educational failure.” But while those factors are not an excuse, they’re certainly an explanation; as researchers like Lareau and Brooks-Gunn have made clear, poverty and dysfunction are enormous disadvantages for any child to overcome. When Levin and Feinberg began using the slogan “No Excuses” in the mid-1990s, they intended it to motivate their students and teachers, to remind them that within the context of a KIPP school, there would always be a way to achieve success. But when the conservative education movement adopted “No Excuses” as a slogan, the phrase was used much more broadly: if that rural Arkansas public school isn’t achieving the success of a KIPP school, those responsible for its underachievement must simply be making excuses. The slogan came to suggest that what is going wrong in the schools is simply some sort of failure of will — that teachers don’t want to work hard, or don’t believe in their students, or are succumbing to what the president calls “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — while the reality is that even the best, most motivated educator, given just six hours a day and 10 months a year and nothing more than the typical resources provided to a public-school teacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers.
The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like — it might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools — but what is clear is that it is within reach.
Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail — if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the country’s poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.
Paul Tough is an editor at the magazine. He is writing a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, a community organization.
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Blocking the Transmission of Violence
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html?sq=treat%20violence%20like%20a%20virus&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
May 4, 2008
Blocking the Transmission of Violence
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
LAST SUMMER, MARTIN TORRES WAS WORKING AS A COOK IN AUSTIN, Tex., when, on the morning of Aug. 23, he received a call from a relative. His 17-year-old nephew, Emilio, had been murdered. According to the police, Emilio was walking down a street on Chicago’s South Side when someone shot him in the chest, possibly the culmination of an ongoing dispute. Like many killings, Emilio’s received just a few sentences in the local newspapers. Torres, who was especially close to his nephew, got on the first Greyhound bus to Chicago. He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently. “That’s how I live. I was going hunting. This is my own blood, my nephew.”
Torres, who is 38, grew up in a dicey section of Chicago, and even by the standards of his neighborhood he was a rough character. His nickname was Packman, because he was known to always pack a gun. He was first shot when he was 12, in the legs with buckshot by members of a rival gang. He was shot five more times, including once through the jaw, another time in his right shoulder and the last time — seven years ago — in his right thigh, with a .38-caliber bullet that is still lodged there. On his chest, he has tattooed a tombstone with the name “Buff” at its center, a tribute to a friend who was killed on his 18th birthday. Torres was the head of a small Hispanic gang, and though he is no longer active, he still wears two silver studs in his left ear, a sign of his affiliation.
When he arrived in Chicago, he began to ask around, and within a day believed he had figured out who killed his nephew. He also began drinking a lot — mostly Hennessey cognac. He borrowed two guns, a .38 and a .380, from guys he knew. He would, he thought, wait until after the funeral to track down his nephew’s assailants.
Zale Hoddenbach looks like an ex-military man. He wears his hair cropped and has a trimmed goatee that highlights his angular jaw. He often wears T-shirts that fit tightly around his muscled arms, though he also carries a slight paunch. When he was younger, Hoddenbach, who is also 38, belonged to a gang that was under the same umbrella as Torres’s, and so when the two men first met 17 years ago at Pontiac Correctional Center, an Illinois maximum-security prison, they became friendly. Hoddenbach was serving time for armed violence; Torres for possession of a stolen car and a gun (he was, he says, on his way to make a hit). “Zale was always in segregation, in the hole for fights,” Torres told me. “He was aggressive.” In one scuffle, Hoddenbach lost the sight in his right eye after an inmate pierced it with a shank. Torres and Hoddenbach were at Pontiac together for about a year but quickly lost touch after they were both released.
Shortly after Torres arrived in Chicago last summer, Hoddenbach received a phone call from Torres’s brother, the father of the young man who was murdered. He was worried that Torres was preparing to seek revenge and hoped that Hoddenbach would speak with him. When Hoddenbach called, Torres was thrilled. He immediately thought that his old prison buddy was going to join him in his search for the killer. But instead Hoddenbach tried to talk him down, telling him retribution wasn’t what his brother wanted. “I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about,” Torres told me when I talked to him six months later. “This didn’t seem like the person I knew.” The next day Hoddenbach appeared at the wake, which was held at New Life Community Church, housed in a low-slung former factory. He spent the day by Torres’s side, sitting with him, talking to him, urging him to respect his brother’s wishes. When Torres went to the parking lot for a smoke, his hands shaking from agitation, Hoddenbach would follow. “Because of our relationship, I thought there was a chance,” Hoddenbach told me. “We were both cut from the same cloth.” Hoddenbach knew from experience that the longer he could delay Torres from heading out, the more chance he’d have of keeping him from shooting someone. So he let him vent for a few hours. Then Hoddenbach started laying into him with every argument he could think of: Look around, do you see any old guys here? I never seen so many young kids at a funeral. Look at these kids, what does the future hold for them? Where do we fit in? Who are you to step on your brother’s wishes?
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force. Zale Hoddenbach, who works for an organization called CeaseFire, is part of an unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets. CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while not artful seems bluntly self-explanatory. Newspaper accounts usually refer to the organization as a gang-intervention program, and Hoddenbach and most of his colleagues are indeed former gang leaders. But CeaseFire doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs — nor interrupt the drug trade. It’s almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.
CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).
EVERY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, in a Spartan room on the 10th floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s public-health building, 15 to 25 men — and two women — all violence interrupters, sit around tables arranged in a circle and ruminate on the rage percolating in the city. Most are in their 40s and 50s, though some, like Hoddenbach, are a bit younger. All of them are black or Hispanic and in one manner or another have themselves been privy to, if not participants in, the brutality of the streets.
On a Wednesday near the end of March, Slutkin made a rare appearance; he ordinarily leaves the day-to-day operations to a staff member. Fit at 57, Slutkin has a somewhat disheveled appearance — tie askew, hair uncombed, seemingly forgetful. Some see his presentation as a calculated effort to disarm. “Slutkin does his thing in his Slutkinesque way,” notes Carl Bell, a psychiatrist who has long worked with children exposed to neighborhood violence and who admires CeaseFire’s work. “He seems kind of disorganized, but he’s not.” Hoddenbach told me: “You can’t make too much of that guy. In the beginning, he gives you that look like he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
Slutkin had come to talk with the group about a recent high-profile incident outside Crane Tech High School on the city’s West Side. An 18-year-old boy was shot and died on the school’s steps, while nearby another boy was savagely beaten with a golf club. Since the beginning of the school year, 18 Chicago public-school students had been killed. (Another six would be murdered in the coming weeks.) The interrupters told Slutkin that there was a large police presence at the school, at least temporarily muffling any hostilities there, and that the police were even escorting some kids to and from school. They then told him what was happening off the radar in their neighborhoods. There was the continuing discord at another high school involving a group of girls (“They’d argue with a stop sign,” one of the interrupters noted); a 14-year-old boy with a gang tattoo on his forehead was shot by an older gang member just out of prison; a 15-year-old was shot in the stomach by a rival gang member as he came out of his house; and a former CeaseFire colleague was struggling to keep himself from losing control after his own sons were beaten. There was also a high-school basketball player shot four times; a 12-year-old boy shot at a party; gang members arming themselves to counter an egging of their freshly painted cars; and a high-ranking gang member who was on life support after being shot, and whose sister was overheard talking on her cellphone in the hospital, urging someone to “get those straps together. Get loaded.”
These incidents all occurred over the previous seven days. In each of them, the interrupters had stepped in to try to keep one act of enmity from spiraling into another. Some had more success than others. Janell Sails prodded the guys with the egged cars to go to a car wash and then persuaded them it wasn’t worth risking their lives over a stupid prank. At Crane Tech High School, three of the interrupters fanned out, trying to convince the five gangs involved in the conflict to lie low, but they conceded that they were unable reach some of the main players. Many of the interrupters seem bewildered by what they see as a wilder group of youngsters now running the streets and by a gang structure that is no longer top-down but is instead made up of many small groups — which they refer to as cliques — whose members are answerable to a handful of peers.
For an hour, Slutkin leaned on the table, playing with a piece of Scotch tape, keenly listening. In some situations, Slutkin can appear detached and didactic. He can wear people down with his long discourses, and some of the interrupters say they sometimes tune him out. (On one occasion, he tried to explain to me the relationship between emotional intelligence and quantum physics.) But having seen a lot of out-of-control behavior, Slutkin is a big believer in controlling emotions. So he has taught himself not to break into discussions and to digest before presenting his view. The interrupters say he has their unqualified loyalty. Hoddenbach told me that he now considers Slutkin a friend.
It became clear as they delivered their reports that many of the interrupters were worn down. One of them, Calvin Buchanan, whose street name is Monster and who just recently joined CeaseFire, showed the others six stitches over his left eye; someone had cracked a beer bottle on his head while he was mediating an argument between two men. The other interrupters applauded when Buchanan told them that, though tempted, he restrained himself from getting even.
When Slutkin finally spoke, he first praised the interrupters for their work. “Everybody’s overreacting, and you’re trying to cool them down,” he told them. He then asked if any of them had been experiencing jitteriness or fear. He spent the next half-hour teaching stress-reduction exercises. If they could calm themselves, he seemed to be saying, they could also calm others. I recalled what one of the interrupters told me a few weeks earlier: “We helped create the madness, and now we’re trying to debug it.”
IN THE PUBLIC-HEALTH field, there have long been two schools of thought on derailing violence. One focuses on environmental factors, specifically trying to limit gun purchases and making guns safer. The other tries to influence behavior by introducing school-based curricula like antidrug and safe-sex campaigns.
Slutkin is going after it in a third way — as if he were trying to contain an infectious disease. The fact that there’s no vaccine or medical cure for violence doesn’t dissuade him. He points out that in the early days of AIDS, there was no treatment either. In the short run, he’s just trying to halt the spread of violence. In the long run, though, he says he hopes to alter behavior and what’s considered socially acceptable.
Slutkin’s perspective grew out of his own experience as an infectious-disease doctor. In 1981, six years out of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, Slutkin was asked to lead the TB program in San Francisco. With an influx of new refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the number of cases in the city had nearly doubled. Slutkin chose to concentrate on those who had the most active TB; on average, they were infecting 6 to 10 others a year. Slutkin hired Southeast Asian outreach workers who could not only locate the infected individuals but who could also stick with them for nine months, making sure they took the necessary medication. These outreach workers knew the communities and spoke the languages, and they were able to persuade family members of infected people to be tested. Slutkin also went after the toughest cases — 26 people with drug-resistant TB. The chance of curing those people was slim, but Slutkin reckoned that if they went untreated, the disease would continue to spread. “Gary wasn’t constrained by the textbook,” says Eric Goosby, who worked in the clinic and is now the chief executive of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation. Within two years, the number of TB cases, at least among these new immigrants, declined sharply.
Slutkin then spent 10 years in Africa, first in refugee camps in Somalia and then working, in Uganda and other countries, for the World Health Organization to curtail the spread of AIDS. During his first posting, in Somalia, a cholera epidemic spread from camp to camp. Slutkin had never dealt with an outbreak of this sort, and he was overwhelmed. The diarrhea from cholera is so severe that patients can die within hours from dehydration. According to Sandy Gove, who was then married to Slutkin and was also a doctor in the camps, infection rates were approaching 10 percent; in one camp there were 1,000 severely ill refugees. “It was desperate,” she told me. Slutkin drove a Land Cruiser two and a half days to an American military base along the coast to the closest phone. He called doctors in Europe and the United States, trying to get information. He also asked the soldiers at the base for blue food coloring, which he then poured into the water sources of the bacteria, a warning to refugees not to drink. “What Gary is really good about is laying out a broad strategic plan and keeping ahead of something,” Gove told me. There were only six doctors for the 40 refugee camps, so Slutkin and Gove trained birth attendants to spot infected people and to give them rehydration therapies in their homes. Because the birth attendants were refugees, they were trusted and could persuade those with the most severe symptoms to receive aid at the medical tent.
After leaving Africa, Slutkin returned to Chicago, where he was raised and where he could attend to his aging parents. (He later remarried there.) It was 1995, and there had been a series of horrific murders involving children in the city. He was convinced that longer sentences and more police officers had made little difference. “Punishment doesn’t drive behavior,” he told me. “Copying and modeling and the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.”
Borrowing some ideas (and the name) from a successful Boston program, Slutkin initially established an approach that exists in one form or another in many cities: outreach workers tried to get youth and young adults into school or to help them find jobs. These outreach workers were also doing dispute mediation. But Slutkin was feeling his way, much as he had in Somalia during the cholera epidemic. One of Slutkin’s colleagues, Tio Hardiman, brought up an uncomfortable truth: the program wasn’t reaching the most bellicose, those most likely to pull a trigger. So in 2004, Hardiman suggested that, in addition to outreach workers, they also hire men and women who had been deep into street life, and he began recruiting people even while they were still in prison. Hardiman told me he was looking for those “right there on the edge.” (The interrupters are paid roughly $15 an hour, and those working full time receive benefits from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where CeaseFire is housed.) The new recruits, with strong connections to the toughest communities, would focus solely on sniffing out clashes that had the potential to escalate. They would intervene in potential acts of retribution — as well as try to defuse seemingly minor spats that might erupt into something bigger, like disputes over women or insulting remarks.
As CeaseFire evolved, Slutkin says he started to realize how much it was drawing on his experiences fighting TB and AIDS. “Early intervention in TB is actually treatment of the most infectious people,” Slutkin told me recently. “They’re the ones who are infecting others. So treatment of the most infectious spreaders is the most effective strategy known and now accepted in the world.” And, he continued, you want to go after them with individuals who themselves were once either infectious spreaders or at high risk for the illness. In the case of violence, you use those who were once hard-core, once the most belligerent, once the most uncontrollable, once the angriest. They are the most convincing messengers. It’s why, for instance, Slutkin and his colleagues asked sex workers in Uganda and other nations to spread the word to other sex workers about safer sexual behavior. Then, Slutkin said, you train them, as you would paraprofessionals, as he and Gove did when they trained birth attendants to spot cholera in Somalia.
The first step to containing the spread of an infectious disease is minimizing transmission. The parallel in Slutkin’s Chicago work is thwarting retaliations, which is precisely what Hoddenbach was trying to do in the aftermath of Emilio Torres’s murder. But Slutkin is also looking for the equivalent of a cure. The way public-health doctors think of curing disease when there are no drug treatments is by changing behavior. Smoking is the most obvious example. Cigarettes are still around. And there’s no easy remedy for lung cancer or emphysema. So the best way to deal with the diseases associated with smoking is to get people to stop smoking. In Uganda, Slutkin and his colleagues tried to change behavior by encouraging people to have fewer sexual partners and to use condoms. CeaseFire has a visible public-communications campaign, which includes billboards and bumper stickers (which read, “Stop. Killing. People.”). It also holds rallies — or what it calls “responses” — at the sites of killings. But much research suggests that peer or social pressure is the most effective way to change behavior. “It was a real turning point for me,” Slutkin said, “when I was working on the AIDS epidemic and saw research findings that showed that the principal determinant of whether someone uses a condom or not is whether they think their friends use them.” Daniel Webster, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University who has looked closely at CeaseFire, told me, “The guys out there doing the interruption have some prestige and reputation, and I think the hope is that they start to change a culture so that you can retain your status, retain your manliness and be able to walk away from events where all expectations were that you were supposed to respond with lethal force.”
As a result, the interrupters operate in a netherworld between upholding the law and upholding the logic of the streets. They’re not meant to be a substitute for the police, and indeed, sometimes the interrupters negotiate disputes involving illicit goings-on. They often walk a fine line between mediating and seeming to condone criminal activity. At one Wednesday meeting this past December, the interrupters argued over whether they could dissuade stickup artists from shooting their victims; persuading them to stop robbing people didn’t come up in the discussion.
LAST DECEMBER, at the first Wednesday meeting I attended, James Highsmith came up to introduce himself. At 58, Highsmith is one of the older interrupters. He wears striped, collared shirts, black rectangular glasses and often a black Borsalino, an Italian-made fedora. He reminded me that I had mentioned him in my book, “There Are No Children Here,” about life in a Chicago public-housing project in the late 1980s. I wrote about a picnic that some Chicago drug kingpins gave in a South Side park. There was a car show, a wet T-shirt contest and softball games for the children. About 2,000 people attended, dancing to a live band while the drug lords showed off their Mercedes Benzes, Rolls-Royces and Jaguars. Highsmith was the key sponsor of the event. He controlled the drug trade on the city’s South Side. He owned a towing business, an auto-mechanic’s shop and a nightclub, as well as a 38-foot boat. In January 1994, he was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison on drug-conspiracy charges; he was released in 2004. Highsmith was just the kind of recruit CeaseFire looks for: an older man getting out of the penitentiary who once had standing on the streets and who, through word of mouth, appears ready, eager even, to discard his former persona. “I’m a work in progress,” Highsmith told me.
One evening we were sitting in Highsmith’s basement apartment when the phone rang. It was Alphonso Prater, another interrupter. The two had a reunion of sorts when they joined CeaseFire; they shared a cell in the county jail 34 years ago. Prater’s voice is so raspy it sounds as if he has gravel in his throat. He told me that he became permanently hoarse after a long stint in segregation in prison; he had to shout to talk with others. When Prater called the night I was there, all Highsmith could make out was: “There’s some high-tech stuff going on. I need you to talk to some folks.” Highsmith didn’t ask any questions.
We drove to a poorly lighted side street on the city’s West Side. Empty beer bottles littered the side of the road. Prater, who is short and wiry and has trouble keeping still, was bouncing on the sidewalk, standing next to a lanky middle-aged man who had receded into his oversize hooded sweatshirt. Highsmith, Prater and another interrupter joined the man in a parked car, where they talked for half an hour. When they were done, the car peeled away, two other sedans escorting it, one in front, the other in the rear. “Protection,” Highsmith commented. Apparently, the man in the hooded sweatshirt, whom I would meet later, had been an intermediary in a drug deal. He had taken an out-of-town buyer holding $30,000 in cash to a house on the South Side to buy drugs. But when they got there, they were met by six men in the backyard, each armed with a pistol or an automatic weapon, and robbed. The out-of-town buyer believed he’d been set up by the intermediary, who, in turn, was trying to hunt down the stickup artists. In the car, Prater, who knew the intermediary, had worked to cool him down, while Highsmith promised to see if he could find someone who might know the stickup guys and could negotiate with them. The intermediary told Prater and Highsmith, a bit ominously, “Something got to give.”
After the intermediary drove off, Prater joked that there was no way he was getting back in a car with him, that he was too overheated and too likely to be the target or the shooter. “I’m not sure we can do anything about this one,” Highsmith told Prater.
RELYING ON HARDENED TYPES — the ones who, as Webster of Johns Hopkins says, have some prestige on the streets — is risky. They have prestige for a reason. Hoddenbach, who once beat someone so badly he punctured his lungs, is reluctant to talk about his past. “I don’t want to be seen as a monster,” he told me. Hoddenbach’s ethnicity is hard to pinpoint. His father was Dutch and his mother Puerto Rican, and he’s so light-skinned his street name was Casper. He has a discerning gaze and mischievous smile, and can be hardheaded and impatient. (At the Wednesday meetings, he often sits near the door and whispers entreaties to the others to speed things up.) Hoddenbach’s father had an explosive temper, and to steal from Slutkin’s lingo, he seems to have infected others. Two of Hoddenbach’s older brothers are serving time for murder. His third brother has carved out a legitimate life as a manager at a manufacturing firm. Hoddenbach always worked. He did maintenance on train equipment and towed airplanes at a private airport. But he was also active in a Hispanic street gang and was known for his unmitigated aggression. He served a total of eight years in the state penitentiary, the last stay for charges that included aggravated battery. He was released in 2002.
In January, I was with Slutkin in Baltimore, where he spoke about CeaseFire to a small gathering of local civic leaders at a private home. During the two-hour meeting, Slutkin never mentioned that the interrupters were ex-felons. When I later asked him about that omission, he conceded that talking about their personal histories “is a dilemma. I haven’t solved it.” I spent many hours with Hoddenbach and the others, trying to understand how they chose to make the transition from gangster to peacemaker, how they put thuggery behind them. It is, of course, their street savvy and reputations that make them effective for CeaseFire. (One supporter of the program admiringly called it “a terrifying strategy” because of the inherent risks.) Some CeaseFire workers have, indeed, reverted to their old ways. One outreach worker was fired after he was arrested for possession of an AK-47 and a handgun. Another outreach worker and an interrupter were let go after they were arrested for dealing drugs. Word-of-mouth allegations often circulate, and privately, some in the police department worry about CeaseFire’s workers returning to their old habits.
Not all the interrupters I talked to could articulate how they had made the transition. Some, like Hoddenbach, find religion — in his case, Christianity. He also has four children he feels responsible for, and has found ways to decompress, like going for long runs. (His brother Mark speculated that “maybe he just wants to give back what he took out.”) I once asked Hoddenbach if he has ever apologized to anyone he hurt. We were with one of his old friends from the street, who started guffawing, as if I had asked Hoddenbach if he ever wore dresses. “I done it twice,” Hoddenbach told us — quickly silencing his friend and saving me from further embarrassment. (One apology was to the brother of the man whose lungs he’d punctured; the other was to a rival gang member he shot.) Alphonso Prater told me that the last time he was released from prison, in 2001, an older woman hired him to gut some homes she was renovating. She trusted him with the keys to the homes, and something about that small gesture lifted him. “She seen something in me that I didn’t see,” he told me.
Though the interrupters may not put it this way, the Wednesday meetings are a kind of therapy. One staff member laughingly compared it to a 12-step program. It was clear to me that they leaned on one another — a lot. Prater once got an urgent call from his daughter, who said her boyfriend was beating her. Prater got in his car and began to race to her house; as he was about to run a stop sign, he glimpsed a police car on the corner. He skidded to a halt. It gave him a moment to think, and he called his CeaseFire supervisor, Tio Hardiman, who got another interrupter to visit Prater’s daughter. Not long ago, three old-timers fresh out of prison ruthlessly ridiculed Hoddenbach for his work with CeaseFire. They were relentless, and Hoddenbach asked to sit down with them. But when it came time to meet, he realized he was too riled, and so he asked another interrupter, Tim White, to go in his place. “I was worried I was going to whip their asses, and wherever it went from there it went,” Hoddenbach told me. “They were old feelings, feelings I don’t want to revisit.”
Recently I went out to lunch with Hoddenbach and Torres. It had been four months since Torres buried his nephew. Torres, who looked worn and agitated (he would get up periodically to smoke a cigarette outside), seemed paradoxically both grateful to and annoyed at Hoddenbach. In the end, Hoddenbach had persuaded him not to avenge his nephew’s murder. Torres had returned the guns and quickly left town. This was his first visit back to Chicago. “I felt like a punk,” he told me, before transferring to the present tense. “I feel shameful.” He said he had sought revenge for people who weren’t related to him — “people who weren’t even no blood to me.” But he held back in the case of his nephew. “I still struggle with it,” he said. On the ride over to the restaurant, Torres had been playing a CD of his nephew’s favorite rap songs. It got him hyped up, and he blurted out to Hoddenbach, “I feel like doing something.” Hoddenbach chided him and shut off the music. “Stop being an idiot,” he told Torres.
“Something made me do what Zale asked me to do,” Torres said later, looking more puzzled than comforted. “Which is respect my brother’s wishes.”
When Slutkin heard of Hoddenbach’s intervention, he told me: “The interrupters have to deal with how to get someone to save face. In other words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your friends are expecting you to do that? . . . In fact, what our interrupters do is put social pressure in the other direction.”
He continued: “This is cognitive dissonance. Before Zale walked up to him, this guy was holding only one thought. So you want to put another thought in his head. It turns out talking about family is what really makes a difference.” Slutkin didn’t take this notion to the interrupters; he learned it from them.
ONE JANUARY NIGHT at 11 p.m., Charles Mack received a phone call that a shooting victim was being rushed to Advocate Christ Medical Center. Mack drove the 10 miles from his home to the hospital, which houses one of four trauma centers in Chicago. Two interrupters, Mack and LeVon Stone, are assigned there. They respond to every shooting and stabbing victim taken to the hospital. Mack, who is 57 and has a slight lisp, is less imposing than his colleagues. He seems always to be coming from or going to church, often dressed in tie and cardigan. He sheepishly told me that his prison term, two years, was for bank fraud. “The other guys laugh at me,” he said. LeVon Stone is 23 years younger and a fast talker. He’s in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down as a result of being shot when he was 18.
Advocate Christ has come to see the presence of interrupters in the trauma unit as essential and is, in fact, looking to expand their numbers. “It has just given me so much hope,” Cathy Arsenault, one of the chaplains there, told me. “The families would come in, huddle in the corner and I could see them assigning people to take care of business.” Mack and Stone try to cool off family members and friends, and if the victim survives, try to keep them from seeking vengeance.
The victim that night was a tall 16-year-old boy named Frederick. He was lying on a gurney just off the emergency room’s main hallway. He was connected to two IVs, and blood was seeping through the gauze wrapped around his left hand. Mack stood to one side; Stone pulled up on the other.
“You know, the most important thing is —” Mack ventured.
“You’re alive,” Stone chimed in.
Stone then asked Frederick if he had heard of CeaseFire. The boy nodded and told them that he had even participated in a CeaseFire rally after a killing in his neighborhood.
“We try to stop violence on the front end,” Stone told Frederick. “Unfortunately, this is the back end. We just want to make sure you don’t go out and try to retaliate.”
The boy had been shot — one bullet shattered his thigh bone and another ripped the tendons in two fingers. Nonetheless, he seemed lucid and chatty.
“My intention is to get in the house, call my school, get my books and finish my work,” he told Mack and Stone. He mentioned the school he attends, which Mack instantly recognized as a place for kids on juvenile-court probation. Frederick told his story. He was at a party, and a rival clique arrived. Frederick and his friends sensed there would be trouble, so they left, and while standing outside, one of the rival group pulled a gun on them. Frederick’s friend told him earlier he had a gun. It turned out to be braggadocio, and so when his friend took off running, so did Frederick, a step behind. As he dashed through a narrow passageway between buildings, he heard the shots.
“Can I ask why you’re in the wheelchair?” Frederick asked Stone.
“I got shot 15 years ago,” Stone told him. Stone didn’t say anything more about it, and later when I asked for more detail, he was elusive. He said simply that he had gotten shot at a barbecue when he tried to intervene in a fistfight.
“You doing good,” Stone assured him. “You got shot. You’re here. And you’re alive. What you do when you get out of here?”
“You got to stop hanging with the wrong person, thinking you’re a Wyatt Earp,” Frederick said, speaking in the third person as if he were reciting a lesson.
At that point, Frederick’s sister arrived. She explained that she was bringing up her brother. She was 18.
“He just wants to go to parties, parties, parties,” she complained. “But it’s too dangerous.” She started to cry.
“Don’t start that, please,” Frederick pleaded.
Mack left a CeaseFire brochure on Frederick’s chest and promised to visit him again in the coming weeks.
LAST MAY, after a 16-year-old boy was killed trying to protect a girl from a gunman on a city bus, Slutkin appeared on a local public-television news program. He suggested CeaseFire was responsible for sharp dips in homicide around the city. Slutkin, some say, gives CeaseFire too much credit. Carl Bell, the psychiatrist, was on the program with Slutkin that night. “I didn’t say anything,” he told me. “I support Slutkin. I’m like, Slutkin, what are you doing? You can’t do that. Maybe politically it’s a good thing, but scientifically it’s so much more complex than that. Come on, Gary.”
Last year, CeaseFire lost its $6 million in annual state financing — which meant a reduction from 45 interrupters to 17 — as part of statewide budget cuts. One state senator, who had ordered an audit of CeaseFire (released after the cuts, it found some administrative inefficiencies), maintained there was no evidence that CeaseFire’s work had made a difference. (The cuts caused considerable uproar: The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial urging the restoration of financing, and the State House overwhelmingly voted to double CeaseFire’s financing; the State Senate, though, has yet to address it.)
It can be hard to measure the success — or the failure — of public-health programs, especially violence-prevention efforts. And given Slutkin’s propensity to cite scientific studies, it is surprising that he hasn’t yet published anything about CeaseFire in a peer-reviewed journal. Nonetheless, in a report due out later this month, independent researchers hired by the Justice Department (from which CeaseFire gets some money) conclude that CeaseFire has had an impact. Shootings have declined around the city in recent years. But the study found that in six of the seven neighborhoods examined, CeaseFire’s efforts reduced the number of shootings or attempted shootings by 16 percent to 27 percent more than it had declined in comparable neighborhoods. The report also noted — with approbation — that CeaseFire, unlike most programs, manages by outcomes, which means that it doesn’t measure its success by gauging the amount of activity (like the number of interrupters on the street or the number of interruptions — 1,200 over four years) but rather by whether shootings are going up or down. One wall in Slutkin’s office is taken up by maps and charts his staff has generated on the location and changes in the frequency of shootings throughout the city; the data determine how they assign the interrupters. Wes Skogan, a professor of political science at Northwestern (disclosure: I teach there) and the author of the report, said, “I found the statistical results to be as strong as you could hope for.”
BALTIMORE, NEWARK and Kansas City, Mo., have each replicated components of the CeaseFire model and have received training from the Chicago staff. In Baltimore, the program, which is run by the city, combines the work of interrupters and outreach workers and has been concentrated in one East Baltimore neighborhood. (The program recently expanded to a second community.) Early research out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that in the East Baltimore neighborhood there were on average two shootings a month just before the program started. During the first four months that interrupters worked the streets, there had not been a single incident.
“My eyes rolled immediately when I heard what the model was,” says Webster of Johns Hopkins, who is studying the Baltimore project. Webster knew the forces the interrupters were up against and considered it wishful thinking that they could effectively mediate disputes. “But when I looked closer at the data,” Webster continues, “and got to know more about who these people were and what they were doing, I became far less skeptical and more hopeful. We’re going to learn from it. And it will evolve.” George Kelling, a Rutgers professor of criminal justice who is helping to establish an effort in Newark to reduce homicide, helped develop the “broken window” theory of fighting crime: addressing small issues quickly. He says a public-health model will be fully effective only if coupled with other efforts, including more creative policing and efforts to get gang members back to school or to work. But he sees promise in the CeaseFire model. “I had to overcome resistance,” Kelling told me, referring to the introduction of a similar program in Newark. “But I think Slutkin’s on to something.”
Most of the police officials I spoke with, in both Chicago and Baltimore, were grateful for the interrupters. James B. Jackson, now the first deputy superintendent in Chicago, was once the commander of the 11th district, which has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Jackson told me that after his officers investigated an incident, he would ask the police to pull back so the interrupters could mediate. He understood that if the interrupters were associated with the police, it would jeopardize their standing among gang members. “If you look at how segments of the population view the police department, it makes some of our efforts problematic,” Baltimore’s police commissioner, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, told me. “It takes someone who knows these guys to go in and say, ‘Hey, lay off.’ We can’t do that.”
Like many new programs that taste some success, CeaseFire has ambitions that threaten to outgrow its capacity. Slutkin has put much of his effort on taking the project to other cities (there’s interest from Los Angeles, Oakland and Wilmington, Del., among others), and he has consulted with the State Department about assisting in Iraq and in Kenya. (CeaseFire training material has been made available to the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq.) Meanwhile, their Chicago project is underfinanced, and the interrupters seem stressed from the amount of work they’ve taken on.
THE INTERRUPTERS have certain understandings. At the Wednesday meetings, no one is ever to mention anyone involved in a dispute by name or, for that matter, mention the name of the gang. Instead they refer to “Group A” or “Group B.” They are not investigators for the police. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid knowing too much about a crime. When Highsmith and Prater left me the night of the failed drug deal, they began working their contacts. Highsmith found someone who knew one of the stickup men and who, at Highsmith’s request, negotiated with them. Highsmith’s contact persuaded the robbers to return enough of the money to appease the drug-buyer’s anger. When I met with the intermediary a few weeks after things were resolved, he was still stirred up about the robbery. “I was mad enough to do anything,” he told me, making it clear that he and his friends had been hunting for the stickup guys. “This could’ve been a hell of a lot worse than it was.” To this day, neither Highsmith nor Prater know the identities of anyone except the intermediary — and they want to leave it that way.
The interrupters often operate by instinct. CeaseFire once received a call from the mother of a 15-year-old boy who wanted out of a gang he joined a few weeks earlier. The mother told Hoddenbach and another interrupter, Max Cerda, that the gang members chased her son home every day from school threatening to beat him. They had shot at him twice. Hoddenbach found the clique leaders and tried to talk sense to them. If the boy didn’t want to be in the gang, he told them, he’d be the first one to snitch. The gang members saw the logic behind that but insisted on giving him a beating before releasing him. Hoddenbach then tried another tack: he negotiated to let him leave the gang for $300 — and no thrashing. The family, though, was only able to come up with $50, so Hoddenbach, Cerda and another interrupter came up with the rest. At their next Wednesday meeting, some interrupters were critical of Hoddenbach for paying what they considered extortion money. “It was kind of a messed-up way, but it was a messed-up way that works,” Hoddenbach said.
It was nearly three months before Charles Mack could find time to visit Frederick, the young shooting victim. Frederick had since moved in with his great-grandmother in a different part of town. In his old neighborhood, he told Mack, “there always somebody who knows you. And I had a reputation.” He complained to Mack that he had never been interviewed by the police but then declared he would never identify the person who shot him anyway. “I’m going to leave it alone,” he said. As is so often the case, Frederick couldn’t remember the genesis of the disagreement between his clique and the other. Mack promised to stay in touch, and as we dropped him off, Mack turned to me and said, “I think he’s going to be all right.” It sounded like both a proclamation as well as hopeful aside.
Not long ago, I stopped by to visit with Hoddenbach at the Boys and Girls Club, where he holds down a second job. It was a Friday evening, and he was waiting for an old associate to come by to give him an introduction to a group of Hispanic kids on the far North Side. Apparently, earlier in the week, they bashed in the face of an African-American teenager with a brick. From what Hoddenbach could make out, it was the result of a long-simmering dispute — the equivalent of a dormant virus — and the victim’s uncle was now worried that it would set off more fighting. As we sat and talked, Hoddenbach seemed unusually agitated. His left foot twitched as if it had an electric current running through it. “If these idiots continue,” he told me, “somebody’s going to step up and make a statement.”
Hoddenbach also worried about Torres, who had recently gone back to Texas and found a job working construction. Hoddenbach says he originally hoped Torres would stay in Chicago and establish some roots, but then decided he’d be better off in another town. “I kept him out of one situation, but I can’t keep him out of all of them,” Hoddenbach said. This may well speak to CeaseFire’s limitations. Leaving town is not an option for most. And for those who have walked away from a shooting, like Torres, if there are no jobs, or lousy schools, or decrepit housing, what’s to keep them from drifting back into their former lives? It’s like cholera: you may cure everyone, you may contain the epidemic, but if you don’t clean up the water supply, people will soon get sick again.
Slutkin says that it makes sense to purify the water supply if — and only if — you acknowledge and treat the epidemic at hand. In other words, antipoverty measures will work only if you treat violence. It would seem intuitive that violence is a result of economic deprivation, but the relationship between the two is not static. People who have little expectation for the future live recklessly. On the other side of the coin, a community in which arguments are settled by gunshots is unlikely to experience economic growth and opportunity. In his book “The Bottom Billion,” Paul Collier argues that one of the characteristics of many developing countries that suffer from entrenched poverty is what he calls the conflict trap, the inability to escape a cycle of violence, usually in the guise of civil wars. Could the same be true in our inner cities, where the ubiquity of guns and gunplay pushes businesses and residents out and leaves behind those who can’t leave, the most impoverished?
In this, Slutkin sees a direct parallel to the early history of seemingly incurable infectious diseases. “Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1880s,” Slutkin says. “Three ghosts: malaria, smallpox and leprosy. No one wanted to go there. Everybody blamed the people. Dirty. Bad habits. Something about their race. Not only is everybody afraid to go there, but the people there themselves are afraid at all times because people are dying a lot and nobody really knows what to do about it. And people come up with all kinds of other ideas that are not scientifically grounded — like putting people away, closing the place down, pushing the people out of town. Sound familiar?”
Alex Kotlowitz teaches writing at Northwestern University and is a regular contributor to the magazine. His last article was about illegal immigration.
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May 4, 2008
Blocking the Transmission of Violence
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
LAST SUMMER, MARTIN TORRES WAS WORKING AS A COOK IN AUSTIN, Tex., when, on the morning of Aug. 23, he received a call from a relative. His 17-year-old nephew, Emilio, had been murdered. According to the police, Emilio was walking down a street on Chicago’s South Side when someone shot him in the chest, possibly the culmination of an ongoing dispute. Like many killings, Emilio’s received just a few sentences in the local newspapers. Torres, who was especially close to his nephew, got on the first Greyhound bus to Chicago. He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently. “That’s how I live. I was going hunting. This is my own blood, my nephew.”
Torres, who is 38, grew up in a dicey section of Chicago, and even by the standards of his neighborhood he was a rough character. His nickname was Packman, because he was known to always pack a gun. He was first shot when he was 12, in the legs with buckshot by members of a rival gang. He was shot five more times, including once through the jaw, another time in his right shoulder and the last time — seven years ago — in his right thigh, with a .38-caliber bullet that is still lodged there. On his chest, he has tattooed a tombstone with the name “Buff” at its center, a tribute to a friend who was killed on his 18th birthday. Torres was the head of a small Hispanic gang, and though he is no longer active, he still wears two silver studs in his left ear, a sign of his affiliation.
When he arrived in Chicago, he began to ask around, and within a day believed he had figured out who killed his nephew. He also began drinking a lot — mostly Hennessey cognac. He borrowed two guns, a .38 and a .380, from guys he knew. He would, he thought, wait until after the funeral to track down his nephew’s assailants.
Zale Hoddenbach looks like an ex-military man. He wears his hair cropped and has a trimmed goatee that highlights his angular jaw. He often wears T-shirts that fit tightly around his muscled arms, though he also carries a slight paunch. When he was younger, Hoddenbach, who is also 38, belonged to a gang that was under the same umbrella as Torres’s, and so when the two men first met 17 years ago at Pontiac Correctional Center, an Illinois maximum-security prison, they became friendly. Hoddenbach was serving time for armed violence; Torres for possession of a stolen car and a gun (he was, he says, on his way to make a hit). “Zale was always in segregation, in the hole for fights,” Torres told me. “He was aggressive.” In one scuffle, Hoddenbach lost the sight in his right eye after an inmate pierced it with a shank. Torres and Hoddenbach were at Pontiac together for about a year but quickly lost touch after they were both released.
Shortly after Torres arrived in Chicago last summer, Hoddenbach received a phone call from Torres’s brother, the father of the young man who was murdered. He was worried that Torres was preparing to seek revenge and hoped that Hoddenbach would speak with him. When Hoddenbach called, Torres was thrilled. He immediately thought that his old prison buddy was going to join him in his search for the killer. But instead Hoddenbach tried to talk him down, telling him retribution wasn’t what his brother wanted. “I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about,” Torres told me when I talked to him six months later. “This didn’t seem like the person I knew.” The next day Hoddenbach appeared at the wake, which was held at New Life Community Church, housed in a low-slung former factory. He spent the day by Torres’s side, sitting with him, talking to him, urging him to respect his brother’s wishes. When Torres went to the parking lot for a smoke, his hands shaking from agitation, Hoddenbach would follow. “Because of our relationship, I thought there was a chance,” Hoddenbach told me. “We were both cut from the same cloth.” Hoddenbach knew from experience that the longer he could delay Torres from heading out, the more chance he’d have of keeping him from shooting someone. So he let him vent for a few hours. Then Hoddenbach started laying into him with every argument he could think of: Look around, do you see any old guys here? I never seen so many young kids at a funeral. Look at these kids, what does the future hold for them? Where do we fit in? Who are you to step on your brother’s wishes?
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force. Zale Hoddenbach, who works for an organization called CeaseFire, is part of an unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets. CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while not artful seems bluntly self-explanatory. Newspaper accounts usually refer to the organization as a gang-intervention program, and Hoddenbach and most of his colleagues are indeed former gang leaders. But CeaseFire doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs — nor interrupt the drug trade. It’s almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.
CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).
EVERY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, in a Spartan room on the 10th floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s public-health building, 15 to 25 men — and two women — all violence interrupters, sit around tables arranged in a circle and ruminate on the rage percolating in the city. Most are in their 40s and 50s, though some, like Hoddenbach, are a bit younger. All of them are black or Hispanic and in one manner or another have themselves been privy to, if not participants in, the brutality of the streets.
On a Wednesday near the end of March, Slutkin made a rare appearance; he ordinarily leaves the day-to-day operations to a staff member. Fit at 57, Slutkin has a somewhat disheveled appearance — tie askew, hair uncombed, seemingly forgetful. Some see his presentation as a calculated effort to disarm. “Slutkin does his thing in his Slutkinesque way,” notes Carl Bell, a psychiatrist who has long worked with children exposed to neighborhood violence and who admires CeaseFire’s work. “He seems kind of disorganized, but he’s not.” Hoddenbach told me: “You can’t make too much of that guy. In the beginning, he gives you that look like he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
Slutkin had come to talk with the group about a recent high-profile incident outside Crane Tech High School on the city’s West Side. An 18-year-old boy was shot and died on the school’s steps, while nearby another boy was savagely beaten with a golf club. Since the beginning of the school year, 18 Chicago public-school students had been killed. (Another six would be murdered in the coming weeks.) The interrupters told Slutkin that there was a large police presence at the school, at least temporarily muffling any hostilities there, and that the police were even escorting some kids to and from school. They then told him what was happening off the radar in their neighborhoods. There was the continuing discord at another high school involving a group of girls (“They’d argue with a stop sign,” one of the interrupters noted); a 14-year-old boy with a gang tattoo on his forehead was shot by an older gang member just out of prison; a 15-year-old was shot in the stomach by a rival gang member as he came out of his house; and a former CeaseFire colleague was struggling to keep himself from losing control after his own sons were beaten. There was also a high-school basketball player shot four times; a 12-year-old boy shot at a party; gang members arming themselves to counter an egging of their freshly painted cars; and a high-ranking gang member who was on life support after being shot, and whose sister was overheard talking on her cellphone in the hospital, urging someone to “get those straps together. Get loaded.”
These incidents all occurred over the previous seven days. In each of them, the interrupters had stepped in to try to keep one act of enmity from spiraling into another. Some had more success than others. Janell Sails prodded the guys with the egged cars to go to a car wash and then persuaded them it wasn’t worth risking their lives over a stupid prank. At Crane Tech High School, three of the interrupters fanned out, trying to convince the five gangs involved in the conflict to lie low, but they conceded that they were unable reach some of the main players. Many of the interrupters seem bewildered by what they see as a wilder group of youngsters now running the streets and by a gang structure that is no longer top-down but is instead made up of many small groups — which they refer to as cliques — whose members are answerable to a handful of peers.
For an hour, Slutkin leaned on the table, playing with a piece of Scotch tape, keenly listening. In some situations, Slutkin can appear detached and didactic. He can wear people down with his long discourses, and some of the interrupters say they sometimes tune him out. (On one occasion, he tried to explain to me the relationship between emotional intelligence and quantum physics.) But having seen a lot of out-of-control behavior, Slutkin is a big believer in controlling emotions. So he has taught himself not to break into discussions and to digest before presenting his view. The interrupters say he has their unqualified loyalty. Hoddenbach told me that he now considers Slutkin a friend.
It became clear as they delivered their reports that many of the interrupters were worn down. One of them, Calvin Buchanan, whose street name is Monster and who just recently joined CeaseFire, showed the others six stitches over his left eye; someone had cracked a beer bottle on his head while he was mediating an argument between two men. The other interrupters applauded when Buchanan told them that, though tempted, he restrained himself from getting even.
When Slutkin finally spoke, he first praised the interrupters for their work. “Everybody’s overreacting, and you’re trying to cool them down,” he told them. He then asked if any of them had been experiencing jitteriness or fear. He spent the next half-hour teaching stress-reduction exercises. If they could calm themselves, he seemed to be saying, they could also calm others. I recalled what one of the interrupters told me a few weeks earlier: “We helped create the madness, and now we’re trying to debug it.”
IN THE PUBLIC-HEALTH field, there have long been two schools of thought on derailing violence. One focuses on environmental factors, specifically trying to limit gun purchases and making guns safer. The other tries to influence behavior by introducing school-based curricula like antidrug and safe-sex campaigns.
Slutkin is going after it in a third way — as if he were trying to contain an infectious disease. The fact that there’s no vaccine or medical cure for violence doesn’t dissuade him. He points out that in the early days of AIDS, there was no treatment either. In the short run, he’s just trying to halt the spread of violence. In the long run, though, he says he hopes to alter behavior and what’s considered socially acceptable.
Slutkin’s perspective grew out of his own experience as an infectious-disease doctor. In 1981, six years out of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, Slutkin was asked to lead the TB program in San Francisco. With an influx of new refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the number of cases in the city had nearly doubled. Slutkin chose to concentrate on those who had the most active TB; on average, they were infecting 6 to 10 others a year. Slutkin hired Southeast Asian outreach workers who could not only locate the infected individuals but who could also stick with them for nine months, making sure they took the necessary medication. These outreach workers knew the communities and spoke the languages, and they were able to persuade family members of infected people to be tested. Slutkin also went after the toughest cases — 26 people with drug-resistant TB. The chance of curing those people was slim, but Slutkin reckoned that if they went untreated, the disease would continue to spread. “Gary wasn’t constrained by the textbook,” says Eric Goosby, who worked in the clinic and is now the chief executive of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation. Within two years, the number of TB cases, at least among these new immigrants, declined sharply.
Slutkin then spent 10 years in Africa, first in refugee camps in Somalia and then working, in Uganda and other countries, for the World Health Organization to curtail the spread of AIDS. During his first posting, in Somalia, a cholera epidemic spread from camp to camp. Slutkin had never dealt with an outbreak of this sort, and he was overwhelmed. The diarrhea from cholera is so severe that patients can die within hours from dehydration. According to Sandy Gove, who was then married to Slutkin and was also a doctor in the camps, infection rates were approaching 10 percent; in one camp there were 1,000 severely ill refugees. “It was desperate,” she told me. Slutkin drove a Land Cruiser two and a half days to an American military base along the coast to the closest phone. He called doctors in Europe and the United States, trying to get information. He also asked the soldiers at the base for blue food coloring, which he then poured into the water sources of the bacteria, a warning to refugees not to drink. “What Gary is really good about is laying out a broad strategic plan and keeping ahead of something,” Gove told me. There were only six doctors for the 40 refugee camps, so Slutkin and Gove trained birth attendants to spot infected people and to give them rehydration therapies in their homes. Because the birth attendants were refugees, they were trusted and could persuade those with the most severe symptoms to receive aid at the medical tent.
After leaving Africa, Slutkin returned to Chicago, where he was raised and where he could attend to his aging parents. (He later remarried there.) It was 1995, and there had been a series of horrific murders involving children in the city. He was convinced that longer sentences and more police officers had made little difference. “Punishment doesn’t drive behavior,” he told me. “Copying and modeling and the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.”
Borrowing some ideas (and the name) from a successful Boston program, Slutkin initially established an approach that exists in one form or another in many cities: outreach workers tried to get youth and young adults into school or to help them find jobs. These outreach workers were also doing dispute mediation. But Slutkin was feeling his way, much as he had in Somalia during the cholera epidemic. One of Slutkin’s colleagues, Tio Hardiman, brought up an uncomfortable truth: the program wasn’t reaching the most bellicose, those most likely to pull a trigger. So in 2004, Hardiman suggested that, in addition to outreach workers, they also hire men and women who had been deep into street life, and he began recruiting people even while they were still in prison. Hardiman told me he was looking for those “right there on the edge.” (The interrupters are paid roughly $15 an hour, and those working full time receive benefits from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where CeaseFire is housed.) The new recruits, with strong connections to the toughest communities, would focus solely on sniffing out clashes that had the potential to escalate. They would intervene in potential acts of retribution — as well as try to defuse seemingly minor spats that might erupt into something bigger, like disputes over women or insulting remarks.
As CeaseFire evolved, Slutkin says he started to realize how much it was drawing on his experiences fighting TB and AIDS. “Early intervention in TB is actually treatment of the most infectious people,” Slutkin told me recently. “They’re the ones who are infecting others. So treatment of the most infectious spreaders is the most effective strategy known and now accepted in the world.” And, he continued, you want to go after them with individuals who themselves were once either infectious spreaders or at high risk for the illness. In the case of violence, you use those who were once hard-core, once the most belligerent, once the most uncontrollable, once the angriest. They are the most convincing messengers. It’s why, for instance, Slutkin and his colleagues asked sex workers in Uganda and other nations to spread the word to other sex workers about safer sexual behavior. Then, Slutkin said, you train them, as you would paraprofessionals, as he and Gove did when they trained birth attendants to spot cholera in Somalia.
The first step to containing the spread of an infectious disease is minimizing transmission. The parallel in Slutkin’s Chicago work is thwarting retaliations, which is precisely what Hoddenbach was trying to do in the aftermath of Emilio Torres’s murder. But Slutkin is also looking for the equivalent of a cure. The way public-health doctors think of curing disease when there are no drug treatments is by changing behavior. Smoking is the most obvious example. Cigarettes are still around. And there’s no easy remedy for lung cancer or emphysema. So the best way to deal with the diseases associated with smoking is to get people to stop smoking. In Uganda, Slutkin and his colleagues tried to change behavior by encouraging people to have fewer sexual partners and to use condoms. CeaseFire has a visible public-communications campaign, which includes billboards and bumper stickers (which read, “Stop. Killing. People.”). It also holds rallies — or what it calls “responses” — at the sites of killings. But much research suggests that peer or social pressure is the most effective way to change behavior. “It was a real turning point for me,” Slutkin said, “when I was working on the AIDS epidemic and saw research findings that showed that the principal determinant of whether someone uses a condom or not is whether they think their friends use them.” Daniel Webster, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University who has looked closely at CeaseFire, told me, “The guys out there doing the interruption have some prestige and reputation, and I think the hope is that they start to change a culture so that you can retain your status, retain your manliness and be able to walk away from events where all expectations were that you were supposed to respond with lethal force.”
As a result, the interrupters operate in a netherworld between upholding the law and upholding the logic of the streets. They’re not meant to be a substitute for the police, and indeed, sometimes the interrupters negotiate disputes involving illicit goings-on. They often walk a fine line between mediating and seeming to condone criminal activity. At one Wednesday meeting this past December, the interrupters argued over whether they could dissuade stickup artists from shooting their victims; persuading them to stop robbing people didn’t come up in the discussion.
LAST DECEMBER, at the first Wednesday meeting I attended, James Highsmith came up to introduce himself. At 58, Highsmith is one of the older interrupters. He wears striped, collared shirts, black rectangular glasses and often a black Borsalino, an Italian-made fedora. He reminded me that I had mentioned him in my book, “There Are No Children Here,” about life in a Chicago public-housing project in the late 1980s. I wrote about a picnic that some Chicago drug kingpins gave in a South Side park. There was a car show, a wet T-shirt contest and softball games for the children. About 2,000 people attended, dancing to a live band while the drug lords showed off their Mercedes Benzes, Rolls-Royces and Jaguars. Highsmith was the key sponsor of the event. He controlled the drug trade on the city’s South Side. He owned a towing business, an auto-mechanic’s shop and a nightclub, as well as a 38-foot boat. In January 1994, he was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison on drug-conspiracy charges; he was released in 2004. Highsmith was just the kind of recruit CeaseFire looks for: an older man getting out of the penitentiary who once had standing on the streets and who, through word of mouth, appears ready, eager even, to discard his former persona. “I’m a work in progress,” Highsmith told me.
One evening we were sitting in Highsmith’s basement apartment when the phone rang. It was Alphonso Prater, another interrupter. The two had a reunion of sorts when they joined CeaseFire; they shared a cell in the county jail 34 years ago. Prater’s voice is so raspy it sounds as if he has gravel in his throat. He told me that he became permanently hoarse after a long stint in segregation in prison; he had to shout to talk with others. When Prater called the night I was there, all Highsmith could make out was: “There’s some high-tech stuff going on. I need you to talk to some folks.” Highsmith didn’t ask any questions.
We drove to a poorly lighted side street on the city’s West Side. Empty beer bottles littered the side of the road. Prater, who is short and wiry and has trouble keeping still, was bouncing on the sidewalk, standing next to a lanky middle-aged man who had receded into his oversize hooded sweatshirt. Highsmith, Prater and another interrupter joined the man in a parked car, where they talked for half an hour. When they were done, the car peeled away, two other sedans escorting it, one in front, the other in the rear. “Protection,” Highsmith commented. Apparently, the man in the hooded sweatshirt, whom I would meet later, had been an intermediary in a drug deal. He had taken an out-of-town buyer holding $30,000 in cash to a house on the South Side to buy drugs. But when they got there, they were met by six men in the backyard, each armed with a pistol or an automatic weapon, and robbed. The out-of-town buyer believed he’d been set up by the intermediary, who, in turn, was trying to hunt down the stickup artists. In the car, Prater, who knew the intermediary, had worked to cool him down, while Highsmith promised to see if he could find someone who might know the stickup guys and could negotiate with them. The intermediary told Prater and Highsmith, a bit ominously, “Something got to give.”
After the intermediary drove off, Prater joked that there was no way he was getting back in a car with him, that he was too overheated and too likely to be the target or the shooter. “I’m not sure we can do anything about this one,” Highsmith told Prater.
RELYING ON HARDENED TYPES — the ones who, as Webster of Johns Hopkins says, have some prestige on the streets — is risky. They have prestige for a reason. Hoddenbach, who once beat someone so badly he punctured his lungs, is reluctant to talk about his past. “I don’t want to be seen as a monster,” he told me. Hoddenbach’s ethnicity is hard to pinpoint. His father was Dutch and his mother Puerto Rican, and he’s so light-skinned his street name was Casper. He has a discerning gaze and mischievous smile, and can be hardheaded and impatient. (At the Wednesday meetings, he often sits near the door and whispers entreaties to the others to speed things up.) Hoddenbach’s father had an explosive temper, and to steal from Slutkin’s lingo, he seems to have infected others. Two of Hoddenbach’s older brothers are serving time for murder. His third brother has carved out a legitimate life as a manager at a manufacturing firm. Hoddenbach always worked. He did maintenance on train equipment and towed airplanes at a private airport. But he was also active in a Hispanic street gang and was known for his unmitigated aggression. He served a total of eight years in the state penitentiary, the last stay for charges that included aggravated battery. He was released in 2002.
In January, I was with Slutkin in Baltimore, where he spoke about CeaseFire to a small gathering of local civic leaders at a private home. During the two-hour meeting, Slutkin never mentioned that the interrupters were ex-felons. When I later asked him about that omission, he conceded that talking about their personal histories “is a dilemma. I haven’t solved it.” I spent many hours with Hoddenbach and the others, trying to understand how they chose to make the transition from gangster to peacemaker, how they put thuggery behind them. It is, of course, their street savvy and reputations that make them effective for CeaseFire. (One supporter of the program admiringly called it “a terrifying strategy” because of the inherent risks.) Some CeaseFire workers have, indeed, reverted to their old ways. One outreach worker was fired after he was arrested for possession of an AK-47 and a handgun. Another outreach worker and an interrupter were let go after they were arrested for dealing drugs. Word-of-mouth allegations often circulate, and privately, some in the police department worry about CeaseFire’s workers returning to their old habits.
Not all the interrupters I talked to could articulate how they had made the transition. Some, like Hoddenbach, find religion — in his case, Christianity. He also has four children he feels responsible for, and has found ways to decompress, like going for long runs. (His brother Mark speculated that “maybe he just wants to give back what he took out.”) I once asked Hoddenbach if he has ever apologized to anyone he hurt. We were with one of his old friends from the street, who started guffawing, as if I had asked Hoddenbach if he ever wore dresses. “I done it twice,” Hoddenbach told us — quickly silencing his friend and saving me from further embarrassment. (One apology was to the brother of the man whose lungs he’d punctured; the other was to a rival gang member he shot.) Alphonso Prater told me that the last time he was released from prison, in 2001, an older woman hired him to gut some homes she was renovating. She trusted him with the keys to the homes, and something about that small gesture lifted him. “She seen something in me that I didn’t see,” he told me.
Though the interrupters may not put it this way, the Wednesday meetings are a kind of therapy. One staff member laughingly compared it to a 12-step program. It was clear to me that they leaned on one another — a lot. Prater once got an urgent call from his daughter, who said her boyfriend was beating her. Prater got in his car and began to race to her house; as he was about to run a stop sign, he glimpsed a police car on the corner. He skidded to a halt. It gave him a moment to think, and he called his CeaseFire supervisor, Tio Hardiman, who got another interrupter to visit Prater’s daughter. Not long ago, three old-timers fresh out of prison ruthlessly ridiculed Hoddenbach for his work with CeaseFire. They were relentless, and Hoddenbach asked to sit down with them. But when it came time to meet, he realized he was too riled, and so he asked another interrupter, Tim White, to go in his place. “I was worried I was going to whip their asses, and wherever it went from there it went,” Hoddenbach told me. “They were old feelings, feelings I don’t want to revisit.”
Recently I went out to lunch with Hoddenbach and Torres. It had been four months since Torres buried his nephew. Torres, who looked worn and agitated (he would get up periodically to smoke a cigarette outside), seemed paradoxically both grateful to and annoyed at Hoddenbach. In the end, Hoddenbach had persuaded him not to avenge his nephew’s murder. Torres had returned the guns and quickly left town. This was his first visit back to Chicago. “I felt like a punk,” he told me, before transferring to the present tense. “I feel shameful.” He said he had sought revenge for people who weren’t related to him — “people who weren’t even no blood to me.” But he held back in the case of his nephew. “I still struggle with it,” he said. On the ride over to the restaurant, Torres had been playing a CD of his nephew’s favorite rap songs. It got him hyped up, and he blurted out to Hoddenbach, “I feel like doing something.” Hoddenbach chided him and shut off the music. “Stop being an idiot,” he told Torres.
“Something made me do what Zale asked me to do,” Torres said later, looking more puzzled than comforted. “Which is respect my brother’s wishes.”
When Slutkin heard of Hoddenbach’s intervention, he told me: “The interrupters have to deal with how to get someone to save face. In other words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your friends are expecting you to do that? . . . In fact, what our interrupters do is put social pressure in the other direction.”
He continued: “This is cognitive dissonance. Before Zale walked up to him, this guy was holding only one thought. So you want to put another thought in his head. It turns out talking about family is what really makes a difference.” Slutkin didn’t take this notion to the interrupters; he learned it from them.
ONE JANUARY NIGHT at 11 p.m., Charles Mack received a phone call that a shooting victim was being rushed to Advocate Christ Medical Center. Mack drove the 10 miles from his home to the hospital, which houses one of four trauma centers in Chicago. Two interrupters, Mack and LeVon Stone, are assigned there. They respond to every shooting and stabbing victim taken to the hospital. Mack, who is 57 and has a slight lisp, is less imposing than his colleagues. He seems always to be coming from or going to church, often dressed in tie and cardigan. He sheepishly told me that his prison term, two years, was for bank fraud. “The other guys laugh at me,” he said. LeVon Stone is 23 years younger and a fast talker. He’s in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down as a result of being shot when he was 18.
Advocate Christ has come to see the presence of interrupters in the trauma unit as essential and is, in fact, looking to expand their numbers. “It has just given me so much hope,” Cathy Arsenault, one of the chaplains there, told me. “The families would come in, huddle in the corner and I could see them assigning people to take care of business.” Mack and Stone try to cool off family members and friends, and if the victim survives, try to keep them from seeking vengeance.
The victim that night was a tall 16-year-old boy named Frederick. He was lying on a gurney just off the emergency room’s main hallway. He was connected to two IVs, and blood was seeping through the gauze wrapped around his left hand. Mack stood to one side; Stone pulled up on the other.
“You know, the most important thing is —” Mack ventured.
“You’re alive,” Stone chimed in.
Stone then asked Frederick if he had heard of CeaseFire. The boy nodded and told them that he had even participated in a CeaseFire rally after a killing in his neighborhood.
“We try to stop violence on the front end,” Stone told Frederick. “Unfortunately, this is the back end. We just want to make sure you don’t go out and try to retaliate.”
The boy had been shot — one bullet shattered his thigh bone and another ripped the tendons in two fingers. Nonetheless, he seemed lucid and chatty.
“My intention is to get in the house, call my school, get my books and finish my work,” he told Mack and Stone. He mentioned the school he attends, which Mack instantly recognized as a place for kids on juvenile-court probation. Frederick told his story. He was at a party, and a rival clique arrived. Frederick and his friends sensed there would be trouble, so they left, and while standing outside, one of the rival group pulled a gun on them. Frederick’s friend told him earlier he had a gun. It turned out to be braggadocio, and so when his friend took off running, so did Frederick, a step behind. As he dashed through a narrow passageway between buildings, he heard the shots.
“Can I ask why you’re in the wheelchair?” Frederick asked Stone.
“I got shot 15 years ago,” Stone told him. Stone didn’t say anything more about it, and later when I asked for more detail, he was elusive. He said simply that he had gotten shot at a barbecue when he tried to intervene in a fistfight.
“You doing good,” Stone assured him. “You got shot. You’re here. And you’re alive. What you do when you get out of here?”
“You got to stop hanging with the wrong person, thinking you’re a Wyatt Earp,” Frederick said, speaking in the third person as if he were reciting a lesson.
At that point, Frederick’s sister arrived. She explained that she was bringing up her brother. She was 18.
“He just wants to go to parties, parties, parties,” she complained. “But it’s too dangerous.” She started to cry.
“Don’t start that, please,” Frederick pleaded.
Mack left a CeaseFire brochure on Frederick’s chest and promised to visit him again in the coming weeks.
LAST MAY, after a 16-year-old boy was killed trying to protect a girl from a gunman on a city bus, Slutkin appeared on a local public-television news program. He suggested CeaseFire was responsible for sharp dips in homicide around the city. Slutkin, some say, gives CeaseFire too much credit. Carl Bell, the psychiatrist, was on the program with Slutkin that night. “I didn’t say anything,” he told me. “I support Slutkin. I’m like, Slutkin, what are you doing? You can’t do that. Maybe politically it’s a good thing, but scientifically it’s so much more complex than that. Come on, Gary.”
Last year, CeaseFire lost its $6 million in annual state financing — which meant a reduction from 45 interrupters to 17 — as part of statewide budget cuts. One state senator, who had ordered an audit of CeaseFire (released after the cuts, it found some administrative inefficiencies), maintained there was no evidence that CeaseFire’s work had made a difference. (The cuts caused considerable uproar: The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial urging the restoration of financing, and the State House overwhelmingly voted to double CeaseFire’s financing; the State Senate, though, has yet to address it.)
It can be hard to measure the success — or the failure — of public-health programs, especially violence-prevention efforts. And given Slutkin’s propensity to cite scientific studies, it is surprising that he hasn’t yet published anything about CeaseFire in a peer-reviewed journal. Nonetheless, in a report due out later this month, independent researchers hired by the Justice Department (from which CeaseFire gets some money) conclude that CeaseFire has had an impact. Shootings have declined around the city in recent years. But the study found that in six of the seven neighborhoods examined, CeaseFire’s efforts reduced the number of shootings or attempted shootings by 16 percent to 27 percent more than it had declined in comparable neighborhoods. The report also noted — with approbation — that CeaseFire, unlike most programs, manages by outcomes, which means that it doesn’t measure its success by gauging the amount of activity (like the number of interrupters on the street or the number of interruptions — 1,200 over four years) but rather by whether shootings are going up or down. One wall in Slutkin’s office is taken up by maps and charts his staff has generated on the location and changes in the frequency of shootings throughout the city; the data determine how they assign the interrupters. Wes Skogan, a professor of political science at Northwestern (disclosure: I teach there) and the author of the report, said, “I found the statistical results to be as strong as you could hope for.”
BALTIMORE, NEWARK and Kansas City, Mo., have each replicated components of the CeaseFire model and have received training from the Chicago staff. In Baltimore, the program, which is run by the city, combines the work of interrupters and outreach workers and has been concentrated in one East Baltimore neighborhood. (The program recently expanded to a second community.) Early research out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that in the East Baltimore neighborhood there were on average two shootings a month just before the program started. During the first four months that interrupters worked the streets, there had not been a single incident.
“My eyes rolled immediately when I heard what the model was,” says Webster of Johns Hopkins, who is studying the Baltimore project. Webster knew the forces the interrupters were up against and considered it wishful thinking that they could effectively mediate disputes. “But when I looked closer at the data,” Webster continues, “and got to know more about who these people were and what they were doing, I became far less skeptical and more hopeful. We’re going to learn from it. And it will evolve.” George Kelling, a Rutgers professor of criminal justice who is helping to establish an effort in Newark to reduce homicide, helped develop the “broken window” theory of fighting crime: addressing small issues quickly. He says a public-health model will be fully effective only if coupled with other efforts, including more creative policing and efforts to get gang members back to school or to work. But he sees promise in the CeaseFire model. “I had to overcome resistance,” Kelling told me, referring to the introduction of a similar program in Newark. “But I think Slutkin’s on to something.”
Most of the police officials I spoke with, in both Chicago and Baltimore, were grateful for the interrupters. James B. Jackson, now the first deputy superintendent in Chicago, was once the commander of the 11th district, which has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Jackson told me that after his officers investigated an incident, he would ask the police to pull back so the interrupters could mediate. He understood that if the interrupters were associated with the police, it would jeopardize their standing among gang members. “If you look at how segments of the population view the police department, it makes some of our efforts problematic,” Baltimore’s police commissioner, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, told me. “It takes someone who knows these guys to go in and say, ‘Hey, lay off.’ We can’t do that.”
Like many new programs that taste some success, CeaseFire has ambitions that threaten to outgrow its capacity. Slutkin has put much of his effort on taking the project to other cities (there’s interest from Los Angeles, Oakland and Wilmington, Del., among others), and he has consulted with the State Department about assisting in Iraq and in Kenya. (CeaseFire training material has been made available to the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq.) Meanwhile, their Chicago project is underfinanced, and the interrupters seem stressed from the amount of work they’ve taken on.
THE INTERRUPTERS have certain understandings. At the Wednesday meetings, no one is ever to mention anyone involved in a dispute by name or, for that matter, mention the name of the gang. Instead they refer to “Group A” or “Group B.” They are not investigators for the police. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid knowing too much about a crime. When Highsmith and Prater left me the night of the failed drug deal, they began working their contacts. Highsmith found someone who knew one of the stickup men and who, at Highsmith’s request, negotiated with them. Highsmith’s contact persuaded the robbers to return enough of the money to appease the drug-buyer’s anger. When I met with the intermediary a few weeks after things were resolved, he was still stirred up about the robbery. “I was mad enough to do anything,” he told me, making it clear that he and his friends had been hunting for the stickup guys. “This could’ve been a hell of a lot worse than it was.” To this day, neither Highsmith nor Prater know the identities of anyone except the intermediary — and they want to leave it that way.
The interrupters often operate by instinct. CeaseFire once received a call from the mother of a 15-year-old boy who wanted out of a gang he joined a few weeks earlier. The mother told Hoddenbach and another interrupter, Max Cerda, that the gang members chased her son home every day from school threatening to beat him. They had shot at him twice. Hoddenbach found the clique leaders and tried to talk sense to them. If the boy didn’t want to be in the gang, he told them, he’d be the first one to snitch. The gang members saw the logic behind that but insisted on giving him a beating before releasing him. Hoddenbach then tried another tack: he negotiated to let him leave the gang for $300 — and no thrashing. The family, though, was only able to come up with $50, so Hoddenbach, Cerda and another interrupter came up with the rest. At their next Wednesday meeting, some interrupters were critical of Hoddenbach for paying what they considered extortion money. “It was kind of a messed-up way, but it was a messed-up way that works,” Hoddenbach said.
It was nearly three months before Charles Mack could find time to visit Frederick, the young shooting victim. Frederick had since moved in with his great-grandmother in a different part of town. In his old neighborhood, he told Mack, “there always somebody who knows you. And I had a reputation.” He complained to Mack that he had never been interviewed by the police but then declared he would never identify the person who shot him anyway. “I’m going to leave it alone,” he said. As is so often the case, Frederick couldn’t remember the genesis of the disagreement between his clique and the other. Mack promised to stay in touch, and as we dropped him off, Mack turned to me and said, “I think he’s going to be all right.” It sounded like both a proclamation as well as hopeful aside.
Not long ago, I stopped by to visit with Hoddenbach at the Boys and Girls Club, where he holds down a second job. It was a Friday evening, and he was waiting for an old associate to come by to give him an introduction to a group of Hispanic kids on the far North Side. Apparently, earlier in the week, they bashed in the face of an African-American teenager with a brick. From what Hoddenbach could make out, it was the result of a long-simmering dispute — the equivalent of a dormant virus — and the victim’s uncle was now worried that it would set off more fighting. As we sat and talked, Hoddenbach seemed unusually agitated. His left foot twitched as if it had an electric current running through it. “If these idiots continue,” he told me, “somebody’s going to step up and make a statement.”
Hoddenbach also worried about Torres, who had recently gone back to Texas and found a job working construction. Hoddenbach says he originally hoped Torres would stay in Chicago and establish some roots, but then decided he’d be better off in another town. “I kept him out of one situation, but I can’t keep him out of all of them,” Hoddenbach said. This may well speak to CeaseFire’s limitations. Leaving town is not an option for most. And for those who have walked away from a shooting, like Torres, if there are no jobs, or lousy schools, or decrepit housing, what’s to keep them from drifting back into their former lives? It’s like cholera: you may cure everyone, you may contain the epidemic, but if you don’t clean up the water supply, people will soon get sick again.
Slutkin says that it makes sense to purify the water supply if — and only if — you acknowledge and treat the epidemic at hand. In other words, antipoverty measures will work only if you treat violence. It would seem intuitive that violence is a result of economic deprivation, but the relationship between the two is not static. People who have little expectation for the future live recklessly. On the other side of the coin, a community in which arguments are settled by gunshots is unlikely to experience economic growth and opportunity. In his book “The Bottom Billion,” Paul Collier argues that one of the characteristics of many developing countries that suffer from entrenched poverty is what he calls the conflict trap, the inability to escape a cycle of violence, usually in the guise of civil wars. Could the same be true in our inner cities, where the ubiquity of guns and gunplay pushes businesses and residents out and leaves behind those who can’t leave, the most impoverished?
In this, Slutkin sees a direct parallel to the early history of seemingly incurable infectious diseases. “Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1880s,” Slutkin says. “Three ghosts: malaria, smallpox and leprosy. No one wanted to go there. Everybody blamed the people. Dirty. Bad habits. Something about their race. Not only is everybody afraid to go there, but the people there themselves are afraid at all times because people are dying a lot and nobody really knows what to do about it. And people come up with all kinds of other ideas that are not scientifically grounded — like putting people away, closing the place down, pushing the people out of town. Sound familiar?”
Alex Kotlowitz teaches writing at Northwestern University and is a regular contributor to the magazine. His last article was about illegal immigration.
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