Engaging Kids: Going Back to the Future?

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

High schools with thousands of students. Yellow buses zipping kids away from town, out to new regional schools. “Professionalism” in teaching, delivered by schools of education in state colleges.

Today all these ideas, hailed as progress at their inception, are under attack. The mega high schools breed impersonalism, alienation in kids no longer known by name, just numbers in a big institution. Long rides to a sprawling campus replace what was once a school within a community. The state teacher colleges catch much of the criticism for a teacher corps not up to par.

Can there be a uniquely New England answer?

There ought to be. New England gave birth to America’s first public schools. It’s the place where generations of small rural schools, often with a single classroom for all grades, led by immensely dedicated teachers, laid the groundwork of America’s best-educated region.

Today most education debates swirl around standards, including the sometimes hotly disputed federal Leave No Child Behind program. And who’s to question the basic motive: getting students to master English, math and other subjects so critical now to their success.

But New England could excel by working to recapture: its historic legacy of education centered in town life, the region’s treasured smallness, intimacy. Can’t the whole town become the school? -- offering back-up for teachers, after-school activities, the engagement of many townspeople and organizations? Libraries, local businesses, nearby colleges all lending a hand? Perhaps tapping New England’s expanding ranks of seniors for mentoring. coaching, new activities?

Such an agenda suggests moving back, when possible, to school locations in communities -- not miles out-of-town. It means breaking down schools’ isolation -- closing at 3 p.m. when the staff heads home. Dividing monster schools into smaller units with online courses for those who need them. Welcoming charter and other experimental schools. Encouraging kids to walk or bike to school. Fostering daily physical activity and less obesity. And drawing teachers into the fullness of community life, with the engagement and accountability that suggests.

Typically, community schools are open afternoons and evenings and involve partnerships -- with Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, social service agencies, local police.

New England could lead the burgeoning national community school movement. Growing evidence proves, says Marty Blank, director of the National Coalition of community schools, that “after-school programs help improve academic performance, provide kids with safe places, help parents find work, and help youth with whole sets of competencies.”

And they work to heal social division. Providence’s Mayor David Cicilline, an outspoken advocate, asserts that without the community partnerships such schools introduce, “it won’t be possible to unite the two Providences -- the one that celebrates diversity, a revitalized downtown and a remarkable concentration of higher education, the other with 40 percent of children living in poverty, an underserved and growing immigrant community, and unacceptably low student performance.”

Indeed, schools today poorly serve about half the kids. Some are savvy, fast minds that find the rigid regimes too boring. Others just do not learn this way; they struggle, disappear and join the ranks of young people going nowhere.

Connecticut is using the courts to resist the rigidity of the federal standards law. Rhode Island changed its graduation law to make standardized tests only 10 percent of the requirement. New England states have always been different. They rate quite high in national comparisons valuing smaller classes, strong attendance and comparative graduation rates. So why not go a step farther by becoming the nation’s laboratory for new and different schools – with enough variety to fit all kinds of students?

Last winter, Bill Gates bluntly told the nation’s governors how lousy American high schools had become. Gates has called The Met -- a Providence high school in a tough neighborhood which focuses intensive attention on individual kids and gets virtually all into college -- the nation’s most exciting high school.

Another plus of community-focused schools are the opportunities they present for young people to become engaged in service learning -- projects protecting streams and wetlands, lending a hand to social service agencies, or even learning to discuss thorny issues like: “Why does our neighborhood have so many liquor stores and abandoned lots and what can be done?”

Should formal requirements of youth service be considered? Terry Williams, publisher of the Nashua Telegraph, told us yes -- that a stint of community service could be a graduation prerequisite. Kids would discover more of their community. Public projects would get a real assist. Students could see firsthand challenges in other towns or even across state borders. Colleges could place a priority on community service in considering applicants.

[Originally published December 2005]

Photo Credit:

Nick Petterssen

Student boarding a school bus in rural Vermont.