The Secret to One High-Poverty School District's Success

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http://www.alternet.org/education/how-union-city-njs-school-district-achieved-huge-gains




2013 Washington Monthly Publishing, LLC. Reprinted with permission.

The following is a book review of David Kirp's Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.

If you believe that education can only be reformed by center-right business notions—that privately run nonunion charters will outperform public schools; that teachers need to be goaded into doing a good job—David Kirp is here to tell you that absolutely the opposite is true. Generous funding, tied to a rigorous and rich curriculum, with testing as a diagnostic tool, can produce extraordinary results. Kirp, a professor at the University of California Berkeley who has written extensively about education for decades, is most recently the author of Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools, a beautifully rendered account of the schools of Union City, New Jersey. Kirp spent the entire 2010-2011 academic year visiting classrooms in Union City, a low-income, mostly Latino school district of 12,000 students, located five minutes from the gleaming towers of Manhattan. His story is written with the empathy that characterizes Jonathan Kozol’s books on urban education, but with a far more hopeful message.

Kirp quickly falls in love with the children he studies, a group that includes many undocumented students who face difficult home lives. “Be my father!” one boy, Joaquin, cries out one day, a reminder that Joaquin’s father has been gone for two years. Another boy, Andres, calls out, “Be my father.” Writes Kirp, “That’s harder for me to hear because Andres is in fact living with his father.” And when Kirp goes to Paris for Thanksgiving, a boy named TomÃis asks, “Can you return? Do you have papers?”—an indication of the fragile lives these children are living.

Nationally, high-poverty schools are twenty-two times less likely to be high achieving than middle-class schools. That was generally the case with the Union City school district, which ranked next to last in the state in 1989, Kirp notes, sparking the mordant response, “Thank God for Camden!”

[Sherman A1]

1. K&R

[HiPointDem]

2. kr

[Nay]

3. As with all other things, the secret is love and care. If you have money as the center of

your interests, your project, whatever it is, will fail (as it is failing in for-profit schools.)