The highly-regarded school system in Barrington has empty seats they’d like to fill.  So, they’re inviting non-resident families to pay $12,800 in tuition for up to 10 kids, spread through the grades.

Student populations are declining in many school districts in Rhode Island, as in most of New England, and certain other non-sun-belt states.  Running schools at partial capacity is wasteful, expensive, and usually requires cuts – arts, sports, student support.

In tight fiscal times, prudence demands using existing resources well.  So why not fill up the best schools?

Tuitions at local private schools are pushing $30K, so Barrington’s offer is a bargain for families that can pay.  The district will get takers.  The private-tuition kids will blend in easily with Barrington students.  The rich will get richer, not more diverse.

Oh, and special-needs students need not apply, since they can be a drain on school finances.  Many commentators found this restriction infuriating.  The ACLU is on it.

However.

Far more important to me is Barrington’s willingness to take in outsiders.  This is a golden opportunity to pilot a cross-district public-school choice program.  Actually, if they do it right, Barrington would make even more money on each of those seats, which I’ll get to.

Cross-district choice programs allow students to attend public schools beyond their local school district’s boundaries.

Minnesota passed a law allowing families to go to whatever district’s school they wanted.  This inspired all sorts of creativity and innovation, as well as collaboration and consolidation among districts.  Minnesota did not, however, provide busing across district lines — no big favor to the low-income kids.

So a Rhode Island cross-district choice program would offer new options to frustrated parents.  But more importantly, it could start to desegregate the schools economically – a research-proven strategy for school improvement.  When we de-ghettoize schools with concentrations of poor kids, also predominantly minorities, we see significantly stronger performances among precisely those students who have struggled historically.  (Note a recent New York Times opinion on racial desegregation.)

Actually, research has a magic number: 40 percent.  The percentage of students who qualify for federally-subsidized lunch, the big poverty indicator, should never exceed 40.  More than that creates a critical mass of kids growing up with “street” values and limited perspective.

The middle-class background of the 60 percent steeps low-income students in a cultural environment that helps them achieve at higher levels than their peers in segregated schools.  Yes, middle-class parents often enable their kids in silly, helicopter ways, but generally they also expect decent performance from them.  And they definitely demand the best from the school itself.

Frankly, you’d think a guy like Obama would know something about the research on the 40 percent and the harms of segregation in America.  When the feds published their four “turnaround” models for “persistently low-performing” schools, I searched in vain for the obvious:  desegregation.  It works.

Take, for example, the impressive story of Wake County, North Carolina.  In 1979, the suburban County school system absorbed the school district of gritty inner-city Raleigh for the express purpose of economic desegregation.  Over time, using a choice program instead of forced busing, the merged district shifted student populations towards the 40/60 balance.

And lo!  The biggest winners were low-income Afro-American males.  Books have been written about Wake County’s success with challenged students. Middle-class kids were in no way harmed.

Quite the opposite.  At the time, the booming economy allowed Wake County to build super-attractive school programs in Raleigh, to attract the 60 percenters back into the inner city.  The suburban middle class hated the 45-minute bus rides, but loved the high-tech high, engineering magnet, or fabulous performing arts program at the other end.   (Sadly, some of that middle class recently elected a school board to dismantle this good work.)

So back to Barrington.

Only 4 percent of Barrington’s students are poor.  If Rhode Island allowed a public, cross-district program aimed at the 60/40 balance, Barrington’s incoming 10 students would be low-income.

Low-income families crave another schooling option for their kids since the charter-school waiting lists are humongous.

And actually Barrington’s progressive community might welcome more diversity and color.  Surveys show that suburban kids are generally more involved with drugs and alcohol than urban kids.  So the only “danger” is that these students might depress the blasted test scores, initially.  Big deal.

The state’s new funding formula adds extra money to the per-pupil allocation for low-income kids, which is how Barrington would make more money on each seat than their asking tuition.

Rhode Island already has a cross-district busing system, originally designed for the charter schools and special-needs kids.

Yes, Barrington’s student gain would be urban systems’ loss.  Dead-broke Rhode Island is not likely to pump big dollars into an urban school to attract an influx of middle-class kids, no matter how beneficial desegregation.  Weirdly, the feds invest their dollars in the “lowest performing schools” as if it’s okay that they remain concentrations of poverty.

In truth, we can no longer ignore that economic desegregation in schools would do wonders for many kids.

So start the process of pulling down the walls between districts.  Carefully.  Slowly.  Ten students at a time, per district, is a good way of thinking about it.

But use cross-district choice to maximize the value of what we’ve already got and improve outcomes for more kids.  Plucky Barrington could lead the way.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

Here’s a jaw-dropping stat: A kid’s brain develops 50,000 synapses EVERY MINUTE.

Synapses are the connections made by the brain’s information-carrying cells, neurons, that “wire” our experience into knowledge, skills, and emotions.  Synapses build neuronal strings that form a foundational network that starts in utero and continues after birth when life experiences flood the baby’s brain.

Eventually, a typical 22-year-old male has about 105,000 MILES of neuronal strings in his brain.

The problem is that bad early wiring inevitably produces problems later on.

The way Dr. Charles Zeneah puts it, “The brain grows from the bottom up.  If we can establish lower-level capacities, the rest is easier.  Like a house, if the foundation is well constructed, it’s a whole lot easier to fix, if you have to.  As time goes on, the window of opportunity to change the child’s trajectory starts to diminish, and the cost of correcting a maladaptive brain goes up.”

Zeneah was in town to address Rhode Island’s Infant Mental Health Association, on:  “When is it too late?  Intervening after early adversity.”

A professor of psychiatry at Tulane, Zeneah is a board member of Zero to Three.  They collaborated on Neurons to Neighborhoods, a seminal book, fully 2 inches thick, presenting evidence that shows how failing to nurture healthy infant brains, right from the start, has dire consequences.

So even if you only care about tax dollars, know that fabulous mothering at the outset radically reduces the cost of special education, residential placement and prisons.

Still, policy-makers and the public are having a horrible time wrapping their heads around the importance of strong mother/child attachments.  But a healthy young brain is precisely what establishes a resilient, creative, trusting foundation for the inevitable adversities that all children will face when older and more independent.

Zeneah always shows videos, often heart-breaking ones, to make his points.  Today we’ll hang out with “Harold.”  We meet him at 15 months old.  He’s in child-protective care because Mom dropped him off at a neighbor’s and said she’d be back in an hour.  After several days she hadn’t shown up.

In Louisiana Zeneah created an Infant Mental Health Team program that works with child-protective services, the courts, and kids like Harold.  The Team supports both child and mother, if possible, to salvage that relationship.  When they can’t, after plenty of trying, they recommend the termination of parental rights to release the child to a loving mother as soon as possible. (All states need these teams.)

Zeneah insists that all kids need a mom, one specific person committed to the child, who’s nurturing and responsive, over time.  Babies must be “the apple of someone’s eye.”  Food, shelter and clothing are by no means enough.

In the video, Harold is weird.  He sit frozen in an uncomfortable-looking posture.  His biological mother tries to engage him with bubbles, conversation and toys.  He watches her intently, but is otherwise non-responsive.

Often, when researchers observe mother/child relationships, Mom leaves the child alone for a minute and then returns.  When Harold’s mother steps out, he crawls awkwardly to the door, gurgling a creepy, desperate cry.   When Mom returns, Harold acknowledges her with a little smile, but heads right past her out the door.  Not much attachment there.  She picks him up, but he can’t be comforted.

That video was taken when he was living with a first foster mom who was overwhelmed with caring for too many challenged people.  So they gave Harold a new placement where he could get more individualized attention.

The next clip shows us Harold at 18 months, after only 6 weeks with the new foster mom.  He thinks she’s a blast.  He’s walking, chasing the bubbles this time, smiling, verbalizing.  And when she returns after the minute of absence, he throws himself into her arms.

Six weeks.

“Harold’s a new man.  He’s in love, and he’s all right.”

With the right nurture and responsiveness, those 50,000 synapses a minute built Harold a new attitude and approach to life.

Infant brains are hardwired to attach to a mom.  If that early attachment gets screwed up, the child is not “securely attached.”   After 22 months, building a strongly-attached relationship gets harder and harder.  It’s critical to get it right the first time.

Zeneah laments, “The biggest disappointment in my career was in the 1980s, when relationships and relationship disorders were getting attention, but little research was done.  We still don’t have good descriptions of relationships themselves, so we can’t communicate effectively about the problems we are dealing with.  Even so, we know quality parenting matters.  But when it comes to foster care parents, we’re desperate.  Please take this kid.  Do you have a pulse?  Instead, we should figure out who’s really good at mothering and use marketing to recruit them.  So much involves the commitment to the child.  That’s one thing we can improve.”

He recommends finding and paying super-moms.  By all means, do everything you can to improve mother/child relations.  But if and when that fails, intervene with someone really good.

Harold’s behavior tells us his second foster parent has the super-mom chops.  Support more of the likes of her.  Create professional super-mom jobs AND develop a healthier bunch to join the workforce later on.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”  – Fred Rogers, aka, Mr. Rogers

 “Use your words, Mom.”  – My grown sons

In 1895, Mrs. Theodore Birney was so distressed about the state of mothering in America, she gathered friends to see if they would help her promote the conversation.  The topic excited such a sense of urgency, they decided to start the organization that would become The National Congress of Mothers.

Birney reflects their concerns in the introduction of her 1905 book, Childhood:

“That parenthood is a vocation, no thoughtful person will deny; but the saddest part of it all is that men and women are called to fill this vocation without any real training for it, and often with a very vague sense of the responsibility it involves.  Public opinion is gradually awakening to the fact that while parental instinct is valuable to a certain degree, it must be supplemented with knowledge of the moral, mental and physical nature of childhood or the best results can not be attained.”

Now here we are, in 2012, struggling mightily to figure out how on earth to attain the best results with our children.  But mothering, as a critical contributor to these results, is hardly discussed.  We talk about poverty – you know, those people – but not about mothers, who could well be us.

The first Congress of Mothers gathered in New York City in 1897.  The ladies’ invitations received thousands of responses.  Socialite Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, mother of William Randolph (Citizen Kane), brought a slew of her fancy friends, whose names were a collection of Mrs. Who’s Who of the time.

Mind you, the Congress attracted not only mothers, but also fathers, politicians, and experts, who in those days were men.  The over-arching topic was the “culture of children.”  Participants read papers and convened in what we would now call break-out groups.

Topics included:

* “the value of kindergarten work”

* “a love of humanity and of country”

* “the physical and mental evils resulting from some of the present methods of our schools”

* “the means of developing in children characteristics which would elevate and ennoble them, and thus assist in overcoming the conditions which now prompt crime, and make necessary the maintenance of jails, workhouses, and reformatories.”

Women’s suffrage was then a hot topic.  In her opening remarks, Mrs. Birney said, “so much has been written in these latter days about higher education, the extended opportunities of women that we have failed to hear the still, small voice of childhood; and yet, how, I ask, can we divorce the woman question from the child question?  Is not one the natural, logical corollary of the other?”

Exposing our painful lack of progress, she continues, “For every single kindergarten there are a hundred, nay a thousand prisons, jails, reformatories, asylums and hospitals; and yet society cries that there is need for more of these.  Are we blind that we fail as a Nation, and State, and individuals to recognize the incontrovertible fact that such demand will never cease until we cut off the supply?”

Mrs. Birney knew how to use her words.  Her late 19^th-century sentiments can be jarring to our modern, hyper-secular, feminist sentiments, but her ideas about childhood still ring true.  To her, mothers were divinely ordained as the ones who would “lead in awakening all mankind to the responsibilities resting upon the race.”  Whether or not a woman marries, she is still of the sex that should know children’s needs and be ready “with head and heart and hand” to serve the young and vulnerable.

From the get-go, the Congress worked to bring together mothers and the exploited teachers who formally instructed their children.  Early in the 20^th century, the Congress of Mothers changed its name to the Parent Teacher Association (PTA).

And by the 1960′s, women were going into what had been men’s careers in droves.

And teaching was becoming professionalized, even unionized, separating it from the direct concerns of nurture and mothering.  Teachers unions were formed to represent the interests of the adults.

The PTA then gradually became a mix of professional educators with a huge range of parents, from big-time-career women to stay-at-home moms.  They no longer shared the same perspective on mothering, specifically, placing the needs of children before their own.

Mrs. Birney would be appalled.

Consider:  while 84 percent of all men and 86 percent of all women become parents, fully 100 percent were born of a mother.  Everyone on earth starts life in utero with Mom.  What could be more important?

But it’s soooo hard to talk about – even though America’s kids are struggling with drugs, teen pregnancy, poor performance at school, defiance, distraction by electronics, and more.

While historically inevitable, it’s too bad the Congress of Mothers gave up their name.  We could use such a Congress today to insist that we talk openly and honestly about the incredible dearth of nurture in our consumerist, individualist culture.  With every effort to avoid mere blame, motherhood badly needs a heartfelt, thoughtful and public conversation driven by everyday moms, from the full range.  Joined, of course, by the fathers, experts, politicians and the rest of us.

That which can be mentioned can be managed.  We can improve the foundations for kids.  We just have to be willing to use our words, starting with “mother.”

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

One day last fall Meghan Rosa was having an ordinary class with her 12^th-grade English students at University Park Campus School (UPCS).

They’d just finished digging into the second act of Hamlet, taking notes in the notebooks each student keeps.  Rosa divides her students into small discussion groups called “tutorials.”  The assignment was to come prepared to lead tutorial discussions with at least one probing question of the sort that promotes the school’s signature strategy, deep thinking.  (See last week’s column.)  Any kid who knows how to ask probing questions and how to find solid answers can learn pretty much anything.

UPCS’s 12^th-grade teachers have a unique charge to teach their content area – history, science – at the same time as weaning the kids from the intense scaffolding, support and TLC they get from their remarkable school.  Fully 95 percent of UPCS’s core-urban students get into college, so the seniors must learn to become completely autonomous readers, writers and thinkers.

The visitors expected that day were no big whup to these students.  Lots of people troop through their classes to admire the school’s amazing success.

But unbeknownst to the kids, that day’s visitors were not the ordinary assortment of educators and journalists.  A team led by Dr. Thomas Del Prete would be conducting “Grand Rounds.”  The Rounds Leader is an education expert, analogous to the star cardiac specialist guiding interns in a teaching hospital.  As many as 8 grad students, university and school faculty, or others fill out the team.

Now the Chair and Director of Clark University’s Urban Education Department, Del Prete developed the technique in collaboration with the school when it first opened in the late 1990s.

Back then, UPCS’s founders were hugely concerned with how to promote teacher learning.  If the adults are going to model the robust appetites for learning that they hope to see in the kids, how do you feed and care for them so they don’t burn out?  Teacher quality depends entirely on each teacher’s ability to be engaged with reaching for new levels of mastery.

Intuitively, it seemed like promoting teacher learning would be at least somewhat similar to helping kids learn.  Rounds function much like good teachers, offering different perspectives, tailored to the situation at hand, in a supportive environment.  Like kids, teachers need substantial, practical feedback, kudos, and also warnings, when appropriate.

But mostly UPCS wanted to spark an on-going, evolving conversation, among the whole school community, about the nature of great teaching.

Much like the conversation Rosa was prodding the kids to have about the mysteries of the Danish Prince.

Was she nervous?

Well, outsiders would observe her work and discuss it with her.  How would you feel?  But unlike other team-observation protocols, Rounds ask the teachers what they’d like feedback about.  What might a fresh set of eyes observe that teachers are too close to see clearly?  These are my strategies; are they working?

Rosa filled out a Rounds sheet which posed her questions to the team.  She titled hers:  “Shakespeare Is Confusing and That’s Okay: Facing Difficult Texts Head-on Through Tutorials.”

Her first question was:  “What ‘college-ready’ behaviors do you see exhibited?  Please include the names of students.”

Once the visit begins, the teacher steps aside.  Instead of peering at her, the team focuses on the effects of her efforts to inspire the kids’ curiosity, their ability to work together, their willingness to dig into the text for evidence, and so forth.

In Rosa’s class, the outsiders dispersed among the tutorial groups.  They asked the students questions of their own and took copious notes.  The kids were able to laugh at themselves trying to make sense of the Elizabethan language and world.  Even with the strangers in the room, they were easy and playful with one another as they pursued a heavy-duty conversation about the masterpiece.

So yes, as the team said in debrief with Rosa, the kids were remarkably autonomous and responsible for their own learning.  The Rounds team gave her very specific responses, with names and evidence – just as Rosa would have required of her students.

Rounds are not exactly a teacher evaluation, at least not the sort that districts are rolling out to their faculties now.  To me, most evaluations seem for all the world designed to get rid of the worst teachers by forcing administrators to collect evidence that can withstand challenge.  Nor are Rounds professional development, exactly, at least not in the sense of bringing expertise from the outside and imposing it.

Del Prete says, “A teacher invites you in and she frames the inquiry.  It’s not done to her.  She owns it.  Rounds are about getting better together.”

UPCS Principal Ricci Hall says, “A typical evaluation is focused on what the teacher is doing.  The teacher is feeling awkward.  There’s a lot of focus on the negative.  Are the objectives posted as rubrics?  Check.  Here at UPCS we ask what the students are doing.  Rounds focus on teacher outcomes.  Did they set up the conditions of learning?  Did the kids write to the prompt?  We’re about making student learning more powerful.”

The deep-thinking vibe at this school is intense.  It’s fun, though.  There’s a joyful culture of hard work.  Once teachers have set the right conditions, the real work is on the kids.

Which is as it should be.  Terrific school.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

This is the second in a series on the University Park Campus School, following Part 1: University Park School Models Urban Education.

Small groups of students are standing in front of five big sheets of newsprint, each placed at a distance around this big, old classroom at the University Park Campus School (UPCS).  Last week Jody Bird’s 9^th-grade biology students brainstormed questions they might have about chromosomes, prior to studying the subject, and wrote them on these sheets.

Bird says “I use questions to spark their curiosity and to find out where their learning is going.  They usually start with pretty basic ones – the who, what, where, why, how questions.  But even in this early group we got one compare-and-contrast, about the chromosomes of different kingdoms – plants, fungi, bacteria.”

If Bird can get them wondering, a little hungry for answers, they’ll dig into the topic themselves.  She and her colleagues must teach these kids to take on the work of learning themselves.

The school has a 95 percent college-acceptance rate.

“Being curious is part of how we’re human.  And my students know that taking risks and being curious is part of the culture of my classroom.  Biology is hard, really hard.  But if you’re curious about it, it gets a lot less intimidating.”

Some students knew what chromosomes were, and that they divided.  She prodded them, “From what you already know, develop a series of questions.  Talk with each other about the rigor of those questions.”  The newsprint questions ranged from “Why do cells divide?” to “Who last got a haircut?”

Well, that last one is Bird’s own.  She pulls the abstractions of academics into the lives of the kids, who all come from the immediate neighborhood of distilled poverty in Worcester, MA.  On average, UPCS students enter 7^th and 8^th grades two grade levels behind.  Eight-two percent receive subsidized lunch, a poverty indicator.  What do they care about mitosis?

After brainstorming the questions, the students read some assignments, and Bird gave a “mini-lecture.”  The kids take notes on what they learn in a journal which functions like a personal textbook, in their own words.  They struggle with textbook language, so formal textbooks become resource materials.

The kids read over the sheets and dive into their notebooks to see if any of the questions have been answered.  If so, students note in their journals that question #4 on sheet “C” was answered by something they’d learned from the reading or lecture.  After working on their own group’s questions, they take a “gallery walk,” moving from sheet to sheet, seeing what the other kids’ questions were, and if they’d been answered.

They’ll go back to these same questions a total of three times while they study this subject.  Next they’ll do a lab, and another gallery walk to see if it answers more questions.  More importantly, Bird enthuses, “Maybe you thought you answered that question in the first round.  But that might be the merely proficient answer.  With what you know now, what’s an answer that’s better than proficient?”  Deepen their understanding.  Guide them to dig deeper on their own.  There is no better intellectual tool than a good question powered by some curiosity.

UPCS’s whole strategy is to produce deep thinkers.  Constant questioning is only one of UPCS’s “six strategies to build college readiness.”  Other strategies include “collaborative group work” and “writing to learn,” as with the kids’ science notebooks.  But as their hand-out says, questioning fosters “purposeful conversations and stimulates intellectual inquiry.”

Deep thinkers can handle any test because they have experience and confidence with considering things thoroughly.

Fully 99 percent of the UPCS students routinely pass the MCAS.

But first UPCS often has to overcome the kids’ learned aversion to learning.

Bird muses, “When I was first teaching, I used to grade everything.  But what’s the message about taking risks and being curious?  I no longer focus on right and wrong.  Now I tell them that if they don’t know the information, they need to find it out.  That’s all.  This is tough stuff, but see how much you can get down in writing, and at least for today that’ll be enough.  I don’t get much push-back about the writing.  When you make a relationship with them, they’re willing to do things for you.”

She assures me that even her lectures involve lots of questioning back and forth.  If you full-on talk at these kids, who’ve been lectured to death in their authoritarian culture, they tend to wonder what’s on TV.  If they have to come up with questions – working with peers, not on their own – they have to shine some attention on the subject.  They’re not just absorbing information; they’re constructing their own primitive tools to go get information.

By the end of the 11^th grade, UPCS students must be prepared to take at least one college course at their partner school, Clark University.  That’s a requirement.  So they’d better be adept at higher-order thinking skills and really confident about using questions to help them master difficult material.  They need to blend in with the smarty-pants college kids.

Despite the success with pushing kids to think deeply, this strategy hasn’t been replicated in any other Worcester schools.  Remarkable.

Of course, finding teachers who can do such work is no small thing.  Next week we’ll see how Clark works with UPCS to prepare new teachers of deep thinkers, and to support the existing ones.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

An old elementary-school building, in a desperately poor neighborhood in Worcester, houses the best urban high school in Massachusetts.  And Massachusetts has the best public schools in the nation, according to the NAEP, the “nation’s report card.”  Today we meet the best of the best.

The University Park Campus School (UPCS) has been sending roughly 95 percent of its kids to college since it started graduating the 7^th and 8^th graders who first began in 1997.  Most are in their family’s first generation to go to college.

UPCS’s secret to success?  Teach the kids to think deeply.

Don’t prep them to take the state tests, the MCAS, which they ace anyway.  Don’t cover tons of content.  Teach reflective habits of mind to help students tackle any intellectual challenge.  The MCAS is no biggie for deep thinkers.

UPCS’s principal Ricci Hall says, “To me this is the missing component on the national scene.”  Presumably referring to school reformers, Hall shrugs, “They think the answer is to get the best canned curriculum or the best tests, and that will solve the problem.  But we think that the whole game is to bring students and teachers together with high degrees of respect and collaboration, working with academic language, so they learn to think.  We teach the kid, not the content.  What matters about the quality of our instruction is the ability to help students engage deeply with the material.

Naturally, UPCS has an array of techniques to support, prod, cajole, and entice their TV-steeped students into becoming intellectually disciplined.  Today we begin with the staff’s commitment to model the behavior they want to see.

For example, the book title on each teacher’s door indicates what that adult learner happens to be reading at the moment.  Curious adults read.

The staff are learners first, and teachers second.  Adults model intellectually rigorous conversation.  Learning is not just for kids.

Of course, modeling college-going and college-educated behavior is a whole lot easier when there’s an actual college next door that weaves the school and their rough-around-the-edges students right into their own daily fabric.

In the mid-1990s, leafy, lovely Clark University looked around at the wide moat of urban poverty that surrounded it.  To remain institutionally viable, Clark had somehow to wall itself off, or else partner with their neighbors on mutually-beneficial goals.  Neighborhood focus groups were loud and clear about wanting schools that would give their kids more options in life.

A block away stood Freeland Street Schoolhouse, a beautiful Victorian building on the National Registry of Historic Places — utterly devoid of shiny modern educational amenities.  Clark, however, could make up for its deficits by sharing its gym, library and other facilities with the school’s now-245 students.

UPCS is a Worcester Public School, but available only to students who live in the immediate neighborhood, who are admitted by lottery.  On average, the 7^th and 8^thgraders enter the school fully two grade levels behind.  Hall says, “It doesn’t matter when you get them, you’ll always want them earlier.  The 8^th grade is way low.  By 10^th we see a big bump.”

Seventh and eighth-grade teachers help students ramp up skills allowed to languish at other schools.  Perhaps more importantly, teachers and older students induct the youngest students into the culture of the school itself, modeling and teaching them the norms of civilized, non-street behavior.

Clark students also mentor their would-be brethren, grades 7-12.

Clark offers free tuition to any UPCS students accepted through their regular admissions process – no lowering the bar.

UPCS teachers serve as adjunct professors and speakers at the college.  Conversely, teachers take classes at Clark, again, modeling the life-long-learning they’d like to see.

Over time, Clark’s education department became dedicated to urban education.  Together, professors and UPCS staff have developed successful strategies for the neighborhood’s tough, but fairly typical low-income population.

Hall calls the result “a bare bones program, focused on literature and the basics.  We have zero tracking.  All kids take all honors courses.”  Juniors and seniors can take electives at Clark.  But at the high-school itself, all kids get pretty much the same curriculum, but dig into deeper layers of the work according to their abilities.

Hall says, “It’s all about shifting to student learning.  First and foremost we are a community of human beings.  Our staff has a genuine love of the kids and a desire to be here.  That caring is in pockets elsewhere, but here it’s palpable.  Parents don’t send their kids here because of the MCAS or the graduation rate.  It’s the culture.  Everything else flows from that.  The kids see the adults collaborating, solving problems, respecting them and each other.  That makes fertile ground for what happens in the classroom.”

He continues, “We look for people who value what the kids think, value them as learners.  We’re not interested in lesson plans or degrees.  We want teachers who fit into the intellectual culture of the building.”

And that culture is about kids and adults both getting personally invested in the content and the work at hand.  Engagement is the opposite of compliance and test-prep.

Okay, but how else can schools teach urban kids to think deeply?  Next week we’ll observe a classroom’s efforts.

          Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

A year ago summer, Megan Rosker was about to put the oldest of her three kids into kindergarten in a public school near Tampa, Florida.  Her family had moved there from New Mexico, where she’d taught kindergarten herself.  As a teacher, she was fine with sending her child off to school.But a friend who had older children already in the school pulled her aside.  Did Rosker know that this all-day kindergarten didn’t have recess?

WHAT?!

Well, not exactly.  As a reward for being good all week, the kids can run around during the last half hour of the last day.

Fat lot of good that does for squirmy little energy dynamos.  Humans of any age are insufferable if they can’t get a break from work.  Might this clueless practice be contributing to Attention Deficit Disorder, now at epidemic proportions?

“Like many parents, I simply didn’t pay that much attention to what was going in schools until my kids got there. I never dreamed that schools had gotten this far off track.  When I was teaching, no one had ever suggested that we do away with recess.”  In New Mexico, her kindergartners got two recesses every day.

Plenty concerned, but confident that reasonable minds could agree, Rosker and her friend spoke to the school’s parent-advisory committee.  “They were nice, but not interested.”

So they poked around to see what the experts say.

In fact, substantial research argues that kids and adults both learn and work better when they get breaks.  Anthony Pellegrini and Catherine Bohn examined various data sources and determined, in “The Role of Recess in Children’s Cognitive Performance and School Adjustment, that “children were more attentive after than before recess.”

Asian schools, whose test scores Americans envy, give their younger kids a 10-minute break after every 40 minutes of instruction.  Older students have 50 minutes of instruction before a break.

Pellegrini and Bohn conclude, “Unstructured breaks from demanding cognitive tasks seem to facilitate school learning, as well as more general social competence and adjustment to school.”

American schools often point to their 25-minute mid-day break and call the latter part of it recess.  But jammed into it are lunch, bathroom, locker, and “transition,” or going to and fro.  Such recesses encourage kids to bolt lunch so they can get out and be on their own.

Rosker and her friend found schools across the nation steadily chipping away at using time for “non-instructional” purposes, eliminating art, music and other fooling around.

Poor kids.

So they went back to the parent-advisory committee, this time armed with “tons of research.”  Rosker says, “Suddenly there was extraordinary animosity.  The teachers felt that with all the testing, they didn’t have time.  The kids lose focus, and they have discipline problems, and they could get hurt.  Parents were scared out of their skin about testing, so they really didn’t want to rock the boat.  No one supported us.  ”

Rosker was incensed.  So she did what she’d never done before, nudge her media-expert husband to take on her issue.  He got their plight covered by papers in St. Petersburg, Orlando, Tampa.  And then wham, the New York Times picked it up.

Rosker had no idea what she’d wandered into.  “Oh, now I get it.  We’re not the only ones dealing with this.  Many parents and advocates feel that this is a very big deal.”

So many people are worried that a group called Peaceful Playgrounds has assembled materials for advocates to use in a movement they call The Right To Recess.

Mind you, the teachers’ issues must be addressed.  Schools’ fear of liability is real.  Americans sue like it was a career option.  Fine, create a liability waiver and let the crazy helicopter parents refuse to sign it.  Allow the other kids to take calculated risks, since that’s the only way to teach adolescents to weigh the consequences of their potentially-foolish actions and curb their own risky behavior.

And yes, left to their own devices, students get into fights with one another, or bully.  So make sure they have close adult guidance that can teach them social skills, including how to deal with social aggression, which is a reality of everyone’s life.

But most worrisome is the way testing and accountability have become a national insanity.  Testing is fine; I love data.  But education bureaucracies seem to have forgotten that those are humans on their assembly lines.  Both frightened teachers and kids are getting their creative life-blood squeezed out of them.

Rosker makes the excellent point that recess and unstructured play provide “a portal into innovation that our current system is not supporting.  Play is the first experience of authoring from my own imagination.  I made this game, story, picture.  We’re not going to create truly creative people who can drive us forward as a culture, you know, like Steve Jobs.  We have a unique culture of innovation.  We should be leading in education, doing a great job with our kids.”

Hear, hear.

Ultimately, the Florida school instituted “brain breaks,” as opposed to recess.  God forbid they appear to be shirking their duty to test prep.

Rosker has since moved to New York City, where she finds the schools to be more “progressive.”  Barring horrible weather, public-school kids go outside for a real recess daily.

Even so, rescuing play-deprived kids has become Rosker’s life mission.  Join her here.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

Someone, not sure who, filled out an application to win Anna a kindergarten seat at theBlackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy (BVP), a charter school in Cumberland, Rhode Island.  Survival consumes her mom, who works several jobs, supporting several kids, by herself.  Developmentally delayed, Anna’s limited communications skills often hit a wall, frustrating her into giant meltdowns and adding to Mom’s burden.

I would have pegged Anna’s family as charter-school “application-challenged.”  When struggling to survive, applying to a charter, returning the confirmation letter, and actually getting a kid to the coveted seat is a big job.

To their credit, BVP recruits application-challenged families by knocking on doors in tough neighborhoods.  If a kid gets in but doesn’t show, they go find him and work out transportation, or whatever issues.

Anna is the sort of special-needs child that many charters have gently turned away.  In the early days, the work of opening a new school was massive enough without developing programs for children with developmental delays, challenging behaviors or issues requiring specialized staff.  These days, however, the best charters are building out their ability to teach whomever shows up.  BVP is one such, but Highlander, Laborers, andLearning Community also spring to mind.

Even so, Colleen Colarusso, Head of BVP Elementary, ruefully admits that Anna “pushed my thinking about our ability to educate all kids.  Sure, poor and minority.  But a few – like Anna – come with very real, very substantial needs.  They can’t communicate well, so we spend a lot of resources going through trial and error to figure it out.”

She continues, “Our goal is to serve the neediest kids in a diverse, integrated environment, hanging on tightly to our middle-class parents.”  About 40 percent of the schools’ kids come from comfortable homes in Lincoln and Cumberland.  They diffuse the concentration — read:  segregation — of students from urban Central Falls and Pawtucket.

BVP groups and re-groups their student “scholars” throughout the day, so each gets individual attention at some point.  This keeps the parents of the smart kids happy, but it also meets all kids where they are, and pushes them to reach for the next challenge.

How do you do that?

Oh, says Colarusso, waiving her hand like it’s a non-issue, “Our whole program is RTI,” meaning Response to Intervention, the badly-named set of protocols designed to respond or intervene immediately whenever a student is not meeting expectations – social, behavioral or academic.  RTI prevents minor challenges from becoming big ones later on.  Colarusso explains, “We get adults together to share ideas about how to intervene with clearly defined goals for the child.  We try our solutions for 6-8 weeks, collect data and then re-evaluate where we are.”  If necessary, RTI repeats that process up to 3 times, in an effort to ramp up the child’s skills, making unnecessary a full-fledged Individual Education Plan (IEP), the indicator a child is in special education.

Many BVP kindergartners merely need help sorting out the sounds, or phonemes, that make up words they’re learning to read.

Others need much more.  In one classroom, I observed four seriously special-needs students.  One had rubbery bands tired on the far legs of his desk so his busy feet could work off the physical anxiety that impedes his learning.  Another needed a special microphone to filter the teacher’s voice from ambient noise, to improve his “auditory processing,” or his brain’s ability to make sense of language.  In all four cases, the school and parents had worked out solutions together.

Anna, however, had the staff flummoxed.  Fortunately for her, her home district is Central Falls, which has the only Superintendent of Schools I know of who actively partners with the charter schools that also educate “her” kids.  She sent her Director of Special Education, Edda Carmadello, to help out.

Colarusso says, “For us, having a relatively young team, it was great to have a more seasoned special educator.  We were struggling and we really needed expert advice.  We continue to call her for her advice on other matters.”  They worked out a new plan for Anna; things have gotten much better.

At this point, about 10 percent of BVP’s student body have IEPs.  About half of those are the sort of children that regular schools often segregate into “self-contained” special-ed classrooms.  BVP’s staff is keenly aware that in urban schools, the percentage of children with extreme needs is more like 20.  That concentration makes it much harder to be successful with the Annas.

True, some unscrupulous charters still send their special-needs kids back to the sending district.  But times are changing.  The best are serving all kids.  BVP’s test scores are off the charts, btw – a story for another day.

The point is that it’s high time to end the myth that charters schools only teach easy kids.

Colarusso and I are out by the playground in the bright, cold day watching kids run, scream and climb.  “Oh great!”  Collarusso exclaims.  I see only exuberant chaos, but she points out a teacher helping Anna successfully navigate the monkey bars.  Anna has asked an adult for help, avoiding a frustrated meltdown. She’s meeting one of her goals.  Big deal.  Collarusso nods and beams, as if to say it’s been a long road, but we’re getting there.

This is when working in education feels great.

          Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears atGoLocalProv.com and GoLocalWorcester.  She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island.  She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data.  For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

No technique quite so effectively teaches students to think as the good old-fashioned essay.  Essays are their own assessments, showing whether kids can reason their way through evidence to a compelling conclusion.  When students pick a thesis, research the topic, and build a good argument, THAT’S thinking.

But sadly, essays are on their way to extinction.