Education in Wisconsin.
In Kids, Schools, and Cities Part I on February 12, 2006 we looked at the environment in which many kids learn and introduced an approach that focused on two elements:
- building neighborhoods by focusing on their assets rather than welfare programs
- public employees are then treated as resources to the neighborhood; they are not to direct neighborhood activities
For those determined to slash government spending, creating Neighborhood Resource Teams (NRTs) and following through with 'asset building' does not save money when compared to traditional programs. Sorry, but it is just more effective creating safe neighborhoods and elevating academic performance.
If you are looking to cut government spending and public employment go elsewhere. If you are prepared to spend money to get great results, read on.
Scattered throughout the neighborhood are many city, county, and school agencies working in an uncoordinated manner. Two things brought to mind the need for NRTs.
On State Street, teenagers hung out in Peace Park. Most were runaways or homeless. Too many of them were involved with older chemically dependent drifters, and none of them trusted authority. One of our police officers built a rapport with the kids, and discovered one summer (1989) that over half dozen of the girls were pregnant. We learned this from a police officer and not a public health nurse. Of course none of the girls was receiving adequate prenatal care.
At the same time another police officer, well trained in community policing, sent me a note that focused on two things. While he knew what to do as a community police officer,
- he felt isolated working alone in the neighborhood,
- he was learning the needs of the neighborhood, but it was in areas outside policing.
These two occurrences lead to the creation of NRTs. They were composed of librarians, police officers, firefighters, building inspectors, traffic engineers, housing specialists, and planners. Some teams met every week, others met once a month. They exchanged information and worked to focus public and private resources into an area. That included making recommendations for the city's next year's budget.
A lesson: one NRT worked in an area isolated from low price grocery shopping. All they had was an expensive convenience store. A building inspector started to help the community organize a ride sharing/baby sitting schedule so that parents could get the the supermarket, sans kids, and get the bulky stuff home. But he didn't follow through.
He backed off and the parents took control and organized the schedule. Two benefits: the families got cheaper, better food, and the families learned they did not have to depend on outsiders to be in control but to use them as a resource.
Eventually Dane County made a major contribution to this effort. The County, already focused on coordinating social workers with the public schools, integrated their efforts with our NRTs into something called Joining Forces For Families. As the months went by, NRT members who served on multiple teams reported back that the teams that had social workers were far more effective than the teams without social workers.
Recapping:
- This is not a cheap process; to properly support a neighborhood requires more from all agencies and it costs money.
- We really began to make progress when the schools, the city and county started working together.
Simultaneously, the police department was making extraordinary efforts to crack down on gang activity. They were involved in a range of activities that included breaking up the trafficking of drugs from Chicago and Milwaukee, domestic abuse, and the extortion and intimidation of area residents.
At the very beginning of these efforts, in Vera Court, two gangsters saw a neighborhood women talking to one of our community police officers. The next day she was murdered. They were apprehended and convicted. This tragedy inspired others, and within a year the neighborhood turned around.
The following year, I ran into a school teacher from the Vera Court neighborhood school. She said, "I want to thank you for what the city has done. This is the first time in ages that I'm really excited about the start of the school year."
There was a downside to the intensive police activity. For a while, as we busted the violent gangsters, they were simply replaced by others. Eventually Madison led the nation in arresting a disproportionate number of black teens as compared to whites, given their proportion of the population. We spent as much effort as we could in developing the NRTs, working the neighborhoods and developing the two most important programs: summer recreation programs, and after school programs, but the mounting number of arrests of young black men continued. In another post I will discuss efforts to deal with this issue.
I could go into more detail about the specifics of the NRTs and the city's efforts but I think the point is clear:
- kids learn best when there is a neighborhood compatible with education, as opposed to one overrun with drugs, extortionists, and where gangsters control the streets;
- this all costs money;
- these community based efforts encouraged parents to become more involved in their children's education.
In the next two weeks I will try to post on two additional areas: the role of the private sector in both housing and education, and the creation of a 24 hour a day learning environment.
In parting, let me share with you the findings of a Northwestern University professor, James Rosenbaum.* He studied poorly performing high school students, virtually all Black, from the Chicago Public Schools who moved into areas served by suburban schools. His findings were that most of these failing students in Chicago were getting C's in the suburbs. A tougher school district and improved grades!
He wanted to see what changes occured in the lives of the families who reloceted to new communities as a result of the Gautreaux Decision.
The main point of his paper (for our purposes) was to challenge the commonly accepted conclusion that once a student was doing poorly academically, there was not much hope for turn around after the 6th or 7th grade. His findings completely contradicted that conclusion.
I met with him and asked him "Why did these students improve so significantly?" He said:
That was not part of my study; I only wanted to see how they did, I wasn't looking into the 'whys.' But I believe what happened is that their peer group standards changed. They met other low and middle income kids, other kids of color and connected with them. They were in a learning environment where academic achievement was admired.
Before anyone of you rushes out and condemns the Chicago Public Schools, remember that these new suburban schools were also public. The difference was they had a lower proportion of low income students, smaller classrooms, and more money. And a peer group that wanted to learn.
*Rosenbaum studied the families who received portable Section 8 housing certificates and used them to find housing in Chicago's suburbs as a result of a court order in the Gautreaux Decision that made the certificates portable.
Rosenbaum studied the effects on both the families and the students. From the abstract, How Do Places Matter? The Geography of Opportunity, Self-efficacy and a Look Inside the Black Box of Residential Mobility:
The culture of poverty model implies that low-income individuals who acquired a low sense of efficacy will retain it, while the geography of opportunity model implies that that they will change if their opportunities improve. The Gautreaux Program moves low-income black families to the city or suburbs in a quasi-random procedure. Participants who moved to higher SES neighbourhoods had higher efficacy and felt safer, which mediated the neighbourhood effects on efficacy. This paper examines which experiences participants identify as having an influence on their sense of efficacy, and the ways those experiences have these effects.
From an article on the findings from the University of Chicago Magazine:
...Administered by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, the Gautreaux model not only gives families rent subsidies but also counseling and assistance in locating housing, with staff working to enlist landlords as program participants. And a seven-year study of Gautreaux families by Northwestern University education professor James Rosenbaum shows that these assisted moves to the suburbs have been beneficial to both parents and children.
"The program is distinctive because it creates both residential and school desegregation," Rosenbaum wrote recently in the North Carolina Law Review. "Children arrive in suburban schools as community residents, not as outsiders in a busing program, and they come to school in the same bus as their white neighbors." Studying some 400 families, Rosenbaum also found that the parents were more likely to find work in the suburbs and their children were far more likely to enroll in college or find full-time jobs than their city counterparts.
What part of this is difficult to understand? This was public education; it was public money; it was public success. It was breaking the stranglehold of dense levels of poverty.
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