Ever since she became an Immaculate Heart of Mary nun two decades ago, Sister Carmela has longed to teach organic chemistry. “I’ve loved organic since high school,” she says, “but I’ve been needed to teach other things — and I’ve loved every assignment.” For the last few years, she has been educating eighth graders at the Gesu School, a Catholic elementary and middle school with just 420 pupils located in one of Philadelphia’s poorest and roughest neighborhoods. The Gesu is your quintessential inner-city miracle school. Over 80 percent of its children are non-Catholic, 95 percent are black — and 95 percent go on to complete high school, several at the region’s most competitive college preps. Its annual tuition is only $ 1,500, subsidized by private donors, and virtually all the students receive financial aid.
Both in her attitude and in her educational priorities, Sister Carmela manifests the wisdom that underlies the Gesu’s solid performance. “I’m joyful when our children succeed,” she told me, “but they’re all our children. . . . I think I understand the arguments for broader [school] reforms. But I don’t understand why we can’t all work in common to help inner-city children achieve literacy, with or without any broader reforms.” The school’s principal, Sister Ellen, holds the same view: “We have all sorts of programs, extracurricular activities, sports and clubs. . . . We work hard to impart good values and maintain a loving yet demanding environment. . . . But literacy is the cornerstone of academic success and a prerequisite for almost everything else they’ll do later in life. . . . Here at the Gesu, all our kids can read.”
And so they can, as I discovered last year when I taught at the Gesu as a volunteer. For two hours on Friday mornings, I introduced Sister Carmela’s three-dozen eighth graders to American government. Most weeks I assigned LaTanya, Jennifer, Kareem, and the others four or five pages from the sixth edition of American Government, the textbook I co-authored with James Q. Wilson. Over the years I had assigned earlier editions of the same textbook, along with the Federalist Papers and lots of other reading, to hundreds of undergraduates at Harvard and Princeton. But this was the first time I had ever taught middle schoolers — much less attempted to bring Madisonian democracy to life for inner-city teens, some of them adept at dodging stray bullets, avoiding sexual predators and drug pushers, filling in at home for absent or dysfunctional parents, and coping with peers who equate studying with “acting white.” Still, our Friday mornings worked, for at least four reasons.
First, these students know about the dark side of human nature. They need no persuading that Madison was right when he argued that men are “not angels.” The hard part, in fact, is getting them to believe that there are governments based on rosier assumptions about human nature and centralized power. “Dr. D,” asked Timothy, a prize pupil, “you mean there’s folks who really think that if one person or one part of government gets lots of power they won’t try to get over on everybody else, won’t rip them off and stuff? Where do they live? . . . What do they say about Hitler or Russia and all that mess?”
Second, I did my best to adapt my pedagogy to my students’ age and real-life circumstances — without dumbing down the subject matter or adopting an all-fun, no-work policy. The class laughed but learned, as I turned my opening discussion of the dispersal of power into an amateur martial-arts spectacle: for the separation of powers, three air-slashing vertical karate chops dividing executive, legislative, and judicial branches; for federalism, three horizontal chops, dividing national, state, and local levels of government. After our unit on civil rights and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, our class trip to Washington, D.C., included a hushed visit to the Lincoln Memorial and informal on-the-spot quizzes (How many members are there in the House? What’s a line-item veto?), as well as lunch at Planet Hollywood by popular demand and a stop at the National Air and Space Museum.
Third, my volunteer teaching was heavily dependent on the intellectual and moral authority of Sister Carmela, Sister Ellen, and the dozen-plus full-time lay teachers who are the Gesu’s valiant staff. Normally, a mere glance in the direction of Sister Carmela’s desk or a casual sigh attending a comment about “how disappointed Sister Ellen would be to hear . . .” was enough to quiet the class or correct an unruly individual. Before long, I could count on the informal student self-policing and regard for teacher authority (“Yo man, knock it off for Dr. D! We want to hear this”) that ultimately mark the difference between an orderly school where learning is possible and one where, as at the Gesu, learning is likely.
But fourth and foremost — and just as Sister Ellen had promised — all of the kids could read. Some read better than others, to be sure, and three or four struggled with simple sentences and reading comprehension. But all of them could read. They could read the textbook. They could read the newspapers and identify stories about “federalism in action.” They could read billboards on the road to Washington, D.C., and books on the way home. They could read the menu at Planet Hollywood. They could read the Gettysburg Address incised in the wall of the Lincoln Memorial. At home, school, or church, they could read the Bible. They could read about W.E.B. Du Bois in preparation for their spirited intra-class African-American history competition. And as early as the sixth grade, they could read and enjoy fiction like The Hobbit.
Although my pupils could read, many of them had relatives, public-school peers, or neighbors who couldn’t, and they knew how debilitating illiteracy is. “Maybe with older people, or the immigrants, you could get by without reading,” remarked a girl named Erica. “But today if you can’t read, you can’t learn what you need to learn, you can’t get a good job, you can’t communicate like you should with other people. . . . You miss so much. It’s a sin that we don’t help all children to read.”
It shouldn’t be necessary to defend the educational primacy of literacy. The ability to read is an obvious precondition for other intellectual pursuits and skilled activities. Nor should it be necessary to point out the social value of literacy, starting with increased economic productivity, or to catalogue the social costs of illiteracy, such as increased rates of repeat criminality. Nor should it be necessary to make the case, on both practical and moral grounds, that every American child without profound learning disabilities can and should be taught to read, and that any school or school system that fumbles basic literacy is a failure.
It would hardly seem necessary to make the case for literacy first — but apparently it is. In A Nation Still At Risk, published in May 1998, Chester E. Finn and a number of other expert education reformers reported that in the last 15 years “over 10 million Americans have reached the 12th grade not even having learned to read at a basic level.” Mind you, they reached the 12th grade. How many more young Americans have dropped out since 1983 without ever achieving literacy? For all the school reforms that are in the works or on the horizon, how many of today’s juveniles are at risk of reaching young adulthood barely able or unable to read? And what, if anything, will today’s education mavens do about it now?
They should start by acknowledging that America does not have a public-school crisis, it has an urban-literacy crisis. In the mid-1990s American taxpayers spent roughly $ 300 billion a year on public schools. Most of those schools were fair to excellent. As Princeton economist Alan Krueger argues in the March 1998 Economic Policy Review, over the past two decades “the public school system has not deteriorated” for most students. Similarly, education expert Diane Ravitch documents in a recent Brookings Institution report that public-school reading scores and other measures of academic performance have been “mainly flat over the past 25 years.”
America’s public schools are not broken, but our urban schools are plagued by high rates of illiteracy. Urban districts serve one quarter of all public-school students, a third of low-income students, and nearly half of minority students. Nationally, most urban public elementary-school students cannot read a simple children’s book. Under chancellor Rudy Crew, New York City public schools have begun to improve, but half of the system’s children are still reading below grade level. Under schools superintendent David Hornbeck, Philadelphia has instituted full-day kindergarten, a new teacher-accountability plan, and other promising reforms. Still, analyses of test data by local newspapers indicate that barely one in ten of the city’s grade schoolers is proficient in reading.
The problem originates not in the urban schools but in the homes of their students. Since the famous 1966 study by sociologist James Coleman, social science has consistently found that home environment is the single most important factor in explaining differences in reading proficiency and other measures of academic performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, of the 4 million children born in 1997, nearly one out of eight was born to a teenage mother, and one out of four to a mother with less than a high-school education. According to a report by the Philadelphia School Readiness Project, last year 37 percent of the city’s public-school first graders were born to mothers under age 18 who had not graduated from high school. Many of these children enter public school without ever having been read to by an adult or held a book in their hands, much less having been taught their ABCs.
Still, there are some notable big-city literacy success stories. In their 1990 pro-school-choice classic Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe spotlighted Manhattan’s School District No. 4, in low-income, minority East Harlem. Its schools’ “dynamic leaders,” they reported, broke free of the usual bureaucratic constraints and educated “some 14,000 students from pre-kindergarten through the ninth grade. . . . While only 15.9 percent of the district’s students were reading at or above grade level in 1973, 62.6 percent were doing so by 1987.” In her 1995 book The Power of Their Ideas, educator Deborah Meier argued that the East Harlem experience demonstrated how “all children could meet high standards of intellectual achievement within a public school setting. . . . Defending public education is difficult, but the best defense is by example.”
Even in East Harlem in 1987, though, nearly 40 percent of the students were reading below grade level. Examples of public schools that have conquered illiteracy among inner-city minority students remain few and far between.
The reason is that well-intentioned defenders of public schools have never accepted the literacy-first challenge. Instead, they promulgate “comprehensive” reform plans. They tinker endlessly with teacher selection, salaries, testing, and training. Even though between 1970 and 1996 public-school budgets rose by over 85 percent in constant dollars, the public-school lobbies continue to demand greater funding and litigate to equalize urban and suburban per-pupil expenditures.
They do everything, it seems, but dedicate themselves to teaching children to read. They do not embrace the proposition that, despite the undeniable difficulties of teaching children from truly disadvantaged backgrounds, every child who is not genuinely learning disabled can and should become literate. The debate over phonics versus whole-language instruction is irrelevant: Research suggests that most children learn regardless of which method is used.
They learn, that is, if one condition is met: Some literate adult concentrates on teaching them how. As Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has argued, summer “intensive-reading” programs in several urban districts have proven quite successful. Such special programs, however, need to be repeated and replicated widely, and regular inner-city public-school curriculums need to become much more reading intensive.
Defenders of public schools are not the only ones who should heed the literacy-first call. “More school choice,” proclaim the authors of A Nation Still At Risk, “must be accompanied by more choices worth making. America needs to enlarge its supply of excellent schools.” To some extent, that’s happening. Between 1990 and 1998 enrollment in Catholic schools, other Christian schools, and home schools grew by 1.4 million to nearly 5 million. In addition, today there are over 800 publicly financed but deregulated “charter” schools — and nobody knows how many unchartered, unaccredited “church basement” schools (estimates range up to 400).
As virtually every study has shown, Catholic schools normally succeed at teaching reading and other subjects, where inner-city public schools commonly fail. But in many cities, the supply of inner-city Catholic schools is contracting, not expanding. The Gesu itself ceased to be a parish school in 1993 and was kept open as an “independent Catholic school” only after it attracted financial support from local businessmen. The educational efficacy of other religious schools has not been studied systematically. Home schooling is not an option for kids in dysfunctional mother-only homes. Charter schools are multiplying, but as Finn and others point out, in terms of academic performance, they are a mixed bag.
Advocates of vouchers and school choice (and I am one) believe that in due course these policies will increase substantially the supply of good schools, both public and private, secular and religious, and thereby increase the supply of literate people educationally equipped to hold jobs and become productive, self-sufficient adults.
But as Harvard’s Paul E. Peterson explains in the September/October 1998 issue of Philanthropy, only in Milwaukee are data available from a randomized experiment with school choice. The Milwaukee data indicate that participants in the voucher program
had limited positive effects during the first two years a student was in the program, with larger gains in years three and four — as much as one quarter of a standard deviation in reading. . . . To put that in plain English, if such gains can be continued at this rate throughout a student’s educational career, existing differences in test performances of whites and minorities could be eliminated. Choice schools are not magic bullets that transform children overnight. It takes time to adjust to a new teaching and learning environment.
That is undoubtedly true: It could take years before even a successful voucher movement transformed the educational landscape. This obstinate fact should lead all save diehard school-choice Pollyannas to concentrate on exploring what we, alongside public-school reformers, can do immediately to prevent tens of thousands of today’s inner-city first graders from becoming the next generation of high-school dropouts.
Back at the Gesu, we’re in the early stages of recruiting other nearby religious schools, public schools, nonprofits, and universities to join us in launching a “summer of literacy” program open to all the children in our neighborhood. Unfortunately, we don’t have Sister Carmela to help us. Named Teacher of the Year by the Philadelphia Archdiocese, she finally got her wish and is teaching organic chemistry at a Catholic high school. But those of us who used to watch her in action are still buoyed by her example — both the love and the clarity about the importance of teaching children to read.
