Success in the Ghetto

Too many inner-city schools are as much ghettos of education as their surroundings are ghettos of life. Their teachers go through the motions of teaching. Their pupils seem more interested in vandalism than vocabulary. The parents regard the schools as alien, unfriendly territory. It need not be so. Two inner-city schools in Illinois and Connecticut are proving that it is possible to be not only effective centers of learning but also centers of community activity and hope. Though their methods differ in some ways, one factor is common to both and available to all: getting the parents more involved.

Grant Elementary, squatting amid glass-strewn streets, decaying houses and a massive public housing project on Chicago's tough West Side, used to resemble a way station to nowhere. Two years ago, sixth-graders were reading at an average of two full years below their grade level. Says Chicago's District 9 school superintendent Albert Briggs: "They were programmed to fail when they got to high school."

Briggs, a no-nonsense administrator from Mississippi, decreed last June that no students in his district would be admitted to high school unless they could read at the sixth-grade level. To help Grant students achieve that proficiency, he created Operation Higher Achievement. Basically, it is a program of determined cooperation among teachers, pupils and parents. Last fall nearly all parents of Grant's 1,350 students--75% of whom come from single-parent households--signed "contracts" pledging, among other things, to encourage their children to read to them and "to provide ... a quiet, well-lighted area for regular study." For their part, teachers undertook to work closely with parents. Together they staged reading festivals, pep rallies and open houses. Grant officials say that roughly a third of the parents became "intensively involved" and that in one year their 400 children recorded average reading-score gains of 1.1 years--a month above the U.S. average. Moreover, discipline improved; absenteeism and vandalism decreased.

Superior Quality. Martin Luther King School, a handsome building on a grassy lot, has always looked like an inner-city oasis. But eight years ago, its quality of education was abysmal. Staff turnover and student absentee rates were high, and fights were commonplace in the halls. Today, thanks to a research program of self-help supported by the Ford Foundation, the Yale Child Study Center and the National Institute of Mental Health, the quality is not only good but superior. All pupils who have been in the school for two years are up to grade level, there has not been a major behavioral problem for three years, and attendance is the best of any inner-city school in New Haven.

At the King school, parents of almost all the 325 students attend monthly curriculum conferences, report-card meetings and potluck suppers with the school staff. Some 25 parents assist teachers in the school for 10 hours a week at $2.56 an hour. The program involves other expenditures for a Yale social worker and four special consultants. In all, it costs $35,000 a year. Says Dr. James Comer, the Yale psychiatrist who launched the program: "If the money isn't spent at the school level, it will ultimately be spent in far greater amounts to cope with delinquency and crime."

At both Grant and King the parents are clearly pleased to be welcomed in out of the cold. Says Dorothy Osborne, who is raising two grandchildren who attend Grant: "They are asking more questions and, instead of blaming the school, I am trying to do better. When I got involved, it really helped." Says Delores Austin, who has two of her ten children at King: "It's beautiful. It's a family. Nobody shuns you."

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