Speaking of Sweating the Small Stuff , as Amy does , and as I catch up on my reading, I commend Sunday's NYT Magazine piece on SEED . David Whitman showed in Sweating the Small Stuff that it's an incredibly interesting model-essentially a five-day boarding school for inner city students (at a public cost of $35,000 per student).
Here, writer Maggie Jones gives us a student-level perspective:
Every Sunday night, 325 students in grades 6 through 12, most of them African-American, most from single-parent, lower-income families in Southeast and Northeast, pass through the gates of SEED - the first inner-city public boarding school in the country, with admission by lottery. And for the next five days they do what other prep-school kids do: in uniforms of pressed khaki pants and polo shirts, they take classes in Spanish, precalculus, U.S. history and other subjects. They meet with staff members at the school's College Caf?? to talk about college applications. They spend their afternoons in chess clubs, on the basketball court or in poetry workshops.Then, after school on Friday, they head back home, lugging duffel bags, suitcases and garbage bags serving as suitcases. For 48 hours, they leave SEED's protected, grassy campus to return to their neighborhoods - the ones that created the need for charter schools like SEED in the first place. That ongoing transition, from school to home and back again, symbolizes the school's unwritten requirement of its students: to juggle and to navigate two different and often conflicting worlds.
It's that "juggle" that Jones captures well:
Black inner-city boys particularly have to wrestle with the question of whether it is O.K. to be smart. And if it is, then they have to figure out how to wear that - or not wear it - when they return to their neighborhoods each weekend.
And
SEED was her [17 year old Reneka Blackmone's] refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. "I know what I gotta do when I'm at SEED," she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, "I don't mix my worlds."
And to Charles Barrett Adams, the school head, the goal is more complex than replacing one set of values with another:
Rather than try to erase students' street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. "Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack," he told me. "Why would I want to rid him of that?"
The article is well worth your time.
