Нижний Новгород, 2005 Печатается по решению редакционно-издательского совета гоу нижегородского государственного лингвистического университета им. Н. А. Добролюбова

Part 2. INTENSIVE READING (Marcus A. Foster "Making School Work") (Marcus A. Foster is the first black Superintendent of Schools in racially charged Oakland, California. He is ready to provide better education for the multiethnic students and community schools) The book "Making Schools Work" describes Forster's personal experience. The author shares with the reader his own thoughts and worries, raises the problems of education and tries to solve them. He meditates upon most typical conflicts which arise at school, preaches kindness and patience for pupils, gives reasonable pieces of advice to parents, criticises snobbish teachers, gives very exciting and illustrative examples of teacher-parent, teacher-pupil, teacher-teacher attitudes. The book is permeated with pedagogical tact, deep insight. It is very instructive. Here we present a few fragments from the book, which will undoubtedly give you food for thought and stir up your professional interest. I. You Are What You Do The New Role of Leadership Our culture is in love with change. We even have a special word for it - progress. But when the change goes beyond the development of new things, when it begins to affect the ways in which we are accustomed to getting things done, we often find ourselves angry and resistant. We have little sense of what is to come or how we should behave. In our confusion, we sometimes think fondly of the past. We imagine that the problems would disappear if someone would put things back the way they used to be. Many educators seem to feel this way today. Our classrooms, our schools, our school systems, are often disorganized and chaotic. We are willing, even eager, to do well the tasks we have done in the past, but there are new problems that seem to interfere. One angry and frustrated urban teacher asked, "How can the institution of education - of books and blackboards - be expected to cope with the problems of undernourishment, poor clothing, and insufficient motivation?" This teacher responded to her own question in the following way: "The answers don't lie with teachers. The answers lie with sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and housing experts". Her view probably would win the support of many educators, even in suburban areas where the problems are sometimes not so different - drugs, distractions, decreasing respect for all institutions. It is a position that removes from the teacher the blame for our educational failures. The trouble with it is that it also robs the educator of the initiative for getting things moving. With things as bad as they are I don't understand how anyone with a sense of responsibility can be willing to stand around waiting for the social scientists and the politicians to do their things. How can the teacher or the principal say, "Poverty is not my business" or "Drugs are a medical-social problem" or "Gangs belong to police gang-control programs"? Besides, what if some of the problems we expect others to solve never get solved? Suppose, after the outside experts get rid of poverty, the students are still disrespectful or unmotivated. Or what if new problems emerge to replace the old ones? Will we always be waiting for things to get better? The answer is as obvious as it is trite: what we want are not packaged solutions but rather a problem-solving process. And we have to accept the truth that if we ourselves fail to become part of this process, we shall certainly be part of the problem. Fortunately, we can find some excellent examples of this "new leadership" in other realms of endeavor. I am thinking particularly of the clergymen who, in the last two decades, have transformed their roles by extending the power of their faith beyond the church walls. Martin Luther King Jr, preached love and hope as he marched through Southern towns. Father Groppi led his congregation in Midwest urban centers. These men came to believe that a meaningful ministry required them to bring religion to the places it was needed. It went beyond praying. When political action was needed to move the spirit, they engaged in politics. The kind of flexibility that characterized these leader-ministers has got to be built into our roles as leader-educators. In my own career I have sometimes played the salesman, the community organizer, the economist, the fund-raiser, and the speechmaker. I am not saying, however, that everyone involved in education has to be a one-man band. What is important is that one comes to accept the diversity of tasks needed to make education work. One has to be open to working with people doing these unexpected things. This obviously is a very different attitude from sitting back while waiting for ourselves to get the job done. Attitude is the key word. What it all comes down to is that the answers lie in ourselves as doers. A principal must constantly assess the needs of his particular children. If the task boils down to orchestrating the learning process - seeing that the materials are available, demonstrating their use, etc - fine. If that's what is needed, get it done. But if the situation calls for something more, if there are home problems or nutritional problems, then the principal and his staff have to become part social worker, part mediator, part dietician. Schools want people who get the job done, who get youngsters learning no matter what it takes. II. Retooling Schools Teachers who consciously or unconsciously expect little from their students are often experts at proving their judgement correct. On one occasion I went into a class where the teacher was berating a child "Look at this sloppy work, Mr. Foster!" I picked up the paper "Well, at least the alignment of the letters is good." The teacher responded: "Oh, no, look over here. See how the word slants down!" "Yes, but he did manage to stay on the line here". But no matter what good thing I found in the child's work, the teacher was able to find something wrong. She was completely stripping that child of every little shred of dignity. I took her out into the hall and said: "Do you know what you did to that child? You murdered him in front of his principal. I was trying to find some way to salvage his ego, to give him a sense of accomplishment, and everything I pointed to, you tore down with a great flourish of perceptiveness". What a contrast to walk into our restaurant practice class. I happened to be visiting the teacher one day while the youngsters were cooking. Mrs. Brooks, a big motherly type of woman, was explaining something to me when she noticed some of the students playing a little bit. I didn't think they were really that bad, but she turned around and drew herself up to her full stature. "Gentlemen," she said, "I am amazed". You could have heard a pin drop. Everything in her demeanor, her voice, her facial expression, communicated the same authentic shock of disbelief that these gentlemen had momentarily forgotten the proper way to behave. She might have turned around and said, "Listen, you thugs, can't you see Mr. Foster is in here and you hoods are in this disciplinary school just because you don't want to behave yourselves.” She would have gotten the same response of immediate quiet. But the students perceived her genuine disappointment. They knew there was nothing ironic in her calling them gentlemen. She believed they could be gentlemen and expected them to behave as gentlemen. Right away, one of the gentlemen said: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Brooks" Mrs. Brooks' class was an example of what could be done at Gatto. But I knew we couldn't create the positive, supporting, high-expectation climate found in her room simply by printing memos and telling everybody to "Please be loving and please have high expectations". Attitudes would change only through active involvement and the experience of success. To get the most of our achievements, we tried to use new sense of team. Each of us could learn from the others. As it turned out more than once, breakthroughs would come from the least-expected places. We had a boy who had witnessed his father kill his mother. He came to Gatto in a terrible state. Our professionals seemed unable to reach him. The head dietician in the school took an interest in the chap. He started going to her to help in the kitchen. We didn't compel him to attend classes. The next thing I knew he was waiting at the subway for the lady so that he could carry her pocketbook. At 8 o'clock in the morning he would by waiting for her. I said to her: "Now look, we've got him going. Can you try to push him out of the nest? Let him go to one class a week". Eventually this boy went back to regular school. But if had been the dietician, not the principal or the counselor, who had got through to him. III. Gratz School In the first classroom I visited, a girl was writing a composition entitled "Gratz Is for Rats". Her title, in fact, was the school unofficial motto, and painfully close to the mark. The dropout rate was 78 per cent. Or to put it more directly, only one out of five students as freshmen graduated. Eighteen graduates out of 600 went to college - less than 3 per cent. It certainly was the worst and the most potentially explosive high school situation in the city. The School Board president called it the most "shortchanged" school in the city. The school, built for 2.600 students forty years before, was terribly overcrowded. There were two shifts for classes. Even with three lunch periods students spilled out into the corridors causing a dangerous situation each day. The physical education facilities were the worst in the city. There was no football field. All games were played away, thus denying the school the morale that comes from interschool sports. Gratz had no band, no debating team, no gym team, no swimming team, no honor society, no dances. Gratz students often viewed themselves as victims, having no control over their future, no place to go - not even down, being at Gratz, they were already at the bottom. Later we met with Gratz's attendance officers. Their role was to visit homes. The attendance problem provided a chance to involve teachers in a guidance role. When a student came back from a long absence, the teacher could say: "Where have you been, son! We missed you". We had homerooms writing letters: "We miss you, Johnny. Where are you? You're keeping us from getting 100 per cent". Every class that had 100 per cent attendance went to the football game free. Later, in an effort to bring back dropouts, we had a "Go to Gratz" campaign. But important as it was to bring our truants and dropouts back, there was a third group of students we wanted even more. We realized that there has to be a kind of cross-fertilization of upwardly aspiring children with the children who have been beaten down and seen life as a hopeless chore. The effect we wanted could be had from any aspiring group... Now that we were bringing in some superior students and working on improved attendance, it was our responsibility to develop a strong and attractive program. If that meant altering the way things were done in the past, fine. If it meant changing some of the basic concepts of what a school is, we were ready. We did not expect some of our professionals might decide to leave. Whenever you make fundamental changes in the organization, the honest person on the staff has two choices. One, he can adjust and work with you. Or two, if he sees that he cannot adjust to your style, he should move out. Some people can neither adapt nor move on their own accord. For their own good, and for the good of the team, the leader must expedite their leaving. It's not the pleasant part of the job, and there often is no formal routine for doing it. Still, it's a necessary process if you are to be successful in making changes. I remember one chap, one of the brightest teachers I have ever known. The problem was that he had a basic, though unconscious, contempt for Gratz students. He found them unsuited to his style of teaching. I facilitated his change to another school in a different part of town. Reports had it he was doing a beautiful job. But he was just no good for Gratz students. He had to leave. Most of the staff, however, elected to stay even when this required some difficult changes. For my part, I accepted the role of personnel consultant. Of course, every aspect of a school program contributes something to its overall images. Gratz had a loser’s image: low academic achievement, losing sporting teams, few activities. To change the image to make the school a winner, we had to improve in every category. For instance, it was incredible that there had been no band in the school over a year. I called the director of music education and said: "Look, we've got to have a band at Gratz. I've never seen a big high school like this with no band." "Okay! You come on up and teach it." "Now, Marc, I can't come up." "Well, if you can't make it, get somebody in here because we've got to have a band." In the end he sent a music supervisor to teach the band. We decided to introduce school-wide activities. We made plans to hold a dance. There had not been one at Gratz for three or four years. We bought new basketball uniforms. Our goal was to involve students and parents in the process of determining what should be taught. We distributed a questionnaire that asked students to make comments and suggestions on curriculum. Parents, community leaders and teachers were similarly involved. We established a Youth Opportunity Centre for introducing inner-city kids to the world of work. What made our centre unique in the state was that it was not located downtown somewhere – it was right in Gratz where it was needed. We were bringing outside services into Gratz, we were extending Gratz out into the community. As one of newspaper headlines put it, we were "taking the school out of school". For instance, many of our students had trouble relating to sciences. "Why study biology?" they asked. This was a very fundamental question. If a person doesn't have some way to relate his studies to himself, he isn't likely to get much out of it. Many of our students needed to have the subject made concrete to them. To do this, we began outreach projects in connection with local hospitals and science centers. At one point, we had 80 students working in 65 different labs. For many of these students, the experience of seeing biology applied in real situations – to help the sick, for instance - gave them a handle for studying science. They began to relate their experience to their work in school. * * * Notes 1. Duck-passing attitude - shift the responsibility to smb else 2. Wrestle with a problem/temptation/one's conscience (fig.) - to struggle with smth 3. Martin Luther King - a famous Negro leader, a clergyman who preached love and hope 4. Catto - a disciplinary school 5. Gratz school - one of the schools where Marcus A. Foster worked as principal Skimming 2.1. Answer the following questions: 1) What idea is lodged in the text? 2) What questions does the author put and provide answers for? 3) How do we usually respond to the development of new things in culture? a. as a rule we fully adjust ourselves to it; b. as a rule we remain indifferent to the new; c. as a rule we cordially welcome new things experiencing happiness and joy; d. we often find ourselves angry and resistant and somewhat confused and start thinking fondly of the past. 4) What education failures and problems are mentioned in the text? 5) Is Foster in favour of new attitudes to students? What are they like? 6) Are attendance problems important? Why? What are the ways of solving them? 7) Why is school's reputation not less important? 8) What kind of teachers do new schools need?

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