Richard Murphy, Stephanie M. Smith, Jean Thomases, Center for Youth Development

CBO schools provide one of the best, long-standing examples of schools that have used Community Youth Development principles and practices to help young people of all backgrounds to learn, grow, and succeed. This issue's cover story, written by staff at the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research as well as two CBO school professionals, examines the ways in which CBO schools support quality education.

Quality education and high standards for all students. It is a rallying cry of both hope and concern that is being echoed all over the country. Many students, parents, educators, and youth development experts know what kind of high schools all young people need in order to succeed in a democratic society and the rapidly changing job marketplace. The schools they describe provide learning experiences that engage young people and challenge them to use knowledge. They are learning communities where each young person is known, respected, and supported; where their potential is nurtured; and where they are safe and able to build vital, positive relationships with adults and peers.

Yet, a large segment of our nation's high school students do not have access to the schools that adequately provide these critical elements of quality education and healthy youth development. Building schools and communities that provide quality education and high standards for all high school students requires that we search within our mainstream educational systems and in our broader educational communities for schools that are successfully working with the young people who might otherwise be left behind.

CBO schools, public schools that are operated by community-based organizations, are able to re-engage these young people in education and help them to succeed due to several crucial assets:

• Commitment to working effectively and intensively with young people who are most in need without trying to "fix" them
• Access to the community resources and services that support student learning and provide for diverse educational experiences in school and in the broader community
• Familiarity with the community's young people and families, and experience working with them on personal as well as community issues
• Opportunities for young people to contribute to their communities

In an effort to bring the lessons of CBO schools to the current movement to reinvent high schools and bring high standards and achievement to all young people, the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research (the Center) at the Academy for Educational Development (AED) undertook an examination of 11 CBO schools across the country. In its forthcoming report, CBO Schools: Changing Lives and Transforming High Schools, the Center presents profiles on each of these schools and a cross-case analysis focusing on the five common areas of principles and practices that help these schools to re-engage young people. Specifically:

• High and comprehensive standards
• Relevant, diverse learning opportunities
• Personalized, flexible learning environments
• Supports and services for effective learning
• Opportunities to make a contribution

Each of these five areas involves principles and practices that come together at the crossroads of quality education, community development, and youth development. CBO schools re-engage young people in their own education, development, and communities by giving them opportunities to become active participants, valuable resources, and capable leaders. Students at CBO schools have a range of formal and informal opportunities to contribute their ideas, skills, talents, and energy in order to shape their own learning environments and their communities. The diverse and relevant learning experiences integrate many of these opportunities into curriculum. The close, positive relationships at CBO schools make it more likely that students will take advantage of opportunities outside the curriculum. CBO schools maintain high and comprehensive expectations of what young people can contribute to their own education, school, and community as well as what they can achieve academically.

CBO schools re-engage young people in their own education, development, and communities by giving them opportunities to become active participants, valuable resources, and capable leaders.

El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice:
Bridging Youth, Education, and Community

By Beth Lev Wehner

Today, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a neighborhood of contradictions. From the days when Betty Smith immortalized it in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn through the twentieth century, it was a community of new immigrants. Williamsburg has traditionally been a place where foreign languages were as common as English and its inhabitants worked long hours for low wages. Now, the make-up is changing. For most of the '80s and '90s, Williamsburg, and especially its south side, was dominated by Hasidic Jews of the Satmar sect and Latinos, mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican. While the two groups are largely segregated despite their close proximity, they have several things in common. Both are working-class communities with a tendency toward large families; therefore, they need to make small paychecks stretch to feed, clothe, and shelter large numbers of people living in close quarters. In the past five years the neighborhood has changed; bodegas have turned into boutiques, vacant lots into trendy nightspots, and factories into converted lofts. With its easy access to Manhattan, abundance of abandoned industrial buildings, and sweeping views of the city, Williamsburg has become irresistible to young, mostly white artists who want to escape Manhattan rents. The problem is, predictably, that with the new, wealthier interest in Williamsburg, the neighborhood has become unaffordable to families who have lived there for years.

Williamsburg is also home to El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, a public high school that is housed within a CBO. The CBO, El Puente, means "bridge" in Spanish. It is aptly named, for it not only serves as a bridge to young people between self and community, but between childhood and adulthood as well. The goal of the Academy is not just to educate young people but to help them see their relationship with and responsibility to the community that raised them. When El Puente first opened its doors 20 years ago, it was largely a response by people who had grown up in the south side to the youth-on-youth violence that plagued Williamsburg. El Puente did its job, perhaps too well: violence is down in the south side, but rents are up. And despite El Puente's commitment to the neighborhood, more than half of its students come from nearby Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and other neighborhoods where the rent is more affordable. Out of fear of further displacement, gentrification and development have become two of El Puente's biggest human rights priorities. The CBO and the Academy have partnered to learn as much as possible and then organize around these issues.

El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice[is] a public high school that is housed within a CBO. The CBO, El Puente, means "bridge" in Spanish. It is aptly named, for it not only serves as a bridge to young people between self and community, but between childhood and adulthood as well.

1. A scale drawing of the site. Since the sites are unavailable to the public, this required some imagination and ingenuity. The students used surveyors' techniques to find the dimensions of the buildings in order to draw models of the sites.

2. A development budget for the site. This development budget will be based on the estimated market values of the sites prepared for tax records and contractors' formulae for estimating the cost of development. Students will both compute these numbers and explain how the formulae work and why they are useful.

3. A financial plan for acquiring and developing the site. Students will study interest rates and bank loans. Based on what they have learned and the development budget, they will determine the actual cost of developing the building. How much money would a potential buyer need to have up front? How much would they have to pay every year? How would a grant from the government or a private investor impact the money a buyer would need?

4. A proposal for how the site should be developed. The seniors will read the Community Needs Assessment written by the Community Board and use it to form a recommendation for how the site should be developed.

As with previous senior portfolio projects, these reports will be used by El Puente for community organizing purposes. The students will learn math while they are learning to research, organize, and use information on how to buy property. These skills are all a valuable part of their education. Equally important, they will have the experience of helping their community by identifying a problem and then working proactively to be part of a solution. In years to come, they may see some of these buildings developed according to the plans that they designed. It is a part of their education that they will never forget, and possibly even a part that will change, in some way, the course of their lives.

Currently a math teacher at El Puente Academy, Beth Lev Wehner has also taught English and history. She is advisor to the Student Council and the Wilderness Club. Raised in Boston, she now lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Education and Community:
Rediscovering the Connections at Shalom High School

By Daniel Grego, Ph.D.

The words education and community have become what linguist Uwe Poerksen calls "plastic words": words that are "rarely used in a particular, precise, appropriate manner." Education is commonly conflated with "school attendance." In everyday conversation, education is often referred to as a thing to which every child is entitled. As a metaphor, community must be one of the most overused words in the English language. I realize, therefore, that in writing about education and community, I risk being misunderstood. So, I better begin by defining terms.

Education is the process by which people become responsibly mature members of their communities. And a community? A human community is a group of people who live together, work together, and practice together the arts of living and learning in a particular place.

The frequently invoked African proverb "It takes a village to raise a healthy child" speaks to the importance of communities for quality education. You will notice, however, the proverb does not say, "It takes a village to create a system to raise a healthy child."

This is where I think we took a wrong turn. Somehow, we convinced ourselves that the division of labor used to manufacture pins or widgets most efficiently could be applied to education. So, in our approach to schooling, we tried to create what historian David Tyack called The One Best System and inserted it between our communities (the villages) and education (the raising of our children). But children are not pins or widgets. Systems cannot substitute for communities. When learning is separated from the life of a community, education becomes impossible.

The myth that must be debunked, therefore, is that schools educate children. They do not. Communities do. Schools are only tools that communities can use as part of the educational process. The responsibility for education belongs to the entire "village."

In Milwaukee, as in other large urban areas across the country, about half the students who start ninth grade drop out before graduation. Shalom High School was founded in 1973 to work with those young people who were not succeeding in the traditional high schools.

The first task in designing an effective educational environment for these students is to create within the school at least a semblance of community. The size of the school is an important consideration in trying to do this. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell cites the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who has concluded, "The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship." Adolescents want to go to a place "where everybody knows their name," where each student is recognized as an individual and where each student's special gift is appreciated. Ted Sizer and others have argued that to teach students well, one must know them well. If Dunbar is right, this cannot happen in a school whose total population is more than 150.

In addition to keeping the school small, it is important to ensure that students feel ownership and responsibility for the community within it. This can only happen if they have some real power. At Shalom, the school rules were written initially by the students themselves, and the school handbook, in which the rules are recorded, can be amended by the students. If there is a serious violation of the rules, the offender must appear before a discipline committee on which students are called to serve in a manner similar to jury duty.

In our society, adolescents are caught in a limbo between childhood and adulthood at a stage in their development when they desperately want to be acknowledged as adults. At Shalom, we have found that it is much better to treat students as adults and risk being disappointed from time to time by someone who is immature than to treat adolescents as children and alienate them all. Shalom reinforces the ideas of responsibility and interdependence during a weeklong orientation, "Building the Shalom Community," in which all students and staff participate. The week is designed to help students understand what it means to be a part of the community, what their responsibilities are, and what they can contribute. During the week students and staff build relationships in activities such as gardening, conducting neighborhood clean-ups, and cooking lunch for the whole school.

At Shalom, we have found that it is much better to treat students as adults and risk being disappointed from time to time by someone who is immature than to treat adolescents as children and alienate them all.

• Working with the elderly at an adult care center at a neighborhood church
• Collecting and donating food and clothing for the homeless and poor
• Organizing a neighborhood clean-up
• Planting gardens
• Joining neighbors in opposing the request for a liquor license by a local store by testifying before the Milwaukee Common Council
• Participating in a neighborhood anti-tobacco campaign
• Tutoring younger students at a middle school
• Visiting a prison on a regular basis and mentoring incarcerated girls
• Assisting the NAACP in a 2000 get-out-the-vote effort
• Meeting with the Milwaukee School Board to advocate increasing the number of charter schools and other small schools
• Implementing the Center for Democracy and Citizenship's Public Achievement program in Milwaukee

Are the Shalom students better educated because of the involvement of community elders in the school? Just ask them. More of them go on to college than ever before. More of them find productive work. More of them are active citizens.

Is Milwaukee a better community as a result of the efforts of the Shalom students? Just ask the hungry they helped feed, or the sick or incarcerated they visited, or the children they tutored and mentored.

As a model, Shalom is far from perfect. However, in its small way, it is rescuing education and community from the junk pile of plastic words-and giving them some flesh and blood, some human energy and commitment. It's a start.

Daniel Grego has been working with at-risk students in Milwaukee since 1980, first as a teacher, then for 12 years as the director of Shalom High School. Since 1993, he has been the director of educational services at TransCenter for Youth, Inc., the nonprofit community agency that governs the Northwest Opportunities Vocational Academy (NOVA), El Puente High School for Science, Math and Technology, and the CITIES Project, in addition to Shalom High School.

Conclusion

When schools operate as true communities, and when they build strong connections to the broader communities in which their students live, young people find relevance in their learning.