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October 16, 2005

Providence Journal

Edwatch by Julia Steiny:

With Communities In Disarray, Schools Need To Make Their Own

"Relationships are to children's development and learning what location is to real estate. Relationships, relationships, relationships."

So says one of my personal heroes, Dr. James Comer, professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center and founder of the Comer School Development Program. He was speaking recently at a Brown University Education Alliance conference.

Comer has a clear message. "We had natural communities, but they fell apart — in part because of high mobility and technological advances. Families and communities were automatic in the past, so we took them for granted. Then they sort of dribbled away without our noticing, until they were gone. Natural communities and their families made education possible, but as they broke down, they took education with it. But unlike Humpty Dumpty, we can't afford not to put community back together again. Or this country will go downhill fast.

"Children need to be born into social networks where they learn social skills from a variety of adults. After 1960, we needed to include the social scaffolding (supports) to get them to academic readiness. We didn't do that. Even now, schools still assume the kids have been prepared. They're not. So everything you do in a school needs to help them grow and develop. We're trying to get schools of education to get both pre-service and in-service teachers to think of themselves as child-developers — as well as someone who passes on information."

Comer confronts his audience in his soft-spoken way: "Two million men are in jail or prison, which is more than in China. One million of them are African-American men. Raising test scores is not going to be enough. Schools need to prepare children for life. Otherwise we'll merely have people in prison with higher test scores."

Tragically for the kids, a surprising number of education pundits have started an aggressive backlash against social and emotional learning in schools, on the grounds that teaching such skills is somehow mutually exclusive with academic achievement. We can't do both? Well, in their minds, teaching social skills is not merely a waste of time — and not the schools' job — but outright detrimental to academic achievement. (See Chester Finn's introduction to the recent report "Mayhem in the Middle" for a particularly depressing example.)

Lest you are of that mind, know that the federal government conducted an exhaustive analysis of 27 comprehensive school-reform models, only three of which were shown to raise test scores reliably. One of them was Comer's.

Comer relates this information with a "well, duh" attitude, since he's seen ample evidence that if you get all the relationships to work well — teachers, kids, parents, community — nothing stands in the way of kids acquiring skills and information. Children enjoy learning, after all, as long as they feel safe, wanted, cared-for, supported and so on. (Copious information about the Comer model is available at this Yale University website.

For example, Comer tells the story of a transient kid who'd been uprooted repeatedly in his life, putting up his dukes at some personal slight on the playground. The other kids shook their heads and said: nah, we don't do that here. And indeed, when the scrapper looked around, no one was going to fight him. The fists came down as he looked to the other kids for what to do next. The kids carried the culture of that school. They had learned to live in peace and to negotiate their differences. It can happen, if you teach them.

The good doctor's personal story shaped his perspective. His grandparents were uneducated sharecroppers. His steel-worker father had a sixth-grade education, and his domestic-service mom had exactly zero. And yet. Those two, for reasons Comer proudly explains, valued education as an operating principal for rearing their children.

The main classroom at home was the dinner table, whose rules were: "You come on time; you listen; you don't talk for too long; you learn to debate; you learn personal control and personal expression, and you can't fight. You problem-solve and debate fiercely, but you could not raise your voices. And if you can't be the best, be among the best. In any case, imitate, identify with and internalize the values and ways of the best. The church reinforced all these things that mainstream culture also wanted from you. In this way, we were prepared before we went to school.'

There were three other African-American kids in his class cohort at school, but only Comer thrived. (He has 46 honorary degrees.) The other kids did not have his lucky preparation, and without it they fell further and further behind. They did not, in Comer's words, "grow right."

Fine, you say, let the parents work on social skills at the dinner table, or anywhere else they want as long as it's at home. Schools should concentrate on teaching academics. But here's the kicker: the parents don't know how to teach such skills because no one taught them. The hard job of parenting was designed to happen within the context of community (tribe) and culture (collective values), and we no longer have communities or culture, to speak of. The duty of teaching social skills has fallen exclusively to parents who are themselves often utterly unprepared.

"Three generations have been on downward mobility, parents don't work, are involved in illegal activities . . ."

Comer notes that these days we have three kinds of families. Some still belong to a social network, which could be at any socioeconomic level, as long as something — church, a stable, tight neighborhood, a common purpose — is holding their community together. Marginal families are those that are currently isolated but could be helped to be socially effective with more information and support, such as helping them get more education. And lastly, we have full-on antisocial families who are so difficult to reach, the only real hope is to teach their children very well so they can either reach the parents themselves or overcome them. The cohort of antisocial families is growing.

So Comer's schools — all 1,000 of them around the country — prepare the kids for life from the moment they enter the door.

"And the parents will get involved as soon as they can see they can be successful. Children grow up in a web of relationships and parents need to be part of that network."

Recreating community is a hard job. But schools are themselves natural communities that could be organizing and teaching all the communities' adults how to grow and develop children. Having done that, imparting academics would be a piece of cake, just as Comer insists.

Herein lies a really promising path.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny [at] cox.net.