Does it take a village to teach a boy?
NEW BEDFORD — It is 8:15 a.m. on a typical weekday morning in the gymnasium of the Nativity Preparatory School, the old YWCA on Spring Street. Fifty boys, all in black slacks, dress shirts and ties, are seated on the hardwood floor listening intently to a movement from a Haydn symphony, introduced by eighth-grader Adam Coppola to a round of polite applause.
When the music stops and everyone returns to their ranks and files, Principal John Rompf addresses the well-groomed students about upcoming events and then leads them in prayers for friends and family, prompted by the boys, who raise their hands in turn.
Morning assembly concludes with everyone in the chilly gym, known as “The Icebox,” holding hands in a huge circle and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Prayer, uniforms and classical music appreciation are some of the things to be found at Nativity that won’t be found in most schools. But the faculty and staff will tell you that these are really the outward signs of something larger: an atmosphere of mutual respect and self-respect, of civility, of dignity, of pride, of purpose, of support and of achievement.
And it’s no accident that they are all boys from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Nativity Prep represents the reality that given an extraordinary effort, boys don’t have to drop out of school at a far higher rate than girls in New Bedford and elsewhere; that they don’t have to be put into special education at twice the rate of girls; that they don’t have to wind up in remedial education at three or four times the rate as girls from the same social background.
“These boys can all compete academically with anyone,” said Claire Carvalho, director of development. “They have learned that their school provides an equal playing field.”
How equal? Each year a handful of students do so well that they win full scholarships to the most prestigious private prep schools in the land: Andover, Choate, Darlington, Tabor. Most of them will re-enter public school, where they will be at a distinct advantage as they shoot for college.
So why do these boys succeed while their neighbors slip into the cracks so often?
The school setting has a lot to do with it, but the faculty emphasizes: not everything. Not by a long shot.
James Mathes, director of the SMILES mentoring program in SouthCoast, said he has come to the seemingly radical conclusion that the schools aren’t the cause of underachievement and the dropout problem at all. The man who spent a career as a fairly conservative executive, running the local Chamber of Commerce, now finds Hillary Clinton’s book title, “It Takes a Village,” escaping his lips.
For the Nativity students, that village includes everyone in their lives, especially their parents, even if it’s a single parent. For one thing, Nativity students have to apply there and pass an entrance exam, and those who do already understand what Nativity is all about and what is expected of them.
Rashard Perry of New Bedford, who spent Grades 2 through 5 in Florida’s elementary public schools, said that during one of his summers in this city during those years he was taken on a tour of Nativity, “and I knew I wanted to come here.”
That despite the school day that lasts until late afternoon and sometimes into the evening.
He might never have known it even existed if it weren’t for his mother, he said. And once there, he might not have known about such prestigious private prep schools as Darlington, outside Atlanta, where next year he will start high school with a full scholarship.
Rashard is a prime example of the possibilities inherent in every boy (and girl).
But what Mr. Mathes says, and others agree, is that the atmosphere in a child’s household, and in the neighborhood, and in the greater community, can make or break a child’s future.
“There’s a lot of research that says the leading indicator of the educational success of a child is having a caring and competent adult in their life. I don’t mean to call people incompetent. I don’t say that to hurt anyone. But the point is, if a child is born into a home without high school graduates, if will be very difficult for that family to support you with education … as opposed to a family with a bunch of college graduates.”
Heather Larkin, director of guidance for the New Bedford public schools, said the pattern shows itself early, especially with boys. Many start kindergarten or the first grade unprepared, she said.
Behavioral problems, which often lead boys into a spiral of intervention leading to a high likelihood of quitting school, appear early. “If you grow up in a house where all you do is fight, you’re going to learn to fight,” she said. “If you grow up in a house where you talk things out, that’s how you are going to do things.”
Worse, she said, “a lot of the attendance problems are not caused by the student. They’re caused by the parent allowing them to stay home. When a kid gets to high school, at that level he is making conscious choices. But when it happens in kindergarten, it’s atrocious.”
Attendance officers, she said, visit the homes of children as early as kindergarten, where the child — most often a boy — is being allowed to skip school by the parent(s). “We’ve heard every excuse in the book,” Mrs. Larkin said.
That sets the tone: The parent either doesn’t value education, or can’t do their duty to get the child to school. When it’s a single-parent home, it’s most likely headed by a woman, and if the child is a boy there could well be a lack of a male role model in his life.
Bottom line: 90 percent of the truancy cases that are taken to court involve boys. And by the time a child reaches high school, “the attendance issue blurs into dropouts,” Mrs. Larkin said.
Mr. Mathes said that even if class sizes in public schools could drop to 12 or 15, as they are at Nativity, “It’s not just the academic presentation that’s necessary. It’s the whole child that comes into that school, that classroom, and it’s the behavior of that child toward his or her education.
“Laying problems at the feet of the superintendent, school leaders and teachers is to abdicate parenting and family and community responsibility for raising children,” he said.
Male role models for boys are especially prized — and hard to find in a community that suffers from such low demographic scores in education, several people interviewed for this story said.
And when problems have their origins in the very early grades, that spells trouble.
“Most of the teachers you see in elementary school are female,” said Dr. Portia S. Bonner, recently chosen as the next superintendent of schools in New Bedford. “Mostly, the middle schools are a nice little mix. And at the high school level, most teachers are female.”
The SMILES program, which began by targeting the middle grades, attempts to put all children, but especially boys, in a one-on-one relationship with an adult who can show that child that education has a purpose, that it is taking them somewhere.
Dr. Bonner echoed that, saying, “The student needs to know the purpose for what he is studying. School needs to be meaningful, purposeful, not, ‘This is just another thing I have to do to get out of this class.’ They need real-life experience and see the application. They need to problem-solve and think critically.’”
And the boys need adult males to guide them.
At the co-educational Nazarene Christian Academy in New Bedford, Principal Susan M. Helm said, “We understand the importance of male influence. We try to involve as many young men in our program as we can.”
High school boys from 14 to 18, she said, “need other young men to be with them and mentor them and work with them and play with them. We have young men, college men, involved in gym classes and aiding in classrooms, young men helping in the after-school care program.” The volunteers, she said, come from “the community: churches, the Salvation Army, Christian camp. They’ve basically found us by word of mouth.
“Kids today have such a lack of men in their life that when the young men are involved in school, the kids flock to them like magnets,” she said.
Mr. Mathes said that as successful as SMILES is in the region, it doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of attention boys receive at Nativity. “If you were to compare the two, SMILES is a four-door sedan and Nativity is a top-of-the-line Cadillac.”
Mr. Rompf, principal at Nativity, said that he goes to great lengths to recruit male teachers, which is proving to be a challenge for the public schools as well, especially in the elementary grades. The job is made much harder at Nativity because teaching there is essentially missionary work: Teachers work long hours and are paid only a few hundred dollars a year, plus room and board. Those who teach there are usually on an educational or career track other than teaching, but they want to do it for a time, Mr. Rompf said.
As a result, teacher turnover typically approaches 75 percent a year.
It’s not a model that can translate to public education. But Mr. Rompf said that there is a public school model that is similar to what happens at Nativity, and that works better to keep boys on track: the neighborhood elementary school.
“Parents may have known teachers there for 30 years,” he said. “They know the school, they know the principal.” Parents are involved in the school, in the education, in the support activities. “There’s a rapport.”
“Then in the middle grades, they’re assigned to one of three great middle schools,” he said. “This is the most pivotal time for young men growing up,” he said, adding that the signs are already apparent as early as the second grade.
“At Keith (middle school), one-third of the students don’t want to be there. That’s why we catch them as young as possible,” in the fifth grade, he said.
A national debate has been under way for nearly two decades about the way boys are taught in school, and whether they have fallen behind girls after federal legislation corrected imbalances in spending and boosted girls’ educational performance.
Some dispute that a disparity even exists, saying that analysts make too much of statistics that show more boys reading poorly, dropping out, being suspended, being held back, or failing to attend college and graduate once they get there.
Among those who are concerned about the fate of boys in public education there are two strains of thought.
Cathy Young, an author at Reason magazine, described in the magazine a 2001 conference in Washington, D.C. in which one group occupied one room, the opponents another.
“In one room, there was sympathy for boys who yearn to be gentle, nurturing and openly emotional, but live in a society that labels such qualities as ’sissy’; in the other, there was sympathy for boys who want only to be boys but live in a society that labels their natural qualities aggressive and patriarchal.
“One camp wants to reform masculinity, the other to restore it; one seeks to rescue boys from patriarchy, the other from feminism,” she wrote.
“Early ’school turnoff’ may cause boys to develop an anti-learning mind set the British have labeled ‘laddism’: a mirror image of the pre-feminist notion that it isn’t cool for a girl to be too bright. ‘The boys have become oppositional and band together in the belief that manly culture doesn’t include grade grubbing,’ observes University of Alaska psychologist Judith Kleinfeld.
“For black boys, this attitude may be exacerbated by the notion that learning is a ‘white thing,’” Ms. Young wrote.
What happens when a motivated boy enters school?
Dr. Bonner is one who thinks that teachers may not be prepared to deal with the way boys naturally behave, their boisterousness and fidgeting. When boys act out, she said, “we don’t really take the time to say, ‘Are we educators doing everything we can to assist?’”
Further complicating the picture is the spread of prescription drugs to remedy ADHD or other problems, which with some diligence might be handled without medication. “In most cases a teacher is able to work with a student without putting a student on a drug, which has a lot of side effects,” she said.
She said her own teaching experience required her to adjust to the learning needs of children with attention deficit disorder, often boys. “I altered my teaching, knowing that students are able to take in information in multiple ways. I also know their attention span is limited, so there’s a limit to how much you can feed that person for a day before you have to engage in other activities,” she said.
“You have to differentiate the instruction, knowing the needs of the child.”
Even with this knowledge, educators say that some teachers simply don’t know how to handle boys’ behavior, and much prefer the girls, who are more likely to sit quietly and complete their lessons.
Ms. Young wrote, “Perhaps the social changes of the past three decades have made young women more self-assured and eager to use their new opportunities, while leaving many men unnerved and confused about what’s expected of them.
“It may also be that boys, particularly those from low-income families, often become alienated from school early — both because their slower developmental timetable causes them to fall behind girls and because school is a ‘feminized’ environment with mostly female authority figures and boy-unfriendly rules that emphasize being quiet and sitting still.”
Anne Wheelock, a retired education analyst in Boston, told The Standard-Times that boys in particular are likely to be held back a grade or two, often because of learning and behavior issues. Once that happens, and as the grades go by, the child feels too old for the class. And an 18-year-old in the 10th grade may well have a job, a marriage, or even children, a perfect recipe for dropping out.
At Nativity, and in many other schools across the country, holding a child back is the last thing that’s going to happen, but it’s not “social promotion.” Nativity, for instance, will require students to spend additional time in the evening, possibly with a parent (who may, by the way, be helping with the custodial work since the school has no janitor).
The boys are so closely monitored that there simply isn’t time for them to waste, or opportunity to slip behind without being noticed.
The same goes for Nazarene Christian Academy. Mrs. Helm said, “We’re very fortunate because we live in a small community where we’re able to meet the needs of those type of students under a very sweet, intimate relationship.
“Where others might be up against a child being agitated or angry or fighting and all of that, there’s a tendency just to try to keep things calm because there’s not enough help to go around,” she said.
For Mr. Mathes, that principle applies to the entire community. The first thing a city like New Bedford needs to do is understand its predicament. “Now that I understand the circumstance that exists, step two is to decide for ourselves as a community what we are going to do about it. Because I guarantee you nobody in any other community is going to do it for you A community can either take care and fix its problems or suffer them,” he said.
“The issue then becomes a call to arms for everyone not to just get involved but to accept some of the responsibility for helping to fix the problem.”
-Steve Urbon, The Standard-Times