No Child Left Behind—Brooklyn Style
5/30/2008With 80 percent of full-time faculty working in Brooklyn’s public schools, the School of Education is finding new and creative approaches to teaching—and to developing the next generation of teachers.
On a crisp fall morning, Haroon Kharem, an assistant professor in the School of Education, paces the honey-colored wooden floors in a small classroom at the
Performing Arts and Technology High School in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. He is encircled by a group of roughly twenty students who simply can’t understand how slaves ate pig intestines, commonly known as chitterlings.
“You all say ‘ewwww’ but they kept your ancestors alive,” explains Kharem, a bald and towering professor in tinted eyeglasses, blue jeans, black button-up shirt, and Adidas sneakers.
One student says he’d rather starve. “It’s easy to say that, but these people were trying to survive,” Kharem shoots back.
In a discussion that ranges from slavery to abused women to welfare, there are no easy answers. What’s most important to Kharem—an East New York native who went from running with street gangs in his youth to earning a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at Penn State—is that the questions keep coming. “They want to learn, but they also want to be heard,” says Kharem after class. “I want to keep pressing them.”
Kharem’s dogged commitment is emblematic of the larger culture in Brooklyn College’s School of Education, which emphasizes real dirt-under-the-fingernails community engagement and, if not rocket science innovations in the area of pedagogy, certainly new and creative approaches to teaching. But most important, say many professors and the school’s dean, Deborah Shanley, is that they always remember that their greatest asset is the rich and textured laboratory that is Brooklyn and its schools—with all the diversity, the hope, and the enormous challenge.
“What makes us unique is that we are in Brooklyn and we get a taste of so many different kinds of scenarios,” says Peter Taubman, an associate professor of adolescent education. Dean Shanley says that about 80 percent of full-time faculty members in the School of Education have some kind of connection with Brooklyn public schools, whether they are teaching a course, conducting research, doing professional development with teachers, or are involved with one of the many College programs. Along with the performing arts school in East New York, known as PATHS, the School of Education has established formal and informal associations with a sizable number of Brooklyn’s public schools. The philosophy behind it is simple: “We can’t really make an impact unless we are where the action is,” says Wayne A. Reed, assistant professor of childhood education.
Their efforts have produced some impressive results. Many of the schools with which the College has established relationships have attendance and graduation rates above 90 percent, while national graduation rates at urban public schools hover at 50 percent. The College’s Science,Technology, and Research (STAR) Early College High School graduated 96 percent of its first class last spring. What’s more, officials at the schools say many of the benefits of forging these kinds of collaborations with the School of Education don’t show up in commonly measured statistics.
“Kharem’s class is the carrot for students to step up and be counted as serious learners,” says Lottie Almonte, the principal at PATHS, where 70 percent of students are considered below proficient for their grade level and 77 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. “They think about their work in a different way. They refer to themselves as researchers.”
For Shanley the ultimate goal is to create a faculty at the School of Education wholly committed to turning out innovative and resourceful teachers, both inside and outside the classroom. “Ones who are able to work with families, who know how to tap into the city’s vast resources, who know how to reach out to community groups,” says Shanley. “We don’t want students who make excuses about a kid’s parents not being involved. Find a sibling. I want our students coming out of here having the ability to exhaust the possibilities.”
In one widely heralded example of the kind of inventive students the College has produced, graduate student Georgina Smith started a tutoring service at neighborhood laundromats when she noticed the number of idle kids waiting with their parents for their laundry to be finished. What started out as an experiment at one Eastern Parkway Clean Rite turned into a program that, thanks to a $12,000 grant from the laundromat’s parent company, has expanded across Brooklyn.
In order to mold such students, many of the School of Education professors lead by example. Reed, for instance, last year piloted a course at another East New York school that brings members of the community into the school to teach.
“In the last four or five years these projects have developed a life of their own, so it has become easy for more and more faculty members to plug into what’s going on,” says Reed.
Kharem, who teaches at PATHS two days a week and also brings his students from the high school with him to tutor at a nearby elementary school where he teaches, says he’s trying to create students who shake up the status quo. Last year, he took nine of his PATHS students with him to Chicago for the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, where he encouraged them to challenge the scholars. One student quizzed a panelist on why students like himself were often labeled “at-risk.”
“He teaches us things that we don’t learn in our textbook,” says PATHS student Elizabeth Miranda. “He makes us really think.”
Principal Almonte says she’s extremely grateful for all the effort from Kharem and others from Brooklyn College. Two to three School of Education professors teach at PATHS every year. Additionally this year, Laurie Rubel, assistant professor of adolescent mathematics education, will start doing some professional development with PATHS math teachers because Almonte says the school is weakest in its math scores. Another School of Education professor, Alma Rubal-Lopez, will teach a course for Hispanic female students on self-confidence and pride.
Almonte says she’s sure all the help has played a role in the school’s success. Approximately 82 percent of seniors are on track to be part of the first graduating class this spring, and the school has a 92 percent attendance rate.
But back in the classroom, Kharem is not satisfied. So he keeps pressing.
As he and his PATHS students progress in their conversation from slavery to modern times, one student is having trouble stringing her thoughts together. Kharem tells her to take her time. She laments that too many of her peers don’t take their education seriously and adds that those without an education tend to live in a kind of modern slave mentality.
“One thing you guys should always realize,” Kharem tells the class, “is that the struggle’s not over.”
