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conuly
Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Problems
President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start several years ago typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada’s two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And the cost of its charter schools — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about their utility as a nationwide model.
Mr. Canada, 58, who began putting his ideas into practice on a single block, on West 119th Street, in the mid-1990s, does not apologize for the cost of his model, saying his goals are wider than just fixing a school or two. His hope is to prove that if money is spent in a concentrated way to give poor children the things middle-class children take for granted — like high-quality schooling, a safe neighborhood, parents who read to them, and good medical care — they will not pass on the patterns of poverty to another generation.
“You could, in theory, figure out a less costly way of working with a small number of kids, and providing them with an education,” Mr. Canada said. “But that is not what we are attempting to do. We are attempting to save a community and its kids all at the same time.”
Few would deny that a middle-class renaissance is under way in the sections of Harlem where Mr. Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone have focused their efforts. The zone extends from 116th to 143rd Streets, between Madison Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
All children who live in the zone have access to many of its services, including after-school programs, asthma care, precollege advice and adult classes for expectant parents, called Baby College. The organization has placed young teaching assistants, known as peacemakers, in many of the elementary school classrooms in the area and poured money into organizing block associations, helping tenants buy buildings from the city, and refurbishing parks and playgrounds. By linking services, the program aims to improve on early-childhood programs like Head Start, whose impact has been shown to evaporate as children age.
Amid the facades of new condominiums that signal gentrification, however, deep poverty remains. So does low student performance in most of the neighborhood’s public schools, despite modest gains over the past decade and a growing number of better-performing charter schools, a development Mr. Canada helped pioneer.
Last month, the Obama administration awarded $10 million in grants to 21 neighborhood groups around the country to help them plan their own versions of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the president is seeking $210 million for next year, although appropriations committees in the Senate and the House have earmarked only $20 million and $60 million, respectively.
But there has been some criticism. Grover J. Whitehurst, a co-author of a Brookings Institution analysis of the zone, said there was still too little evidence that its approach, of linking social services to promote student achievement, justified an investment of federal education dollars, and urged that a more rigorous study be conducted.
“My quarrel is not with an effort in Harlem funded largely by philanthropy, it’s with the federal approach to scaling this up,” Mr. Whitehurst said. “It just doesn’t rise to the level of evidence the president and the secretary of education said they were going to apply in determining their investments.”
In awarding the grants, Education Secretary Arne Duncan emphasized, the government hoped neighborhoods would coordinate and stretch their existing services, while asking the private sector to step up and match financing.
“The cost is going to vary community to community,” Mr. Duncan said, “but we think this is an absolute investment.”
In 2009, the Harlem Children’s Zone had assets of nearly $200 million, and the project’s operating budget this year is $84 million, two-thirds of it from private donations. Last month, the Goldman Sachs Foundation pledged $20 million toward constructing an additional school building. With two billionaires, Stanley Druckenmiller and Kenneth Langone, on the board, its access to capital is unusually strong.
Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, who also sits on the children’s zone board, said that while test scores were important, so was treating Harlem’s childhood asthma crisis, which is a cause of absenteeism. “What it’s about to us is dealing with all of the issues these kids encounter,” Mr. Cohn said.
The zone’s two charter schools are open to all city children by lottery. Officially, the schools spend, per student, $12,443 in public money and $3,482 in private financing each year. But that does not include the costs of a 4 p.m.-to-6 p.m. after-school program, rewards for student performance, a chef who prepares healthy meals, central administration and most building costs, and some of the expense of the students’ free health and dental care, which come out of the zone’s overall budget, said Marty Lipp, the zone’s communications director.
Regular public schools in New York City spend about $14,452 each year per general education student, less than half of which is generally for classroom instruction.
In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school.
The school, which opened in 2004 in a gleaming new building on 125th Street, should have had a senior class by now, but the batch of students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on. Mr. Canada called the dismissal “a tragedy.”
On a recent Thursday, the current high school students, neatly attired in blue and white uniforms, got special help in college note-taking skills, and chatted animatedly about velocity in an advanced physics class. Most were well below grade level when they first got to the school and took three or four years to catch up; many are now ahead.
“You really have to put money into personnel,” said Marquitta Speller, who has been the high school principal since January. “I don’t think you can experience the same level of success without the same level of resources.”
But most of the seventh graders, now starting their third year in the school, are still struggling. Just 15 percent passed the 2010 state English test, a number that Mr. Canada said was “unacceptably low” but not out of line with the school’s experience in lifting student performance over time. Several teachers have been fired as a result of the low scores, and others were reassigned, he said.
Giving administrators the ability to fire teachers for poor performance is one of the central suggestions of “Waiting for ‘Superman.’ ” Over all, 38 percent of Promise Academy I’s students in third through sixth grade passed the 2010 English test under the state’s new guidelines, placing it in the lower half of charter schools citywide, and below the city’s overall passing rate of 42 percent. In Harlem as a whole, just 29 percent of children passed.
Promise Academy II, an elementary school that occupies part of a public school building, did better, with 62 percent passing in English, among the top 10 percent of charters. But because it lost more ground than comparable schools, it got a C from the city on its annual A-to-F report card, and an F in the student progress category. Both schools continued to outperform the city in math, with 60 percent passing in one school and 81 percent in the other.
A few recent studies have broached the question of what was helping the zone’s students raise attendance and test scores: the interlocking social services, or what was going on in the classroom? But they were based on state test results in years when the exams were easier to pass, and they may now be less conclusive.
One study, by the Harvard researchers Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr., found that while Promise Academy students who entered the sixth grade in 2005 had raised their test scores so much by the eighth grade that they had “reversed the black-white achievement gap in mathematics” and reduced it in English, there was “at best modest evidence” that the social programs were driving that success. In 2009, nearly all the students passed the math test.
“The challenge,” the researchers wrote, “is to find lower-cost ways to achieve similar results in regular public schools.”
Mr. Whitehurst’s 2010 Brookings analysis went further, noting that test performance at the two charter schools was only middling among charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, even though higher-performing schools, like those in the lauded KIPP network, had no comparable network of cradle-to-college services.
Dave Levin, a co-founder of KIPP, took issue with the study, noting that most of his schools already had counselors and college-advice programs, and all were expanding to serve kindergarten through grade 12, just like Mr. Canada’s. But KIPP schools do try to stick to the per-student spending of the surrounding district “to demonstrate what schools can do on the money that they have.”
“I think there are differences, but we are both deeply committed to meeting all of the children’s needs,” Mr. Levin said.
The Harlem Children’s Zone is not the only block-by-block effort to ease poverty, though it is unusual in its intensive focus on children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example, is wrapping up projects in seven cities called Making Connections Neighborhoods that promoted a “two-generation approach” with job-training programs for parents. An effort that turned around the East Lake Meadows neighborhood in Atlanta used the construction of mixed-income housing and the renovation of a golf course as the fulcrum.
While it is still years away from confirming its broader theories about poverty, the Harlem Children’s Zone has already had some impact on thousands of children. Its after-school college advice office has helped place 650 students in college, and it supports them until they graduate. Its asthma initiative has drastically reduced emergency room visits and missed school days among its 1,000 participants. Preschool students have made bounds in kindergarten readiness. Parent satisfaction in the charter schools, as measured by city surveys, is high.
And Mr. Canada has achieved superhero status among those who admire him for his vision. Lisbeth B. Schorr, a senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, said, “The fact that the impact has not been proven doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
Understanding ‘Ba Ba Ba’ as a Key to Development
As a pediatrician, I always ask about babble. “Is the baby making sounds?” I ask the parent of a 4-month-old, a 6-month-old, a 9-month-old. The answer is rarely no. But if it is, it’s important to try to find out what’s going on.
If a baby isn’t babbling normally, something may be interrupting what should be a critical chain: not enough words being said to the baby, a problem preventing the baby from hearing what’s said, or from processing those words. Something wrong in the home, in the hearing or perhaps in the brain.
Babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech, and as a key predictor of both cognitive and social emotional development. And research is teasing apart the phonetic components of babble, along with the interplay of neurologic, cognitive and social factors.
The first thing to know about babble is also the first thing scientists noticed: babies all over the world babble in similar ways. During the second year of life, toddlers shape their sounds into the words of their native tongues.
The word “babble” is both significant and representative — repetitive syllables, playing around with the same all-important consonants. (Indeed, the word seems to be derived not from the biblical Tower of Babel, as folk wisdom has it, but from the “ba ba” sound babies make.)
Some of the most exciting new research, according to D. Kimbrough Oller, a professor of audiology and speech-language pathology at the University of Memphis, analyzes the sounds that babies make in the first half-year of life, when they are “squealing and growling and producing gooing sounds.” These sounds are foundations of later language, he said, and they figure in all kinds of social interactions and play between parents and babies — but they do not involve formed syllables, or anything that yet sounds like words.
“By the time you get past 6 months of age, babies begin to produce canonical babbling, well-formed syllables,” Professor Oller said. “Parents don’t treat those earlier sounds as words; when canonical syllables begin to appear, parents recognize the syllables as negotiable.” That is, when the baby says something like “ba ba ba,” the parent may see it as an attempt to name something and may propose a word in response.
Most of the time, I ask parents: “Does he make noise? Does she sound like she’s talking?” And most of the time, parents nod and smile, acknowledging the baby voices that have become part of the family conversation.
But the new research suggests a more detailed line of questions: by 7 months or so, have the sounds developed into that canonical babble, including both vowels and consonants? Babies who go on vocalizing without many consonants, making only aaa and ooo sounds, are not practicing the sounds that will lead to word formation, not getting the mouth muscle practice necessary for understandable language to emerge.
“A baby hears all these things and is able to differentiate them before the baby can produce them,” said Carol Stoel-Gammon, an emeritus professor of speech and hearing sciences at the University of Washington. “To make an m, you have to close your mouth and the air has to come out your nose. It’s not in your brain somewhere — you have to learn it.”
The consonants in babble mean the baby is practicing, shaping different sounds by learning to maneuver the mouth and tongue, and listening to the results. “They get there by 12 months,” Professor Stoel-Gammon continued, “and to me the reason they get there is because they have become aware of the oral motor movements that differentiate between a b and an m.”
Babies have to hear real language from real people to learn these skills. Television doesn’t do it, and neither do educational videos: recent research suggests that this learning is in part shaped by the quality and context of adult response.
To study babbling, researchers have begun to look at the social response — at the baby and the parent together. Michael H. Goldstein, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, has done experiments showing that babies learn better from parental stimulation — acquiring new sounds and new sound patterns, for example — if parents provide that stimulation specifically in response to the baby’s babble.
“In that moment of babbling, babies seem to be primed to take in more information,” he said. “It’s about creating a social interaction where now you can learn new things.”
A study this year by this group looked at how babies learn the names of new objects. Again, offering the new vocabulary words specifically in response to the babies’ own vocalizations meant the babies learned the names better.
The experimenters argue that a baby’s vocalizations signal a state of focused attention, a readiness to learn language. When parents respond to babble by naming the object at hand, the argument goes, children are more likely to learn words. So if a baby looks at an apple and says, “Ba ba!” it’s better to respond by naming the apple than by guessing, for example, “Do you want your bottle?”
“We think that babies tend to emit babbles when they’re in a state where they’re ready to learn new information, they’re aroused, they’re interested,” Professor Goldstein said. “When babies are interested in something, they tend to do a furrowed brow,” he continued; parents should understand that babble may be “an acoustic version of furrowing one’s brow.”
Right there, in the exam room, I have that essential experimental combination, the baby and the parent. It’s an opportunity to check up on the baby’s progress in forming sounds, but also an opportunity to help parents respond to the baby’s interest in learning how to name the world — a universal human impulse expressed in the canonical syllables of a universal human soundtrack.
Helping Schools’ Chefs Find Alternatives to Frozen Pizza
Mark Barrett, the 37-year-old chef at Henry’s Restaurant on the Upper West Side, has big ambitions for the $20,000 Hobart food mixer that sits, unused, in the kitchen of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. “Instead of serving frozen pizza out of a box, they could be making their own dough,” Mr. Barrett suggested during a tour of the school kitchen this week.
He also has big ambitions for the school’s head chef, Larry Cowell, who is one of about 40 employees of school cafeterias scheduled to attend a training session with Mr. Barrett on Wednesday sponsored by the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food.
“We’ll see you there, right, Larry?” Mr. Barrett asked Mr. Cowell.
“Um, I think I have a doctor’s appointment that day,” Mr. Cowell said, half-joking.
Hard to blame him for being a little skeptical. After three decades of cooking in New York schools, Mr. Cowell might well be wary of the latest in a string of outsiders swooping in with suggestions about overhauling the frozen foods that feed thousands of students daily.
New York City schools have already made sweeping changes in their menus over the past few years: serving only low-fat milk and whole-wheat buns and breads; installing salad bars; and replacing canned vegetables with frozen ones, which are lower in sodium.
The contents of the vending machines in the DeWitt Clinton basement cafeteria, typical of city schools since March, looked like what the Automat might have offered had it been taken over by Canyon Ranch: Blueberry Pomegranate Trail Mix Crunch, Organic Berry Water, Sensible Foods Crunch Dried Snacks. Aha, there was one throwback to the bad old days of snacking: a Pop-Tart. Closer inspection revealed that it was a whole-grain Pop-Tart. (Is nothing sacred?)
The city’s schools have also benefited from the celebrity of devoted players like Bill Telepan, owner and chef of Telepan, who worked with Michelle Obama to create a template for her Chefs Move to Schools program, which encourages chefs to adopt public schools to educate about healthy cuisine.
In the past year, the number of New York chefs committed to the cause has doubled, Mr. Telepan said, to about 20, including names like Jonathan Waxman of Barbuto and Jennifer McCoy of Craft.
With school food an officially sexy subject, volunteering in the cafeteria may well become one more station of the cross for aspiring celebrity chefs, along with televised competitions and spots on local news.
At DeWitt Clinton the other day, Mr. Barrett tasted a bean stew being offered for lunch — a recipe provided by the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food — and nodded with tepid approval. Over about 10 minutes, the ratio of students in the line picking reheated frozen pizza over the bean stew was roughly a gazillion to one. But most of them also grabbed fruit (no other option is available for dessert), and one boy in a gray hooded sweatshirt piled his plate so high with baby carrots from the salad bar that they nearly toppled.
“Some food tastes good,” he said. “This food tastes like it is good.” Michael Pollan might have wept.
At the training Wednesday, Mr. Barrett hopes to enhance some of the cooks’ techniques, so the healthy plant-based recipes the coalition suggests will taste as tempting as possible.
“Kids won’t eat healthy if it tastes like a cardboard box,” Mr. Barrett said. “Simple techniques, like toasting the spices, goes a long way.”
What might be even more effective to get students to try new things like the bean stew: getting rid of the pizza.
The elegant cuisine already on offer at DeWitt Clinton — wheat berries were mixed in with the rice served that day — is in stark contrast with the typically institutional feel of the school itself, which saw fighting so severe this month that the police were called in and issued several notices of disorderly conduct to students. Budget cuts, student violence, overworked teachers — those are intractable problems. Food, on the other hand — that can be fixed, with training, with simple shifts in what gets ordered, with will and good will.
Occasionally, food and violence have been known to mix in high schools: The chaos at DeWitt Clinton that led to the police visit started out as a food fight in the cafeteria. On a Facebook page called “I survived DeWitt Clinton 10/1/10,” a student named Jazmin Castillo wrote, “It was mad scary, and crazy.” She got milk in her boot, she said, and “got hit by a pear at the food fight.”
It could have been worse. It could have been a Pop-Tart.
Navajos Hope to Shift From Coal to Wind and Sun
For decades, coal has been an economic lifeline for the Navajos, even as mining and power plant emissions dulled the blue skies and sullied the waters of their sprawling reservation.
But today there are stirrings of rebellion. Seeking to reverse years of environmental degradation and return to their traditional values, many Navajos are calling for a future built instead on solar farms, ecotourism and microbusinesses.
“At some point we have to wean ourselves,” Earl Tulley, a Navajo housing official, said of coal as he sat on the dirt floor of his family’s hogan, a traditional circular dwelling.
Mr. Tulley, who is running for vice president of the Navajo Nation in the Nov. 2 election, represents a growing movement among Navajos that embraces environmental healing and greater reliance on the sun and wind, abundant resources on a 17 million-acre reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
“We need to look at the bigger picture of sustainable development,” said Mr. Tulley, the first environmentalist to run on a Navajo presidential ticket.
With nearly 300,000 members, the Navajo Nation is the country’s largest tribe, according to Census Bureau estimates, and it has the biggest reservation. Coal mines and coal-fired power plants on the reservation and on lands shared with the Hopi provide about 1,500 jobs and more than a third of the tribe’s annual operating budget, the largest source of revenue after government grants and taxes.
At the grass-roots level, the internal movement advocating a retreat from coal is both a reaction to the environmental damage and the health consequences of mining — water loss and contamination, smog and soot pollution — and a reconsideration of centuries-old tenets.
In Navajo culture, some spiritual guides say, digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium (which the reservation also produced until health issues led to a ban in 2005) is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.
“As medicine people, we don’t extract resources,” said Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about 100 healers known as medicine men and women.
But the shift is also prompted by economic realities. Tribal leaders say the Navajo Nation’s income from coal has dwindled 15 percent to 20 percent in recent years as federal and state pollution regulations have imposed costly restrictions and lessened the demand for mining.
Two coal mines on the reservation have shut down in the last five years. One of them, the Black Mesa mine, ceased operations because the owners of the power plant it fed in Laughlin, Nev., chose to close the plant in 2005 rather than spend $1.2 billion on retrofitting it to meet pollution controls required by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Early this month, the E.P.A. signaled that it would require an Arizona utility to install $717 million in emission controls at another site on the reservation, the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico, describing it as the highest emitter of nitrous oxide of any power plant in the nation. It is also weighing costly new rules for the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona.
And states that rely on Navajo coal, like California, are increasingly imposing greenhouse gas emissions standards and requiring renewable energy purchases, banning or restricting the use of coal for electricity.
So even as they seek higher royalties and new markets for their vast coal reserves, tribal officials say they are working to draft the tribe’s first comprehensive energy policy and are gradually turning to casinos, renewable energy projects and other sources for income.
This year the tribal government approved a wind farm to be built west of Flagstaff, Ariz., to power up to 20,000 homes in the region. Last year, the tribal legislative council also created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to promote environmentally friendly jobs and businesses.
“We need to create our own businesses and control our destiny,” said Ben Shelly, the Navajo Nation vice president, who is now running for president against Lynda Lovejoy, a state senator in New Mexico and Mr. Tulley’s running mate.
That message is gaining traction among Navajos who have reaped few benefits from coal or who feel that their health has suffered because of it.
Curtis Yazzie, 43, for example, lives in northeastern Arizona without running water or electricity in a log cabin just a stone’s throw from the Kayenta mine.
Tribal officials, who say some families live so remotely that it would cost too much to run power lines to their homes, have begun bringing hybrid solar and wind power to some of the estimated 18,000 homes on the reservation without electricity. But Mr. Yazzie says that air and water pollution, not electricity, are his first concerns.
“Quite a few of my relatives have made a good living working for the coal mine, but a lot of them are beginning to have health problems,” he said. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect me.”
One of those relatives is Daniel Benally, 73, who says he lives with shortness of breath after working for the Black Mesa mine in the same area for 35 years as a heavy equipment operator. Coal provided for his family, including 15 children from two marriages, but he said he now believed that the job was not worth the health and environmental problems.
“There’s no equity between benefit and damage,” he said in Navajo through a translator.
About 600 mine, pipeline and power plant jobs were affected when the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada and Peabody’s Black Mesa mine shut down.
But that also meant that Peabody stopped drawing water from the local aquifer for the coal slurry carried by an underground pipeline to the power plant — a victory for Navajo and national environmental groups active in the area, like the Sierra Club.
Studies have shown serious declines in the water levels of the Navajo aquifer after decades of massive pumping for coal slurry operations. And the E.P.A. has singled out the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Generating Station as two of the largest air polluters in the country, affecting visibility in 27 of the area’s “most pristine and precious natural areas,” including the Grand Canyon.
The regional E.P.A. director, Jared Blumenfeld, said the plants were the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 emitters of nitrogen oxides, which form fine particulates resulting in cases of asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart attacks and premature deaths.
Environmentalists are now advocating for a more diversified Navajo economy and trying to push power plants to invest in wind and solar projects.
“It’s a new day for the Navajo people,” said Lori Goodman, an official with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, a group founded 22 years ago by Mr. Tulley. “We can’t be trashing the land anymore.”
Both presidential candidates in the Navajo election have made the pursuit of cleaner energy a campaign theme, but significant hurdles remain, including that Indian tribes, as sovereign entities, are not eligible for tax credits that help finance renewable energy projects elsewhere.
And replacing coal revenue would not be easy. The mining jobs that remain, which pay union wages, are still precious on a reservation where unemployment is estimated at 50 percent to 60 percent.
“Mining on Black Mesa,” Peabody officials said in a statement, “has generated $12 billion in direct and implied economic benefits over the past 40 years, created thousands of jobs, sent thousands of students to college and restored lands to a condition that is as much as 20 times more productive than native range.”
They added, “Renewables won’t come close to matching the scale of these benefits.”
But many Navajos see the waning of coal as inevitable and are already looking ahead. Some residents and communities are joining together or pairing with outside companies to pursue small-scale renewable energy projects on their own.
Wahleah Johns, a member of the new Navajo Green Economy Commission, is studying the feasibility of a small solar project on reclaimed mining lands with two associates. In the meantime, she uses solar panels as a consciousness-raising tool.
“How can we utilize reclamation lands?” she said to Mr. Yazzie during a recent visit as they held their young daughters in his living room. “Maybe we can use them for solar panels to generate electricity for Los Angeles, to transform something that’s been devastating for our land and water into something that can generate revenue for your family, for your kids.”
Mr. Yazzie, who lives with his wife, three children and two brothers, said he liked the idea. “Once Peabody takes all the coal out, it’ll be gone,” he said. “Solar would be long-term. Solar and wind, we don’t have a problem with. It’s pretty windy out here.”
At a Long Island Middle School, a Course in What Unites and Divides
Fifteen eighth graders at Jericho Middle School were considering a fictional case of stereotyping by hair color the other day, or how a boy came to be prejudiced against people with green hair, or “greenies.” From there, they extrapolated to the stereotypes in their own lives: dumb football players, Asian math whizzes, boring bankers.
“We can feel stronger going back to our hallways,” the teacher, Elisa Weidenbaum Waters, said, “going back to our homes, going back to our society, and saying: ‘You know what? What you said is a stereotype, and that’s not cool.’ ”
This year, Jericho, a high-performing district, is offering an unusual elective for its middle-school students that channels the soul-searching and team-building activities of a diversity workshop into a yearlong class for credit. The course, which focuses on diversity, “will have you actively thinking about everything from food through language in a way you may never have before as we learn about what unites and divides all of us, and why,” a description said.
“What I’m looking to do,” said Ms. Waters, 40, who has long been active in social causes, “is build acceptance, awareness and appreciation that people may be different than you.”
There are no quizzes or tests in the class, and homework is assigned only occasionally. Instead, there are free-flowing discussions about privilege, discrimination and oppression, and readings, like the recent one about people with green hair from “Prejudiced — How Do People Get That Way?” — a book published by the Anti-Defamation League.
Jericho’s new class comes amid a renewed focus on diversity and antibullying programs in schools, heightened by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman whose intimate encounter with a man was said to have been streamed over the Internet by his roommate and another student.
“It’s a concern that students are not prepared for what they’re going to face when they leave the school district, particularly in more homogenous communities,” said Timothy G. Kremer, the executive director of the New York State School Boards Association, who supports the elective.
With about a third of its current student population Asian, nearly double the proportion in 2004, Jericho’s school district is changing. Nevertheless, it is still largely wealthy, and it is 63 percent white.
Henry L. Grishman, the Jericho superintendent, said special assemblies and programs might not be enough. “While there is a place for one-shot deals, whether it’s for kids’ awareness or teacher training, an ongoing class has so much more meaningful impact,” Mr. Grishman said.
But Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, questioned whether a class in diversity was necessary, saying it could too easily become “amorphous mush” with little intellectual value.
Mr. Hess, who is a former high school social studies teacher, added that in a public school, problems could also arise if class discussions about complex societal situations became politicized to favor more popular, progressive views.
“It’s very easy to appeal to a teenager’s imagination and get him riled up about the plight of a homeless youth in New York City,” Mr. Hess said.
But he said it was less intuitive for teenagers to consider the issues faced by a doctor who was facing staggering student loans and was asked to pay high taxes to finance programs for homeless youth.
“It’s not intuitive, and it’s easy to overlook, but it’s the other half of the equation,” Mr. Hess said.
Thirty students have enrolled in the new class, which is divided into seventh- and eighth-grade sections and meets for 45 minutes every other day. Called “Seedlings” — at least one parent mistook it for a gardening class — it grew out of teacher training workshops taught by Ms. Waters, and is named after a national program, SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), that she attended in 2005.
Ms. Waters, who also teaches Spanish, said students would be graded not on their personal views, but rather on how they participated in discussions and challenged themselves, and on what they wrote in self-evaluations.
“How do you truly grade kids learning to be better humans?” she said.
But while there is less academic pressure, the class is unlike other electives. Discussion topics, like Mr. Clementi’s suicide, have weighed heavily on some of the students.
“It was really emotional for me,” Brady Berman, 12, a seventh grader, said. “To be treated like that for being homosexual, it was almost like I felt the pain for his family.”
Ms. Waters said she was careful to keep the class materials age-appropriate. For instance, while she shows the movie “Crash” in her workshops for teachers, she will not play it in her middle-school classes.
As a group, the students have become unusually close.
“I know thousands of things about every single person in this class,” said Sam Newman, 13, an eighth grader. “We’re learning how to make the world a more connected place.”
Emma Distler, 13, an eighth grader who was adopted from China by a Jewish family, said she had become more aware of challenging stereotypes, even ones that do not seem harmful on their face. A classmate recently joked to her: “Oh, you’re Asian, you’re smart; tell me the answer.”
“I like it, kind of,” she said, about people thinking she is smart. “But sometimes when people come up to me and I don’t know the answer, I feel pressured.”
Emma said she had come into class with preconceived notions about athletes in the school: She was surprised to find herself sitting across from them in class.
“I always thought they were the jocks, and why would they want to be here when they could be hanging out with their friends,” she said. “That shows what stereotyping can do to you.”
At Mosques, Inviting Non-Muslims Inside to Ease Hostility Toward Islam
Brother Abdullah was working the sidewalk outside the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz Mosque in Jamaica, Queens, on Friday, looking for the curious, fearful, idle and confused.
It was an hour into a two-hour open house intended to dispel ignorance and promote neighborliness and interfaith harmony. But only four guests, all Muslim, had showed up at the mosque, and all the passers-by he had stopped had said they had somewhere else to go.
“I want you to write that we tried,” said Brother Abdullah, a member of the mosque’s congregation who declined to give his last name, as he watched another pedestrian hurry away down the block. “Efforts were made to the public, and there’s nothing for them to avoid or shun. Islam is a good way of life.”
This week, hundreds of mosques and Islamic organizations across the country have been encouraging their members to invite non-Muslims to attend prayers, discussions and tours of Islamic centers as a way to defuse hostility toward the Muslim population.
In New York, about 20 mosques are participating in the event, which began last weekend and ends on Sunday. And organizers said that it had been a success — the experience of the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz Mosque notwithstanding — with hundreds of visitors attending lectures, tours and question-and-answer sessions at Islamic centers in all five boroughs of New York City and on Long Island.
The idea for the program, “A Week of Dialogue,” emerged from a summit of Islamic leaders last month in New York and was, in part, a response to the furor surrounding a plan to open a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero.
“In terms of rectifying this Islamophobia and bigotry, we should focus on our relationship with our neighbors,” said Zaheer Uddin, executive director of the Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan New York, an umbrella group of mosques and Islamic groups in the city. “If our neighbors are happy, they can’t make some propaganda stuff.”
A New York Times poll in August found that 75 percent of New Yorkers had never visited a mosque, and that those who had, or who had a close Muslim friend, were more likely to support the Muslim center planned in Lower Manhattan.
That same poll also found widespread anxiety among New Yorkers about Muslims. One-fifth of New Yorkers acknowledged animosity toward Muslims, and nearly 60 percent said people they knew had negative feelings toward Muslims because of 9/11.
Juan Williams gave voice to such concerns this week when he said on the Fox News Channel, where he is a political analyst, that he got “nervous” when he saw people in “Muslim garb” on an airplane. National Public Radio, where Mr. Williams had also worked, terminated his contract on Wednesday; Fox gave him a new contract on Thursday.
While some Islamic leaders publicly supported the decision to fire Mr. Williams, the organizers of the weeklong dialogue said the open houses were intended to help dispel just the sort of concerns that Mr. Williams expressed.
Though mosques are always open to the public, the organizers said they felt that a special open-house program was necessary to bring non-Muslims through the door.
On most days this week, at least two mosques somewhere in the city have held programs to accommodate visitors. Before Friday, attendance at the programs ranged from about a dozen visitors — at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York in Manhattan — to more than 100 at the Muslim Center of Long Island, or Masjid Darul Quran, in Bay Shore, according to organizers.
Organizers said the interactions had been peaceful and engaging, for the congregations and the visitors alike.
“So far so good,” Mr. Uddin said. “Very friendly, very pleasant, very educational.”
For many visitors, it is the first time they have been to a mosque, organizers said. They brought questions about prayer rituals, Muslim holidays and the similarities and differences between Islam and other religions.
In recent months, Islamic leaders in the United States have been wrestling with the question of how to improve their faith’s image in the public eye.
In Jamaica on Friday, Aiyub Abdul Baqi, an imam who was visiting from another mosque, addressed the small gathering, which also included about a 10 members of the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz congregation. He spoke about the main tenets of Islam and talked about the early history of Islam in the United States.
“This is not a gathering to convert anyone,” he said. “This is an attempt to clear up some of the lies and misconceptions that some people have tried to perpetuate.”
His audience, already converted, nodded in assent.
President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start several years ago typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada’s two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And the cost of its charter schools — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about their utility as a nationwide model.
Mr. Canada, 58, who began putting his ideas into practice on a single block, on West 119th Street, in the mid-1990s, does not apologize for the cost of his model, saying his goals are wider than just fixing a school or two. His hope is to prove that if money is spent in a concentrated way to give poor children the things middle-class children take for granted — like high-quality schooling, a safe neighborhood, parents who read to them, and good medical care — they will not pass on the patterns of poverty to another generation.
“You could, in theory, figure out a less costly way of working with a small number of kids, and providing them with an education,” Mr. Canada said. “But that is not what we are attempting to do. We are attempting to save a community and its kids all at the same time.”
Few would deny that a middle-class renaissance is under way in the sections of Harlem where Mr. Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone have focused their efforts. The zone extends from 116th to 143rd Streets, between Madison Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
All children who live in the zone have access to many of its services, including after-school programs, asthma care, precollege advice and adult classes for expectant parents, called Baby College. The organization has placed young teaching assistants, known as peacemakers, in many of the elementary school classrooms in the area and poured money into organizing block associations, helping tenants buy buildings from the city, and refurbishing parks and playgrounds. By linking services, the program aims to improve on early-childhood programs like Head Start, whose impact has been shown to evaporate as children age.
Amid the facades of new condominiums that signal gentrification, however, deep poverty remains. So does low student performance in most of the neighborhood’s public schools, despite modest gains over the past decade and a growing number of better-performing charter schools, a development Mr. Canada helped pioneer.
Last month, the Obama administration awarded $10 million in grants to 21 neighborhood groups around the country to help them plan their own versions of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the president is seeking $210 million for next year, although appropriations committees in the Senate and the House have earmarked only $20 million and $60 million, respectively.
But there has been some criticism. Grover J. Whitehurst, a co-author of a Brookings Institution analysis of the zone, said there was still too little evidence that its approach, of linking social services to promote student achievement, justified an investment of federal education dollars, and urged that a more rigorous study be conducted.
“My quarrel is not with an effort in Harlem funded largely by philanthropy, it’s with the federal approach to scaling this up,” Mr. Whitehurst said. “It just doesn’t rise to the level of evidence the president and the secretary of education said they were going to apply in determining their investments.”
In awarding the grants, Education Secretary Arne Duncan emphasized, the government hoped neighborhoods would coordinate and stretch their existing services, while asking the private sector to step up and match financing.
“The cost is going to vary community to community,” Mr. Duncan said, “but we think this is an absolute investment.”
In 2009, the Harlem Children’s Zone had assets of nearly $200 million, and the project’s operating budget this year is $84 million, two-thirds of it from private donations. Last month, the Goldman Sachs Foundation pledged $20 million toward constructing an additional school building. With two billionaires, Stanley Druckenmiller and Kenneth Langone, on the board, its access to capital is unusually strong.
Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, who also sits on the children’s zone board, said that while test scores were important, so was treating Harlem’s childhood asthma crisis, which is a cause of absenteeism. “What it’s about to us is dealing with all of the issues these kids encounter,” Mr. Cohn said.
The zone’s two charter schools are open to all city children by lottery. Officially, the schools spend, per student, $12,443 in public money and $3,482 in private financing each year. But that does not include the costs of a 4 p.m.-to-6 p.m. after-school program, rewards for student performance, a chef who prepares healthy meals, central administration and most building costs, and some of the expense of the students’ free health and dental care, which come out of the zone’s overall budget, said Marty Lipp, the zone’s communications director.
Regular public schools in New York City spend about $14,452 each year per general education student, less than half of which is generally for classroom instruction.
In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school.
The school, which opened in 2004 in a gleaming new building on 125th Street, should have had a senior class by now, but the batch of students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on. Mr. Canada called the dismissal “a tragedy.”
On a recent Thursday, the current high school students, neatly attired in blue and white uniforms, got special help in college note-taking skills, and chatted animatedly about velocity in an advanced physics class. Most were well below grade level when they first got to the school and took three or four years to catch up; many are now ahead.
“You really have to put money into personnel,” said Marquitta Speller, who has been the high school principal since January. “I don’t think you can experience the same level of success without the same level of resources.”
But most of the seventh graders, now starting their third year in the school, are still struggling. Just 15 percent passed the 2010 state English test, a number that Mr. Canada said was “unacceptably low” but not out of line with the school’s experience in lifting student performance over time. Several teachers have been fired as a result of the low scores, and others were reassigned, he said.
Giving administrators the ability to fire teachers for poor performance is one of the central suggestions of “Waiting for ‘Superman.’ ” Over all, 38 percent of Promise Academy I’s students in third through sixth grade passed the 2010 English test under the state’s new guidelines, placing it in the lower half of charter schools citywide, and below the city’s overall passing rate of 42 percent. In Harlem as a whole, just 29 percent of children passed.
Promise Academy II, an elementary school that occupies part of a public school building, did better, with 62 percent passing in English, among the top 10 percent of charters. But because it lost more ground than comparable schools, it got a C from the city on its annual A-to-F report card, and an F in the student progress category. Both schools continued to outperform the city in math, with 60 percent passing in one school and 81 percent in the other.
A few recent studies have broached the question of what was helping the zone’s students raise attendance and test scores: the interlocking social services, or what was going on in the classroom? But they were based on state test results in years when the exams were easier to pass, and they may now be less conclusive.
One study, by the Harvard researchers Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr., found that while Promise Academy students who entered the sixth grade in 2005 had raised their test scores so much by the eighth grade that they had “reversed the black-white achievement gap in mathematics” and reduced it in English, there was “at best modest evidence” that the social programs were driving that success. In 2009, nearly all the students passed the math test.
“The challenge,” the researchers wrote, “is to find lower-cost ways to achieve similar results in regular public schools.”
Mr. Whitehurst’s 2010 Brookings analysis went further, noting that test performance at the two charter schools was only middling among charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, even though higher-performing schools, like those in the lauded KIPP network, had no comparable network of cradle-to-college services.
Dave Levin, a co-founder of KIPP, took issue with the study, noting that most of his schools already had counselors and college-advice programs, and all were expanding to serve kindergarten through grade 12, just like Mr. Canada’s. But KIPP schools do try to stick to the per-student spending of the surrounding district “to demonstrate what schools can do on the money that they have.”
“I think there are differences, but we are both deeply committed to meeting all of the children’s needs,” Mr. Levin said.
The Harlem Children’s Zone is not the only block-by-block effort to ease poverty, though it is unusual in its intensive focus on children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example, is wrapping up projects in seven cities called Making Connections Neighborhoods that promoted a “two-generation approach” with job-training programs for parents. An effort that turned around the East Lake Meadows neighborhood in Atlanta used the construction of mixed-income housing and the renovation of a golf course as the fulcrum.
While it is still years away from confirming its broader theories about poverty, the Harlem Children’s Zone has already had some impact on thousands of children. Its after-school college advice office has helped place 650 students in college, and it supports them until they graduate. Its asthma initiative has drastically reduced emergency room visits and missed school days among its 1,000 participants. Preschool students have made bounds in kindergarten readiness. Parent satisfaction in the charter schools, as measured by city surveys, is high.
And Mr. Canada has achieved superhero status among those who admire him for his vision. Lisbeth B. Schorr, a senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, said, “The fact that the impact has not been proven doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
Understanding ‘Ba Ba Ba’ as a Key to Development
As a pediatrician, I always ask about babble. “Is the baby making sounds?” I ask the parent of a 4-month-old, a 6-month-old, a 9-month-old. The answer is rarely no. But if it is, it’s important to try to find out what’s going on.
If a baby isn’t babbling normally, something may be interrupting what should be a critical chain: not enough words being said to the baby, a problem preventing the baby from hearing what’s said, or from processing those words. Something wrong in the home, in the hearing or perhaps in the brain.
Babble is increasingly being understood as an essential precursor to speech, and as a key predictor of both cognitive and social emotional development. And research is teasing apart the phonetic components of babble, along with the interplay of neurologic, cognitive and social factors.
The first thing to know about babble is also the first thing scientists noticed: babies all over the world babble in similar ways. During the second year of life, toddlers shape their sounds into the words of their native tongues.
The word “babble” is both significant and representative — repetitive syllables, playing around with the same all-important consonants. (Indeed, the word seems to be derived not from the biblical Tower of Babel, as folk wisdom has it, but from the “ba ba” sound babies make.)
Some of the most exciting new research, according to D. Kimbrough Oller, a professor of audiology and speech-language pathology at the University of Memphis, analyzes the sounds that babies make in the first half-year of life, when they are “squealing and growling and producing gooing sounds.” These sounds are foundations of later language, he said, and they figure in all kinds of social interactions and play between parents and babies — but they do not involve formed syllables, or anything that yet sounds like words.
“By the time you get past 6 months of age, babies begin to produce canonical babbling, well-formed syllables,” Professor Oller said. “Parents don’t treat those earlier sounds as words; when canonical syllables begin to appear, parents recognize the syllables as negotiable.” That is, when the baby says something like “ba ba ba,” the parent may see it as an attempt to name something and may propose a word in response.
Most of the time, I ask parents: “Does he make noise? Does she sound like she’s talking?” And most of the time, parents nod and smile, acknowledging the baby voices that have become part of the family conversation.
But the new research suggests a more detailed line of questions: by 7 months or so, have the sounds developed into that canonical babble, including both vowels and consonants? Babies who go on vocalizing without many consonants, making only aaa and ooo sounds, are not practicing the sounds that will lead to word formation, not getting the mouth muscle practice necessary for understandable language to emerge.
“A baby hears all these things and is able to differentiate them before the baby can produce them,” said Carol Stoel-Gammon, an emeritus professor of speech and hearing sciences at the University of Washington. “To make an m, you have to close your mouth and the air has to come out your nose. It’s not in your brain somewhere — you have to learn it.”
The consonants in babble mean the baby is practicing, shaping different sounds by learning to maneuver the mouth and tongue, and listening to the results. “They get there by 12 months,” Professor Stoel-Gammon continued, “and to me the reason they get there is because they have become aware of the oral motor movements that differentiate between a b and an m.”
Babies have to hear real language from real people to learn these skills. Television doesn’t do it, and neither do educational videos: recent research suggests that this learning is in part shaped by the quality and context of adult response.
To study babbling, researchers have begun to look at the social response — at the baby and the parent together. Michael H. Goldstein, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, has done experiments showing that babies learn better from parental stimulation — acquiring new sounds and new sound patterns, for example — if parents provide that stimulation specifically in response to the baby’s babble.
“In that moment of babbling, babies seem to be primed to take in more information,” he said. “It’s about creating a social interaction where now you can learn new things.”
A study this year by this group looked at how babies learn the names of new objects. Again, offering the new vocabulary words specifically in response to the babies’ own vocalizations meant the babies learned the names better.
The experimenters argue that a baby’s vocalizations signal a state of focused attention, a readiness to learn language. When parents respond to babble by naming the object at hand, the argument goes, children are more likely to learn words. So if a baby looks at an apple and says, “Ba ba!” it’s better to respond by naming the apple than by guessing, for example, “Do you want your bottle?”
“We think that babies tend to emit babbles when they’re in a state where they’re ready to learn new information, they’re aroused, they’re interested,” Professor Goldstein said. “When babies are interested in something, they tend to do a furrowed brow,” he continued; parents should understand that babble may be “an acoustic version of furrowing one’s brow.”
Right there, in the exam room, I have that essential experimental combination, the baby and the parent. It’s an opportunity to check up on the baby’s progress in forming sounds, but also an opportunity to help parents respond to the baby’s interest in learning how to name the world — a universal human impulse expressed in the canonical syllables of a universal human soundtrack.
Helping Schools’ Chefs Find Alternatives to Frozen Pizza
Mark Barrett, the 37-year-old chef at Henry’s Restaurant on the Upper West Side, has big ambitions for the $20,000 Hobart food mixer that sits, unused, in the kitchen of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. “Instead of serving frozen pizza out of a box, they could be making their own dough,” Mr. Barrett suggested during a tour of the school kitchen this week.
He also has big ambitions for the school’s head chef, Larry Cowell, who is one of about 40 employees of school cafeterias scheduled to attend a training session with Mr. Barrett on Wednesday sponsored by the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food.
“We’ll see you there, right, Larry?” Mr. Barrett asked Mr. Cowell.
“Um, I think I have a doctor’s appointment that day,” Mr. Cowell said, half-joking.
Hard to blame him for being a little skeptical. After three decades of cooking in New York schools, Mr. Cowell might well be wary of the latest in a string of outsiders swooping in with suggestions about overhauling the frozen foods that feed thousands of students daily.
New York City schools have already made sweeping changes in their menus over the past few years: serving only low-fat milk and whole-wheat buns and breads; installing salad bars; and replacing canned vegetables with frozen ones, which are lower in sodium.
The contents of the vending machines in the DeWitt Clinton basement cafeteria, typical of city schools since March, looked like what the Automat might have offered had it been taken over by Canyon Ranch: Blueberry Pomegranate Trail Mix Crunch, Organic Berry Water, Sensible Foods Crunch Dried Snacks. Aha, there was one throwback to the bad old days of snacking: a Pop-Tart. Closer inspection revealed that it was a whole-grain Pop-Tart. (Is nothing sacred?)
The city’s schools have also benefited from the celebrity of devoted players like Bill Telepan, owner and chef of Telepan, who worked with Michelle Obama to create a template for her Chefs Move to Schools program, which encourages chefs to adopt public schools to educate about healthy cuisine.
In the past year, the number of New York chefs committed to the cause has doubled, Mr. Telepan said, to about 20, including names like Jonathan Waxman of Barbuto and Jennifer McCoy of Craft.
With school food an officially sexy subject, volunteering in the cafeteria may well become one more station of the cross for aspiring celebrity chefs, along with televised competitions and spots on local news.
At DeWitt Clinton the other day, Mr. Barrett tasted a bean stew being offered for lunch — a recipe provided by the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food — and nodded with tepid approval. Over about 10 minutes, the ratio of students in the line picking reheated frozen pizza over the bean stew was roughly a gazillion to one. But most of them also grabbed fruit (no other option is available for dessert), and one boy in a gray hooded sweatshirt piled his plate so high with baby carrots from the salad bar that they nearly toppled.
“Some food tastes good,” he said. “This food tastes like it is good.” Michael Pollan might have wept.
At the training Wednesday, Mr. Barrett hopes to enhance some of the cooks’ techniques, so the healthy plant-based recipes the coalition suggests will taste as tempting as possible.
“Kids won’t eat healthy if it tastes like a cardboard box,” Mr. Barrett said. “Simple techniques, like toasting the spices, goes a long way.”
What might be even more effective to get students to try new things like the bean stew: getting rid of the pizza.
The elegant cuisine already on offer at DeWitt Clinton — wheat berries were mixed in with the rice served that day — is in stark contrast with the typically institutional feel of the school itself, which saw fighting so severe this month that the police were called in and issued several notices of disorderly conduct to students. Budget cuts, student violence, overworked teachers — those are intractable problems. Food, on the other hand — that can be fixed, with training, with simple shifts in what gets ordered, with will and good will.
Occasionally, food and violence have been known to mix in high schools: The chaos at DeWitt Clinton that led to the police visit started out as a food fight in the cafeteria. On a Facebook page called “I survived DeWitt Clinton 10/1/10,” a student named Jazmin Castillo wrote, “It was mad scary, and crazy.” She got milk in her boot, she said, and “got hit by a pear at the food fight.”
It could have been worse. It could have been a Pop-Tart.
Navajos Hope to Shift From Coal to Wind and Sun
For decades, coal has been an economic lifeline for the Navajos, even as mining and power plant emissions dulled the blue skies and sullied the waters of their sprawling reservation.
But today there are stirrings of rebellion. Seeking to reverse years of environmental degradation and return to their traditional values, many Navajos are calling for a future built instead on solar farms, ecotourism and microbusinesses.
“At some point we have to wean ourselves,” Earl Tulley, a Navajo housing official, said of coal as he sat on the dirt floor of his family’s hogan, a traditional circular dwelling.
Mr. Tulley, who is running for vice president of the Navajo Nation in the Nov. 2 election, represents a growing movement among Navajos that embraces environmental healing and greater reliance on the sun and wind, abundant resources on a 17 million-acre reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
“We need to look at the bigger picture of sustainable development,” said Mr. Tulley, the first environmentalist to run on a Navajo presidential ticket.
With nearly 300,000 members, the Navajo Nation is the country’s largest tribe, according to Census Bureau estimates, and it has the biggest reservation. Coal mines and coal-fired power plants on the reservation and on lands shared with the Hopi provide about 1,500 jobs and more than a third of the tribe’s annual operating budget, the largest source of revenue after government grants and taxes.
At the grass-roots level, the internal movement advocating a retreat from coal is both a reaction to the environmental damage and the health consequences of mining — water loss and contamination, smog and soot pollution — and a reconsideration of centuries-old tenets.
In Navajo culture, some spiritual guides say, digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium (which the reservation also produced until health issues led to a ban in 2005) is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.
“As medicine people, we don’t extract resources,” said Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about 100 healers known as medicine men and women.
But the shift is also prompted by economic realities. Tribal leaders say the Navajo Nation’s income from coal has dwindled 15 percent to 20 percent in recent years as federal and state pollution regulations have imposed costly restrictions and lessened the demand for mining.
Two coal mines on the reservation have shut down in the last five years. One of them, the Black Mesa mine, ceased operations because the owners of the power plant it fed in Laughlin, Nev., chose to close the plant in 2005 rather than spend $1.2 billion on retrofitting it to meet pollution controls required by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Early this month, the E.P.A. signaled that it would require an Arizona utility to install $717 million in emission controls at another site on the reservation, the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico, describing it as the highest emitter of nitrous oxide of any power plant in the nation. It is also weighing costly new rules for the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona.
And states that rely on Navajo coal, like California, are increasingly imposing greenhouse gas emissions standards and requiring renewable energy purchases, banning or restricting the use of coal for electricity.
So even as they seek higher royalties and new markets for their vast coal reserves, tribal officials say they are working to draft the tribe’s first comprehensive energy policy and are gradually turning to casinos, renewable energy projects and other sources for income.
This year the tribal government approved a wind farm to be built west of Flagstaff, Ariz., to power up to 20,000 homes in the region. Last year, the tribal legislative council also created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to promote environmentally friendly jobs and businesses.
“We need to create our own businesses and control our destiny,” said Ben Shelly, the Navajo Nation vice president, who is now running for president against Lynda Lovejoy, a state senator in New Mexico and Mr. Tulley’s running mate.
That message is gaining traction among Navajos who have reaped few benefits from coal or who feel that their health has suffered because of it.
Curtis Yazzie, 43, for example, lives in northeastern Arizona without running water or electricity in a log cabin just a stone’s throw from the Kayenta mine.
Tribal officials, who say some families live so remotely that it would cost too much to run power lines to their homes, have begun bringing hybrid solar and wind power to some of the estimated 18,000 homes on the reservation without electricity. But Mr. Yazzie says that air and water pollution, not electricity, are his first concerns.
“Quite a few of my relatives have made a good living working for the coal mine, but a lot of them are beginning to have health problems,” he said. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect me.”
One of those relatives is Daniel Benally, 73, who says he lives with shortness of breath after working for the Black Mesa mine in the same area for 35 years as a heavy equipment operator. Coal provided for his family, including 15 children from two marriages, but he said he now believed that the job was not worth the health and environmental problems.
“There’s no equity between benefit and damage,” he said in Navajo through a translator.
About 600 mine, pipeline and power plant jobs were affected when the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada and Peabody’s Black Mesa mine shut down.
But that also meant that Peabody stopped drawing water from the local aquifer for the coal slurry carried by an underground pipeline to the power plant — a victory for Navajo and national environmental groups active in the area, like the Sierra Club.
Studies have shown serious declines in the water levels of the Navajo aquifer after decades of massive pumping for coal slurry operations. And the E.P.A. has singled out the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Generating Station as two of the largest air polluters in the country, affecting visibility in 27 of the area’s “most pristine and precious natural areas,” including the Grand Canyon.
The regional E.P.A. director, Jared Blumenfeld, said the plants were the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 emitters of nitrogen oxides, which form fine particulates resulting in cases of asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart attacks and premature deaths.
Environmentalists are now advocating for a more diversified Navajo economy and trying to push power plants to invest in wind and solar projects.
“It’s a new day for the Navajo people,” said Lori Goodman, an official with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, a group founded 22 years ago by Mr. Tulley. “We can’t be trashing the land anymore.”
Both presidential candidates in the Navajo election have made the pursuit of cleaner energy a campaign theme, but significant hurdles remain, including that Indian tribes, as sovereign entities, are not eligible for tax credits that help finance renewable energy projects elsewhere.
And replacing coal revenue would not be easy. The mining jobs that remain, which pay union wages, are still precious on a reservation where unemployment is estimated at 50 percent to 60 percent.
“Mining on Black Mesa,” Peabody officials said in a statement, “has generated $12 billion in direct and implied economic benefits over the past 40 years, created thousands of jobs, sent thousands of students to college and restored lands to a condition that is as much as 20 times more productive than native range.”
They added, “Renewables won’t come close to matching the scale of these benefits.”
But many Navajos see the waning of coal as inevitable and are already looking ahead. Some residents and communities are joining together or pairing with outside companies to pursue small-scale renewable energy projects on their own.
Wahleah Johns, a member of the new Navajo Green Economy Commission, is studying the feasibility of a small solar project on reclaimed mining lands with two associates. In the meantime, she uses solar panels as a consciousness-raising tool.
“How can we utilize reclamation lands?” she said to Mr. Yazzie during a recent visit as they held their young daughters in his living room. “Maybe we can use them for solar panels to generate electricity for Los Angeles, to transform something that’s been devastating for our land and water into something that can generate revenue for your family, for your kids.”
Mr. Yazzie, who lives with his wife, three children and two brothers, said he liked the idea. “Once Peabody takes all the coal out, it’ll be gone,” he said. “Solar would be long-term. Solar and wind, we don’t have a problem with. It’s pretty windy out here.”
At a Long Island Middle School, a Course in What Unites and Divides
Fifteen eighth graders at Jericho Middle School were considering a fictional case of stereotyping by hair color the other day, or how a boy came to be prejudiced against people with green hair, or “greenies.” From there, they extrapolated to the stereotypes in their own lives: dumb football players, Asian math whizzes, boring bankers.
“We can feel stronger going back to our hallways,” the teacher, Elisa Weidenbaum Waters, said, “going back to our homes, going back to our society, and saying: ‘You know what? What you said is a stereotype, and that’s not cool.’ ”
This year, Jericho, a high-performing district, is offering an unusual elective for its middle-school students that channels the soul-searching and team-building activities of a diversity workshop into a yearlong class for credit. The course, which focuses on diversity, “will have you actively thinking about everything from food through language in a way you may never have before as we learn about what unites and divides all of us, and why,” a description said.
“What I’m looking to do,” said Ms. Waters, 40, who has long been active in social causes, “is build acceptance, awareness and appreciation that people may be different than you.”
There are no quizzes or tests in the class, and homework is assigned only occasionally. Instead, there are free-flowing discussions about privilege, discrimination and oppression, and readings, like the recent one about people with green hair from “Prejudiced — How Do People Get That Way?” — a book published by the Anti-Defamation League.
Jericho’s new class comes amid a renewed focus on diversity and antibullying programs in schools, heightened by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman whose intimate encounter with a man was said to have been streamed over the Internet by his roommate and another student.
“It’s a concern that students are not prepared for what they’re going to face when they leave the school district, particularly in more homogenous communities,” said Timothy G. Kremer, the executive director of the New York State School Boards Association, who supports the elective.
With about a third of its current student population Asian, nearly double the proportion in 2004, Jericho’s school district is changing. Nevertheless, it is still largely wealthy, and it is 63 percent white.
Henry L. Grishman, the Jericho superintendent, said special assemblies and programs might not be enough. “While there is a place for one-shot deals, whether it’s for kids’ awareness or teacher training, an ongoing class has so much more meaningful impact,” Mr. Grishman said.
But Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, questioned whether a class in diversity was necessary, saying it could too easily become “amorphous mush” with little intellectual value.
Mr. Hess, who is a former high school social studies teacher, added that in a public school, problems could also arise if class discussions about complex societal situations became politicized to favor more popular, progressive views.
“It’s very easy to appeal to a teenager’s imagination and get him riled up about the plight of a homeless youth in New York City,” Mr. Hess said.
But he said it was less intuitive for teenagers to consider the issues faced by a doctor who was facing staggering student loans and was asked to pay high taxes to finance programs for homeless youth.
“It’s not intuitive, and it’s easy to overlook, but it’s the other half of the equation,” Mr. Hess said.
Thirty students have enrolled in the new class, which is divided into seventh- and eighth-grade sections and meets for 45 minutes every other day. Called “Seedlings” — at least one parent mistook it for a gardening class — it grew out of teacher training workshops taught by Ms. Waters, and is named after a national program, SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), that she attended in 2005.
Ms. Waters, who also teaches Spanish, said students would be graded not on their personal views, but rather on how they participated in discussions and challenged themselves, and on what they wrote in self-evaluations.
“How do you truly grade kids learning to be better humans?” she said.
But while there is less academic pressure, the class is unlike other electives. Discussion topics, like Mr. Clementi’s suicide, have weighed heavily on some of the students.
“It was really emotional for me,” Brady Berman, 12, a seventh grader, said. “To be treated like that for being homosexual, it was almost like I felt the pain for his family.”
Ms. Waters said she was careful to keep the class materials age-appropriate. For instance, while she shows the movie “Crash” in her workshops for teachers, she will not play it in her middle-school classes.
As a group, the students have become unusually close.
“I know thousands of things about every single person in this class,” said Sam Newman, 13, an eighth grader. “We’re learning how to make the world a more connected place.”
Emma Distler, 13, an eighth grader who was adopted from China by a Jewish family, said she had become more aware of challenging stereotypes, even ones that do not seem harmful on their face. A classmate recently joked to her: “Oh, you’re Asian, you’re smart; tell me the answer.”
“I like it, kind of,” she said, about people thinking she is smart. “But sometimes when people come up to me and I don’t know the answer, I feel pressured.”
Emma said she had come into class with preconceived notions about athletes in the school: She was surprised to find herself sitting across from them in class.
“I always thought they were the jocks, and why would they want to be here when they could be hanging out with their friends,” she said. “That shows what stereotyping can do to you.”
At Mosques, Inviting Non-Muslims Inside to Ease Hostility Toward Islam
Brother Abdullah was working the sidewalk outside the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz Mosque in Jamaica, Queens, on Friday, looking for the curious, fearful, idle and confused.
It was an hour into a two-hour open house intended to dispel ignorance and promote neighborliness and interfaith harmony. But only four guests, all Muslim, had showed up at the mosque, and all the passers-by he had stopped had said they had somewhere else to go.
“I want you to write that we tried,” said Brother Abdullah, a member of the mosque’s congregation who declined to give his last name, as he watched another pedestrian hurry away down the block. “Efforts were made to the public, and there’s nothing for them to avoid or shun. Islam is a good way of life.”
This week, hundreds of mosques and Islamic organizations across the country have been encouraging their members to invite non-Muslims to attend prayers, discussions and tours of Islamic centers as a way to defuse hostility toward the Muslim population.
In New York, about 20 mosques are participating in the event, which began last weekend and ends on Sunday. And organizers said that it had been a success — the experience of the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz Mosque notwithstanding — with hundreds of visitors attending lectures, tours and question-and-answer sessions at Islamic centers in all five boroughs of New York City and on Long Island.
The idea for the program, “A Week of Dialogue,” emerged from a summit of Islamic leaders last month in New York and was, in part, a response to the furor surrounding a plan to open a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero.
“In terms of rectifying this Islamophobia and bigotry, we should focus on our relationship with our neighbors,” said Zaheer Uddin, executive director of the Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan New York, an umbrella group of mosques and Islamic groups in the city. “If our neighbors are happy, they can’t make some propaganda stuff.”
A New York Times poll in August found that 75 percent of New Yorkers had never visited a mosque, and that those who had, or who had a close Muslim friend, were more likely to support the Muslim center planned in Lower Manhattan.
That same poll also found widespread anxiety among New Yorkers about Muslims. One-fifth of New Yorkers acknowledged animosity toward Muslims, and nearly 60 percent said people they knew had negative feelings toward Muslims because of 9/11.
Juan Williams gave voice to such concerns this week when he said on the Fox News Channel, where he is a political analyst, that he got “nervous” when he saw people in “Muslim garb” on an airplane. National Public Radio, where Mr. Williams had also worked, terminated his contract on Wednesday; Fox gave him a new contract on Thursday.
While some Islamic leaders publicly supported the decision to fire Mr. Williams, the organizers of the weeklong dialogue said the open houses were intended to help dispel just the sort of concerns that Mr. Williams expressed.
Though mosques are always open to the public, the organizers said they felt that a special open-house program was necessary to bring non-Muslims through the door.
On most days this week, at least two mosques somewhere in the city have held programs to accommodate visitors. Before Friday, attendance at the programs ranged from about a dozen visitors — at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York in Manhattan — to more than 100 at the Muslim Center of Long Island, or Masjid Darul Quran, in Bay Shore, according to organizers.
Organizers said the interactions had been peaceful and engaging, for the congregations and the visitors alike.
“So far so good,” Mr. Uddin said. “Very friendly, very pleasant, very educational.”
For many visitors, it is the first time they have been to a mosque, organizers said. They brought questions about prayer rituals, Muslim holidays and the similarities and differences between Islam and other religions.
In recent months, Islamic leaders in the United States have been wrestling with the question of how to improve their faith’s image in the public eye.
In Jamaica on Friday, Aiyub Abdul Baqi, an imam who was visiting from another mosque, addressed the small gathering, which also included about a 10 members of the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz congregation. He spoke about the main tenets of Islam and talked about the early history of Islam in the United States.
“This is not a gathering to convert anyone,” he said. “This is an attempt to clear up some of the lies and misconceptions that some people have tried to perpetuate.”
His audience, already converted, nodded in assent.
