Youth Today: Small is Essential

By Karen Pittman, October 1999

Construction of a new 5,000-student high school in Los Angeles was halted last month because someone discovered that is was being built on a toxic site. Because of land scarcity, it turns out that this is a problem in big cities across the country.

We should be alarmed at the thought of schools being built on toxic sites. But how can we be so complacent about building schools that potentially are on toxic sites? Five thousand students! How can you build community among 5,000 students, one-third of who will be new to the community each year?

The standards movement is driving public education. The questions are which test, exit exams and minimum graduation requirements to institute on what timetable. The challenge now faced at all levels is putting student, teacher and building supports in place quickly enough that students are helped, not penalized by the push for quality.

Many inner city schools are undoubtedly inadequate places of learning in part because they are inadequate facilities — overcrowded, under-equipped and built for 19th rather than 21st century technology needs. New buildings are needed, especially in areas experiencing population growth. But there must be a way to balance attention to the components of the new education mantra of safe, supportive, learning environments. There are commas between the adjectives for a reason. Safe environments are not necessarily supportive (metal detectors do not breed openness and trust). Supportive environments are not necessarily conductive to learning (peer culture can have the opposite effect when fitting in requires tuning out in the classroom). Learning environments do not have to be either safe or supportive. Competitive learning situations in which only the quickest students are rewarded can be threatening to others.

Obviously, the other mantra — education for all — is more easily achieved when schools address all three goals of safety, support and learning. But the fact that districts and states continue to build mega-schools suggests that these goals are being seen as separate rather than intertwined. They should be assessed separately, but approached interactively. And the bottom-line message as I peruse the education literature is that small is better because small better accommodates the development of community. Youth workers and educators have a common goal — the preparation and development of young people. But we have different approaches. At the risk of oversimplifying things, educators think about individuals in groups; youth workers think about groups of individuals.

Educators think about the challenges of providing individual instruction with group settings. Youth workers think about the challenges of creating community among groups of young people with individual differences.

There are many things that youth workers and educators should work on together. Community-building is an issue that could unite them. It is true that increasingly young people are growing up in toxic environments and bringing that baggage into schools, upping the demand on schools to do more social services in order to ensure that students are ready to learn. But it is also true that many students see schools as alienating, if not toxic, environments. This problem is created by schools because they have not paid adequate attention to community building.

The Littleton tragedy has given us an opportunity. Over the next year, youth workers should push to define school climate/school community standards that are as clear, rigorous and measurable as those in place for academic achievement. We should start a community for all campaign, building on the data on school connectedness from the AdHealth survey, which suggests that the variation in students’ feelings of connectedness to school is much greater within schools than between them. Inner city and suburban schools have more in common than we think: In both, many young people feel unsafe, unliked, unsupported and unfairly treated. Youth workers know a lot about how to address these issues. Let’s show our stuff, and hope our colleagues in education listen.
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Pittman, K. (1999, October). "Small is Essential." Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. A version of this article appears in Youth Today.

Karen Pittman is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment.