Youth Today: The 8 R's: Building Community Within Schools

By Karen Pittman, June 1999

“Shoelace monitor.” This is the new job that a group of four-year-olds asked their teacher to post so they could apply. Their logic: Lots of kids still can’t tie their shoes well. The teacher spends time tying shoes, straining her back and cutting into playground time. The solution: Certify lace tie-ers to help.

This story always elicits warm giggles when told by Jerome Frieberg, a University of Houston expert on improving school climate. But it makes a strong point. Schools are communities. Classrooms, when they work right, are large families. People in communities are neighbors and citizens. Every young person should have roles and responsibilities. And relationships, adds Paul Schwartz, former assistant principal at Central Park East (CPE) in New York City and principal-in-residence at the U.S. Department of Education. “We don’t know our students,” he says.

Schwartz recounted the risk and results of an experiment at CPE to implement a student advisory system. The risk: Cutting six hours out of the instructional week, at a time when the heat was on for improved academic performance. The results: Increased attendance, increased student and teacher motivation, better student performance and (the clincher) 100 percent parent attendance at parent/advisor conferences. By ensuring that there was someone in school who actually knew each student well and would share insights with parents, the CPE faculty licked the problem that is the bane of most school systems. Parents — low income, minority, inner city, often single-head-of-household parents — found their way to the school.

Frieberg, Schwartz, Asa Hilliard (a professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University) and I spent a day in Alexandria, Virginia., last month talking about building school environments with the Learning First Alliance, recently created by the 12 largest national education associations as a common forum for debate and consensus-building. The LFA had gathered for its Board meeting. “The conversation should have been going on across the river at the White House,” noted one LFA member, referring to the White House meeting on school violence. This was more impressive, however, because it was not some quick response to Littleton. It was a well-planned out, ongoing, intentional and strategic effort to address the second of LFA’s three goals: 1) increase student achievement, 2) improve school environments; and 3) increase parent and community involvement.

Inside the Beltway, meetings are a dime a dozen. This one, however, left me optimistic about the potential for real learning partnerships between youth workers and educators. Why? First, the group reaffirmed the idea that the three LFA goals are not independent, but intricately related. Gains in student achievement require attention to school environment, and improvements in school environment sometimes require but often inspire parent and community involvement.

Second, members began to generate and use language that gave teeth to the idea of improving school environments. The question of outcomes and indicators was raised early. By the end of the day there was a basic recognition that the big 3Rs cannot be fulfilled in rule-driven environments. There are other measurable Rs — traditionally coveted within the domain of youth work — that must be wedged in between:

Roles, Responsibilities, Relationships and Resources are critical building blocks of community. Students and teachers need time and space to build relationships, assume important roles and create environments where all assume responsibility for enforcing community norms and community goals. Appropriate resources must be provided.

Relevance, Reality, Respect and Recognition are the cornerstones of student engagement. Young people repeatedly ask teachers and adults to understand their reality, to let them make learning (and service) relevant, to treat them with respect and to recognize their accomplishments publicly and privately.

Many of the environments created by youth workers are described as alternatives to the rule and assessment-driven bureaucracies of schools. Without in any way suggesting that it will be simple, it is time to use the growing interest in school environments and student motivation as an opportunity to show and share youth work expertise with educators.

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Pittman, K. (1999, June). "The 8 R's: Building Community Within Schools." 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.