Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for February 28, 2007 STAY IN THE RUTS

From the Miami Herald...

What Works: In Texas, staying in the ruts

Mr. Harris has a way of putting things. That's what the young men say if you ask how he was able to get through to them when nobody else - teachers, mothers, cops - was able to. He has a way of breaking things down so you can understand.

For instance? "I tell them to stay in the ruts. What's the story behind stay in the ruts? My grandfather drove a wagon and one day he was going through a marshy field. And there was another guy behind him that had a wagon. This guy decided, that's too long. I'm going to take a short cut."

Moments later, that guy found himself bogged down and yelled for help. Harris' grandfather told him he should have stayed in the ruts. "You don't always have to cut new tracks," he said.

"So what I tell these guys," says Harris, "is that we've cut ruts for them to have some of the opportunities and some of the things they can do. You don't have to make a short cut. If you'll just follow my tracks, you won't bog."

Wilton Harris is not trying to lead his guys across a muddy field. He's trying to lead them to adulthood across a minefield of drugs, crime, poverty and academic failure. Harris is the case manager for the XY-Zone at John H. Reagan High School; the program operates on 48 campuses in Central Texas under the auspices of Communities in Schools, a national dropout prevention program.

Reagan is a tough school in a state where one in three high school freshmen never graduates. I'm here as part of a yearlong series of columns seeking to discern What Works to improve the lives of black kids. The XY-Zone, according to its young participants, works.

Ronald Falkquay, 17, says that before the XY-Zone, his life was about drinking, smoking, skipping school, chasing girls and trouble. But now, he says, his grades are up, his attendance has improved and he hasn't been in a single fight this semester. It's an assessment echoed by other young men in the program and by an independent audit that found that 84 percent of participants improve their grades, attendance or behavior.

The XY-Zone offers services from tutoring to conflict mediation. The young men take field trips - they've spent a day training with the fire department, they've gone camping, they've met the chief justice of the state Supreme Court - and volunteer for community service projects. Harris teaches his boys (the program is geared toward male students) such fundamentals as how to write a resume or shake hands with a potential employer.

The pillars of the program are what they call "working the five R's," which are: reaching out, relationships, role models, respect and responsibility. "Not only being responsible for yourself," explains Harris, "but your community, your surroundings, your family. Being a role model to your younger brothers and your sisters. Being respectful of not only yourself but family, those around you, your instructors."

For all that, though, it seems obvious the young men at Reagan feel the XY-Zone's primary attraction is that in Harris, they have an advocate who cares, who has expectations of them and who has a way of making things plain. Such as when it was reported that lawmakers were preparing to add thousands of new beds to the state prison system.

He told one young man, "They're waiting for you. They're making a bed for you. ... The alternative is, you can bypass that state prison on your way to state college."

The message resonates. Asked if his new outlook causes him grief with his old friends, Falkquay says, "If you don't want to change your life and I do, something wrong with that. I want to live a successful life. I want to be known ... as a good man. Not just no nobody, no unknown, one of them people you just shrug off and say, whatever. I want to be somebody kids and people can look up to."

So he's staying in the ruts.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

Leonard Pitts received a large reader response to his launching of the "What Works" series on education. Below is his initial response to this feedback...

What Works: Readers share their thoughts

One month and 1,400 e-mails later, here is a progress report on What Works.

That's a series of columns I started last month in which I asked folks to tell me, in 250 words or less, about programs in their communities that have shown success in improving the lives of black children in five specific areas: self-esteem, violence prevention, education, fatherlessness and poverty.

And then came the deluge. So far, I've read through about 400 of your 1,400 e-mails. Let me share some impressions:

1. There are some rather ... visionary thinkers out there. One person swears transcendental meditation will fix what ails black children. Another says a mass conversion to Orthodox Judaism will do the trick.

2. There is a lot of wonderful work being done out there. At the University of Dayton, for instance, they've got an effective college prep program for at-risk kids. In Baltimore, there's a high school where I'm told 72 percent of the kids live below the poverty line, but 90 percent go to college. In Indianapolis, they're using classical music to reach out to kids; in Detroit, they're using sports; in Miami, they're using the sea.

3. Many people consider "program" a four letter word. They wrote emphatic notes stressing the value of stable, two-parent homes, parental involvement - in a word, families. As one person put it, "program smogram."

I agree. I also disagree.

After all, it is not exactly rocket science that a restoration of families would go a long way toward redeeming African-American children and, for that matter, American children, period. But the truth of that does not foreclose a further truth: If there is a way we can organize to save children who have little or no family support, we should do so with all deliberate speed.

I find it interesting that some of us are suspicious of attempts at social engineering in the lives of black kids. That suspicion is, I suspect, a byproduct of the perception that the Great Society programs instituted by President Lyndon B. Johnson to tackle some of these same issues failed to achieve their stated goals.

I don't have the space to launch a defense of the Great Society, but I will say this: Even if you buy the notion that it was a total failure - and I don't - that's an indictment of that particular effort in that particular era, not of the idea that we can and should seek ways to make a difference.

Indeed, we have historically instituted programs to achieve other socially desirable ends. The Homestead Act of 1862 was passed in order to drive the nation's population west. The G.I. Bill created a generation of first-time college students and homeowners.

So why is this particular socially desirable end - a world in which black kids live in safe and thriving communities and the education gap stands closed - any different? Why are some of us so quick to conclude that the uplift of their lives is not a matter for the nation's attention?

I started this series because I got tired of reading stories about isolated successes: Farmer Bob takes at-risk city kids down to the farm and turns their lives around. When I see those stories I always wonder, why can't we just find a hundred Farmer Bobs and save a few thousand kids? More to the point, if we know how to do this, if we understand how to get these results, why are such programs the alternative and not the standard? Whatever they've got that works, why can't we make that available to all at-risk kids, instead of a lucky few?

You may think the question is about denying the importance of families. I think it's about saving black children by any means necessary.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.