The Wall Street Journal
DECEMBER 4, 2008, 7:46 P.M. ET
Bookshelf
Parochial-School Lessons
A solution to a 19th-century problem finds success in a 21st-century setting.
By CHRISTOPHER WILLCOX
The efficacy of Catholic schools in urban neighborhoods has been documented time and again, beginning with James S. Coleman’s landmark studies in the 1980s. His findings were so devastating at the time that the public-school establishment panicked. School officials heatedly claimed that Mr. Coleman’s results were flawed because public schools had to take everyone while Catholic schools could select more talented students — or at least those who came from more stable homes. But the economist Derek Neal exploded that myth in the 1990s, showing definitively that Catholic-school methods are both class- and color-blind. The stereotypical product of a poor, single-parent home generally does better in a Catholic school than a public one.
As Patrick J. McCloskey notes in “The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem,” urban Catholic schools in the U.S. have a long history of serving the poor and the rough. In the 19th century, the “social pathologies of the Irish,” he writes, “were seen simply as evidence of their genetic and cultural inferiority.” New York Archbishop John Joseph Hughes (1797-1864), when asked what he was going to do about the “Irish problem,” replied: “We are going to teach them their religion.” These Irish were largely from Ireland’s south and west, where the English severely restricted the teaching of Catholicism. Mr. McCloskey writes that “most Irish Catholics arrived in America with a hodgepodge of beliefs and religious practices that were more superstition than religion. They were Catholic in name only, more as a badge of honor against the hated English than as an identity they understood.”
The primary engine for the transformation of the Irish in America was the parochial school, established to turn poor Catholics into productive citizens without losing their religious identity. While Mr. McCloskey acknowledges this religious purpose, especially of early Catholic schools, he wisely distinguishes another characteristic. Citing Anthony Bryk, a professor at Harvard and later Stanford, he refers to “the common school effect.” That is: “All students, regardless of their ethnic background, social class, family problems, or future plans and regardless of their scholastic level before entering high school, are taught basically in the same way.”
Catholic apologists have argued that this approach is rooted in their theology, with its central belief in the dignity and worth of every human person, but it is an approach that was developed by 19th-century educators in both the Catholic and public systems. And while theology might have kept it vital in the Catholic schools, finances also had some influence.
The Street Stops Here
By Patrick J. McCloskey
(University of California Press, 456 pages, $27.50)
At Rice High School in Harlem, where Mr. McCloskey focuses most of his book’s attention, the per-pupil cost of an education is pegged at $5,800 a year. The cost of a public-school education in that same neighborhood is at least twice that and probably higher, depending how much debt service and pension cost is included in the estimate. The “common school” model, with its one-size-fits-all, liberal-arts focus, is simply more economical than the sprawling, desperate and failing public enterprise.
Mr. McCloskey obviously feels sympathy for the many hardworking and dedicated teachers and administrators in the public system. “The Street Stops Here” is not a polemic by any means. One of his principal arguments is that the public schools should adopt the best practices of the Catholic institutions — without the religious content. (After all, most of the students at the Harlem school and other similar institutions are not Catholic, and the schools make no effort to proselytize.)
Although he clearly believes that the success of these schools, especially in the inner city, merits some kind of state support or encouragement, the purpose of the book is not to advocate for vouchers or any other specific policy. At one point he estimates that Catholic schools in America save the taxpayers about $20 billion a year and wonders whether a little of that savings might not be plowed back into their entirely laudable efforts. But as a product of the Canadian Catholic schools, where taxpayer support is taken for granted, Mr. McCloskey also wonders whether the dead hand of government, with its mandates and work rules, are worth the price of admission.
Mr. McCloskey promises a warts-and-all portrait of one year in the life of Rice High School, and he manages for the most part to deliver. In Orlando Gober, the dynamic but flawed principal, he has a memorable and heroic central character. A former Black Panther, Mr. Gober defines himself and his mission in part through occasional conflicts with authority (in this case, the Christian Brothers who operate the school), but he also has obvious respect for the religious order, which was founded in Ireland to serve poor children.
Mr. Gober’s boss, Brother J. Matthew Walderman, also comes alive as Mr. Gober’s patron (over opposition, Mr. Walderman installed him as the school’s first black principal). When Mr. Gober’s demons, and diabetes, finally separate him from Rice, he has left behind a thriving culture of learning and authentic pride. But in the end it is the kids that merit the author’s keenest attention, and ours. Predictably, the wash-outs are the ones remembered best — Prince Youmans, who lives with his grandmother because both of his parents are dead from AIDS, and Yusef Abednego, who is expelled for drug dealing. This would be something of a downer if Mr. McCloskey didn’t note
that Rice enjoys a 70% to 80% graduation rate — at least double that of New York public schools.
This is a first book — with a gracious foreword by Samuel G. Freedman, Mr. McCloskey’s former professor at Columbia University — and occasionally it shows. The narrative wobbles when the author moves back and forth in time, the writing style sometimes falters and even disappears, and some chapters can read like homework. But this is homework of a high caliber, and it should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the welfare of our kids.
Mr. Willcox is a writer in Ridgefield, Conn.
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Publisher’s Weekly
October 27, 2008
The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem Patrick J. McCloskey, foreword by Samuel G. Freedman. Univ. of California, $27.50 (482p) ISBN 978-0-520-25517-3
Keeping the challenges of urban education in mind, McCloskey, who writes for the New York Times, monitors a year of studies at a Catholic high school in Harlem in his debut book, revealing the soaring cost of academically training young poor and non-Catholic black males for graduation and college. The subject of the yearlong investigation is Rice High School, with principal Orlando Gober, who keeps the street culture at bay while pursuing educational excellence and a high moral foundation. With the highest black student population in the regional diocese, Gober makes no excuses for how schools have failed: “parents and teachers made excuses, which crippled their willpower…. People have to be held responsible for what they do.” It is illuminating to see the struggles and triumphs of a school day where students feud, teachers jockey for power, and administrative control must be maintained at all costs. Powerful, eloquent, candid, McCloskey’s account should be required reading for those who seek to remedy the academic woes of our troubled urban schools. (Jan.)
America THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY
A Working Model
David Gibson | AUGUST 17, 2009
The Street Stops Here
A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem
By Patrick J. McCloskey
Univ. of California Press. 456p $27.50
www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11808
If you are looking for a convincing argument in support of voucher programs for Catholic schools, you could do no better than Patrick J. McCloskey’s new book, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, a profile of New York City’s all-boys Rice High School. Yet as the title indicates, the power of this work is not so much in its policy analysis—though McCloskey skillfully lays out the issues—but in the frank and moving narrative he unspools over the course of 400 richly detailed pages.
In the end, that narrative makes the case for Catholic schools, but does so almost obliquely, and because of that perhaps more convincingly than the usual efforts. As the journalist and author Samuel G. Freedman writes in the foreword, this book is not “an advertising brochure” for Catholic schools, even though McCloskey is clearly a fan. Instead, as Freedman writes, “By admitting to imperfection…this book makes the most persuasive case possible for what Catholic education has achieved and how its example can help improve public education.”
McCloskey does this by sticking to the story, or rather stories. The book is an omnibus of sorts, which as the author admits is part of the “unavoidable structural complexity” of writing about such a variegated community. Yet McCloskey is a diligent craftsman and that makes the book work, and makes The Street Stops Here a standout in the welter of educational wonkery.
The central characters of the story are the African-American principal, “a charismatic and complex visionary” named Orlando R. Gober, and the Irish-American president of Rice, Brother J. Matthew Walderman, a member of the Congregation of the Christian Brothers that founded the school in central Harlem in 1938. As with most schools run by religious orders, the role of lay people has expanded as the presence of priests and religious has diminished sharply. That transition is not without tensions, and the fraught relationship between the tall, athletic and impulsive Gober and the bald, thick-set Brother Walderman is told with unflinching honesty. “They get along by avoiding each other as much as possible,” McCloskey writes early on. That Walderman granted McCloskey such uncensored access is a rare thing, and yet the portrayal here rewards that magnanimity.
Race is another central tension, one that is in many respects unique to inner-city Catholic schools like Rice, but one that can perhaps be more instructive for Catholics than traditionally homogeneous settings. Readers will (or should) cringe at times as racial issues are laid bare, and the stories of the students who pass through Rice are not always feel-good, made-for-TV-movie fare. McCloskey also deals with the complex questions plaguing education in America, especially in poor urban areas: academics versus athletics, communicating religious values versus indoctrination, and balancing tough love with an understanding of the even tougher life that awaits the students when they leave school.
So what can this book tell us about the future of Catholic schools? Can they be saved? That is the question everyone in the church is asking today, and the one McCloskey set out to answer.
Born in Canada and educated in Catholic schools in Ottawa—which receive state funding with little fanfare—McCloskey was drawn to his subject by the furor over school vouchers in the United States. He also writes from the perspective of a father trying to find good schools for his own children, rejecting first a soulless public system in upscale New Jersey suburbs, then the mediocrity of public schooling in New York City, and finally settling on a private school in Brooklyn that provided a superb education but at a cost that entailed serious financial sacrifices.
Propelled by a desire to find out what works in education, and what could be improved and made affordable, he decided to make a “qualitative” study of a single school to see what lessons he could learn and then impart. The Street Stops Here is the result.
The book impressed me. As an adult convert to the church, I missed out on the classic parochial school experience—uniforms, Latin declensions, nuns both stern and encouraging and, above all, the chance to transform my miserable grade school years into a comedy routine or memoir of lament. Darn. But that lacuna has also left me, regrettably, with a certain indifference to the plight of Catholic education. I am not against Catholic schools by any stretch; rather, my parish life experience is one of churches and dioceses that struggle so mightily to keep their schools alive that they too often—or so it seems to me—sacrifice outreach programs for young adults and families who could encourage more youngsters to attend those schools.
McCloskey does not necessarily dispel all my biases, but he does something more profound: he forces me to face up to the challenge as well as the promise of Catholic education. There is much talk about shoring up “Catholic identity” these days, yet often lost in that navel-gazing is the axiom popular among Catholic educators who are forming young people with little or no connection to the church: “We’re here because we are Catholic,” they say, “not because they are.”
To be sure, Catholic schools and parents everywhere are getting squeezed by rising costs. But the decline in Catholic education is most poignant for urban areas where children, often African-Americans, desperately need good alternatives, and for Latino immigrants who cannot find the good and affordable Catholic education that previous generations enjoyed. Some four in 10 Catholic schools are still located in inner cities, but the trend is to close those and shift Catholic education to the suburbs where there are more Catholics who can afford a Catholic education.
It is a painful transition with no easy answers, if there is an answer at all. In that sense McCloskey’s book illustrates what Catholic schools can be and pays tribute to what the Catholic Church in America may never again achieve.
David Gibson is the author of The Coming Catholic Church and The Rule of Benedict and covers religion for PoliticsDaily.com.
CITY JOURNAL 13 February 2009
Catholic-School Closing Tragedy
Patrick J. McCloskey reminds us about what we’re losing.
Sol Stern
The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, by Patrick J. McCloskey (University of California Press, 456 pp., $27.50)
Announcements of Catholic-school closings in New York have become melancholy annual rituals. In January, the New York Times reported that the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn would shut down 14 of its elementary schools next fall, and that Brooklyn and Queens now have 40 percent fewer Catholic schools than they did when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002.
So dire is the Brooklyn Diocese’s financial situation that Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and Mayor Bloomberg have agreed to draw up a plan to convert some of the threatened Catholic schools into publicly funded charter schools. If this pilot program works, it could expand to other Catholic schools in the city. It resembles a similar arrangement made last year in Washington, D.C., where seven Catholic schools facing closure (despite benefiting from federally funded vouchers that paid full tuition for a significant number of students) were converted into taxpayer-funded charters. In accepting this last-ditch solution, Catholic leaders are raising the white flag and giving up on the religious mission of their schools.
That Catholic schools have reached this sad state has nothing to do with the quality of education that they’ve historically provided to millions of disadvantaged children. Rather, the crisis is entirely about money. New York’s Catholic schools have been hit by the same crippling economic and demographic shifts that have afflicted urban Catholic education all over the country. First, starting in the 1960s, the formerly poor Irish and Italian families who owed their economic success to no-nonsense, traditional Catholic education began moving out of the cities and into the suburbs, and became less inclined to send their kids to parish schools or to support the schools they left behind. Second, the teaching nuns who once supplied free instructional services in the classrooms became a vanishing breed and were replaced by lay faculty, who eventually organized into unions and demanded higher salaries. Third, many of the new black and Hispanic families who would surely send their children to fill the Catholic-school seats vacated by white ethnics are less and less able to afford the higher tuition payments necessitated by the schools’ rising costs.
But Gotham’s Catholic schools have lately faced an additional challenge—tough competition from a remade public school system that aggressively markets itself and touts its accomplishments. The city’s education department has succeeded in convincing many low-income families that the public schools in their neighborhoods, including the new charter schools, have become good educational options. Indeed, some of the charter schools—including the Kipp schools and the Harlem Promise Academies—are in fact excellent options (in no small measure because they have adopted the approaches for educating underprivileged kids perfected over 50 years in the city’s Catholic schools). The charter schools are not only free, but often provide a longer school day and longer school year. By contrast, even scholarship recipients in the Catholic schools must come up with some part of the total tuition cost. Moreover, public education spending has increased from $13 billion to $21 billion since Mayor Bloomberg took over the schools, allowing the city to raise salaries for public school teachers by 43 percent—putting even more pressure on the Catholic schools to raise pay scales for their own teachers. Under the leadership of the billionaire mayor, the public schools have also been soaking up most of the philanthropic education spending in town.
At this time of peril for the entire Catholic-school enterprise, civic-minded New Yorkers should remember what these schools have accomplished and how much poorer the city will be if they disappear. That’s exactly what The Street Stops Here, an extraordinary new book by Patrick J. McCloskey, manages to do. It tells the compelling story of embattled, 100-year-old Rice High School for boys in central Harlem. Other excellent books and research reports (including the famous Coleman Report of 1982) have quantified the “Catholic-school advantage.” But McCloskey provides a deeper understanding of how some Catholic schools succeed against all odds, something that all the number-crunching of student test data and graduation rates can never express. McCloskey spent an entire academic year at Rice, making audio and video tapes of classroom sessions and school events. His reporting puts the reader in the classrooms, the teachers’ lounge, the principal’s office, the basketball games, and the students’ tough neighborhoods. More than in any other book on Catholic education, McCloskey lets us see exactly how dedicated, underpaid educators doing the right thing in the classroom and in an atmosphere of mutual respect and order can transform the lives of at-risk African-American boys.
McCloskey himself is a product of a Catholic-school education in his native Ontario, where the state funds religious schools on an equal basis with the regular, secular public schools. He is bemused by the anomaly that a thoroughly secularized country like Canada feels comfortable providing public funding for religious schools, while in the far more religious United States, such an arrangement is constitutionally taboo. But he doesn’t argue for vouchers or any other education reform, instead providing readers with an immersion experience in Catholic education.
McCloskey’s title derives from the sign that hangs over the entrance to Rice, located in a former YMCA building on 124th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. The words succinctly capture the key ingredient in the school’s culture, without which nothing else would work. I witnessed this myself when I spent a few days at Rice in 2007 for an essay I wrote on the Catholic school crisis. Passing through the entrance underneath the sign every morning and walking into the lobby, the boys (over 90 percent African-American) are physically transformed, leaving the “street” and its culture behind for the duration of their day in school. No security guards or metal detectors greet them at the doors. But the boys remove their do-rags and hooded sweatshirts and presto, they become Rice men, with pressed slacks, oxford shirts and ties, and green Rice jackets. “The ritual is almost sacramental,” McCloskey writes. “The young men lose their street swagger and transform into students not much different than their peers at suburban, predominantly white Catholic schools.” That transformation does not come in a sudden revelation. As McCloskey’s detailed daily reporting shows, it is won through the incredible persistence of Rice’s teachers and administrators, through incremental steps, and through little victories (and sometimes setbacks), until a counterculture of middle-class values and an ethos of hard work has taken hold.
Through a laserlike focus on a no-frills, core academic curriculum, and by resisting progressive-education fads, Rice takes most of the students who enter in ninth grade—many of them two years behind in reading and math—and gradually gets them up to grade level. The kids pass most of the necessary state Regents exams. There are no Jaime Escalante miracles here, no AP calculus whiz kids. But Rice’s graduation rate is a legitimate 90 percent, compared with the public schools’ rate of 50 to 60 percent—despite per-pupil spending in the city’s public high schools triple that of Rice’s. Most Rice graduates go on to some form of higher education.
School-reform experts often argue that money is overrated as a factor in school improvement. For the most part, I agree. But in the case of Rice High School and most of the other Catholic schools in the city, money is the issue. With a little extra each year, we could almost guarantee that Rice will go on doing an excellent job of educating at-risk black boys far into the twenty-first century, just as it educated underprivileged white boys throughout the twentieth century. I estimate that if the city’s Catholic schools could get just 1 percent of the budget for the public schools, there would be no more Catholic-school closings. And if the people and political leaders of this wealthy city can’t figure out how to get such a small amount of money into the Catholic schools, Patrick McCloskey’s inspired book can serve as a requiem for one of New York’s most noble institutions.
Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice
The San Francisco Chronicle
Nonfiction review: ‘The Street Stops Here’
Dena Levitz, Special to The San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, January 5, 2009
The Street Stops Here:
A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem
By Patrick J. McCloskey
University of California Press; 456 pages; $27.50
Early on in “The Street Stops Here,” a single mother goes to the principal’s office, thrilled to enroll her troubled son in Rice High School, a thriving all-boys Catholic school in Harlem.
She talks nonstop about the protection from the rough-and-tumble streets that her boy will get within the protective walls of Rice. But there’s something she’s left out: any mention of her son’s academic and intellectual prowess. The oversight, unfortunately, is a fatal one to principal Orlando Gober, who denies the teen admission on the spot.
It’s a brief yet pivotal scene in a book that, in more than 400 pages, vividly takes the reader through a year at Rice.
New York Times writer Patrick J. McCloskey turns his meticulous research – which took the better part of a decade – into a story about hope and loss. Readers can pore over students’ writing examples and struggle with English teacher Kate Hebinck as she tries to quiet back-talking students to teach them basic conjugation.
Yet more than anything, the book is a mini-biography of Gober, a charismatic and complex character. Think Crazy Joe from “Lean on Me” with the oratorical gifts of Martin Luther King Jr. – and a Black Panther past – and you’ll get a sense of his layers. As McCloskey puts it in the must-read epilogue, Gober never met a contradiction he didn’t like.
Years before his time at Rice, Gober lost a former student on a mountain-trekking field trip. The experience broke him until it ultimately built him back up; he was determined to save students from underprivileged fates.
To achieve his goal, Gober takes drastic steps: The n-word is virtually eliminated from Rice’s grounds so that an alternate universe thrives. He relies heavily on his right-hand man, Christopher Abbasse, the dean of discipline, who makes sure all students are dressed and acting appropriately. And he demands that academics reign over sports.
All the while, the principal positions himself as a father figure to young men who often don’t have men to look up to. To off-and-on gang member Yusef, in particular, their relationship outside of school becomes so strong that the youngster gets visibly jealous if his beloved administrator takes interest in other students.
“I hold their feet to the fire, but while holding them I massage them too,” the principal says in explaining his tough-love approach.
Gober sees himself as chosen for a life of educational leadership in the same way a priest possesses a calling to religious devotion. Nevertheless, McCloskey doesn’t shy from portraying Gober as a flawed hero who needs conflict – and will even create it if he’s surrounded by an insufficient drama level.
When Gober is late to a staff meeting he has called, teachers complain about his borderline personality, the way he treats adults like children and the fact that his message of empowerment has prompted students to be rude to teachers.
“It’s a sick family,” one of the teachers observes. “Everyone’s afraid of how daddy’s going to react.”
A seasoned journalist, McCloskey takes great care to stay out of the action. Halfway through the book, he loses his way a bit in telling the story of Irish immigrants and Catholic schools in America. Thankfully, the history lesson morphs back into the tale of educational triumph that the book rises to page after page.
The real accomplishment of McCloskey’s work, though, is setting forth a primer for urban school districts and raising questions about the sacrifices it takes to turn around struggling institutions.
Although not every innovation can be applied at traditional public schools, the book is something educators and education reformers should cling to and study with the same vigor that Gober preaches to his young men.
Dena Levitz is a freelance journalist, based in Washington, D.C., who writes about school reform in the nation’s capital. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/05/DDHC14URSK.DTL
Weekly Standard
Motivation High
Schools that work need a system that sustains them.
by Joan Frawley Desmond
03/02/2009, Volume 014, Issue 23
The Street Stops Here
A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem
by Patrick J. McCloskey
California, 456 pp., $27.50
During a campaign stop in Milwaukee, site of the largest publicly financed voucher program in America, then-Senator Barack Obama was asked to comment on the city’s school reform program. He expressed skepticism about vouchers, but seemed to leave the door open: “You do what works for the kids,” he told editors at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As news of this apparent willingness to buck the teachers’ unions made headlines, the campaign issued a quick clarification: Barack Obama “has always been a critic of vouchers.”
If President Obama still wants to know “what works for kids,” particularly students on the social margins, he should pick up The Street Stops Here. This compelling portrait of the daily “miracles” performed in Roman Catholic institutions like Harlem’s Rice High School isn’t designed to make the case for vouchers. (Patrick J. McCloskey favors privately funded tuition subsidies that don’t carry the risks associated with government intrusion, and thus protect the unique character of church schools.) No, the author is concerned with a less contentious agenda: He wants to renew our appreciation for the methods, achievements, and requirements of inner-city Catholic schools that might face extinction if they don’t stabilize their finances.
A Canadian journalist who conducted research for the book while attending the Columbia School of Journalism, McCloskey asks readers to discard preconceived notions about the “Catholic model”–a top-down, teacher-directed, virtue-based approach that contradicts the received wisdom of progressive education. He even suggests that urban public schools might incorporate some of the practices of Catholic schools. His moving account of the daily grind at one such institution should easily convince readers that Catholic schools for the poor deserve and need support.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York operates 55 secondary schools. No one would mistake Rice High School for boys, founded by the Congregation of Christian Brothers in 1938, as the crown jewel of the system. Short on funds, staff, and occasionally even students, the school provides a case study of the crisis besetting inner-city Catholic education.
Critics assert that such schools are “elitist institutions,” and that higher test scores and graduation rates are achieved by “skimming” the best students from the public system. Such claims, however, do not describe the status quo at Rice. When the author arrives for the start of the school year, he encounters an institution organized around an unstated but radically pragmatic mission: Rice seeks to move students from the underclass into the working class.
The student body includes boys from stable dual-income and single-parent families. But Rice also enrolls homeless teenagers, former gang members, and students with parents dying of AIDS or battling addiction. Private and corporate donors help out the most needy, covering all or most of the annual $5,550 tuition. For some students, a Rice diploma is the only option: “They all dead or in jail,” says one boy of friends who began their high school careers in the public system.
Most freshmen begin Rice with academic deficits and nonexistent work habits; but contrary to their experience in middle school, they learn that disruptive behavior and unfinished assignments provoke immediate consequences. Few are ready, but 99 percent of Rice seniors get into college. McCloskey believes this is accomplished through a hopeful, ordered, and unifying religious ethos that makes the school community “an attractive alternative to street culture.”
Another key difference with public schools is that the church places enormous authority (and accountability) in the hands of principals. The late Orlando Gober, the archdiocese’s first African-American principal, led Rice like a latter-day Charlemagne. On a given day, he played the roles of visionary, disciplinarian, teacher, fundraiser, and father figure. Through extraordinary personal commitment, he kept this small, countercultural oasis functioning.
Initially, Gober appears an unlikely hero. The students idealize celebrity athletes and gangsta rappers; the principal was an overweight diabetic who initiated a campaign to eliminate the “n-word” from student speech. But teenaged boys raised by single mothers yearn for paternal approbation, and many visited Gober’s office to sort out their troubles. As students dropped their guard, the principal confronted the “father wounds” inflicted by absent men who rarely surfaced in their sons’ lives. Yet Gober disdained self-pity as a “trap.” When a homeless student complained about doing homework, Gober reminded him that a college scholarship, the ultimate solution to his predicament, requires even more concerted effort.
“You are male by birth, but men by choice” is one favorite aphorism that Gober repeated at assemblies. His impromptu sermons and classroom discussions were inspired by Christian teaching, which affirms the intrinsic dignity of each person and guides the inculcation of virtue. The faculty’s determined efforts to help students find their place in the world recall 19th century New York, when local churches began to open schools for impoverished Irish immigrants, seeking to curb an epidemic of homelessness, alcoholism, and illegitimacy. The parochial system evolved into a powerful tool of social engineering, and aided subsequent waves of Catholic immigrants.
For much of the 20th century, the steady supply of educated priests, nuns, and brothers established a financially competitive alternative to the public system. The religious teaching orders lived in common and made minimal financial demands, keeping tuitions low. The status quo remained intact until the 1970s, when religious orders lost members in droves and church schools were forced to raise tuitions to cover salaries for lay faculty. Meanwhile, demographic changes in urban neighborhoods reduced the pool of Catholic students.
Rice High School proves that Catholic schools can still change lives. But the church has yet to adopt an economic model that will keep tuitions affordable. About a hundred Catholic schools close annually, the survivors depend on a patchwork system of contributions from parents, wealthy Catholics, foundations, and local corporations. (Twenty percent of Rice students receive full tuition from Student Sponsor Partners, the nation’s first privately funded voucher initiative, which turns away thousands of applicants.) And although Rice is still open for business, McCloskey describes its status as fragile–a “lingering presence” in Harlem.
The Street Stops Here calls on Roman Catholic leaders, education reform groups, and large philanthropic institutions such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to coordinate a systemwide rescue/reinvention that would protect the legacy of Rice High School, and similar institutions, for generations to come. As Obama said, “You do what works for the kids.”
Joan Frawley Desmond, who writes on religious and social issues for a variety of publications, lives in Maryland.
Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)
Home > Rice men: Lessons at a Harlem high school
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Rice men: Lessons at a Harlem
high school
Reviewed by FRANK J. MACCHIAROLA
The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem
By Patrick J. McCloskey
Published by University of California Press, $27.50
In the 1980s, James Coleman’s studies of the effectiveness of Catholic schools showed that despite factors that would cause one to expect these schools to perform more poorly than their public school counterparts, they, in fact, did much better. Their students performed better on standardized tests, they had higher graduation rates, and they had, in the most difficult neighborhoods of the nation’s cities, managed to keep the street out of the school. Although controversial when first reported, later studies almost invariably have confirmed Coleman’s findings.
At the same time, Catholic schools were facing difficulties. The religious brothers, priests and nuns who once carried the most significant teaching burdens in these schools were disappearing, and rising costs and the inability of many parents to meet tuition exacerbated the problem. By the time the 21st century came, many of the schools were closing — notwithstanding their successes.
There have been many efforts to support students in Catholic schools and thereby preserve the institutions that have served students so well. Vouchers have been tried and charter schools have become more established, really as a reaction to failing public schools. Generous philanthropists have come forward to make the connection between students and sponsors. In many cases the students get to know their sponsors. Several Catholic dioceses have begun the process of seeking more direct government support of the students in schools, conceding a measure of autonomy to satisfy First Amendment concerns.
If one needs to see at ground level why it is worth making the effort to save these schools, one should read Patrick J. McCloskey’s The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem. Rice High School is an all-boys school on 124th Street in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. It was founded by the Irish Christian Brothers in 1938 and at first was staffed almost entirely by the brothers. Its student body then was overwhelmingly white boys from Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn. But through the 1960s it began to change its racial composition until by the 1970s it had become a black high school serving a significant number of non-Catholic boys. It was also struggling to maintain its academic reputation and to meet increasing budget shortfalls.
While others have told the story of Catholic education today, none have told the story on the school level better than McCloskey, who chronicles the 1999-2000 academic year by being a daily presence at Rice and engaging students, parents, teachers and administrators to tell their story in compelling ways. Total access, which is what McCloskey had, is an incredible testimony to the Rice administrators, who allowed the story to be told, “warts and all.”
The principal, Orlando Gober, an inspiring black man of incredible strengths and some tragic flaws, is at the center of the tale. He is seen in his many roles at the school — charismatic leader, mentor, child advocate, black empowerer and preserver of the faith. He has arrived at Catholicism by choice, takes God seriously and church authority less so. He clashes with many at the school with a take-no-prisoners mentality. He is determined to enhance academics and is less interested in Rice’s storied basketball program. He teaches respect, enforces a dress code, bans the N-word and makes discipline a central part of the academic program. He does it with a staff of many personalities and strengths. Respect for students is also a key component of the program, and their academic success is treasured.
The odds are against these youngsters, who are portrayed in depth throughout the book. Many are from dysfunctional families, live in neighborhoods that are unsafe and risk the wrath of many of their peers who resent their success. They themselves are not angels. A number of them deal drugs, belong to gangs and live in a world that is barely barred at the schoolhouse door. They can be threatening to one another and experience more discipline at Rice than many of them can bear.
But Rice has something significant going for these students — even if they don’t realize it: At Rice, these young men are expected to succeed, and their human dignity is affirmed in their interactions with the adults who staff the school. College is the goal, and many of them make it. The formal religious practices of the Catholic faith are not frequent, but the fact that they are seen to be saints in the making gives the students a respect that is not found in too many public schools. They all know they are “Rice men,” and that knowledge brings forth self-confidence and self-discipline.
Their stories, and those of the staff, are heroic ones. They defy the odds — teachers work harder and longer days for less pay than public school teachers. Students are encouraged to overcome their difficulties and not bemoan their fate. And the stories are often hard ones. In fact, the enormous commitment and sacrifice of Gober ultimately results in a death several years after McCloskey’s visit.
The book’s publication date was delayed for several reasons, and the delay allowed McCloskey to track students several years after their time at Rice. In the last chapter, we see that while not all the outcomes are good ones, most are, overwhelmingly so. Those who are successful bring home the message that Rice High School does very good things for youngsters.
The Street Stops Here gives us reason to be hopeful for those lucky enough to attend a school that loves them, nurtures them, teaches them to be men and to live productive lives. Since getting this assignment, I visited Rice, met with Br. Michael Segvich, the current principal, talked to staff and students and saw a fine, safe school with fine instruction taking place. I realized as well that generous benefactors have made the difference that keeps Rice High School alive.
Policymakers who are thinking of what the loss of Catholic schools means should read The Street Stops Here. They will see why they must take action. Unfortunately, as with almost all issues in politics today, our leaders see solutions in terms of spending money rather than in terms of empowerment they can encourage and help provide. If President Obama would govern with this understanding about education, there would indeed be change we can believe in. We can only hope.
Frank J. Macchiarola is chancellor of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Section:
I. Book Reviews
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Ottawa Citizen, January 4, 2009
BOOKS
Saint Orlando of HARLEM
Ottawa author chronicles principal’s triumphant and tragic crusade to save inner-city boys
The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem By Patrick J. McCloskey University of California Press, $36.95
Hollywood should grab this plot and ensure Denzel Washington gets the lead role.
It’s the true-life story of Orlando Gober, a one-time Black Panther who gets religion, and a calling, and becomes the principal of a privately funded Catholic boys school in Harlem.
With unlimited energy and neon-coloured suits, the enigmatic Gober presides over Rice High School. The African-American and Hispanic boys there are taught to behave. They are taught to respect their teachers and themselves. They are taught that they can be achievers.
The formula works much of the time. In many ways, Rice is far more successful in producing upstanding, literate young men than the neighbouring public schools, with their defeatist attitudes and unsafe hallways.
But this is more than a feel-good story ending with sentimental graduation ceremonies in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in downtown New York City. It is also a tragedy because Gober is a flawed character who takes the tale into shocking and unpredictable territory.
Argumentative, inconsistent and forceful, Gober was so driven by his calling that he neglected himself. He simply lost perspective. Maybe he felt he was invincible. Maybe he unconsciously had a martyr’s death wish. But he died what should have been a preventable death from overwork, diabetes and stubbornness.
Orlando Gober’s story is found within the pages of The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem. The author is Patrick McCloskey, an Ottawa man who packed up his philosophy degree from Carleton in the late 1970s, moved to New York City to take dance lessons, but studied journalism, wrote education articles for the New York Times and then spent a year at Rice High School observing classes, interviewing teachers and students, attending basketball games and drinking in every ounce of Harlem culture he could.
At first blush, the book seems aimed exclusively at an American audience. The overall thesis is that privately funded Catholic schools in American inner cities are better than taxpayer-financed public schools. Catholic schools maintain better discipline. They demand more of the students. As a result, more students graduate actually able to read and write. Fewer of them get stabbed in school hallways.
Canadians naturally feel smug about such issues. Surely we have a better education system and help fund both public and parochial schools. Surely we do not graduate illiterate students. Surely our schools are safe.
Well, those assumptions are debatable and worthy of another book, although McCloskey’s next project is a fictional account of life in 19th-century New York.
The Street Ends Here, despite its preachiness about the U.S. Catholic school system, deserves an audience beyond American borders. And that is because of Gober’s story and the stories of his students: Prince, Yusef, Linwood, Ricky and others with family histories straight out of Charles Dickens.
Most of Rice’s boys are fatherless, terribly impoverished and constantly fighting pressures to join the gang and-drug culture thriving on every street corner of their neighbourhoods. McCloskey managed to win the confidence of some of these boys and they pour out stories of homelessness, hunger, violence and jailbird parents..
The battles Gober fights with the Christian Brothers who run the school, with drug-dealing students and with angry parents, are gritty, compelling slices of life alien to most comfortable Americans and Canadians who have never put a foot into Harlem nor ever tried to understand what life is like for illiterate people who see no way out of poverty and despair.
The parents of the Rice boys are so far down the economic ladder that even the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, will not inspire these people to strive for greater things, says McCloskey. How can you aspire to a better job, he adds, when you have no job to begin with and lack the basic literacy skills to get one?
Gober died before Obama was elected. So, we don’t know how he would have reacted. What we do know is that, while alive, Gober, the heroic crusader, was like a freight train speeding far too fast through the streets of Harlem.
We sense, almost from the beginning of the book, that disaster waits around some curve ahead. Yet, when it comes, in the form of illness, it was not the disaster we expected, nor wanted. No one can read this book and not fall in love with an amazingly unselfish man whose counsel and companionship was being sought even by boys he had just expelled for misbehaving.
McCloskey spent the 1999-2000 academic year at Rice High School. Afterwards, he kept in touch with some of the staff and students and moved back to Ottawa, where he has had a variety of jobs on Parliament Hill, including a stint as press secretary to Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz. Currently, he is a researcher for the inquiry led by Justice Jeffrey Oliphant into Brian Mulroney’s dealings with German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.
“Maybe I shouldn’t talk about that,” McCloskey says, as if Mulroney or Schreiber were eavesdropping from the next table in a busy Italian restaurant in the Glebe. Frankly, Gober is more interesting than those two rascals with their cash-stuffed envelopes.
“Gober reminded me of the saints of the early church,” McCloskey says. “They almost wanted to be martyred and were willing to endure anything, no obstacle was too great. He was going to endure for whatever vision he had. That, I guess, was born out of the civil rights movement. As a child, his parents took him to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. He never thought about himself. It was always the cause.”
So, there you have it: Saint Orlando of Harlem in an orange suit on a mission to educate poor boys. It’s a compelling tale. Surely, Denzel Washington could not pass up such a role.
General
