Book Reviews:
The Street Stops Here
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.
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.)
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.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/05/DDHC14URSK.DTL
Ottawa Citizen, January 4, 2009
BOOKS
Saint Orlando of Harlem
TAMARA BECKWITH PHOTO
Principal Orlando Gober congratulates a student at an awards ceremony at Harlem’s Rice High School.
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.
Author Patrick McCloskey spent a year at Rice High School observing classes and interviewing faculty and students.
Breaking News from the Phoenix area, Tucson & Flagstaff, Arizona
www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=66241
What if blacks had been treated and educated like the Irish?
Posted by PHX - Craig J. Cantoni on Tuesday January 13, 2009 at 10:25 pm MST
You might know the horrible socioeconomic statistics about inner-city African Americans. Here’s a refresher:
- Blacks commit almost half the murders in the nation, and most of these are by males 14 to 24-years-old, a segment that makes up only 1.2 percent of the nation’s population.
- Although they comprise less than 13 percent of the population, blacks account for about half of Americans with AIDS. (Some epidemiologists attribute some of the higher incidence to the higher incarceration rate of black males.)
- Since the Great Society and War on Poverty over 40 years ago, the black middle class has tripled, but the percent of blacks living at or below the poverty level has remained unchanged at 35 percent. (Note: Today’s poverty level equates to a higher standard of living than it did in the 1960s.)
- On average, the math and reading scores of black high school seniors are no better than the scores of non-Hispanic whites in the eighth grade.
- In big cities, the dropout rate of black students is 50 percent or higher. In the District of Columbia, where our overlords in Congress and the White House send their kids to private schools, only nine percent of public school students graduate and complete college within five years.
You might not be as familiar with statistics about the wave of Irish-Catholic immigration that began in the 1840s. A sampling:
- In 1847, 40,000 Irish immigrants died crossing the Atlantic on “coffin ships,” a much higher mortality rate than that in slave ships of the same period.
- Irish immigrants were despised as the poorest, most uncivilized, least educated, and most immoral of the world’s people. Frederick Douglas called them “the filthy scum of white society.” When the great black thinker and orator visited Ireland in 1840s, Douglas said that he was almost ashamed to speak against slavery, because blacks in bondage often lived in better conditions. W. E. B. Dubois had similar sentiments. He said that freed blacks were “not as poor as the Irish peasants.”
- Alcoholism, prostitution, fighting, gangs, child labor, illegitimacy, and parentless children were rampant in Irish slums. Widowed or abandoned by their husbands, many Irish women resorted to prostitution. It was estimated that prostitutes numbered 50,000 in New York City. Mothers even prostituted their own children. Children roamed the streets, slept in doorways and coal bins, and rarely saw a classroom.
- Help-wanted signs read, “Any color or country except Irish.” Accordingly, less than half of the Irish were employed in legitimate jobs, and most of those at low pay.
- The Protestant establishment, believing that the Irish would never be assimilated, clamored to stop their immigration.
Let’s fast forward to the 1960s. By then, Irish Catholics ranked above Protestants in education, income, and other measures of socioeconomic progress. And all Catholics, regardless of ethnicity, outperformed every other group except Jews.
What accounts for the progress of Irish Catholics and, by contrast, the steps back by the black underclass in American inner cities? In his latest book, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, Patrick J. McCloskey makes a compelling case that Catholic schools and social institutions were the primary reasons for the progress of the Irish, while misguided government policies and pedagogy were the primary reasons for the current plight of inner-city blacks.
McCloskey, who is certainly not a conservative or right-wing ideologue, spent a year at Rice Catholic High School in Harlem , an all-male school of mostly non-Catholic blacks, except for a smattering of Latinos. Contrary to the propaganda of the public education establishment, neither Rice nor other inner-city Catholic schools cherry-pick the best students, but they consistently outperform public schools that cater to the same races and socioeconomic classes. Nor do the schools proselytize about the Catholic faith, as the propagandists would have you believe.
McCloskey is not Pollyannaish about Catholic schools. He reveals all of the warts of Rice but also reveals what sets Rice and other parochial schools apart from public schools: discipline, high standards, and a values-based education. To take one small example, Rice will not tolerate the N-word, while New York public schools, with all of their political correctness, let black students get by with demeaning each other with the racial pejorative.
In painful anecdotes and statistics, the book details the social pathologies of young black men and how those pathologies affect learning. McCloskey attributes the pathologies to the absence of fathers, which in turn is due to misguided government social policies and the War on Drugs. Black boys enter school without any framework of what it means to be a man, a virtuous person, and a contributing member of society. Rice High School tries to fill that gap, which McCloskey believes has to happen before classroom learning can take place.
This is precisely the role that Catholic schools played in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the Irish and other poor immigrants. As McCloskey details, by the beginning of the twentieth century, “Nationwide, 10.1 million Catholics sent 854,523 children to 3,811 parochial elementary schools, which was closer to half of all school-aged youngsters.” But the impact of Catholic education was far greater, because Catholic-trained teachers took Catholic pedagogy into public schools, which at the time did not have today’s secular fetish and thus were not adverse to teaching moral precepts.
Catholic schools were successful even though parochial schools had 111 students per class, on average, in 1868.
To me, the biggest “Ah-hah!” in McCloskey’s book is the author’s point that independent institutions had developed to address the unique problems of the Irish underclass, but that the government has blunted the spontaneous development of such independent institutions for the black underclass.
Black scholar and author Thomas Sowell makes a similar point in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberal. Due in large part to independent black institutions and schools, there had been dramatic black academic progress until the 1960s, when three things began to happen: (1) the crowding out of independent institutions by the government; (2) the deleterious effects of the welfare state on the black family; and (3) the closing or integration of academically rigorous all-black schools, due to a belief of the courts and white elites that separate couldn’t be equal or better.
Unfortunately, Catholic schools are closing in inner cities due to a number of factors, especially funding and the inability of families to pay parochial tuition in addition to ever-increasing public school taxes. Education vouchers or education tax credits are solutions to this problem, but the party of the children and social justice, the Democrat Party — including, ironically, the Irishman Ted Kennedy — keeps vouchers and credits from expanding nationwide. Meanwhile, the Obama children have enrolled in a private D.C. school.
Just think, if the Irish had immigrated en masse in 1960 instead of the nineteenth century, they would have been taken care of by the benevolent government. As such, they would have a large and permanent underclass, just like African Americans.
An author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.
Kirkus Reviews
November 2008
THE STREET STOPS HERE;
A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem
SECTION: NONFICTION
LENGTH: 362 words
McCloskey embarks on a qualitative exploration of a New York City parochial high school.
“The most urgent problem in American education today,” the author writes, “is the high dropout rate and low achievement of inner-city minority students.” As the Catholic school model has shown a measure of success in educational achievement and graduation rates, often with fewer resources than public institutions, McCloskey undertook a non-ideological inquiry to see what makes one inner-city, underfunded Catholic school successful. This entailed a yearlong immersion into Rice High School, an all-boys parochial academy in Harlem with a student body comprised of 85 percent African-Americans and 15 percent Hispanics.
The author sat in on daily classes, attended events and teachers’ meetings, conducted interviews and visited students on their home turf. Rice is no cakewalk for students or teachers: All kids, regardless of issues, are taught in the same way, with a demanding curriculum, and there are expectations, discipline and extensive parent-teacher interaction. No effort is made to convert
students to Catholicism, but morality and social justice are tangible dimensions of daily life. McCloskey situates Rice within the evolution of U.S. public and parochial education, noting its imperfections, but also the fact that it graduates many more students than public schools with similarly difficult demographics. The author makes a solid case for public funding of inner-city parochial schools that is both hard to challenge — certainly as long as the pedagogical and administrative model meets resistance in the public-education sphere — and likely to cause church-state feuds. Still, he notes, “[t]he only certainty here is that people who fight against public funding for inner-city Catholics schools would never condemn their children to the public schools they so readily consign those children.”
The unadorned narrative is convincing in its portrayal of Rice’s mission to put an education, not a creed, into young men’s heads.
Publication Date: 1/1/2009 0:00:00
NINETEENTH YEAR, NO. 968 CANADA’S POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT NEWSWEEKLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2008 $4.00
Former Ritz staffer writes book, The Street Stops Here
Patrick McCloskey, a former press secretary to Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, has written his first book, a non?fiction, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, which will be published by the University of California (Berkeley) Press in January 2009.
Mr. McCloskey, now a researcher with the Oliphant Commission’s Mulroney- Schreiber Inquiry, graduated from Columbia University’s graduate journalism program in 1998 where he began writing education articles for The New York Times. At the time, he said, he was a single father who lived “on the edge of Harlem” so that he would be able to afford to pay private school tuition fees for his daughter. “We tried public school but it was a disaster,” he told HOH, explaining that two public schools she attended were either “uncaring,” “toxic” or “an academic joke.”
“In urban centres across the U.S., the overwhelming majority of public schools serving disadvantaged minorities have become education dead zones,” he said. “In contrast, Catholic schools in the same neighbourhoods serving the same demographic, and often mostly non-Catholic students, graduate students with remarkable efficacy and get them into college and university.”
The focus of Mr. McCloskey’s book is Rice High School, an all-boys Christian Brothers-run school which was walking distance from his New York apartment. A Wall Street Journal review of the book recently called it “required reading for anyone who is interested in the welfare of our kids” as it is a “warts-and-all por
trait” of life in a school where one student lives with his grandmother because his parents died of AIDS and another student is expelled for dealing drugs. “This would be a downer if Mr. McCloskey didn’t note that Rice enjoys a 70 per cent to 80 per cent graduation rate—at least double that of New York public schools,” The Wall Street Journal review said.
Mr. McCloskey has also written for The Financial Times, Reason Magazine, Business Week Online and New York Daily News. He also previously worked for the House of Commons as a Parliamentary committee report editor.
Book Reviews