Can Inner-City Public Boarding Schools Be the Bridge Kids Need to Walk Out of Poverty?

I was struck by an article I read yesterday in the New York Times Magazine: “The Inner City Prep School Experience,” by Maggie Jones. Can an inner-city public boarding school be the bridge kids need to walk out of poverty?

The school, run by The SEED Foundation, is public, so they can’t select their students. Instead, kids fill out an application, and are then chosen by lottery. If selected, they will live at the boarding school throughout the school week from 6th grade until they graduate.

This model is intriguing because it attempts to tackle, in one way or another, the complicated web of influences that trap kids in poverty. While most people will agree that education is the way out of poverty, many people fail to see how many different factors influence both the quality of education a child receives, as well as that child’s ability to use her education to advance her opportunities in both the workplace and life. Usually, public schools are up against a lot more than limited funds--although having no money exacerbates the situation. Kids not feeling safe going to and from school, little parental involvement (many times because parents are working multiple low-paying jobs and don’t have the energy or the education to help their children learn), little access to books or computers, and a lack of successful neighborhood role models are just a few of the social factors that inhibit achievement.

Yet what excites me so much about this idea is that its approach seems to address many of those "x factors."  It is an approach of building bridges from the world of poverty to the world of the middle class, and of creating relationships and support networks that help kids step out of their comfort zone to experience the world outside of their neighborhood, and see the possibility of a different life for themselves.

Here are a few reasons why I think this is a potentially great idea:

1.  It is able to teach, in a concrete way, that leaving poverty means learning to navigate an entirely different world. Living in poverty requires skills and knowledge that people growing up in middle class or wealthy homes don’t have.  Children growing up poor know the “hidden rules” of poverty that they need to play by to survive. But likewise, children growing up in poverty don’t learn the “hidden rules” of the middle class—the rules of school and the workplace—that they need to succeed in the world outside their neighborhood. (Dr. Ruby Payne’s research about the “hidden rules” of social classes and their effect on students can be found in her work, A Framework for Understanding Poverty). Immersion is the quickest way to learn any culture, and being immersed in a boarding school culture, a culture based on the “hidden rules” of the middle class, can prepare students to succeed in the world outside of poverty. As Jones writes in her article, the “ongoing transition, from school to home and back again, symbolizes the school’s unwritten requirement of its students: to juggle and to navigate two different and often conflicting worlds.”

2.  The school is located within the neighborhood of most of the kids it serves, but provides structured opportunities to go other places. One of the hardest things for many inner city kids is leaving their own neighborhood. Their neighborhood encompasses most, if not all, of their entire social support network, and while it might be dangerous, they know how to navigate it.  For teenage boys in disadvantaged neighborhoods, people from other neighborhoods aren’t seen as potential friends, but rather, potential enemies.  This means that leaving the neighborhood is normally a dangerous endeavor, and one to be avoided.

3.  It stabilizes the environment during the school week and allows kids focus. If kids live at school, they don’t have to stress about what is going to happen to them when they walk home, or how they are going to find a place to focus with the TV blaring, or who might be coming over to visit.

4.  It creates social networks of kids from the neighborhood that are trying to achieve in school and go to college. In the teenage years especially, peer relationships have such a large effect on decision making. Some research shows that in violent neighborhoods, older peers have even more influence over the choices teenage boys make.  Who your friends are guides how you define yourself, and gives you a network of people who support you when you are making tough decisions--like deciding to stay in school when everyone else is dropping out. 

5.  It sets the stage for meaningful relationships with adults and “near-peers” who can guide them in more than just academics. Kids can hear public service announcements all day long without effect—but when someone they trust and respect tells them something, they listen. With kids living in poverty, often those voices are peers who might have learned the same misinformation that they did. With a school like this, they have active mentors to teach critical life skills and give good advice.

Of course, there are a lot of unanswered questions with this model. As the article says, SEED has struggled with keeping its students.  There's also the dilemma that only those who "win" the lottery get the opportunity to attend.  And of course, there is always the argument that the money spent on a boarding school should go to improving the rest of the city’s public schools. But would that money spent on traditional public schools have the same impact? I’m not sure. On the whole, I’m inclined to believe that as a boarding school, it just might have greater potential to take on the “x factors” of education that traditional public schools have been unable to address. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.