Anti-Racist Scholarship: An Advocacy

Highly Successful and Loving Public Elementary Schools Populated Mainly by Low SES Children of Color: Core Beliefs and Cultural Characteristics

163 Chapter 7 Highly Successful and Loving Public Elementary Schools Populated Mainly by Low SES Children of Color: Core Beliefs and Cultural Characteristics James Joseph Scheurich Rather than asking “what are the correlates of marginally greater success within the parameters of traditional schools?” we are asking, “what entirely different parameters for schooling appear to enable far greater numbers of students of all kinds to succeed in ways that are not found within traditional schools?” (Darling-Hammond, 1996, p. 13) The fact that elementary public schools, urban and rural, that are highly successful for low-socioeconomic-status (SES) students of color do exist is unquestionable (see, e.g., Burka, 1996; Daniel, 1996). In fact, such schools are more common than most educators or the general public realize, although certainly not common enough. The schools are ample enough in number to provide the basic outline of the type of school that is needed to provide both a loving environment1 and strong academic success for low-SES students of color, a level of academic success that is de¤nitively higher than that often reported for “successful” schools populated principally by low-SES children of color.2 These elementary schools are also suf¤cient enough in number and consistent enough in terms of their characteristics to undermine the widespread assumption that the source of academic failure for low-SES students of color is themselves, their parents, their genetics (i.e., Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), their neighborhood, their SES, their race, or some combination thereof (see e.g., Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Hacker, 1992; or Shulman, 1990, for discussions of some of these latter assumptions). In other words, if there is a schooling model that consistently works academically, especially at the highest levels, then the problem for educators is not anything about the students, the problem is that we are providing the wrong type of schooling for them. What is needed, then, is a research-based description of these highly successful and caring pre-K to ¤fth-grade schools.3 But, before I provide this description, I ¤rst need to emphasize that the schools on which this model is based are not 164 James Joseph Scheurich simply ones in which students of color do acceptably well on state-based high-stakes tests. They are ones in which these students do exceptionally well, placing them in direct academic competition with what are considered the better Anglo-dominant schools in the state. Second, I need to emphasize that the educational environments provided for the children in these schools are genuinely caring and strongly child-centered. Third, I need to emphasize that the model described here was developed not at the university level, like Comer’s, Levin’s, Sizer’s, or Slavin’s, but was developed at the grassroots level of education by school-level educators, principally educators of color who were working essentially on their own. My purpose here, then, is to describe the model that these schools have operationalized, although it should be understood both that there may well be other models that are equally successful4 and that this generalized model is de¤nitely not a formula that can be applied in the same way in every school. I will not, though, provide a thick description of each of the core beliefs and cultural characteristics of this model.5 Instead, my purpose is to name these and to provide a brief discussion of each one, resulting in a remarkably coherent model, a model that I and many of those who have led such schools6 have begun to call HiPass (High Performance All Student Success Schools).7 However, before I describe the HiPass model, I brie¶y discuss the source of the model, and then I describe the sources of data from which this model was drawn. I begin my description of the model by discussing the core beliefs that virtually all of the administrators and teachers in a school must hold to create a highly successful and loving school for low-SES students of color. Next, I depict the characteristics of the organizational culture8 of these schools. Last, I discuss some implications of this model for education, for other organizations, and for society in general.9 What Is the Source of the HiPass Model? The HiPass model did not come from the reform literature or from the leadership or organizational literatures, although those who created the model individually drew some pieces from these. Indeed, those who developed the model were not self-consciously developing a model; in their...