| Maggie Jones’ article “The Inner City Prep School Experience,” [New York Times, 2009] reported on a charter school in Washington D.C. called SEED. The college preparatory public charter school and dormitory serves 320 students, grades six through twelve. Most students are African-American from single-parent, lower-income, families in southeast and northeast section of Washington’s Ward 7 near an impoverished Ward 8. According to the article, the inner city home neighborhood of the students necessitated the creation of SEED charter school, which is now in its twelfth year of operation.
Students formerly had to deal with failing schools and serious neighborhood risks – murders, drug sales, and drug abuse – during non-school hours. SEED took on the task of changing options for these students because they felt there was a need for students living in sometimes dangerous urban neighborhoods to have access to safe and successful learning environments that ease their transition to college, to help them imagine and experience a broader world, and equip them with the skills to achieve life-long success.
Problems Addressed by the Charter School
The issue facing the students of SEED is by no means an isolated circumstance. Problems of urban neighborhood risks plague inner cities of the United States and pose a significant barrier to educational access. These problems have a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, who through discriminatory practices in housing, employment, and education are highly likely to find themselves living in urban settings.
In the particular case of the 7th and 8th Ward of Washington D.C., this issue is predominantly affecting African-Americans in general, who reflect both genders and come from a lower socio-economic class. In response, the charter school has been successful in closing the achievement gap for its students primarily by offering refuge and rigor outside the students’ home community in a safer, secluded dormitory setting. Last year, President Obama, former President Clinton, as well as Senator Edward Kennedy called it an inspiration on a visit there in April.
Controversial Issues With the Charter School
Students live at the SEED prep school five days a week and return home on weekends. While some students have the ability to “survive back and forth” between the two worlds they regularly navigate, all students should be formally and informally equipped to not simply survive in these two worlds, but also to use their unique position to improve the world they came from – their home neighborhood and community.
To address these issues, there could be a policy-response that specifically addresses the need for code-switching in a manner that includes agency development for students to become ambassadors of uplift to their home community.
Code-switching refers to the learning and use of differing dialects based on social context. According to an online workshop document “Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectically Diverse Classroom” [Annenberg Media, 2010], “Teachers can draw upon the language strengths of urban learners to help students code-switch – choose the language variety appropriate to the time, place, audience and communicative purpose. In doing so, we honor linguistic and cultural diversity, all the while fostering students' mastery of the Language of Wider Communication, the de-facto lingua franca of the US.”
While it is true that social and economic success depends upon the ability to learn and acquire the language of power (the de facto lingua franca of the US), having the ability to speak appropriately in contexts where this dominant language loses its power gives one the added advantage of having increased cultural capital.
For example, the leader of SEED talks to students about the value of knowing how to speak the language of the students’ neighborhoods. He was quoted in the article saying “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a set of skills that others lack. Why would I want to rid him of that?” This leader speaks to the controversial issues around language in the school, but perhaps the school would do well to move from "talk" to explicit instruction and subsequent action. The nature of this instruction would explore deeply the matter of and more importantly, the value of code-switching. In doing so, this curriculum will also equip students with the tools to be agents of social justice for the purposes of racial uplift in their home community.
Some might argue that explicit instruction in code-switching might detract from "true" instruction. They might suggest that it is not a true language, or that students will be not fluent enough in either language if code-switching is necessary, or perhaps code-switching is not academically appropriate. While these arguments seem legitimate, they are based on narrow visions of education that support the status quo, which denies multicul ... |
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