Golden Rule Days
JR., JOHN J. DIIULIO
Parochial School Days, Golden Rule Days By John J. Dilulio, Jr. In the mid-1970s, the student body of West Catholic High School in Philadelphia consisted of poor and working-class boys, black and...
...Should I support someone who won't work...
...Say it properly or you will get twice the number of Franks...
...That is something that even inner-city schools can do if teachers are formally empowered and informally encouraged to do it...
...They didn't have educational and sporting traditions that put local football legends like "Reds" Bagnel on a plane with the likes of Saint Augustine...
...Though he would be reluctant to admit it straight out, John Devine might have liked Brother Greg...
...Several neighboring public schools with socioeconomically similar student bodies couldn't claim the same...
...Man, I ain't doin' nothin...
...Let Devine blast Bill Bennett as a "reactionary...
...Devine is director of the School Partnership Program at New York University's School of Education...
...Read Sol Stern's "The Invisible Miracle of Catholic Schools" (City Journal, Summer 1996), which summarizes the virtues of the Catholic schools and their fabulous contributions to inner-city New York students...
...But, in his estimation, these efforts not only are generally ineffective, but serve to confirm most teachers "in their view that dealing with violence and aggressive students is a subspecialty that they had better not get involved with because they are neither trained in this area nor given that specific responsibility...
...Fear was certainly not considered the best method for motivating students in these highly competitive schools, but neither was it disdained...
...You know it's against the rules...
...Serious city-boy mischief was rife (who hid the beer kegs in the gym...
...Gerson's methods were unconventional, and he proved gutsy: A common punishment for classroom foolery was to stay after school, listen to the teacher's beloved Frank Sinatra oldies, and write 30, 40, or 50 times something like, "When I go home, I'm going to listen to the Chairman of the Board...
...He notes how his "graduate students today stare at me in disbelief when I relate to them how, as late as the 1960s, as a young priest-housemaster living in the student dormitory of a Jesuit university, I was doing midnight bedchecks, bailing students out of the local precinct when they got in trouble with the law, communicating with their parents, and checking to see if they were going to daily Mass...
...Still, almost none went to jail, and a few even went to Ivy League schools...
...Inner-city kids will behave like famous role models only when they regard the bourgeois virtues not as an idea but as a code, a code followed every day by lots of people...
...But he seems a bit too interested in remaining on speaking terms with the education establishment to admit as much, save in the form of an apologetic, don't-get-me-wrong, I-am-not-a-conserv-ative-Catholic epilogue entitled "A Jesuitical Fantasy...
...As the ex-gum-chewing, double-negative-spouting Jamal stated: "I think that welfare should only be used by those who really need it...
...But the essence of Gerson's well-told tale, and his own success, was not to become one with his stu-dents—not to pander to their tastes in music, accept their uncivil behavior, or be intimidated by their taunts and threats—but to make them become one with him...
...White or black...
...Fifty Franks today after school for chewing gum...
...Too bad the Jesuits didn't teach him to refrain from taking cheap shots at big-name conservatives with whom he clearly agrees more than he is willing to say out loud...
...Student: Chewing gum...
...When you did something right, you got immediate reinforcement...
...Having treated us to what he taught them, and how, Gerson sums up, in the book's concluding chapter, "The City and the Suburbs," what he learned from his students...
...Schools should be "designed to foster and develop students' native moral sense," he writes...
...Having abdicated responsibility for the very physical well-being of students, he suggests, teachers inevitably failed the students in other ways...
...Make them hustle, not just hot-dog, on the basketball court...
...It seems that Jersey City's youth are conservatives at heart...
...Gerson I graduated summa cum laude from Williams College in 1994, then spent a year teaching history at a spartan co-ed Jersey City Catholic high school...
...The kid heeded Gerson and straightened up...
...From the work of James Cole-man to the present, the best empirical research does indeed find that, for students from comparable backgrounds, absenteeism, disciplinary problems, threats to teachers, and rates of violence among students are lower, and academic achievement higher, among Catholic- school students...
...Gerson's chapter-by-chapter recitations of what his students believed, and what he taught them, on subjects as diverse as race, religion, history, politics, and O.J...
...It worked...
...Gerson: Jamal, it's "I didn't do anything...
...Devine's novel thesis is worth considering, and parts of his book are quite insightful and fair...
...When a student named Walt got caught using drugs, denied he was guilty, and begged Gerson to let him slide, the young teacher stared him down and shamed him...
...Or hear Quanti-na: "Personally, I think people on welfare are generally lazy...
...My reason for saying this is because I work...
...The Jesuits, Devine recounts, "were not afraid to confront students who failed to uphold their responsibilities...
...We knew he could and would—and had...
...In four years, how many butts did you actually see him kick...
...He criticizes an official report on school safety for focusing on such issues as the security supervisor-to-guard ratio rather than the roles and responsibilities of teachers: "Teachers are barely mentioned in this report— they appear as silent actors in a talkies film, as bit players on the school safety scene....The report never contemplates the teacher as a mature person having expectations for social or cognitive behavior, as a responsible adult conscious of the need to set an example of courtesy, as a team member accountable for helping to foster the identity of the institution, or as a moral instructor concerned with providing leadership and helping to construct a communal code of values...
...Going to college or back to [the local bar...
...You are, he told the student, "not only a criminal but a liar...
...Chewing gum...
...Gerson's students couldn't see why Bennett's call to behead drug dealers in public parks was so controversial, or why anyone would think welfare didn't breed dependency, or why school prayer wasn't universal...
...And too bad he couldn't avoid using pseudo-intellectual prattle about the dangers of a "crypto-positivist outlook" as a cover for his own obvious statistical illiteracy...
...Jock or not...
...I don't think so...
...In short, make them better educated, more civilized, and more capable of expressing themselves while honoring their obligations to others...
...In his just-released book, Maximum Security, he offers a novel interpretation of the violence and poor overall performance of inner-city public schools...
...Student: I ain't be doin' nothin...
...Gerson: If you insist on being insolent, then at least do it in proper English...
...A typical exchange: Gerson: Jamal, you have been in Frank all week, and you will get more now...
...In the mid-1970s, the student body of West Catholic High School in Philadelphia consisted of poor and working-class boys, black and white, Catholic and non-Catholic, from some of the city's toughest street corners...
...But lest anyone should think he really means it, in his next breath Devine adds: "The mere recollection of such memories . . . should not be taken as an endorsement of the get-tough approaches recommended by such conservatives as William Bennett and other reactionary commentators...who reiterate the comparison studies between Catholic and public schools...
...Its roots," he writes, "are in the gradual withdrawal of teachers, over the past several decades, from the responsibility for school-wide discipline, when the union contract removed this function from their job descriptions or reduced it...
...And yes you did...
...He had a sense of humor...
...And they didn't have consistent tough-love school discipline, as in Brother Greg (not his real name...
...By his own frank account, it took Gerson some time to adjust to his predominantly black and Latino students' language, leaders, laws, and rites...
...That is, make them speak proper English...
...are priceless...
...I don't think welfare is automatically bad but there should be a law to contain cheats...
...We also knew he cared, and that he didn't play favorites...
...He knew his stuff...
...Make them behave respectfully...
...He respected you...
...And it can't be easy in any case to walk into a school where your male students worry about being raped in jail and the primary "intellectual" influences on your female students are Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, and other trash-talk television queens...
...They didn't have school uniforms...
...The schools, he reports, are now crawling with expert "violence-prevention courses, peer-mediation programs, and conflict-resolution programs...
...What Jesuit teachers feared more than any arrogant student was a fellow teacher (Jesuit or lay) who didn't know how to control a class...
...None—but that's the point...
...You are more Republican than most Republicans," Gerson teased them...
...The classrooms were calm...
...You chewed gum...
...But serious teen violence, gang warfare, and interracial strife were exceedingly rare...
...And read In the Classroom, a ¦g sprightly new book on suc-| cessful inner-city schools ? by Mark Gerson...
...If there's a second edition, somebody should run the manuscript through a deconstructionism detector and expel passages like the ones on our "complicity" with "the ongoing fabrication and dissolution of the narrative of modernity," Fou-cault's "network of gazes," and how ruthless juvenile drug dealers are ostensibly aping "the morality and ideology of the mainstream American business community...
...Upon graduation, most of the boys went to work, not to college...
...Make them complete assignments on time...
...everyday language among peers was rough, and bloody knock-down fistfights over girls and games were routine...
...But then again, they didn't have school prayer...
...The answer to the inner-city public schools' culture of violence and lousy academic record is as plain as the nose on Devine's very own Catholic-educated face...
...It is not enough for kids to know they should stay away from drugs and irresponsible sex and that they should work hard and go to church...
...During Devine's decade teaching at some of New York City's "lower-tier" schools, he watched in frustration as metal detectors and small armies of security guards (3,200 by 1994) and safety bureaucrats normalized the schools' "culture of violence...
...He simply was not used to the exceedingly rough horseplay or the brutal racial and ethnic jokes and wordplay of Jersey City teens...
...Devine wisely invokes James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense against those who insist that ghetto youth "arrive at the schoolhouse door as moral illiterates...
...Walt, Jamal, and the others were fortunate to have such a teacher...
...Unfortunately, no one saved Devine from his Derrida-isms...
...But if you played the badass or mouthed off or hassled other kids, no matter how big you were, he would take off his shirt, show his martial arts thing, and, if you pressed it, kick your butt but good...
...It is "only possible," he advises, "to help someone you know...
...Coming off a 20th reunion gathering, a class of '76 graduate recalled, "Brother wanted you to learn...
...Yet the hallways were peaceful...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 15
