<p>Fieldston and University Heights are in the same borough but are worlds apart. How much understanding between their students can a well-told story bring?</p>
<p>very interesting. thanks for posting.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure what to think about this story, as the vast majority of kids, including upper income kids, don’t lose sleep over not attending $40k+ tuition private high schools. </p>
<p>I don’t know what the kids from the poor school get out of this exchange, besides envy.</p>
<p>I think they get an idea that wealthy kids aren’t so different from them, that they are all human with the same bodies and brains and souls. And I think that may help them aspire to do well in school and in life.</p>
<p>But I agree that the rich kids have more to learn.</p>
<p>My D goes to an expensive private in an Urban setting. This hits home.<br>
We are not poor enough to receive FA at this wonderful school and scrimp and save to send her there, but it is hard when she sees others who just get handed “more”. More clothes, more vacations, more electronics, etc. But D takes it in stride. Great article, which I just forwarded to her. </p>
<p>I found the article very touching. For those who haven’t read it, the kids were paired off (one from Fieldston, one from University Heights), and each kid had to tell his/her partner a story of something important in his/her life. Then the partners prepared and told the story to the group. The content of the stories varied widely in terms of seriousness, but what I found moving was the care that each kid took to understand his/her partner’s story and present it well. </p>
<p>Fieldston is not the typical expensive prep school; it has a history of involvement in social justice, environment, etc. So this is the kind of thing they would do. I can see the benefits for the Fieldston kids, but I’m not sure that this program helps the University Heights kids. It must be difficult to ‘visit’ this world with no hope of ever entering it.</p>
<p>Touching revelations from the perspectives of young people, but the University Heights kids are not completely shut out of the world that surrounds them, not when there are universities and museums within a 20 minute commute of their high school. Thats what makes me sad to hear stories like theirs…that the difficulty of their immediate surroundings (lack of a 2-parent home, financial stress, etc.) dampens their curiousity and their motivation to go out and explore and question the world. </p>
<p>My daughter went to elementary school in Manhattan’s Chinatown. A large majority of the children in her school came from families where English was not spoken. The principal and teachers worked very hard to encourage families to take advantage of the wonders of the city, and reinforced this message with field trips, activities, and extracurriculars. But it’s not so easy for a kid living in an insular environment to pick up and go to a museum in midtown.</p>
This American Life on NPR has a follow up on this article episode 550: Three Miles. You may be able to listed today on your local NPR station or on line after 7 PM central tonight http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/three-miles We listened yesterday in the car on the way from our eastern Massachusetts gritty urban city to the public library in the town of the BS that encouraged DS to apply but was rejected from. Made for some interesting conversation on the way home about his peek over the wall. The broadcast is basically about finding the one kid who ran crying off campus and her story along with a few others from University Heights.
The exchange takes kids from an impoverished public high school and puts them together with a non-randomly selected group of high achievers from families who can afford very high tuition. And even the kids from the public school aren’t randomly selected, since it obvious that if people could afford to live somewhere else, they would.
This is like taking physically handicapped kids and putting them together with kids who are invited to a Nike select basketball camp. Its not a “fair” comparison, and is likely to make the poor kids feel even less adequate. I looked up the stats for the University Heights school and you have average SAT scores in the low 400s, and ACT scores around 17 or 18. The students on average would be in about the 26th percentile, compared to probably 90th or so on average for Fieldston.
I guess the people making the decisions to do the program see it as having value to someone. Maybe if I were there I’d feel the same way.
The point is that the UH kids, particularly the three highlighted in This American Life, were very smart kids. If they had been lucky enough to be born to the type of parents that come to CC, they too would be worried about which college to go to. The idea of the exchange was to let the poor, but smart, kids see there was another path. It had some positive effect, but not on all the kids.
The most devastating part of the This American Life story was the girl who had looked forward to high school as the place she would actually learn and discuss things, but when she got to UH, was totally disappointed. Fieldston was what she had dreamed of, but was totally out of reach for her and felt pretty much set up. Her story makes up the first part of the broadcast. Well worth a listen.
The bright kids at UH were failed in that NYC has some very good high schools. Yet these kids were not pointed in that direction by their middle schools and/or had families that did not have the desire or the ability to get them to a better school.
Fieldston may be more progressive than other NYC prep schools, but it also has a tuition bill of over $43K per year so a pretty privileged bunch.
Should point out that the Times article is from last year and the This American Life story looks at kids that were in the program several years ago and are now in the mid-20s. The article focuses on the areas of common ground. The radio show seems somewhat more realistic about what happens next to the UH kids.
I think the world that the Fieldston kids experience is one that the poor kids probably don’t even know about, and how do they begin to understand what they would have to do to get into that world, or even move a step closer to it, if they don’t know about it. My parents thought college was for rich kids, so they provided no support when I wanted to go. It was beyond their experience that someone from their family could go.
I suppose that some kids might fall into envy, but it might also make them aware that there are other possibilities than the world they know. And maybe some of them -from both schools - will work to create a society where the economic losers don’t end up in a cycle of poverty that their children can’t overcome.
Indeed, that issue is the big one, but it hasn’t exactly been tractable. I think we do a pretty good job of attempting to assist the best and brightest of low income kids. If anything, some observers say too much is done and that it often puts unprepared kids into environments where they will fail.
The larger question, perhaps, is how to encourage good habits and behaviours, as well as skills, that will help people through life when they aren’t going to be middle managers or better. There are things that could be done on that count, but they’re not particularly popular overall.
Anyone aware of any studies about student outcomes in the Boston Metco program?