Nxxx,2006-08-09,B,007,Bs-BW,E1

THE NEW YORK TIMES

METRO WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2006

B7

EDUCATION

When the Bank Teller Is Still in High School

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN For students at the Theodore Roosevelt High School campus in the Bronx, remembering their lunch money may never be easier. This fall, North Fork Bank plans to open a full-service branch in the school lobby, just steps past the metal detectors near the main entrance on East Fordham Road. The branch will be staffed by 17 students in a banking and finance class at the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology, one of five schools in the building. The students worked this summer in North Fork branches throughout the Bronx, training as tellers and customer service representatives. The goal is to help students further their skills in banking and financial services and to promote basic finance literacy among the wider student body. The branch will have two teller stations and two customer service desks, but to make sure that students do the work, it will have no A.T.M. The branch will serve students and the high schools staff members three days a week during lunch periods. Outside customers will not be permitted. Wander Morrobel, an 18-yearold senior from Washington Heights who worked this summer at a North Fork branch on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, said he was already recruiting his friends to open new accounts, especially classmates who had summer internships at Bear Stearns, the investment bank. I want the summer to be over, said Mr. Morrobel, who was wearing slacks, a shirt and tie, and a lapel pin displaying the banks insignia. Were going to be promoting ourselves a lot. But one of the students first real-world lessons in the banking business will be about patience. After lengthy talks with the city Education Department over security and other concerns, the inschool branch is not likely to open until late October. North Fork is also still working with the department to iron out legal issues. True to life, most branches dont open exactly when you expect them to, said Stacey Cooper, a North Fork senior vice president. Officials said the branch was a new idea in New York City but that banks elsewhere run similar programs. Last year, Columbia Bank, of Fair Lawn, N.J., opened a branch in Passaic County Technical Institute, a high school in Wayne, N.J. And Park Federal Savings Bank in Chicago has a branch in the Curie Metro High School. Ms. Cooper and others in North Forks community reinvestment group said the project was a way to contribute to city school children. This isnt about a grant, Ms. Cooper said. This isnt about North Fork writing a check. School officials suggested a partnership with Fordham Leadership Academy because of its focus on business. Then staff members there recommended students who were interviewed for the summer internships. Jeanine Reynoso, 17, said she was thrilled to staff a teller station and a customer service desk, and to interact directly with customers this summer. When you go for an internship in a company in the summer, usually they have you making copies and stapling things, she said. Were treated like employees. The students were paid $11 an hour for seven 40-hour weeks. They were also given a clothing allowance. Ms. Reynoso said that sometimes customers would notice intern on her name badge and ask which school she attended. I always say Fordham and they say, Oh, Fordham University, and I say, No, Fordham High School. Several students said they were impressed by the piles of cash in the vault. But Terrence Murrell, 17, said that all he needed to see more money than he had ever seen before was his paycheck. The check surprised me, he said. This is my first job. Jonathan Perez, 16, said his parents were proud. They didnt finish high school, he said. So they push me to strive.

Photographs by ngel Franco/The New York Times

Jackie Sheeler read one of her poems at the graduation in late June for Horizon Academy, a high school at the Rikers Island jail.

Rhyme and Reason for Young Inmates

Poet Laureate of Rikers Island Teaches Lessons From Her Past
By APRIL SIMPSON The youngest inmates of Rikers Island have plenty to worry about: their pending court cases, resolving their charges, when they might reunite with their families. More immediately, they worry that the guards will spontaneously search their bodies and cells. Yet on a recent morning, Jackie Sheeler, who leads poetry writing workshops at one of the jails four schools, encouraged the young men there to worry about other things, like putting their thoughts into verse. I know you had a lockdown this morning and youre in jail, not to mention youre in summer school, she told the 14 students in her class at Horizon Academy, a high school at the jail for inmates ages 16 to 21. Lamenting how hard things can sometimes be, she added that some of my best writing has come from the worst times of my life. Ms. Sheeler, 48, a dark-haired woman with black tattoos resembling vines snaking up her arms, was invited to teach at the jail by Marty Flaster, an English teacher at Horizon who had seen her appear at a poetry reading series she moderates at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village. He wanted to pay her for her time, she said. But knowing Horizon had a shoestring budget, and a dearth of visiting artists, Ms. Sheeler suggested that she be named poet laureate of Rikers Island as her reward. The idea kind of came to me out of the blue, said Ms. Sheeler, whose latest collection of verse, The Memory Factory (Buttonwood Press), was published in 2002. With no one else clamoring to be chief poet of the citys largest jail complex, the Department of Correction had little reason to object, although a spokesman pointed out that the position was not an official one. Ms. Sheeler was named to the post at the Horizon graduation ceremony in late June. Within days, she had updated shoutedword.com, her Web site, to take note of her new title. She really gets to them, Gloria Ortiz, the Horizon principal, said of Ms. Sheelers students. Its not above their heads. She touches on issues that affect them and she makes writing fun, which its what its supposed to be. Ms. Sheeler said that poetry and writing in her youth helped lift her above poverty and drug use. Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she said, she had an abusive and racist father who kept her mothers Puerto Rican heritage a secret. Id sit in the windowsill in my room and cry and write these pathetic little couplets, Ms. Sheeler said. I would go to the page to figure out how I felt. Between smoking marijuana and drinking beer in a nearby park, she found time to attend English classes at Lafayette High School. She said a beating by her father, provoked by her kissing a black man, was a real turning point for me in terms of wildness. She began having sex, using harder drugs and exploring Greenwich Village. At 16, she discovered Poez, a street performer in Washington Square, and Sylvia Plath. Between Poez and Sylvia Plath, who I really didnt understand because of the density of her language, poetry wasnt just writing poems, there was this whole other wild place you could go with it, Ms. Sheeler said. She lived in several communes before she met a man, a heroin addict who had been imprisoned for burglary. Although heroin was supposed to be off limits when they decided to be married, once we took that limit off the table, it was off to the races, Ms. Sheeler said. I went down further and faster than I had ever done before. In Witnessless, published in was published in 2003 by Soft Skull Press in Brooklyn. She is also the lyricist for the Manhattan rock band Talk Engine and maintains a regional poetry calendar at poetz.com. On the recent morning at Rikers, Ms. Sheeler entered a series of checkpoints and was escorted into a classroom, where her students trickled in after the lockdown. She began class by explaining poetrys relationship to hip-hop and cracking jokes on the dead old white men from England who were poetrys primary audience 300 years ago. The young men were energized. The best poetry is jail poetry, one of the students remarked. Because thats where you let out all your feelings. I think the best poetry comes from pain, she replied. Like many of the students, Anthony Ayala, 20, used a free-writing exercise to delve into the gloom of incarceration. Give me light Life is light, but Will I be able to see it If I got released from prison Then my light will be a given. When in rehab, or when in prison, Ms. Sheeler said, and youre with people who basically have nothing, if you can bring that gift in selfconfidence, that aha thats what its all about to me. Ms. Sheeler, talking about her workshops, added: In all the groups, theres this inherent human fear of the blank page. This is about self-expression, and helping the students past those type of barriers. Helping them to understand that punctuation and spelling are not necessarily about good writing, but getting some good images on paper, getting the words out there.

Horizon Academy inmates were guarded during the ceremony.

The Memory Factory, Ms. Sheeler described her courthouse wedding in October 1987 as blurry with methadone and bad coke. The couple lost their apartment and panhandled to support their addiction, she said. In July 1989, her husband disappeared. By the end of the month, she had entered drug rehabilitation, and the couple divorced three years later. Her former husband committed suicide in 1995, she said. Upon her release from rehab, Ms. Sheeler threw herself into the arts. In addition to writing her collection of poetry, she has edited Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About Police, which

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Terrence Murrell, an intern with North Fork Bank in the Bronx, and Iris Rodriguez, center, head teller, helping a customer.

ON EDUCATION/Diana Jean Schemo

It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap

HEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs. But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer? The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas. To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families. For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate. The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms fail to make sufficient progress every year. Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of childrens lives outside of

school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically. At Johns Hopkins University, two sociologists, Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander, collected a trove of data on Baltimore schoolchildren who began first grade in 1982. They found that contrary to expectations, children in poverty did largely make a year of progress for each year in school. But poor children started out behind their peers, and the problems compounded when school ended for the summer. Then, middle-class children would read books, attend camp and return to school in September more advanced than when they left. But poorer children tended to stagnate. The long summer break is especially hard for disadvantaged children, Professor Alexander said. Some school is good, and more is better. Family really is important, and its very hard for schools to offset or compensate fully for family disadvantage, he said. In Chicago, a court order to empty public housing projects, which dispersed families and children into the suburbs, led to a rise in childrens academic achievement. The evidence is pretty clear that the better their housing, the betDavid Suter ter kids do on tests, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan group. In his 2004 book, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap, Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom. A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even

the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children. I would never say public schools cant do better, Mr. Rothstein said. Id say they cant do much better, unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.

OR many children in America, public schools are not lacking. A 2001 international reading test put Americans ninth out of students in 35 nations. But only students in Sweden, the Netherlands and England had scores more than marginally higher than the United States average. More important, the average score of the 58 percent of American students attending schools that were not predominantly poor surpassed that of Sweden, the top-scoring nation. But for the 42 percent of American students attending the poor schools that are the principal target of No Child Left Behind, the inequities remain. Blacks and Latinos lag more than two years behind white students in math on national assessment tests. In reading, which is more influenced by family background, blacks and Latinos fall three years behind whites. Yet these gaps have shrunk considerably since 1992, when blacks were 3.5 years behind whites in math. Since 1973, when the federal government began collecting these scores, black 9-year-olds have gained roughly 3.5 grade levels in math, narrowing the achievement gap, even though white scores were also rising at the same time. The cause of these improvements is unclear, although some are most likely related to state efforts, especially in the last 15 years. A $100 million school voucher bill sponsored by Republicans gives vouchers a prominent place in next years debate over renewing No Child Left Behind. But other voices are likely to call for a sense of responsibility for improving childrens academic success that does not begin and end at the schoolhouse door. It cant just be a burden on the schools to do away with social inequality, said Mr. Jennings, of the education policy center. It has to be a burden on all of us.