Meeting the challenge of the urban High School by Joyce Baldwin If it takes a village to raise a child, it may also take the equivalent—teachers, parents, elected officials, business leaders and anyone else who cares about kids—to create a successful high school.

“Hi, teach!”
This snappy, disrespectful first line in Up the Down Staircase effectively sets the tone of Bel Kaufman’s portrayal of her experiences as a teacher in New York City high schools. Kaufman draws a deft portrait of a situation that is at once funny and sad, a story of how teachers and students try to cope with a system that simply doesn’t work for them. The book, which was a great success when published in 1964, sold more than six million copies and was made into a hit movie staring Sandy Dennis.

In a forward to a paperback edition issued in 1991, thirty years after she wrote the classic, Kaufman described her story as one of plunging “Sylvia Barrett, the young, inexperienced, idealistic teacher, into the maelstrom of an average city high school, where, inundated with trivia in triplicate, she had to cope with all that is frustrating and demeaning in the school system, while dealing with larger human issues.”

At the beginning of the new millennium, many educators and students view their own school situations as similar to that experienced by Sylvia Barrett. In a comment about the current urban school crisis, Kaufman notes that “Everything described in my fiction is today reality. Only computers and condoms are new.” Her story now, she says, “seems more timely than ever, and more urgent.”

The Scope of the Problem

Since Ms. Kaufman wrote that observation, the crisis in the nation’s schools has deepened, especially in large, impersonal urban schools. While there are high schools that do an excellent job of effectively educating students, in many cases schools are not really meeting the needs of today’s young people. Symptoms of this problem include students who are too often absent from school and too often drop out altogether. According to the National Education Association, in 1998 nearly 12 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds were without a high school credential; this included 29.5 percent of Hispanic youth; 13.8 percent of black, non-Hispanic youth; 7.7 percent of white, non-Hispanic youth; and 4.1 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander youth.

Next page: The traditional high school has served as a sorting device, sending graduates off to college or to pursue a vocation or service work and sending students who did not graduate to unskilled jobs.

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