Urban education: systems, challenges, and reform approaches

Urban Education

In the recent past, research on the attitudes toward school of African-American students has suggested that the subculture within which many lived explained negative attitudes toward school success (Tyson, 2002). In this view, African-American students who excelled in school were teased by friends. This peer influence would prod students to either slough off school or attempt to hide the fact that they were good students. They would avoid bringing books home because completing homework was not a peer-supported value (Tyson, 2002).

However, Tyson (2002) has come to a different conclusion based on her research. She found that early school success or failure better accounted for the attitudes individual students hold toward school and school success. She found that African-American students who struggle in school during the elementary years would avoid academic work simply to avoid more failure. Her research suggested that the evolution of negative views of school was a developmental one and based on personal success or failure and not driven solely -- and possibly not even primarily -- by a "culture of opposition" (Tyson, 2002) toward education.

This means that teachers and schools can actively any tendency in urban students to devalue school success as a goal. Some approaches to teaching students might work toward the goal of developing and supporting a desire to do well in school. Howard Gardner's "theory of multiple intelligences" argues that there are many ways to learn, and that schools' tendency to emphasize verbal learning over other approaches unnecessarily disadvantages students whose strengths lie in other areas but who are nevertheless intelligent children (Nolen, 2003). Gardner identifies eight different "intelligences." In addition to verbal-linguistic, he lists musical, mathematical-logical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Those who follow Gardner's theory seek to find alternate ways for students to excel. Such an approach might be one way to keep potentially alienated students engaged in the learning process by providing them academic successes in ways that make sense to them. Schools that rely on a linguistic approach to teaching, often supplemented by collaborative work, address only two of Gardner's eight areas. While no teacher could teach all year to, say, a naturalist style of learning, to leave it out completely means that such a child never has his or her unique learning style addressed and recognized.