Front Page

[This article originally appeared in the April 1990 issue of OMNI magazine in a special section on the challenges of public education.]

By Keith Hefner

As the deadline approaches, half a dozen reporters cradle phones, checking facts and gathering last-minute quotes. In a corner one writer argues with his editor about changes in his story while another writer, in a voice loud enough for the whole newsroom to hear, excitedly describes her interview with a TV star. The noise level rises almost out of control but subsides when the editor in chief pokes his head over the half wall of his cubicle. Reporters working at a dozen computer terminals, artists hunched over their drafting tables, and photographers in the darkroom rush to complete their work.

One by one, finished pages appear on a large computer screen for one final check before they go to the printer. Tomorrow 80,00 copies will be on their way to our readers.

A closer look reveals something unusual about this newsroom. An eighteen-year-old who was in prison for attempted murder sits at one computer, helping a student from one of New York City's most prestigious high schools. Next to them a reporter on a day-pass from a drug treatment program struggles to write about his life in the drug underworld, and nearby a girl writes about a crack addict she knows well: her father. Other reporters in the newsroom include a high-school dropout, a valedictorian, several youngsters from traditional two-parent homes, and two kids who are already parent themselves. A retired advertising agency president, incongruous among the swarm of energetic teens with his sweet-smelling pipes and dignified manner, works the phones, trying to convince a film company that New York teens are an important part of its market. Two adult editors, a professional desktop publisher, and myself keep the logistics of the paper in motion.

In 1980, at the age of twenty-five, I founded the newspaper on which they're working-New Youth Connections. Our 24-page publication circulates every month in more than 400 public high schools, libraries, and community-based youth programs, each paying $10 a year for a subscription. Fortunately, we do not have to make a profit for our newspaper because we receive donations from many corporations and foundations. Our newsroom functions as an extended classroom.

The kinds of kids we attract, I find all too often, have been brutalized by poverty. Often their education-their best chance to escape poverty-consists of 10 or 12 years of drill for state-mandated competency exams. The kids running this paper are doing something many of them have never done before: They learning to solve problems. Not problems that they've been coached on for six months, but meaningful, multifaceted problems: What articles should we write? What vocabulary should we use? What responsibility do we have to the various racial and ethnic groups among our readers? Should we criticize school administrators by name?

Our project provides the kids with a context where school learning becomes relevant. While working on the paper, students learn to type, to read for the "main idea," to travel the subways, to present themselves professionally on the telephone and in an interview. They learn to speak in a group...and how to listen. They become adept at addressing envelopes and using computers. Most important, they learn about the world outside of themselves, something that traditional classroom education frequently fails to help them do.

As their fluency in these areas increases, students often pose problems for the adult editors. They question and challenge the standards we set for the paper. In 1986, an angry eighteen-year-old ex-graffiti artist and high school dropout, Bonz Malone, wanted to write entirely in slang, with unconventional spelling, grammar, and syntax. He wrote the way many of our readers talked. Why couldn't New Youth Connections run a column written in slang?

At first I couldn't understand even half of what Bonz wrote-he had to translate it. Yet there was a potency in his work that transcended the street talk he used to convey his experiences. In an early article Bonz described his first few minutes at a shelter for teenage runaways as follows:

Dawghouse ragamuffins from Brooklyn to the Bowery packed the lounge. Big Foot showed me to my room as a fight broke out.

"Aye yo, what kind of place iz this?"

"A place these kids call home."

"They live here?"

"Yeah, and you don't. You can leave and go home, but they can't. Your room iz down the hall and to the left."

"Thanks."

There ain't no clock in here. What tyme iz it!

"Tyme will tell," a voice said.

"Who is you?"

"Finsta, L.E.S. (Lower East Side) I came here to dry out. I was hooked on the pipe and I didn't care."

"When did you chill?"

"It was hard, 'cause it took me two years ta quit. One day I came home from school and Moma Duke threw me and my clothes out. 'Cause I stole some money from her."

"But you look young. How ol' iz ya?"
"I'm fourteen."

All of their lives our students had been told that the way they spoke was wrong, substandard, ignorant. Yet Bonz's writing fearlessly flaunted their speech, making a point in a way standard English could never duplicate. When we shared Bonz's work with the other students, their eyes lit up. They recognized themselves and their experience in his writing.

Censoring Bonz's writing, I knew, would crush and devalue our students' experience. We decided not to edit out the slang in Bonz's work; some teachers disapproved, but many used it as a point of departure to talk about dialect, forms of expression, and self-identity. The column succeeded because it acknowledged our readers' experience in a way seldom done in school but without patronizing them by implying that street talk works in mainstream discourse.

One name for what we do is experiential education. You pose a problem, throw diverse groups of students into a team, and have them work at solving the problem. When the kids solve problems and do a good job, they become more confident in themselves. Across the country, in thousands of schools and communities, experiential education coaches kids to look to themselves for solutions. The good programs share many of the ingredients of our newspaper:

• They use problems to structure the learning environment.
  
  
• They are student centered.
  
  
• They give training in concrete skills.
  
  
• They acknowledge the validity of the students' lives.
  
  
• They help students to engage in the larger world.
  
  
• They encourage cooperative work.
  
  
• They produce a tangible product.
  
  
• They serve an audience that depends on the quality of the work that the teenagers provide.

Our graduates have gone on to use their skills at publications such as Newsweek, Manhattan Lawyer, and the St. Petersburg Times; several are now enrolled at Harvard Law School, Columbia University's School of Journalism, and scores of other universities.

The education of American children will improve-and so will the prospects for our renewed economic vitality-when more educators challenge students with problem-based education. If we don't figure that out, besides providing the money that fuels our economy, the Japanese may have to send us bank tellers to count it.