Part I: The Power of Enduring Commitment as Revealed in the Lives of Students in the New Salem Educational Initiative

So many times, discussion about issues of education reform is done in the absence of referents to lives as lived on real streets, in actual homes, by human beings striving for a better path. For me, even my more theoretical and issue-oriented tracts are written with images of people about whom I care deeply flashing on my mental screen. I see a large selection of these people on any given day in the New Salem Educational Initiative. I am a unity of theory and action sort of guy. The students and families connected to me through the program spur my action and spawn my theory.

One of the chief tenets of the New Salem Educational Initiative concerns the permanent commitment made to every student once she or he enters the program. The week that began on Sunday, 24 February 2013 (near the end of which I write this on 1 March 2013) provides several examples of the action that drives the theory of the program.

On Sunday evening I met, as I always do at this time in the week, with three students who have been participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative for at least six years.  One of the students (I’ll call her Yemisi) is a Yoruba Nigerian immigrant who enrolled as a Grade 5 student struggling to achieve grade level performance in reading and math. Among many other feats, she can now (as a grade 10 student) do the “Oh, my offense is rank…” soliloquy in Hamlet better than any professional actor I have seen do this in the role of Claudius; her rendition of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is just as riveting.

Another student (I’ll give her a data privacy name of Rosa) speaks only Spanish at home with a family that emigrated from El Salvador. She was similarly striving for grade level accomplishment when she entered the program in Grade 5; she has now passed her Grade 9 Writing Test (necessary for graduation), reads sophisticated material in preparation for the ACT, and can perform a speech from Frederick Douglas and the major soliloquy of the elder Hamlet’s ghost with equal aplomb.

The third student (I’ll call her Monique) in this Sunday powerhouse of a group has been studying with me for eight years.  She is the best student I have ever seen---  anywhere, anytime. You would never know that she hails from one of the meanest streets in North Minneapolis when you hear her lead our Sunday evening discussions on Sequestration; the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who survived a vicious attack by Muslim extremists to continue her fight for the rights of females; the intricacies of the history and the functioning of the electoral college; the contending views in debate concerning the Keystone Pipeline; or the contrasting melting pot and pluralism conceptualizations of immigrant lives with reference to ethnic diversity in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Oh, yeah, and she can do the “To be or not to be” Hamlet soliloquy, proceed to a rendering of a speech by Ida B. Wells Barnett on the atrocities of lynching, and then explain to you that John Locke conceptualized the fundamental rights of “life, liberty, and property” but Thomas Jefferson changed these to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.

If I had contracted only to get these initially low achievers up to grade level and then released them to fend for themselves, they would never be primed for college and university attendance the way they are today. I am not satisfied with merely closing the achievement gap by getting these students to grade level in math and reading. I want them to have all of the advantages that middle, upper middle, and upper class kids can often claim as a matter of natal circumstance. I want them to have the benefit of a superior college preparatory education.  My goal is to put them in a position at high school graduation to take their places in the best institutions of post-secondary education in the nation (or in another country, if they so choose). And they know that even then I will be checking on them to see how they are doing.

Children from households of poverty and familial dysfunction must have this kind of enduring commitment in order to envision the higher educational experience and the fulfilling life that can flow from it. As we look toward an overhaul of K-12 education that does democratic justice to all of our precious children, the public schools must convey this sense of permanency to students. The tenet of enduring commitment may be extrapolated from the theory of a program that is revealed in action and put into practice every day. All of our children deserve to be embraced by the human family, and as institutions charged with the duty of serving the entire public, the public schools must let each child know that educators will be there at every step along a path leading to success in citizenry and vocation.