Here’s an interesting article about Harlem Success Academy, a New York City charter school whose kindergarten field trip to a farm is more than a cute story about pumpkins and cows.

“The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to rural life and lift their [test] scores,” since questions on New York state tests often center on “livestock, crops, and other staples of the rural experience.” A Harlem Success Academy teacher explains, “[the students] are good at reciting and remembering things, but they can’t make the connection unless you show it to them.”

For most students growing up in urban environments, state test questions that include passages about milking, plowing, cornstalks, and pumpkins are foreign and therefore more challenging, and “educators have long known that prior knowledge of a subject can significantly improve a child’s performance on tests.”

Though there’s no way of knowing the precise impact that such field trips will have on Harlem Success students’ test results, this charter school is right to emphasize the importance of content and background knowledge, especially for young readers. Such “real-world” learning might even impress the “21^st century skills” camp, although the purpose for Harlem Success Academy’s field trips seems less about  fostering critical thinking, innovation, or creativity (those buzzwords that 21^st century folks have a proclivity for) and more about overcoming deficiencies in background knowledge experienced by their students. 

Images courtesy of Andy Wright, Wikimedia Commons and Emmy Partin.

We DC-based policy types are susceptible to getting dangerously far removed from the quotidian thrills and struggles of real schools. So I visited four schools earlier this week while in NYC. It was a complete delight. If you find yourself suffering from policy- or research-induced edu-malaise, here’s a highlight from each school.

At the Cornelia Connelly Center, an all-girls Catholic middle school on the Lower East Side serving a 100 percent minority and 90 percent free and reduced-price eligible student body, my two “student ambassador” tour guides were pulled out of their mandatory Latin class where they were, at the moment, learning the roots of the word “intractable.” “I like Latin,” one of the young ladies told me, “it helps me understand English better, too.” Walking past a picture of the president hanging next the history classroom, the other young woman said, “We were allowed to watch the inauguration in school. Some students got pretty emotional. It showed what we could become.”

At the remarkable Harlem Success Academy charter school (run by the remarkable Eva Moskowitz), the school’s powerful culture was evident everywhere, from the founders’ vision to the teachers’ behavior to the inspirational adages affixed to the walls. Their results are outstanding and their replication goals audacious.  I thought I was blown away by the five- and six-year olds doing science experiments on momentum (all students take one hour of science five days a week beginning in kindergarten), but it was eclipsed by seeing a sea of six-year old hands shoot into the air during the required chess class when asked how they could free the bishop from the back line. “Move the pawn at E7 two spaces forward,” a student said with pride.

At the much-heralded Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools, Harvard economist Roland Fryer provided an excellent presentation on the project’s outstanding academic gains in recent years. This was exciting but even better was founder Geoffrey Canada’s admission that their early results, despite huge investments, were disappointing and that the whole team acknowledged their shortcomings and redoubled their efforts. The highlight of the tour of the fifth-floor medical clinic, with full health and dental services for all students, was walking past the classroom where five-year olds were learning the proper way to brush their teeth and wash their hands.

Finally, at Mount Carmel-Holy Rosary Catholic school, the principal told the riveting tale of the school’s two brushes with closure and ultimate salvation through a large donation from a previously unknown out-of-state benefactor. Despite having nearly all of its students attend on scholarship, 100 percent of 8th graders pass the state ELA exam. Though the class sizes were large–all above 30 from what I saw, one at 35–there couldn’t have been more order or higher morale.

In one classroom, 34 second-graders were determining which emotions were associated with which colors so they could improve poems they had recently written. With the lesson complete, the teacher asked the students to get out their recorders so they could play “Ode to Joy” for their guests. Who wrote “Ode to Joy?” she asked as they silently got out their musical instruments. A sea of hands. “Beethoven.” Then 34 low-income seven-year olds played the most beautiful recorder version of a Beethoven song of all time.

Ode to joy, indeed.

Jumping for joy – photograph by reebs* on Flickr