[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 3 (Friday, January 6, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S573-S574]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         IN DEFIANCE OF DARWIN

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, no one doubts that the schools in 
our Nation should do better. What is still not widely known is that we 
really do understand how to do better, but we're not applying the 
knowledge we have.
  Education simply has not become enough of a priority. Those of us in 
public life talk a good game, but too few of us do anything about it.
  An illustration of what can happen is an article that appeared 
several weeks ago in Newsweek magazine titled ``In Defiance of 
Darwin,'' written by Lynnell Hancock.
  I ask that the article be printed in the Record at this point.
  The article follows:

                     [From Newsweek, Oct. 24, 1994]

In Defiance of Darwin--How a Public School in the Bronx Turns Dropouts 
                             Into Scholars

                          (By Lynnell Hancock)

       It's a notorious corner in the South Bronx--once a grand 
     address, now the hub of the nation's poorest neighborhood. 
     Today, at 149th Street and the Grand Concourse, a public high 
     school for at-risk children defies Darwin on a daily basis. 
     Inside Hostos-Lincoln Academy of Science, a class of seniors 
     grapples with ``The Seafarer,'' an Old English poem about 
     danger, survival and destiny. None of these teenagers was 
     expected to ever navigate into the treacherous pages of 
     medieval lit. In fact, their eight-grade counselors had 
     written off most of them as probable dropouts, based on low 
     reading scores and spotty attendance. That's how they landed 
     at Hostos. Now, after four years here, more than 80 percent 
     are headed for college. And they engage in a lively 
     discussion about the sailor who believes his imminent death 
     at sea is a stark inevitability, written in foam. ``The 
     Anglo-Saxons thought every person's fate was predetermined,'' 
     the teacher, Vincent Sottile, reminds the class. ``But we 
     know we have to help ourselves.''
       These 300 black and Latino students provide the basis for a 
     strong retort to ``The Bell Curve.'' Richard Herrnstein and 
     Charles Murray argue that IQ is largely genetic and that low 
     IQ means scant success in society. Therefore, they contend, 
     neither effective schools nor a healthier environment can do 
     much to alter a person's destiny. Yet, at Hostos, reading 
     scores nearly doubled over two years. The dropout rate is 
     low, and attendance is high. About 70 percent of the class of 
     1989 graduated on time, double the city's average. Among last 
     year's graduates, one was accepted at Columbia University's 
     School of Engineering. Others are attending Fordham 
     University and Hamilton College.
       Hostos was established by the city seven years ago for 
     South Bronx children who live ``stressing lives,'' as one 
     student puts it, in broken families and dangerous neigh
      borhoods that offer only huge, anonymous public schools. 
     Hostos is small, attentive to individual students, and 
     demanding. To ensure that no child goes astray, one 
     teacher is assigned for four years to the same homeroom 
     class, which combines lessons in rudimentary social skills 
     with those in computer and civics. Most students take 
     honors and even college-level courses. ``We threw out the 
     Mickey Mouse curriculum and introduced [University of the 
     State of New York] Regents-level courses,'' said Dr. 
     Michele Cataldi, Hostos's founder and principal. Where 
     students once had business math, they now have 
     trigonometry. ``At first we felt students couldn't do it, 
     but we were wrong,'' says Cataldi. Teachers worked 
     overtime to provide intensive one-on-one tutoring. The 
     results were impressive. The number of students in each 
     class who passed the state's regents biology test rose 
     from 9 to 50 percent in two years. ``You have to believe 
     in them,'' says Donna Light-Donovan, a biology teacher. 
     ``Most kids don't have anyone at home who does.''
       Stanley Mustafa is one student who found a haven at Hostos. 
     A few years ago he was stabbed on the street by a 
     neighborhood teen. His life was saved by a trauma surgeon. 
     That's the profession he now expects to enter some day. ``It 
     made me grow up faster,'' says Mustafa, 17, dressed in baggy 
     jeans and an oversize Black Sheep T shirt. ``I don't want to 
     end up on the corner, hanging with the homeboys.'' He takes 
     chemistry and cellular biology at Hostos, studies radiology 
     at a local hospital and hopes to attend Atlanta's Morehouse 
     School of Medicine or the University of Virginia.
       Nationwide, more and more districts are establishing small 
     ``restructured'' schools like Hostos that stress team 
     teaching, a familylike environment and high expectations. New 
     York City has more than 35 of them, with plans for about 50 
     more. Herrnstein and Murray argue that 30 years of such 
     experimental schools for disadvantaged children have shown 
     paltry improvements, and that federal money should be 
     funneled away from them, and toward schools for the 
     ``cognitive elite.'' But a new study comparing 820 high 
     schools--some big and traditional, others small and 
     cooperative--proves otherwise. From eighth to 10th grade, 
     students in the restructured schools showed 30 percent higher 
     gains in math and 24 percent higher gains in reading compared 
     with students in traditional schools.
                    [[Page S574]] high expectations

       The study, commissioned by the Center on Organization and 
     Restructuring of Schools at the University of Wisconsin in 
     Madison, also found that the gap between the poor and those 
     who were not poor shrank in the more nurturing schools. 
     ``When high expectations for student learning are embodied in 
     the formal structure of the school, very positive effects can 
     occur for at-risk youth,'' says Anthony Bryk, director of the 
     University of Chicago's Center for School Improvement, one of 
     the report's analysts.
       Yet in ``The Bell Curve'' scenario, most Hostos students 
     would give up their goals and find a valued place in 
     society'' back in the South Bronx. ``The idea that people 
     with the most capacity to be educated should become the most 
     educated sounds dangerously elitist,'' they write. In fact, 
     at 149th and the Grand Concourse, it sounds more like 
     ``Beowulf.'' ``Fate is more strong, God more mighty than any 
     man's thought,'' writes the anonymous Anglo-Saxon seafarer. 
     And students like Mustafa know they can help 
     themselves.
     

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