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 neighborhoods 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 curric-ulum 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.
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 AngloSaxon seafarer. And students like Mustafa know they can help themselves.
