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Promoting a National Love of Children, previous...
See sidebar profiles of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Henry Rosovsky, Katherine Merseth, Charles Deutsch, and Martha Minow
Exceptional innovative schools--the subject of the second HPSC task force--particularly interest Merseth. The task force has launched a proposal for an innovative-schools initiative that explores new forms of school organization, governance, and management that enhance children's learning. In particular the initiative examines the charter-school movement and acts as a repository of information
for scholars and practitioners. It also runs short-term professional-education programs and offers technical assistance to people starting new schools. Above all, it engages faculty members from across the University-especially those
in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the schools of business, education,
government, and law-in the kind of cross-disciplinary venture Merseth believes
will help people from all over the country who are interested in starting
innovative schools make connections with each other, learn about the successes
already achieved at some public schools, and then apply this information
to others. In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for example, assistant professor
of economics Caroline Minter Hoxby '88 is examining student performance
in charter schools. Meanwhile, a study of the organizational challenges
facing charter schools in Massachusetts is already under way at the Harvard
Business School; the first short-term professional education program on
the subject will be held there December 12 and 13.
But what is "success," whether in schools or intervention programs
that affect children, and how does one measure it? "We don't know the
right way to measure the success of innovative schools, or of family and
community programs," says Merseth. "Yet if we understood what
worked in school X or intervention program Y, then we'd know a lot more
about how to transfer it." Many of the traditional measures that foundations
and government rely on-test scores, for example, or statistics about drop-outs-are
too limited, she suggests. More important would be understanding how well
schools prepare children to lead productive and fulfilling adult lives.
Measuring success is the aim of the third task force, chaired by Carol
Weiss, professor at the School of Education and author of Evaluation
Research: Methods of Assessing Program Effectiveness (1972), one of the
best-selling texts on evaluation ever published. "Educational programs
are changing," Weiss notes. "The old evaluation paradigms are
not as appropriate as they used to be because many programs are going outside
the classroom to involve parents and other community members with the schools.
As programs do this, they become less hospitable to traditional evaluation
approaches." The task force seeks to identify issues critical to the
evaluation of programs that focus on children, and to do so from the perspectives
of diverse disciplines. "What is sorely missing in most public debates
and individual beliefs about the problems of children," Weiss writes,
"is convincing evidence. What works and under which circumstances?
How does it work? And for whom does it work?" HPSC recently applied
to a major foundation for a grant to fund post-doctoral fellowships in this
field; the money would bring a small number of fellows to Harvard for two
years to join faculty members in grappling with issues of how better to
evaluate complex educational and social programs.
Martha Minow and Stuart Hauser, director of Boston's Judge Baker Children's
Center, which provides mental health services to children and families throughout
New England, echo the need for interdisciplinary approaches. They cochair
the fourth HPSC task force, a series of interfaculty seminars dedicated
to "rethinking America's commitment to children." Among the questions
they are exploring are: "Why don't Americans care more about children?"
and "What guides policymakers and the people who influence them?"
"Our task," they write, "will be to articulate the connection
between broad themes that have emotional and moral resonance, and immediate
policy issues with important implications for children." As Minow observes,
"Many factors affect children that are not amenable to public policy;
we have to focus on those that are." The task force explored this issue
in the first event of the series, "America's Children: Who Cares?,"
which took place October 17 at the Kennedy School of Government.
One question that comes up repeatedly in HPSC's discussions is, How much
can-and should-Harvard do for local schools and institutions through direct
intervention and community collaboration? The question itself makes many
people uneasy because, as everyone knows, Harvard is a research institution.
Indeed, research is what Harvard prizes and rewards, so graduate students
and junior faculty often concentrate on that and shy away from practical
work.
But a number of people involved in the schooling and children initiative
feel that Harvard should encourage more practical, hands-on work. Lisbeth
B. Schorr is a lecturer on social medicine and health policy at the Medical
School and cochair with Lawrence-Lightfoot of the ecology of schooling task
force. As she points out in connection with social services, "We already
know what to do; we need to go out and do it."
Lawrence-Lightfoot concurs. "I have the view-I think it's shared by
my colleagues-that there should be at least three pieces to the Project:
one is research, two is policy, and three is direct intervention at the
local level," she says. "Harvard is particularly good at research
and pretty good at developing policy, but we also need to reach out at the
local level so as not to be just another think tank. These three pieces
have to be related and make sense to a wider community. We have to establish
a framework that takes account of the ways various institutions get involved
in children's lives and development, and how they intersect."
Charles Deutsch also believes that there has to be "a connection between
academic learning and service work done in the community." A senior
program associate at HPSC and an instructor at the School of Public Health,
Deutsch observes that Harvard can bring "high-visibility institutional
leadership to working with the community. The University's engagement in
the community has to be visible from the president on down."
In 1994 Deutsch organized a national conference on health and education,
jointly sponsored by Harvard and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
to address the roles and responsibilities of colleges and universities in
improving children's health and readiness to learn. One outcome of that
conference is a new Harvard-based national committee on higher education
and the health of youth, chaired by professor of social medicine emeritus
Julius Richmond. The committee seeks to inspire and assist American colleges
and universities to "become collectively engaged with urgency in a
national endeavor to improve the health of children and youth."
Practicing what he preaches, Deutsch organized a city-wide leadership forum
this October for Cambridge school, hospital, and human-service administrators
that emphasized the importance for young people of making connections between
health and education. "There's a new recognition that children have
to be healthy and safe in order to learn," he says. "The University
shares in the responsibility to find ways to improve kids' futures
through partnerships with the community.Through HPSC, President Rudenstine
is saying that working with the community to improve kids' lives is really
important to our institution because we're members of the community. If
we do our work well, maybe we can promote what Ernie Boyer [late president
of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching] called 'a national
love of children.'"
John de Cuevas '52 has written articles for this magazine on the
Graduate School of Education, on the plight of children, and (with Kathleen
Koman) on Harvard's mind, brain, and behavior initiative.
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