ISSN 0017-8055

Copyright©1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Teaching and Practice

Elementary School Curricula and Urban Transformation

PAUL SKILTON SYLVESTER

School District of Philadelphia

Abstract

In this article, third-grade teacher Paul Skilton Sylvester describes how he practiced critical pedagogy in his urban Philadelphia classroom. Conceptualizing education as a means for changing social structures rather than merely replicating them, Sylvester created a classroom economy, which his students called "Sweet Cakes Town, as part of a larger study of the neighborhoods surrounding the school. In Sweet Cakes Town, students and teacher studied and lived "real world" situations such as unemployment, nepotism, successful entrepreneurship, homelessness, injustice, and cooperation in their exploration of social transformation. (pp. 309-331)

"I want to get off welfare; I've been on food stamps all of my life!" Derek said to no one in particular. It was payday. Every Friday, each of my third graders received a paycheck or welfare payment. After cashing their checks at the classroom branch of the Fidelity Bank, they could spend their money, open their businesses, or report to work.

This was Sweet Cakes Town, a name chosen by students for the child-sized, red-brick neighborhood they created out of cardboard boxes in our classroom. (None of the students could explain to me why they seized upon one boy's odd suggestion for this name.) In this town, the businesses, government, and union were owned and run by the students. The economy of Sweet Cakes Town was not make-believe; Sweet Cakes dollars were legal tender for real goods and real services. Using money they earned from classroom jobs, students participated in the economy according to their individual interests. They could buy and manage businesses, rent a chess board at the toy store, rent paints at the Art Supply Store, borrow a book from the Free Library, plant seeds at the Wonderful World of Plants Store, sell one of their own paintings at the Art Gallery, rent an outfit at the Value Plus Clothing Store, get their hair corn-rowed at Shawntay's Beauty Salon, or feed the rabbit at the Sweet Cakes Zoo.

Derek's dilemma of finding a way off welfare was real both inside and outside the classroom.1 The students' Philadelphia neighborhood had suffered the trauma of de-industrialization during the 1970s and 1980s, and 93 percent of our students were on public assistance (most recent figures available at time of writing) (School District of Philadelphia, 1991, p. 239). As in most eastern cities, factory closings compounded the historical effects of racial discrimination, leaving many African Americans and Latinos economically isolated.2

As an elementary school teacher attempting to engage my students in real social and economic issues, I needed clear illustrations of what critical pedagogy could look like in the mainstream, K-12 public school systems of this country. In reviewing the current literature on education for social reform, I found a great deal of information on the theory of critical pedagogy, including work in the fields of adult literacy, higher education, feminist pedagogy, international development, and education for employment. Unfortunately, most of this was written in an abstract fashion, with little explanation of how one could make it work in an actual classroom.

Educational anthropologist John Ogbu (1978, 1988) has shown how students' views about their chances in the economy affect their school performance. Ogbu has found that as some African-American children grow older, they tend to engage in nonacademic activities and "become more aware of how some people in the community `make it' without good school credentials or mainstream employment" (1988, p. 332). He has shown that such beliefs about success can lead to life strategies that undermine their school achievement. Similarly, in a study of twelve hundred Los Angeles high school students, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson found a significant relationship between the "economic returns" students anticipated from their education and how well they performed in school (1984, p. 112).

One could infer from Ogbu's findings that education cannot address the impoverishment in inner cities until changes have occurred in the economic opportunity structure. My own view, however, lies closer to that presented by Michael W. Apple and Lois Weis:

If education can be no more than an epiphenomenon tied directly to the requirements of an economy, then little can be done within education  itself. It is a totally determined institution. However, if schools (and people) are not passive mirrors of an economy, but instead are active agents in the processes of reproduction and contestation of dominant social relations, then understanding what they do and acting upon them becomes of no small moment. For if schools are part of a "contested terrain" . . . then the hard and continuous day-to-day struggle at the level of curriculum and teaching practice is part of these larger conflicts as well. The key is linking these day-to-day struggles within school to other action for a more progressive society in that wider arena. (Quoted in Erickson, 1987, p. 351)

In the second section of this article, I describe changes in the roles played by three students in the class. Finally, I discuss the implications of this curriculum for social transformation among the ghetto poor.3 Overall, two questions guide this discussion: 1) How do we as teachers educate so that we do not replicate existing social inequalities? and 2) How do we avoid the twin pitfalls of a) stressing the obstacles to economic success, thereby encouraging defeatism, and b) stressing the possibilities for economic success and thereby encouraging the view that those who have not "made it" have only themselves to blame?

Identifying the Problem and Becoming Part of the Solution

My interest in using education to address urban inequality began in the 1960s, as I was growing up in the suburbs of Detroit. I saw a city increasingly split between affluent suburbs where I saw only White people, and a run-down inner city where I saw mostly Black people. It was not until 1989, however, that I felt that I was making the least bit of progress in understanding what had been happening to Detroit. That year my parents gave me William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) as a Christmas present, with the inscription " . . . that you may be part of the solution."

Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged showed me our city through an economic lens in a time when much of the popular rhetoric blamed urban problems on the moral deficiencies of the poor (e.g., the need for "values"). Looking at the problem from Wilson's perspective, I wondered what role, if any, an urban elementary school teacher could play in helping to create the solution.

I had recently completed my teacher training at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City where, in the tradition of John Dewey and the Progressive education movement, curricula are developed around in-depth studies of various aspects of students' experiences. I began to think that if students were to overcome the obstacles presented by changes in the economy ó or better yet, to play a role in breaking down these obstacles ó they would first need practice imagining how they might do it. I began looking for a way to bring together students' experience of the economic conditions Wilson described with the integrated, experiential education I learned at Bank Street.

Around the same time, I was getting my feet wet as a teacher new to Philadelphia. In a curriculum guide issued by the school district, I found the suggestion to pay students classroom dollars for being "good classroom citizens" (School District of Philadelphia, 1989, pp. 34-39).4 In this curriculum, students were to fill in a pay sheet, deciding whether they should receive pay for fulfilling the responsibilities of attendance, homework, getting along with others, and other classroom "jobs" (p. 36). The writers of the curriculum pointed out that this project could be extended in endless directions.

What I liked about this idea was that it seemed to provide the possibility of bringing economic experience into the classroom. The problem I had was that in the real world, one does not get paid for being a good citizen, but rather for doing one's job; those who are richest are not always the best citizens. With this in mind, I reframed the economic system so that children were paid for "the job of being a good student" rather than a good citizen; I structured the classroom economy to run parallel to an experiential economic study of the outside neighborhood; and I used students' questions and experience about both economies to chart the direction of our study.

The Evolution of the Classroom Economy

When the classroom economy first began, all student jobs were "government work" and I, the teacher, was the only boss. I began paying students for the job of being students, which included classroom jobs (e.g., distributing corrected work), academic performance, behavior, and a personal goal of their choosing (e.g., "I will get a job"). Students voiced no opposition to the power I reserved, which might be attributable to the reality that teachers are always the boss. A job chart at the front of the room listed government jobs, their rate of pay, and the name of the person currently holding each position. I later added a second chart listing "private sector" jobs. To apply for a job, students filled out an application. On the job application, students gave reasons why I should hire them and included their previous work experience and names of references. I returned these applications with written explanations for their acceptance or rejection. Students became familiar with the boss' criterion for a strong application. They learned, for example, that last year's teacher made a better reference than one of their friends, and that it was better to cite one's success at the last job than to state that one needs money. I once observed a boy start an application, then crumple it up to start over, saying, "I forgot, neatness counts!"

Students designed the money that we used. On the different denominations we had pictures of Rosa Parks, "Homey the Clown," Don King, and a student's mother. We printed the money on different colors of paper using our hand-cranked rexograph.

In our class, the students' schedule was highly structured, with the basic subjects being studied at the same time each day. In some progressive classrooms I have known, activities tend to be "decentralized," with two or three different groups engaged in different lessons at the same time. One group might be reading with the teacher, another working on dioramas, and still another testing each other on their spelling words. In contrast, my students seemed to do best when working as a class. Although students' ability levels varied greatly, there seemed to be a feeling of momentum when the entire class worked on an exercise, with the faster or more advanced students tutoring the others. Within this rather traditional routine, students had a great deal of input into the curriculum, great flexibility in the approaches they used to complete their work, and great responsibility when they earned it. Academic work and social behavior became the basis for the ebb and flow of the responsibilities and trust earned by students. When a child was responsible, I hired him or her for the most important work, such as collating homework packets. When the class as a whole earned my trust, we took more ambitious walking trips, such as to the local pond.

In the last ten minutes of every day, each child evaluated his or her "job of being a good student" by filling out a pay sheet. On the top half of the pay sheet was a grid for the student to fill in, with one column for each day of the week and a row for each aspect of the "job of being a student": their school work, behavior, and "government" job. Based on their self-evaluations, students wrote in how much they should be paid. I provided some parameters, such as that school work paid a maximum of twenty-five dollars per day. At the end of each column was a row for them to total each day's pay. On the bottom half of the sheet was a space for them to write their personal goal for the day. On Friday afternoons, I paid the students. They then had the chance to use their money to buy the use of activities. Yet, before they could spend their wages, they were required to pay rent for their desk and taxes needed for municipal salaries. Students who were unable to pay rent or taxes went on welfare.

Each month I asked the students, "How can we make the classroom more like the neighborhood?" Their responses directed our explorations. The first time I posed this question, students answered that we should start stores in the classroom. When William asked how much a store costs, I turned this question back to the class by asking them where we might go to find the answers. In the discussion that followed, we decided that we would take a walking trip to the soul-food restaurant named "Ziggie's Barbecue Pit," which was located on the same block as our school.5

The next day, with Ziggie forewarned of the invasion, we set out to learn about starting a business. Ziggie's was a dimly lit, homey establishment, with hundreds of snapshots decorating its walls. With students and parent chaperons sitting on the stools at the lunch counter and on the seats from Ziggie's long-deceased Chevy van, the press conference began. The regular customers listened with curious attention as Ziggie patiently answered the questions students posed to him. After a half-hour of talking with Ziggie, we returned to the classroom, and I asked the students what they had learned. From our conversation with Ziggie they recalled: start small and save; buy wholesale for cheap and sell retail for less cheap; and the motto of the patient entrepreneur, little by little. The students' over-sized thank you letter is still hanging on the inside of Ziggie's door.

After talking about the goods and services already available in our classroom, the students discussed what stores we should have in our classroom economy. For example, because we used educational games and puzzles in our classroom, the students decided that we needed a toy store. Once we knew what stores we needed, student builders painted red bricks on boxes large enough to be used as storefronts. Using a razor-blade knife, I cut "windows" out of the boxes so that the merchants could stand behind them and sell their wares through the opening. Positioned around the perimeter of the room, these storefronts framed our carpeted area. Store names painted by students hung from the ceiling over each establishment. Two potted trees, donated by a company that rents large indoor plants to corporations, added to the realism of the "neighborhood."

In January, in my role as "the government," I auctioned off the Arts Supply Stores, Fidelity Bank, the toy store, Value Plus Clothing Store, an Art Gallery, and the Sweet Cakes Zoo. This "privatization" provided material for a lesson on the law of supply and demand. The students subsequently decided to add more businesses to Sweet Cakes Town. With each new proposal, we were propelled out of the classroom and into the neighborhood, visiting businesses and a factory, inviting visitors to be interviewed, collecting specimens from the neighborhood pond, and doing research at the public library.

After each trip, students drew in a few more neighborhood landmarks on a 5-foot-by-4-foot "working map" of the neighborhood that hung on our wall. Earlier in the year, students had made maps of our classroom, the school, and the area directly surrounding the school. Once we had some shared understanding of what the map of the neighborhood would look like, I laid out the larger street grid on our working map. Following each trip, two or three students would make additions to this map in pencil, then compare them to an aerial photograph of the neighborhood (purchased from the local regional planning commission) before making their additions permanent.

 In January, when we first added stores to our economy, I created a form that asked students to subtract their rent and taxes from their earnings on their pay sheets in order to find their gross and net pay. From this point on, their paychecks included only the net figure. By gradually increasing the complexity of these forms, the students had meaningful applications of math problems at a level that was both challenging and attainable. I once overheard a boy say to himself after correctly filling out his pay sheet, "Ya, I'm all that."

Retail buying time on Friday afternoons was as exhilarating as anything I have experienced as a teacher. I watched in anxious amazement as students followed their own purposes, whether they were working at their store or spending their money. Without anything else to do, I might rent a hat at Value Plus, or go to the Men's Styling Shop, where Derek would spray water on my head, style my hair, and then slap the chair with a towel as I got up, as barbers often do. During this time, the zoo keepers even let Frances the rabbit wander about the classroom. The amazing thing to me was that usually retail buying time worked; that is, students went about their business and didn't require me to play the role of disciplinarian.

On those occasions when retail buying time did start to get wild, I followed the advice of a wise teacher trainer, Barbara Moore Williams, who once told me, "Don't lecture ó let the kids tell you what the problem is. The kids know it all!" When it got too noisy, I would call things to a halt using the traditional hand in the air and a finger over my lips. The students would do the same, and pretty soon it would be quiet. Then I would ask, "Why did we have to stop?" One of the kids would explain, "Because Tyree was running." Then I would ask, "What's the matter with running?" Somebody would say, "It's too wild for the classroom." I would say, "What's going to happen if I see running again?" They would say, "We'll have to stop retail buying time." This generally worked for us.

After a few months of learning from people in the neighborhood, students wrote nominations for neighborhood citizenship awards (e.g., "My neighbor, Mr. Davis, watches over the children on the block to make sure they are safe. He is like a guardian angel."). We invited those people, as well as all those whom we had interviewed in our study, to come to the classroom to receive awards for their contributions.

Along with studying their neighborhood, the mandated curriculum called for third graders to study the city of Philadelphia, the state of Pennsylvania, the United States, and the world. We began to study the city after about four months of studying our neighborhood, and later, we studied the state. Our point of departure for both of these projects were first-hand investigations of other neighborhoods. We visited the outdoor Italian market as an example of the diversity of Philadelphia, and the community of Landsdale as an introduction to rural Pennsylvania. In both of these studies, we established correspondence between our class and third-grade classrooms in the other neighborhoods. Throughout these units, the Sweet Cakes Town economy continued to develop within our classroom.

Economics and the Classroom Neighborhood

I structured the Sweet Cakes Town economy to mirror some of the changes that had occurred in the economy of the students' neighborhood in North Philadelphia.6 For example:

• I listed high-paying jobs, such as gerbil cage-cleaning, but then explained to the kids that this job had moved to a classroom in the suburbs. We talked about how many of the jobs that used to be in the cities are now outside the cities and the strategies that adults use for overcoming this problem.
• I hired fourth-grade students who would work for nothing just so that they could get out of their class. These were our immigrant workers. My students responded to this by encouraging them not to work unless they were paid.
• I sent one student a letter via Sweet Cakes mail relating the bad news that a great aunt had died. Enclosed was the inheritance check, which gave us the opportunity to discuss the fact that some people start off with more capital than others. Students reacted to this with quiet resignation.
• Students also dealt with recessions, layoffs, wage inequities, and alliances of capital.

Our classroom neighborhood study gave us an economic frame of reference for discussing a variety of real-life situations. For example, a work period was interrupted by two students yelling back and forth, "Your mother's homeless!" "No, your mother's homeless!" I intervened, and said that I was angry about their interruption and felt that we needed to discuss it as a class. We agreed that there were two issues at hand: one was that the two students were angrily arguing about something; the other was that homelessness was being used as an insult. I decided that the two students and I would discuss their dispute privately, but that the issue concerning homelessness would be addressed as a class.

I began this discussion by asking the students what kept people from being able to pay their rents. Jameel said, "They won't go out and get a job." We compared this explanation to what we experienced in our classroom economy, namely, the effects of intervening factors such as lay-offs, businesses relocating to the suburbs, jobs not paying enough, and people not having enough money to start a business. I emphasized that if a person is homeless, it is not something of which the person should be ashamed, but something of which our country should be ashamed. Individual students volunteered examples of honest and hardworking people they knew who were homeless. Only later did I learn that one of the students present for this conversation had recently moved to a homeless shelter with her family. I marveled at this, because even with such turmoil in her home life, she was excelling as a student, consistently making the honor roll.

It seems to me that impromptu discussions of economic issues complemented more structured discussions of inequality. For example, during the year, I used Margaret Davidson's (1986) biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of our reading texts. In previous years, my students had always responded to King's fight against prejudice, but seemed to have trouble connecting their own lives with King's call for economic justice. This year, however, perhaps because of our classroom economy, students had an experiential vocabulary for talking about the economic factors behind inequality.

We also looked at language differences in an economic context. Knowing of the stigmatization of non-Standard English (NSE) in our society, I wanted to raise my students' awareness of the role that language differences play in social relations, but to do so in a way that did not demean the language style used in their homes. Assimilation was never the goal. Instead, I wanted them to see that one possible use of learning Standard English (SE) was infiltration: crossing over into a world where non-Standard English is not valued and using Standard English to achieve their own goals, while understanding that to do so need not mean giving up their identity as African-Americans or their loyalty to their home communities.

I therefore initiated discussions of the relative effectiveness of SE and NSE in different contexts. Students identified quotes from poetry we had studied and speeches by African-American leaders as "SE" or "NSE." Then we labeled quotes by students in the class in the same way. Finally, students identified a list of various situations with the type of English that would be most appropriately used there (e.g., speaking at home, writing a rap, asking for something from the principal, or applying for a job at a bank). I encouraged students to see language differences as options that could be invoked to suit their purposes in a given context, rather than as a once-and-for-all choice (Erickson 1987).

On a number of occasions, I saw informal evidence that these exercises might be raising students' awareness of their uses of language. For example, one afternoon as we were working on a science project, a boy with writing disabilities was dictating to me his observations about a snail that we had brought back from the neighborhood pond. The student said, "He ain't movin." As I started to write, he hurried to say, "He is not moving." I asked the boy if he was changing to Standard English and he looked at me perplexed. This suggested to me that while such labels as "Standard English" may have eluded him, this student had gained some practical awareness that he was able to switch codes and that he had knowledge of their appropriate contexts.

Democracy and the Classroom Neighborhood

As John Locke would have wanted it, the government of Sweet Cakes Town evolved naturally as problems arose between individuals. It seems that Lateef, the owner of the Value Plus Store, had been hiring new clerks each week rather than paying the old ones. Just when mob action seemed imminent, I separated the parties and suggested that we start a court. A judge was elected, jurors and lawyers picked, and for the time being, playground justice was held off. Before the trial, which was held a few days later, I invited an African-American lawyer to coach both the prosecution and the defense. Witnesses were sworn in on a coloring-book Bible found in a student's desk. In lieu of the black robe, the judge wore a black velvet evening gown on loan from Value Plus. At one point during the defendant's testimony, Judge Jameson blurted out, "Oh, he is so guilty!" giving us a chance to explore the notion of "innocent until proven guilty." In the end, Lateef was convicted and forced to pay all back wages.

Occasionally an offense was committed without the perpetrator ever being discovered. On a day when I was absent and the students had a substitute teacher, someone scrawled graffiti across the red-brick front of our toy store. At the beginning of the following day, I asked the students to answer the following questions: "What feelings are people showing when they hurt the classroom neighborhood? Who does it hurt? Does it solve the problem? What are other possible solutions?" In this way, I tried to get students to see that destructive behavior, like doing graffiti, is sometimes an expression of misplaced feelings like anger, which could be better used to solve the problem. The effective uses of anger came up again in our discussion of the L.A. riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. "Solve the problem!" became our class mantra.

Another day, we had problems with loitering students starting trouble during retail buying time. I overheard one girl explain, "I don't want to shop. I'm savin' my money for a business." Some students decided that we needed a "no loitering" law and called for the election of a government. I suggested to the students that they conduct a poll regarding which citizens should be allowed to vote. The boys said that girls should not vote, and the girls said that the boys should not vote. I used these experiences to provide a meaningful context for discussing the women's suffrage movement and the history of African Americans' struggle for voting rights in the United States.

As a result of these history lessons, the class decided on universal suffrage. With signs hanging from the ceiling, they designated each group of desks as a different city council district. They elected a city council representative from each table group and a mayor for the whole town. I asked each student to submit ten laws to their city council person. Student suggestions included "No more pay increases for city council" and "No air pollution."

Once when I asked how we could make the classroom more like the neighborhood, students suggested that we add roads and garbage collectors. "Who's going to pay for all this?" asked one realist. I turned this dilemma back to them and asked, "Who pays for these services in the outside neighborhood?" We discussed this, as well as the local controversy over the privatization of municipal services.

To learn more about how tax money was used, two student delegates and I telephoned Philadelphia's City Hall. Afterwards we received a pie chart of the city's expenditures in the mail, which I simplified for use with the children. This provided the basis for a discussion of students' views on spending priorities for city governments. Students created their own pie charts showing how they thought Sweet Cakes dollars should be used, and these suggestions were given to the mayor of Sweet Cakes Town. In our discussions about public and private services, students offered a variety of opinions about which services should be paid for with tax money and which should be handled privately. Eventually, the government paid for roads made out of black contact paper marked with yellow lane dividers, and instituted trash collection.

The mayor of Sweet Cakes Town was popular for nearly a month, until students realized he had hired only close friends to fill virtually all the government jobs, with some friends holding four jobs. We talked about how this happens in real life and discussed what options voters have when they feel their elected officials are not acting on their behalf. The mayor was roundly defeated in his bid for a second term.

By the time students decided that the town needed a mayor, they were already in the habit of going to the source for their information. Philadelphia's Mayor Rendell graciously accepted the children's invitation and came to Sweet Cakes Town to be interviewed about his job. During his visit, students gave him a large bar graph showing the results of the poll they had conducted to survey their parents' attitudes toward the mayor (at that point, the mayor was enjoying an 80 percent approval rating). As a final gesture of thanks, the mayor of Sweet Cakes Town gave Mayor Rendell the papier-mache "key" to our city.

The final project the citizens of Sweet Cakes Town undertook was a community works project: the students agreed to address the problem of small grocers in the neighborhood selling "crack." By writing a newspaper about Sweet Cakes Town and selling it on the street, they raised money for DARE, an anti-drug group. This project had to be squeezed into a single week, as the end of the school year was closing in on us. Our last day of school was a triumphant one. We returned to the streets of our neighborhood to sell the Sweet Cakes News, telling stories from students' study of the neighborhood. The response from the community was tremendous: in about two hours we sold 250 copies of Sweet Cakes News at 25 cents apiece. The students also gave copies to the merchants who had helped them during the year.

At the end of the year I asked students to carry the storefronts of Sweet Cakes Town to the trash. They asked to keep them, explaining to me that, if I didn't object, they would like to use them to start concession stands in the neighborhood. I didn't object.

Student Experience and the Standardized Curriculum

A series of questions guided the Sweet Cakes Town curriculum. Each day, when students filed into the classroom, an "opening exercise" sheet awaited them on their desks. The opening exercise typically included a few problems reviewing yesterday's math lesson and a single question concerning the neighborhood study, such as, "What are some things that money cannot buy?" which did not have a single "right" answer. These questions formed the basis of our morning discussions. Sometimes they served an instrumental purpose ("What special rules will we need for our trip to the pond?"); other times, they prepared us for the arrival of a visitor from the neighborhood ("Write one question that you have about the job of a dress designer."). By linking the questions from one day to the next, we developed themes while keeping students' experience and opinions at the heart of our study. For example,

       Monday: In the Sweet Cakes Town system of jobs, what leaves you feeling bad, sad, or angry?
       Tuesday: In the outside neighborhood system of jobs, what leaves people feeling bad, sad, or angry?
       Wednesday: In the outside neighborhood, what are some bad things some people do if they are having a hard time making money?
        Thursday: In the outside neighborhood, what are some good things some people do if they are having a hard time making money?

After ten minutes devoted to this opening exercise, students had an opportunity to volunteer their answers, which I recorded on chart paper, and a discussion usually ensued. With this format, I found that students would listen to each other more patiently and give thoughtful responses based on their considerable life experience. I tried to let students' questions and interests guide our study as much as possible, but this was negotiated in the context of the requirements that I faced and my own beliefs about what should be taught. My principal gave me great support and flexibility, but also insisted that the objectives of the curriculum be met, and that students be prepared for the standardized tests. Unfortunately, a new standardized test was implemented during the study of Sweet Cakes Town, making comparison of students' scores to previous years problematic.

To keep track of what mandated objectives we had met, I kept a list of them in my planbook and marked each one as we studied it (Donnan, 1988, p. 3).7 Topics from social studies, such as "interdependence in the community," arose relatively naturally. But when other required topics did not come up, I looked for opportunities to raise them during the course of our investigation. For example, students were not clamoring to learn about commas, so with Raquel's permission, we began a writing class with the question, "Where are commas needed in Raquel's thank you letter to the people at the clothing store?"

Overall, I found that some of the most difficult issues of our study came from the students' own experiences in the community. The proper response to violence was an issue that confounded my easy answers. After discussing problems of urban violence, Black-on-Black violence, and the uses of political nonviolence, and after doing countless role plays of conflict resolution, I would be reminded again of how complicated my students' lives were. In a bit of writing that makes me laugh even while it saddens me, Macio wrote:

Being violent is bad to people. They steal from people. It is too bad that people are stealing from my mom. Me and my brother is going to kick some butts.

Our class had, on average, twenty-four students, which was typical for third-grade classes in our school but down from thirty-four children the previous year. (This reduction was due to a vote by teachers in our school to use discretionary federal funds to reduce class size.) During the year, six students transferred in and eight transferred out. Of the entire class, one boy was Latino, and all others were African American. While Sweet Cakes Town evolved, not only was there turnover in student population, but students' roles within the town changed. Most students switched professions every month or two. Workers quit or were fired. Partnerships came and went as easily as third-grade friendships. Everyone held a job for some period, and no one held only one job. I will now describe three children who seemed to benefit socially and academically from their experiences in Sweet Cakes Town. While some students showed less personal and academic growth during the year, the experiences of these three students were not atypical among the group.

Derek

Derek, the boy quoted earlier who wanted to get off welfare, was handsome, funny, keenly observant of social interactions ó a gifted mimic. At the beginning of the year, Derek requested to sit alone; he told me outright that he did not get along with other children. He was vehemently protective of his work being seen by the other students, but had a habit of yelling out humorous commentary to those very peers he held at a distance. A burly eleven-year-old, he could read at a kindergarten level. Despite this, or because of this, he refused to see a reading tutor. In the early stages of our classroom neighborhood, Derek created the character of "Kool Homie." Homie had a haircut known as a high-top fade, a big gold chain around his neck, sometimes a hat, and the local expressive walk. Week after week, Derek would pay for the clothes to dress up as Kool Homie, and act out stick-ups and muggings.

It was during this time that I heard Derek pronounce that he wanted to get off welfare, and that he had been on it all his life. Since Sweet Cakes Town did not have food stamps, I believe Derek was expressing the connection he saw between his life outside of school and his role in Sweet Cakes Town. In an effort to get off welfare, Derek applied for the job requiring the highest skill and receiving the highest wage: the filer of corrected work. The job paid forty Sweet Cakes dollars per day. Because he lacked experience, he did not get the job. Later that day another boy told Derek to apply for another job paying only $10.00 per day. Derek replied, "Who wants some $10.00 job! I don't want to get off welfare. . . . I applied to be a filer. That shows I want a job. Now I'm stayin' on welfare for the rest of my life. . . ."

I discussed with Derek the fact that he had not gotten the higher paying job for which he had applied because he lacked experience. We discussed strategies that people use to overcome this problem in the outside world, and Derek decided to volunteer as a work distributor for a week before applying to be a filer once again. Though he didn't get the filing job, he succeeded in being hired to water the plants (a job that paid a moderate wage).

With the money that Derek saved from his job, he was able to start the classroom branch of the Fidelity Bank. Making the most of our trip to a neighborhood bank, occasional lunch meetings with me, and hypothetical banking problems in math class, Derek proved greatly successful as a banker. He offered checking and savings accounts, as well as high-interest loans. As his business increased, he took on two partners. At the same time, he showed marked increases in social and academic confidence. However, though he regularly completed his math work, being older and bigger than the other children and barely able to read, he rarely attempted any language arts work in the classroom for fear of losing face.

One day in April, the kids told me that Derek had sold the bank. Because of the success he had had with the bank, I wondered why. When I talked with Derek, he would give me no explanation. A former teller, however, confided to me that Derek had sold the bank because people were bouncing checks: Derek thought this meant that he was in trouble. With the money from the sale of the bank, Derek bought the Value Plus Clothing Store and ran it successfully until the end of the school year.

Later in the year, I recommended that Derek be evaluated by our school's instructional support team (IST), a cross-disciplinary team charged with finding remedies when the school was failing to meet a child's needs. Derek was said to have a normal IQ, but also deficits in information processing, perceptual organization skills, and fine visual-motor perception and integration. As part of the IST effort to find support for students with learning problems within regular education classes, Derek was given intensive tutoring, which ó this time ó he accepted. When this tutoring failed to help him, the members of the IST, of which I was a part, recommended that Derek be switched to a special education class the following year.

Shawntay

Shawntay was a quiet, amiable girl. She did not cause trouble or draw attention to herself, but often did not finish her work. I found that as a teacher, I needed to keep deliberate track of her progress. Shawntay had good social skills, but remained peripheral to the social network. Moreover, I worried that her academic progress was hindered by low self-esteem. Like Derek, she too had been "held back" in first and second grades and now, in third grade, she was developing as an adolescent. In the early part of the year, the school psychologist found that Shawntay was dyslexic, but it was decided that she should remain in our classroom, where she seemed to be making progress.

Shawntay was the student who bought the bank from Derek. After the purchase, she found herself having great responsibility, but lacking a good understanding of how to run a bank. When people came to her asking for "their money," she neglected to keep track of how much she was giving out. When we realized the problem, she arranged to pay Derek to take time out from his new business to train her in banking (our first highly paid consultant). Although Shawntay learned to run the bank, she never really seemed to take a liking to it. She sold the business after a few months.

With the money she made from selling the bank, Shawntay opened a beauty parlor in May. Here she thrived. Shawntay's Beauty Parlor offered hair braiding, manicures, and make-up consultation. She did a brisk business, and soon her idea for a beauty parlor was copied by Tyree, who began a styling salon for "men." Shawntay's business career proved to be a springboard for political life; now, as an esteemed leader among the girls, she was elected to a seat on the city council. In the process, she showed marked improvement in her math skills, going from B's to A's.

William

William was a thoughtful, quiet boy who was well-liked by his classmates. In reading and math he performed on grade level. He had gotten an A in reading for the previous year, even while getting an F in behavior. My journal notes from the beginning of the year describe William as "sullen" and "sulky." Sometimes, William would become emotionally removed and perform a "go-slow" for an afternoon. William occasionally gave me a glimpse of the experiences he was having outside of school that might be draining his vigor. In response to a homework assignment asking students to write a true story about their neighborhood, William wrote the shortest of stories, but one that told volumes:

       One day on a weekend my best friend's dad got shot. I didn't know that he would get killed because he was good to people.

Despite such troubles, William came alive when we started the classroom economy. He was the first to apply for a job and the first to hold more than one government job at a time (at one point he held four). During this time William saved his money, keeping it in a big "knot" in his front pocket. It was he who inquired how much a business cost and, not suprisingly, he was the first to buy a store of his own.

Over the course of the year, William demonstrated a great entrepreneurial spirit. William's first store was the toy store, for which he hired his long-time friend Tyree as manager. With their profits, the two bought the Art Supply Store and hired Ray as a manager. William was the town's first mayor (it was his fall from power that I mentioned earlier). William's first appointment was again his friend Tyree. On Fridays, William and Tyree stayed in the classroom during recess to calculate revenues and expenditures for that fiscal week. Eventually, William and Tyree completed them on their own. One day when they requested to use silent reading time to finish their calculations, I heard William say to his buddies, "Don't bug me ó I'm busy!" As he left that day I told him that he had done a good job on the budget. He grinned from ear to ear as he walked out through the gate of the schoolyard.

After William was defeated in his bid for re-election, he returned to running his businesses with Tyree. In the springtime, they started a plant store where students could plant seeds and then pick up their plants a week or so later.

In this section, I return to the first of the questions with which I began this article: How can we teach children so that we do not simply replicate the existing social inequalities? Following are the seven primary insights I gained from my experiences with my students in our development of Sweet Cakes Town.

ó Creating opportunities for repeated, meaningful applications of academic skills

As has long been recognized by educational advocates among the poor, "self-efficacy" is a hollow term when one lacks the skills necessary to accomplish one's goals (Freire, 1993, p. 59; Lukas, 1986, p. 36). But, too often, "skills" and "knowledge" have been dichotomized, as if the two needed to be taught separately, as if the meaningfulness of a task could not increase the process of skill acquisition. Besides running counter to empirical research (Sticht, 1987), this dichotomization contradicts the common experience many of us have of learning deeply and quickly something that we care about.

Sweet Cakes Town involved students in what I call "meaningful drill." For example, at the end of each day, students computed their daily pay using multiplication and addition with carrying. At the end of each week, they also calculated their weekly pay, using addition with carrying and subtraction with borrowing. This was not math taught as practice for some task that the students might face in future years, but real math applied to make things happen in their present lives. Traditionally, most of what are called "applications" of math skills, such as story problems, ask students to pretend that they are using skills in a real situation. Unfortunately, it is all too possible for a student to go from kindergarten through twelfth grade and never use math for a real purpose. In Sweet Cakes Town, the calculations were as real as the privileges that the students could buy with their money. Similarly, I believe students' involvement in issues that mattered to them dramatically enhanced their acquisition of hard skills in reading, writing, science, and geography. It seemed that students learned skills faster in Sweet Cakes Town because they needed them, and they routinized their new skills by using them every day.

ó Providing opportunities for students to imagine themselves in new roles

For years, sociologists have told us that schools prepare lower socioeconomic status (SES) students to become lower SES adults, and upper SES students to become upper SES adults. Though this problem is partly a sin of omission, there are other dimensions to it that I will address later. Schools have failed to broaden their students' range of possibilities, leaving students to choose from the limited options that they see around them.

Options that Derek saw were playing "Kool Homie," standing on the street corner, or being a thief. Though Derek was not satisfied being on welfare, other options did not seem accessible to him. There were obstacles in his way, such as his lack of experience, the lack of role models to teach him how one gets experience, and, not least of which, a school system that had failed to find successful ways to teach him. I believe he needed to develop a strategy and to know that others (such as the lawyer who visited our classroom) have succeeded in overcoming the obstacles that face African Americans from the inner city.

By allowing students to imagine themselves in new roles, Sweet Cakes Town was, I like to think, a dream that we as a class dreamed together. The power of dreams to transform a life is explained by Ernst Bloch:

Dreams come in the day as well as at night. And both kinds of dreaming are motivated by wishes they seek to fulfill. But daydreams differ from night dreams; for the day dreaming "I" persists throughout, consciously, privately, envisaging the circumstances and images of the desired, better life. The content of the daydream is not, like that of the night dream, a journey back into repressed experiences and their associations. It is concerned with an, as far as possible, unrestricted journey forward, so that instead of reconstituting that which is no longer conscious, the images of that which is not yet can be phantasied into life and into the world. (quoted in Simon & Dippo, 1987, p. 102)

ó Helping students to divorce academic success from "acting White"

As has been observed by Fordham and Ogbu (1986), success in school is often perceived by African-American children as "acting White," which makes having a positive racial identity and succeeding in school seem mutually exclusive. Erickson (1987) has pointed out that this perception can be exacerbated or ameliorated depending on the behaviors of teachers and school personnel. He cites a comparative study of two classrooms: in one, the teacher frequently corrected the students for using "Black English"; in the other, the teacher did not correct students' language (Erickson, 1987, p. 346, citing Piestrup). At the end of the year, students who had frequently been corrected were speaking a more pronounced dialect in the classroom. Students who were not corrected were using language that was closer to "Standard English."

Erickson explains this data using contrasting metaphors of a "boundary" and a "border" (used first by Barth, 1969). In the classroom where Black English was stigmatized, a boundary was created between the world of the student and the world of the teacher. With each correction, the students' defense of their own cultural style grew, raising the wall a bit higher. The ultimate impact of this boundary was a sacrifice of the mutual trust that is needed for a student to risk attempting new academic tasks. In contrast, in the classroom where Black English was not stigmatized, this boundary became a border that the students could cross in both directions without threat of giving up an aspect of their cultural identity (Erickson, 1987, p. 350).

Whereas Fordham and Ogbu (1986) have shown the effects of a closed labor market on African Americans' attitudes about education, Erickson's (1987) analysis shows how the actions of people in schools can affect these attitudes. In our classroom, one way we incorporated the observations of Fordham and Ogbu and Erickson into the neighborhood study was in the treatment of language difference. I presented both Black English and Standard English as options that were appropriate and useful in certain contexts (Ladson-Billings, 1992). More generally, I attempted to show that academic skills are tools in the ongoing struggle for equality (Freire, 1993; Ladson-Billings, 1990). As educators, we need to find new ways to show students that achieving academic success can be "acting Black."

ó Allowing students to take pro-active stances in relation to those in power

In Sweet Cakes Town, the students not only had the chance to imagine themselves as grown-ups in roles of power, they also had power right then and there to influence the classroom study, each other, and me as their teacher. In the drama of the classroom economy, they experimented with strategies for using power: as workers who sue a corrupt boss, as exploited union members who strike for a fair wage, or as constituents who rally for a new mayor. In other words, as modern-day Davids, they found that the Goliaths of their day were within their range.

But beyond these chosen roles, Sweet Cakes Town also gave students a chance to experience new relationships between themselves and the authority figure with whose power they are most familiar: their teacher. Writers discussing such diverse topics as social reproduction, critical pedagogy, the hidden curriculum, process consultation, and education for empowerment have observed that having a passive role in educational institutions prepares students for taking a passive role vis-à-vis authority figures later in life: that is, a role as object rather than subject (Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p. 56; Freire, 1982, p. 59; Giroux, 1977, 1978, pp. 148-151; Schein, 1988, p. 9; Sleeter, 1991, p. 15). In contrast, problem-posing education replaces this vertical relationship between teachers and students with a horizontal one, a dialogue (Freire, 1982). In the case of Sweet Cakes Town, students were part of the process of guiding the course of study.

In our classroom, as students created a model of the neighborhood, they were encoding aspects of their culture (Freire, 1986). Derek's character Kool Homie was a code packed with elements of the situation faced by some African-American men. Derek had an understanding of how one might portray himself as an African-American male in a closed economy. I shared with Derek my belief that he could make it in the mainstream economy. In our daily discussion of Kool Homie, jobs, and strategies for getting jobs, the two of us came to a new understanding of his relationship to street corner life, as well as to how he could envision a different relationship.

Problem-posing education provides an opportunity to prepare the next generation for relationships qualitatively different than those we know between authorities and subordinates, such as bosses and workers or government leaders and constituents. Such changes are well-suited to current innovations in management practices, as U.S. corporations begin to realize the loss inherent in treating human beings like machines and move to less hierarchical, more team-oriented approaches to management (Byrne, 1993; Stewart, 1992, 1993).

For my students to play a role in changing their relationships to authority figures, they had to learn how to get, keep, and use power to participate in defining these relationships. The need for such practice will be developed below in my next-to-last recommendation.

ó Creating curricula that treats reality as something to be questioned and analyzed (Giroux, 1979)

When teachers change their students' role in acquiring knowledge, I believe they also change the nature of the students' relationship to that knowledge. In more traditional forms of education, knowledge is deposited into the minds of uncritical students (Freire, 1982). Henry Giroux has pointed out that in such "banking" pedagogy, knowledge is treated as a set of objective "facts" (Giroux, 1979). He says that

knowledge is divorced from human meaning and inter subjective exchange. It no longer is seen as something to be questioned, analyzed and negotiated. Instead, it becomes something to be managed and mastered. In this case, knowledge is removed from the self-formative process of generating one's own set of meanings, a process that involves an interpretive relationship between knower and known. (Giroux, 1979, p. 250)

For example, when two students taunted each other, saying, "Your mother's homeless," I believed that the students had internalized the popular ideology of blaming the victim. Consequently, I related that example to their experience in Sweet Cakes Town, showing that factors outside of an individual's control sometimes interfere with a person's ability to pay the rent.

Similarly, as students in Sweet Cakes Town studied their environment, they created their own understanding of how their community works and where its hope lies. The structures of knowledge that they created were not isolated, abstract, and theoretical, but interrelated, concrete, and practical. To borrow terms from Lev Vygotsky (1978), the informal knowledge of their experience was organically connected to the formal knowledge of school learning. Or, from Pierre Bourdieu's (1977) perspective, the students used the "cultural capital" from their community to create "dividends" to take back to their community.

ó Creating opportunities for students to develop strategies and hope for overcoming barriers to economic success in the mainstream

So far in this discussion, I have talked about aspects of my curriculum aimed at changing conditions internal to the students: their perceptions about their role in the world, their perceived relations both to those in power and to knowledge itself. But urban, African-American children of lower socioeconomic status also face obstacles to success that are external to them, obstacles that they will need to understand if they are to stand a chance (Sleeter & Grant, 1986). First, there are those obstacles Black people have always faced in the United States: prejudice, residential ghettoization, poor education, lack of capital, and lack of networks to obtain capital, to name a few. Secondly, postindustrial changes in the economy have constructed new obstacles to economic success for those isolated in the inner cities: lack of jobs, jobs moving further out of the city where there is no public transportation, lack of access to job information networks, jobs that require higher skills, or, I would add here, that require them to speak differently than they do at home.8 In the face of these obstacles to economic success, there are new self-destructive alternatives, such as crack cocaine, which also threaten to pull them down. As teachers, we want to say to our students, "If you try, you will make it," but we know that it's not that simple, and to say it is that simple is to imply falsely that those who did not make it did not try.

This brings me to the second of the two questions with which I began: How do we avoid the twin pitfalls of a) stressing the obstacles to economic success, thereby encouraging defeatism, and b) stressing the possibilities for economic success, thereby encouraging the view that those who did not make it have only themselves to blame? Some might argue that it is better to teach the bootstraps "myth," believing that a false hope is better than none. This, of course, would ultimately leave students unprepared for the obstacles ahead. Our students face the stark realities of the inner cities every day. As teachers we must face our responsibility to abandon the innocuous social studies curricula that do not take into account the abandoned buildings and crack vials that students pass on any walking trip to the fire station. We must help our students cope with their present problems, and prepare them to overcome future obstacles. I believe that children who are economically isolated in U.S. inner cities need to be educated about the structural obstacles to their success, while also being taught that with strategic planning and collective effort these obstacles are surmountable.

ó Offering opportunities for students to experience social structures as impermanent and changeable for the sake of those people who live within them (Freire, 1993)

In the students' creation of Sweet Cakes Town, they had the opportunity to question why certain conditions exist, and to try out new approaches in such areas as legislation, taxation, social services, and labor/management relations. Here the importance of the imagination in social change becomes clear. I would like to explain this connection with a passage written by Northrop Frye (1964) about the literary imagination. What Frye says about the literary imagination I find equally applicable to the social imagination exhibited by my students in the creation of Sweet Cakes Town. While he wrote this in 1964, referring to the imagination of Canadians, I have taken the liberty of inserting the United States of our time:

Just as [the material world] looks real, so this ideal world that our imaginations develop inside us looks like a dream that came out of nowhere, and has no reality except that we put into it. But it isn't. It's the real world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we see. It's the world of what humanity has done, and therefore can do, the world revealed to us in the arts and sciences. This is the world that won't go away, the world out of which we built the [United States of 1964], are now building the [United States of 1994], and will be building the quite different [United States of 2004]. (Frye, 1964, p. 152)

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Notes

1 Students' names have been changed for confidentiality.

2 Many of my assumptions about the causes of our urban situation come from the work of William Julius Wilson. Recently, he provided a concise summary of his landmark work: "I argue in The Truly Disadvantaged [Wilson, 1987] that historic discrimination and a migration flow to large metropolitan areas that kept the minority population relatively young created a problem of weak labor-force attachment within this population, making it particularly vulnerable to the ongoing industrial and geographic changes in the economy since 1970. The shift from goods-producing to service-producing industries, increasing polarization of the labor market into low-wage and high-wage sectors, innovations in technology, relocation of manufacturing industries out of the central city, periodic recessions, and wage stagnation exacerbated the chronic problems of weak labor-force attachment among the urban minority poor" (Wilson, 1990, p. 6).

3 In response to Gans's (1990) suggestion that the term "underclass" is no longer useful due to the pejorative connations it has taken on through misapplication, Wilson (1990) has suggested the substitution of the term "ghetto poor."

4 For other classroom uses of "micro-societies," see McCarthy and Braffman (1985), and Richmond (1989).

5 In many schools, the spontaneity of going on field trips is curtailed by the time it takes to issue and receive signed permission slips. The Philadelphia school system helps teachers to avoid this problem by issuing permission slips that allow children to go on neighborhood walking trips throughout the year.

6 Philadelphia, like most Eastern, industrial cities, had been decimated by the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last two-and-a-half decades. In the period between 1975 and 1979 alone, the city lost 128,000 jobs, or one out of six (Katz, 1986, p. 276).

7 See Elliot Wigginton (1989) for another framework for bringing together students' interests and mandated curricula.

8 The split between low-wage (goods producing) and high-wage (service producing) sectors of the economy was not addressed in the curriculum, but would be wisely included in future neighborhood studies.
 
 

Those who know my teaching know that it has been a wildly uneven road to any success. As any teacher, I am indebted to the wisdom and generosity of others. Credit and thanks must first go to my students, and the many members of the community who supported us. For reasons of confidentiality, all of the above must go unnamed. I am also indebted to the wisdom of my mentors: Scott Tiley, my fifth-grade teacher; Virginia Miller of Bank Street College; Fran Motola of PS 87; Joan Billen, formerly of the Bank Street School for Children; Ewa Pytowska, of the Intercultural Training Resource Center; Barbara Moore Williams of the School District of Philadelphia; the principal of my school. Lastly, I am indebted to the many people who patiently helped me with the preparation of this manuscript: Nancy Brooks, Frederick Erickson, David Kinney, Michael B. Katz, Karl Otto, Ellen Skilton Sylvester, and my family.