Editor's note: Fancy dancing across the achievement gap

Remember break dancing? They don’t always call it that anymore, but back in the day, kids “busting moves” to rap music (they don’t always call it that anymore, either) would twirl on their heads, drop split-legged to the floor and otherwise defy the laws of physics and physiques in displays worthy of the late, great, hardest-working man in show business himself, James Brown.

I encountered my first break dancers in the windowless, two-room former storage closet that passed for the Title IV-A American Indian Education office in the central high school serving the Seneca Nation of Indians reservation where I’d grown up. (Long story short: A town had sprouted up at the junction of some railroad tracks on the “res.”)

I was the academic assistant for Title IV, a federal education program intended to help the country’s original inhabitants succeed in school. My job required a teaching degree, which is why I was hired instead of a Seneca—the few who had degrees were already working. My job was to identify native students at academic risk and tutor them in small-group or one-on-one sessions. I enjoyed that independent, freestyle approach to education better than the classroom teaching I’d done elsewhere the year before. And I was good at what I did. I filed progress reports documenting that I regularly met or exceeded my remediation targets.

I was part of a Title IV team: A childhood friend (a Seneca with a master’s degree) was the program administrator, and her husband (a white guy like me) chased down truants and counseled families. Bill Crouse Jr.—not to be confused with his dad, the late, great, still-legendary hardest-working man in Seneca heritage—was our cultural teacher, providing classes in the Seneca language and customs.

That’s where the dancers came in—literally. A few of Bill’s students were gathering at the Title IV office for a trip to a neighboring school where they would demonstrate their traditional steps and “fancy dancing” (as native-inspired, non-ritual dance to a classic tom-tom beat is called). As they waited, two boys broke out in an impromptu demonstration of hand stands, head spins and rhythmic gyrations to boom box accompaniment—break dancing! I was impressed, and I enthusiastically said so. Both of the boys were students whom I worked with, and it was clear how much they enjoyed the chance to show me something they were good at—and, more, to earn my respect.

I guess kids today are into mosh pit freaking, whatever that is, and break dancing has joined that fading conga line of dance steps ticked off by some old geezer in the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”: “ … The watusi. The twist. Oh, they’ll all old …” My school’s Title IV program hasn’t fared much better. It still exists, but funded now at even more anemic levels than the declining grant awards that led me to resign after two years, to leave the reservation for good and come to California. But the last I heard, some of Bill’s dancers were still performing; financed in large part by awards, fundraisers and donations, they’d travel to fancy-dance exhibitions and competitions at powwows as far from the Seneca Nation as New Mexico and Arizona.

That’s a long way to go to make a point, which is: At-risk students—especially those of racial and ethnic backgrounds outside the traditional American mainstream—are hungry for recognition, acceptance and respect, and when they get those things, there’s no telling how far they can go. Often, they just need to be engaged—on their level, in their community, in an environment that honors their identity and extends a helpful hand while expecting them to do their best. The tutoring that I did, the counseling that my boss’s husband provided, and the dance, language and handicrafts that Bill Crouse Jr. handed down combined to help those native students more than the stern approach symbolized by the ominously paddle-shaped “board of education” that hung on the principal’s office wall.

It really does, to borrow a phrase, take a village to educate a child. We Title IV workers got our paycheck from the school district, but we really answered to a parents council that read the reports we filed and regularly challenged us on our methods and our results. Council members also served as chaperones on our cultural trips, and they wielded wide influence in the tight-knit native community.

Darlene Willis would fit right in. A former college dean who cofounded the Concerned Parents Alliance in the Poway Unified School District, Willis is a self-described “Mean Mama” whose group combines some tough love with cultural understanding—and community engagement—to raise the academic achievement of black students.

“We empower students and teach them who they are. We tell them they had ancestors who did powerful things,” Willis tells CSBA staff writer Carol Brydolf in “Reaching out to close the gap” (page 38). “So if someone says, ‘You can’t do well on this test,’ you know it’s not true.”

That isn’t fuzzy-minded feel-good talk. Willis is a graduate of Harvard University’s Institute for Management and Leadership on Education, and she holds a doctorate of philosophy in organizational psychology.

Terilyn Finders, a board member at Las Virgenes Unified School District in Calabasas, applies a similarly informed and effective emphasis on community involvement and self-esteem to an issue she’s passionate about: autism spectrum disorders.

“We must help school districts build programs to meet the needs of ASD children in their local public schools, as this is how you build societal understanding and tolerance,” Finders says in staff writer Marsha Boutelle’s story, “Spanning the spectrum” (page 18).

“From the earliest ages, we must show children that all are to be respected, and they can learn and work and play together,” Finders tells Marsha. “Today’s students are tomorrow’s police officers, doctors, nurses, teachers and librarians. We build a society that accepts uniqueness and difference when children of all abilities can learn side by side.”

Speaking of building, we also have a nuts-and-bolts feature on the dollars and good sense of building environmentally friendly schools (page 28)—and, speaking of dollars, CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin helps make sense of the ever-changing state budget picture (page 5). We have two guest columns this month: National School Boards Association Executive Director Anne Bryant writes about mayors and schools (page 13), and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell offers strategies for closing the achievement gap (page 9).

Me, I offer you my sincere appreciation for reading. Niyawë (thanks)!

Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is the managing editor of California Schools.