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The New York Times: Now Shaping Minds, Instead of Buildings April 6, 2004, Tuesday By DAVID GONZALEZ Somebody once thought it fitting that the high school named after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. look more like a bunker or a warehouse than a place of learning. Its rough block and rusted-over steel facade seem hardly welcoming, despite the faint "United We Stand" that lingers in huge sticky tape outlines on the windows overlooking Amsterdam Avenue. "They used to call in the brutalist era," said Richard Kahan as he glanced up at the building. "Hard, tough materials. It wasn't about being pretty." He said it almost as an afterthought, out of habit, perhaps. Mr. Kahan was once the head of the state's Urban Development Corporation, conceiving and managing gargantuan projects like Roosevelt Island, Battery Park City and the Javits Center. After decades of putting up buildings for city people, he is now preparing people for cities. Mr. Kahan, 58, has taken up the cause of establishing smaller, theme-based public high schools around the city, helping educators reimagine not only their lesson plans, but also the function of those old, big high schools as they gradually house several smaller academies each. At King, he will place a school for media studies, one of five schools he is setting up in the city next September. Almost by accident, he has gone from being someone once comfortable with the bare knuckles and back rooms of New York City development to someone who simply says: it is not about the building, but what happens inside. "There's no doubt I get more out of this than seeing the Javits Center or Times Square built to our plan," he said. "Even when I was building, it was a rare occasion that I could see a direct result on a human being. But I can go to a ninth grader and know if I did my job properly. "Cost overrun in construction is one thing," he continued. "Letting a kid down is something altogether different." His own re-education started in the 1990's, when residents of the South Bronx opposed plans to build a new courthouse complex on 161st Street. Mr. Kahan, who was no longer at the development corporation, but was advising the Bronx borough president on redevelopment plans for the area, helped negotiate a solution by including a high school in the complex. The school made sense, since the plans he was working on called for more community involvement in determining the neighborhood's future economic and housing development. The school, the High School for Law, Government and Justice, became a reality under New Visions, part of an independent fund that set up smaller theme schools. Mr. Kahan went on to other projects, notably Take the Field, which provides up-to-date athletic fields for public schools. Soon, the principal at one of the schools with a new field suggested that it would go well with a school for careers in sports. By last year, he had set up four schools. They operate under the umbrella of the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that he co-founded. In many ways, his decision to focus on starting new schools dates to his years at Columbia Law School during the social upheaval of the late 1960's. He recalls how a course in poverty law raised the question, what does one change to improve life in the inner city: jobs, school, housing or welfare? "If you could only do one thing, what would be most important?" he said. "At the end of the day, if you change education, you change everything else." That could explain why he decided last year to aim to set up five schools a year. He says his efforts--mostly under a program to phase out the factories some of the big schools had become--are not too far a stretch from those of his building days. "You have to get this up to numbers where you are serving people," he said. "When I was with the U.D.C., we kept quality and size while managing 30 projects around the state." What he envisions is a network of schools where teachers and principals share ideas and encouragement. He wants the students, in turn, to explore the city beyond their neighborhoods, which at times seems as distant as the other side of the globe. The themes, he said, allow for that to happen by enlisting professionals in business, the arts or culture. "It is not so much to channel the children into careers, but connecting to the outside world," he said. "You want to excite children about education and expose them to a world they rarely see." The Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship, in the Bronx, aims to expose its all-male student body to an elusive image: that of ambitious, confident young men committed to their city and to themselves. Jonathan Foy and Kamau Patterson, the school's founders, once taught history in Harlem before they went off to the suburbs for a while. But their plans to resume their educational partnership in the city took form last year when they met Mr. Kahan at a reception. The two see history and citizenship as topics once rendered near invisible by educational fads. But they are serious about using it as a tool to inspire teenage boys grappling with how to fit into the world. "History allows you to know yourself," said Mr. Patterson, who is partial to dreadlocks and rites of passage that encompass poetry, literature and the arts. "History exposes you to another generation's issues." They hope the school will help boys become men, a concept that has frayed in some urban communities. They have taken their pitch to various schools in the city, hoping to find 100 young men to enroll as "scholars" in the new school. "The media definitions of manhood are those of youth culture," Mr. Patterson said. "The man is the hard rock, knucklehead, player or thug. Within the community there is the daily struggle over that being forced down their throats every day. The struggle between an image that is so popularized and another that has no acknowledgement." Naomi Barber, who once led the New Visions program and later helped the Foy and Patterson prepare their successful proposal, said she was confident that their academy would succeed. Part of the reason, she said, was the sheer force of Mr. Kahan's personality, which can be a potent force. After all, this is a man who can climb icy mountainsides. For fun, even. "He's a bruiser; he's a developer," she said. "He understands how the world works; he understands how to get things done. He's not intimidated by any bureaucracy." Though he says it is not about the building, part of him knows that the current crisis in education--whether it is unequal financing or inadequate instruction--has part of its problem in buildings: the neighborhood, not the school. "The most undemocratic thing about America is, the tax base where you are born can affect your entire life," he said. "You can predict if you are born in a poor community your likelihood of ending up a doctor or lawyer is slim. That is the antithesis of democracy and equality. We're trying to level the field a bit. Or a lot." |