Educating Alienated Inner-City Youth

In recent years a number of new institutions have been established to educate students who have dropped out or are prone to drop out of inner-city secondary schools. These institutions have been variously called storefront academies, mini-schools, and, in the case of some which officially are part of public school systems, community outposts. Except where specific schools are referred to later, for shorthand purposes these institutions frequently will be referred to simply as in the remainder of this paper. As suggested in the title, there is reason to believe that many of these schools have been successful with youth who had not succeeded before, and therefore that lessons might be derived to help improve regular inner-city schools. To credit this possibility, one need not believe that all street academies have been successful, but only that some have been able to provide effective education for a substantial proportion of young people who probably would not have learned much in regular schools. This would be enough to place them in a distinctly different class of phenomena from standard inner-city secondary schools, which, to my knowledge, have not produced a single representative that unabashedly could be called successful. There are several varieties of street academies. Some enroll mainly young people who have done very poorly and either have dropped out or were on the verge of dropping out of regular public school programs. Some primarily serve youth who not only are dropouts or prospective dropouts but also have been classified by one or another institution as delinquents or pre-delinquents. Some are limited mostly to educating young people who indicate a hope to go to college and already have acquired basic skills in reading and writing

Geography · Inner city · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms · Education Discipline and Inequality · Homelessness and Social Issues · Psychology

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