The strengths of Urban City Schools

When people think of an Urban City School they automatically give the assumption that all the kids are drug dealers,gang members, drop outs etc. This assumption is not entirely true because Urban City Schools produce kids who are intellectual and capable of doing something with there lives.Building on the strenghts of city kids, rather than tallying up their weaknesses, takes a fundamental shift in thinking about urban education. This article explains a little more:More than 150 languages are now spoken in America’s public schools, a reflection of recent immigration trends. City schools enroll the lion’s share of these newest Americans. Is this diversity a strength or an obstacle to learning? If seen as a deficit, immigrant students’ limited English skills can look like one more burden for urban districts to bear. Taken as a talent, however, children’s "multilingual abilities may one day give them a distinct advantage in the global marketplace," points out R. Craig Sautter in CITYSCHOOLS, a publication of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. Urban schools, concludes Sautter, "need to develop strategies that build aggressively on the real capacities, experiences, culture, and linguistic attributes of city kids." Such strategies start by thinking of urban children as "of value" rather than "at risk," suggests former Philadelphia superintendent Constance Clayton in City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row.
For decades, researchers have been documenting the deficits of urban students and the social ills of the inner cities. Across the country, including the largest cities of the Northwest, achievement gaps remain especially glaring for low-income minority youth. Complex social and economic reasons have left many of these children increasingly isolated from middle-class students and from successful schools, according to Trends and Issues in Urban Education, 1998, a report from the ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education. City kids attending high-poverty schools, according to the ERIC report, tend to have limited exposure to rigorous coursework and experienced teachers—two key factors for boosting achievement.