Thanks to Taylor Stoehr for his thought-provoking piece. I think we have
much to learn from such work. I'd like to hear more.
 
I work at the Fortune Society, a 39 year old organization in New York
City dedicated to (1) advocating for prison and criminal justice reform
and (2) working with people after they leave prison. At Fortune,
education is just one of a wide array of programs people coming out of
prison can participate in. Even though most people who come to us do not
have a high school diploma, education is usually not the first thing on
their minds. The vast majority need a job and many are either homeless
or one step from it. In addition, most people are dealing with a range
of parole and probation mandates like substance abuse treatment and
anger management. 
 
Approximately 250 people participate in our Education program each year;
in the last few years, the percentage of younger students and
particularly of people mandated to one of Fortune's Alternative to
Incarceration program has grown dramatically. I think our underlying
philosophy has much in common with the program described by Taylor
Stoehr - we develop curriculum around the needs and issues brought to
the class by the students themselves. However, a number of factors have
undermined our ability to maintain that focus on content:

*	
	The sheer numbers of people coming through our doors every year
has stretched our resources. We have struggled to keep up with the
demand. Recently we have restructured our program so that it serves
fewer people, but more intensively.
*	
	We are serving increasing numbers of court mandated students,
many of whom really don't want to be in class. We have worked hard to
develop a curriculum that honors their right and need to make autonomous
decisions about the role of education in their lives and at the same
time to insist on the integrity of the process in the classroom.  
*	
	Perhaps though, the biggest obstacle has been the fact that we
are caught up in the National Reporting System and its focus on
educational gain as defined by test scores. The pressure to meet state
targets, lumped together indiscriminately as we are with every other
program in the state, has produced enormous pressure to test, test,
test. This has not been all bad as it has led us to look closely at what
we are doing and think about how we can do it better. But the narrow
focus on test scores has made it difficult to shape the program around
the real and individual needs of the students.

Perhaps in a later post, I can address some other issues, but I did want
to pose one question:  Given that the elimination of Pell Grants for
prisoners has virtually ended the possibility of going to college while
in prison, what do the panelists think is the importance of and
possibility of reinstating that right? Here at Fortune where many of the
staff have been incarcerated themselves, the value and significance of
college level work in prison is a given. Many of the staff members in
the leadership of the agency got their degrees (or at least started
them) while in prison. Obviously, the college degree, or college level
coursework, opens up job possibilities for people once they're out. But
it also contributes to the development of leadership skills that will
allow former prisoners to come back to their communities and play
critical roles in shaping collective responses to the problems those
communities are facing.
 
john gordon
The Fortune Society 
 
While we 

  _____  

From: specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov
[mailto:specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Taylor Stoehr
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 8:38 PM
To: specialtopics at nifl.gov
Subject: [SpecialTopics 205] Comment on discussion of "re-entry
education"for ex-offenders



I work in a Massachusetts program for probationers called Changing Lives
Through Literature.  (See our website: cltl at umassd.edu )  Started in
1991 in a single court, it has spread to a number of jurisdictions in
Massachusetts and to six other states.  I can speak for the men's
program in Dorchester, the busiest criminal court in the state, where we
have the experience of a dozen years - perhaps 250 graduates of our
ten-week program offered every semester.  We are currently involved in a
study of recidivism in five jurisdictions, but the results will not be
available for quite some time.  For the moment, I can say that the
probationers themselves believe that they change during this short
period of intense focus on a few texts, and a set of concerns that are
central in their lives.  Our primary text is Frederick Douglass's
Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, which serves as the starting
point for discussion of problems faced by the students themselves -
poverty and racism, the struggle for social  justice, family breakdown,
the weakening of community bonds and thinning out of spiritual
sustenance.  Short supplementary readings by other authors - black and
white, American and foreign, contemporary and classic - clarify issues
Douglass raises by putting them in a broader context, and a writing
assignment helps us focus on their relevance today.  For example, after
reading how Douglass describes his childhood, and how Malcolm X, Bill
Russell, Maxim Gorky, or Leo Tolstoy describe theirs, students are asked
to state their own opinion of what is necessary for a "normal"
childhood, and who has the responsibility to provide it.  What was your
childhood like?  What kind of a father do you want to be?  Those are the
implied questions.  We also ask how a man like Frederick Douglass or
Malcolm X finds himself.  "Where do people get their courage,
self-esteem, and righteousness?"

With men like those I work with, it's probably better to concentrate on
the literacy skills they already possess - a complicated mix of street
smarts and a colloquial eloquence among friends and family - than to
imagine that we are going to "improve" their reading, writing, or
talking.  To speak in their own voices in a public setting like our
classroom, where we talk about serious issues that affect their lives,
is the best training in literacy we can offer them.  

One of our aims is to demystify the whole realm of social control,
schooling, and literacy.  All their lives our students have been told
they are incompetent readers and writers, and this tends to make them
so.  But the incompetence is superficial in most cases.  Their speech
skills are usually more than adequate, and often superb.  In fact, their
failure in school has protected them from certain kinds of glibness and
beating about the bush.  

All students, including ours, have the right to success in a truly
democratic classroom - not just an opportunity to learn, but active
exercise of language, taste, and ethics, in order to explore their own
individual powers and ideals in relation to a growing sense of how
others speak and judge and evaluate.  "Success" means both discovering
and making standards, rather than merely living up to them.  "Failure"
means being left out of the most essential aspects of civic life.  Often
the schools fail to do this important work, through a misguided notion
of what kind of education is appropriate in an egalitarian society.  The
men we meet in Changing Lives typically think of themselves as failures.

>From their earliest experiences in schooling to the regimen of

incarceration and probation, they have stubbornly resisted demands and
admonishments, have been labeled incorrigible, and have little or no
sense of what it might mean to be part of a democratic forum deciding
matters of concern for their own lives.  We want to establish such a
classroom, in which no one will be left out.

Our aim is to give each man a chance to think better of himself, while
simultaneously dispelling the illusion that success in school is the
only route to respectability.  We aren't trying to get people back on
the educational track, but to let them judge for themselves what it
would mean to return to school, or to decide not to go that route, a
question that asks them to assess their own lives - Who am I, really,
and what kind of future do I want for myself?

 

Taylor Stoehr, English Department

University of Massachusetts - Boston

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