Clearly, it is easy enough to say that a school must become a home, but how do we make it happen? What constitutes a home? How can we apply the comfort and sense of ownership that we feel toward our homes to our schools? The NYC Student Union has begun to identify the institutions within schools that determine whether students feel that their school belongs to the student body and school faculty as a community, or that it belongs to someone else who is separate and different from this community.

At the present time, we have divided these institution into six categories. They do not speak for the entirety of the issue, but are a first step to breaking down student apathy and building new ways for students to truly love their schools.

I. The Physical Building
-Students will have increased access to the school building and all of its facilities
-Students will be encouraged to use the physical space for a large variety of constructive purposes, using the inherent creativity of youth to turn schools into major cultural centers

II. Rules and Regulations
-School rules will be constantly evaluated to make sure that they are not only purposeful, but meaningful.
-A rule’s ability to make students feel secure must always outweigh its ability to make students feel oppressed

III. Representation
-Effective student governments will exist in all schools, allowing the student body an accessible way to make real change within their schools.
-Students will have equal representation always in organizations such as School Leadership Teams (SLT)

IV. Security
-Security will be focused on positive action instead of negative reinforcement
- security guards, for example, might hold workshops on self-defense or gang violence, establishing a positive relationship between security and the student body.

V. The Classroom
-Emphasis on critical thinking is crucial. Schools will experiment with creative, flexible ways to assess students and will not depend on standardized testing.
-Smaller class sizes will allow classes to become places of deep thinking, discussion, and learning, rather than fact factories.

VI. Student Rights
-Students will have, and will be aware of, immutable rights that provide them with real strength to combat foul-play and authoritarianism in schools

The Campaign Against Student Apathy (CASA) is The New York City Student Union’s newest, most groundbreaking project. We seek to identify the causes of student apathy within our schools, our communities, our government, and ourselves, and construct a new plan for how we can maximize the potential of every student, not only to learn, but to become active, engaged, and to positively change the world around them.

Student apathy is a large and complicated idea, and sometimes seems difficult to stick into a package, like CASA. But student apathy becomes concrete and very real when we recognize the ways in which it manifests itself. An astonishingly high dropout rate, a low percentage of students involved in extra- and co-curricular activities, low test scores, truancy, vandalism, and even classroom violence are all caused, ultimately, by student apathy.

After hours of discussion with students from schools around New York City, we realize that student apathy pervades all schools, high and low performing, well- and under-funded, specialized and zoned. Consequently, we have concluded that student apathy originates at a place much deeper than the sources traditionally cited as causes of student failure. Student apathy comes from the universal feeling that we, students, are herded around what feels like a learning factory (or worse, if there is little learning happening), nameless and faceless - merely a desk that isn’t empty, and that in four years, we will graduate and move on, never to return.

This is why we must, above all, turn our schools into much more than schools for our students. We must turn them into homes.
Hence, CASA. Home.

There will be no meeting this coming Monday, April 2nd. However, there will be a meeting the following Monday. See you all then.
-Seth Pearce

On Friday Feb. 23 Dana, Kathryn, Laura and Noah and I participated in a summit on the high school dropout rate at Baruch college. A lot of interesting ideas were presented about how to reduce the dropout rate in regard to what goes on inside th classroom. Here are a few that I found especially interesting.
These were created in response to a Gates survey which cited boredom as the highest cause of high school drop outs nation wide.

IMPROVING TEACHING
In the business-model for education there is a lot of emphasis on test prep, lectures and mounds of homework. These are important for students to succeed on standardized tests and have been thought to increase graduation rates but as we have seen this is not the case. The negative, isolating effects of these methods could very well be the cause of students feeling that they can’t go on with going to school every day. The issue of making classes more accessible to students is an important part of the Campaign Against Student Apathy.
Some solutions to this problem that were offered at the summit included:
-Interactive Teaching methods
-More project based learning, less test based learning
-more discussion, less lecture
- simulations
-presentations
-learning through experiences (i.e. seeing how what you are learning affects the real world)

AND MY FAVORITE SOLUTION OF ALL:
-Make class time work time: Less reliance on homework.

This way teachers can help students work through problems and ideas and really help teach them how to learn and how to solve problems rather than throwing work on top of them and MAYBE commenting when they are done. I’m a junior getting ready for the English regents and I’ve got to say, I still get really nervous when I have to approach an essay.

This entry has gotten a little dense so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Hopefully dissecting these issues will help us come up with a comprehensive plan for CASA.
More to come on Guidance and extra-curricular solutions to the dropout problem.

–Seth Pearce