What we do

Literacy Empowers All People – or LEAP – was born when Le Moyne College education students Becca Gray and Maggie Donohue traveled to the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans to help rebuild after Katrina.  As education students, they saw needs beyond the rebuilding of homes, as important as that is.  They both volunteered in an afterschool program and saw that the storm, combined with poverty, had created enormous educational deficits for the children in the Lower Nine.  The decision was made to offer literacy education over the summer – and LEAP began.

The first summer, we worked with 52 children in the Lower Nine for one week.  Now, our program, which combines progressive education with an anti-racist curriculum, serves over 100 children every summer.  This year, we are offering a 4 week problem-based learning program that draws on literature and music, art and ingenuity to help students address problems of their own choosing. 

And LEAP is growing elsewhere.  We plan on bringing our program back home to Syracuse – again addressing children who live in poverty and do not have the resources that other students have.  Living in poverty can lead to poor nutrition, increased stress in the home, health issues and a lack of educational resources (such as books and computers) in the home.  And all of those effects lead to poor educational attainment.  Children who live in poverty have only 45% of the vocabulary of a child who is raised in a middle-class home.   These struggling readers will then have extra challenges in all subjects – where the text book may be incomprehensible.  Even the instructions for homework can be a challenge to read. 

So LEAP reaches out to these children.  We strive to show them that they are smart, they have something to say, and they can find ways to say it through literacy.  We provide fun, stimulating educational experiences that will, hopefully, show these wonderful children that the extra hard work that they will have to put into their education is worth it. 

All of this, of course, takes money.  We provide children with books they can take home with them when the program is over, we use craft supplies and journals and pencils, pens and crayons.  Your support can really make a difference for a child who, through only the accident of where they were born, has to work twice as hard to get a high school diploma or college degree as other children.  Please consider donating.  We’re getting ready to launch this summer’s program and will immediately put your gift to good use.  (You’ll see a Donate Now! link above.)

Stories of Hope: Children’s Lifesaving Foundation

It’s Monday, and it’s gray outside.  Karen Carpenter is running around the back of my mind singing “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down . . .”

So here’s a little ray of sunshine to brighten up a gray day.  Maria D’Angelo, who grew up poor in New York City, became a teacher.  And we all know what that means – so much more than a profession!  Something happens when a teacher looks at a problem – there is both the intelligence and problem solving ability and the heart that leads to a program like D’Angelo’s Children’s Lifesaving Foundation.  Starting with helping one homeless child who couldn’t read in 1990, D’Angelo has now built an organization of 250 volunteers that works to get the most vulnerable children in our society to college.  The Children’s Lifesaving Foundation has provided 45 students with four year scholarships – after working to make sure that the students were prepared to take on that challenge. 

Read more about CLF here – or visit theirwebsite.

High stakes testing can kill a democracy

I honestly believe that what LEAP does can change our world.  I tell the kids that all the time – you can use your words to change the world!  When we read and write we are connecting with others – perhaps people who live far away or in a different time, perhaps with someone right next to us – but we are sharing our ideas with them and they are sharing theirs with us.   Literacy education, for those of us in LEAP, has to do with empowering people growing up in some of the worst circumstances in the United States to communicate their understandings of the world, and their solutions to the problems we all face.  Literacy, then, is about critical engagement with the rest of society. 

That is also what democracy is.  In a democracy, we, the people, decide how we will live.  But we, the people, can’t make those decisions unless we communicate with others, unless we connect with others.  And we, the people, can’t make these decisions well without two important things: good information and the ability to think creatively. 

Having good information involves reading, yes, but it also involves critical thinking.  We need to sift through the information we are bombarded with daily and separate the important and useful information from the unsubstantiated blather.  In our public schools today, do we teach this ability?  I would love to hear from teachers about how that is taught.  When we worry about getting students through a test, so they won’t be “left behind” but can “race to the top,” we end up spending weeks just telling students the information they need to pass.  While we may pass on a lot of good information, we also train the students to trust our judgment on what they need to know.  Memorization, not evaluation, is the crucial task for students when faced with high stakes testing.  It isn’t important that they know why D is the correct answer – they must just recognize that it is the right answer (because we told them so) and bubble it clearly!  Understanding can happen, but it isn’t essential.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau once warned that if you teach your students to listen patiently, trust what you say and repeat it, you have set them up to accept what others may say as well.  “With all these fine speeches you give him now to make him wise, you are paving the way for a fortune-teller, pied-piper, quack, imposter, or some kind of crazy person to catch him in his snare or draw him into his folly.”[1]  It is easy to manipulate someone who has been trained to memorize and repeat – and the way political campaigns are currently waged as a war of slogans attests to that.  People are guided by who says something the loudest, the most often or with the most memorable sound bite.  We want, instead, to teach our children to think, to understand, to evaluate.  Although it may look like a democracy, a system where people vote based on manipulation it is, at best, an oligarchy – the people with the most money for ads, etc., decide who will rule and what decisions will be made.

The ability to think creatively is a higher order thought process.  In Bloom’s taxonomy, the lowest mental abilities are remembering and understanding; the highest are evaluating and creating.[2]  By emphasizing memorization (with or without understanding) we are leaving our children behind and we definitely are not reaching the “top.”  High test scores do not always equate with creative and critical thinking.  As Matt Damon (who is Harvard educated) has said, the abilities that have contributed the most to his success – such as creativity and imagination – cannot be measured on a multiple-choice test!  He is proud that his mother (an educator) insisted that he not be tested when he was in public school.[3]

Back in the 1970s, a mother marching into the principal’s office and insisting that her son not take a standardized test worked.  Now the situation is more difficult.  One DC school announced that students who do not take the tests will be barred from participating in sports the following academic year.  (At the same time, they offered “incentives” like raffling off iPad minis and Visa gift cards for students who do take the test – and giving gift packs to those who score well).[4]  Here in Central New York, parents cannot make this decision for their children – but the students themselves are refusing to take them.[5]  In Seattle, WA, the opt-out movement is strong, with 600 high schoolers refusing to take the standardized test.[6] 

Refusing the test – refusing to be “dehumanized” (as Paulo Freire would put it) by being trained to remember and repeat – is, in my opinion, a truly democratic move.  Although it is possible that these students are merely doing what their parents told them to do, I hope that many of them are thinking for themselves.   And I hope that the opt-out movement grows enough that our legislators are forced to rethink the democracy strangling practice of high states testing and give our teachers the time to truly teach.

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[1] Rosseau, Jean-Jacques.  Emile.  http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/pedagogies/rousseau/index.html 612.

[2] Overbaugh, Richard C. and Lynne Schultz.  Bloom’s Taxonomy.  http://ww2.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm

[3] Strauss, Valerie.  “Matt Damon’s Clear-headed Speech to Teachers Rally”  The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/matt-damons-clear-headed-speech-to-teachers-rally/2011/07/30/gIQAG9Q6jI_blog.html

[4] Strauss, Valerie.  “School Warns Students: No test, no sports.”  The Washington Post.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/22/school-warns-students-no-test-no-sports/

[5] Hannagan, Charley.  “Pencils Down! Central New York Parents Tell Schools Their Children Won’t Take Tests.”  http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/04/opt_out.html

[6] Layton, Lindsey.  “Bush, Obama focus on standardized testing leads to opt-out movement.”  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-14/local/38537469_1_no-child-students-such-testing

Welcome!

Welcome to the LEAP (Literacy Empowers All People) page!

We're committed to changing education so that children are encouraged to think for themselves and engage their world -- moving it ever so slowly toward social justice.  We'll be bringing news about teachers who are transforming their classrooms and children who are transforming their lives.  We'll discuss the new ideas, new books, new curricula that are stirring the education pot in the United States.  And we'll be looking for your input on how we can truly educate our children.  Looking forward to hearing from you!