Educational Talent Scout

For the better part of a lifetime, Daniel Schreiber, current head of New York City's Project 43, has been trying to get underprivileged youngsters into college. Indeed, since the conception of the Project in 1955, he has made this his full time work.

His career may be said to have really begun, however, more than twenty years ago, when he first became principal of Junior High School 43. Schreiber, who had previously taught mathematics in a "special," elite high school, found that his new assignment to a depressed neighborhood demanded a complete change in approach. "I had to stop teaching subject matter and start teaching children. What was most important was to give the kids some motivation for learning, some kind of future worth working for."

With these same aims in mind, Schreiber set out, five years ago, to organize Project 43. Begun as a pilot experiment in his own institution, the Project, sometimes called "Operation Higher Horizons," has now expanded to 65 schools and aroused the interest and excitement of college officials throughout the country. Working on the hypothesis that it is a fatalistic attitude which, more than any financial problem, keeps most low income students from continuing their education, the Project seeks, above all, to encourage poor but promising young people to think in terms of going to college.

Schreiber, in explaining the philosophy behind the Project, often enjoys telling one particular anecdote. "It's a story Sam Levenson sometimes tells. It seems that one day his brother goes up to his father and says 'Dad, I want to go to college.' So the old man stops for a minute and he looks at him and he says 'So who's stopping you.' That's the attitude we'd like the parents of our kids to take. We'd like them to say 'Don't worry about it, son, we'll get yourself through somehow. And if we can't, well then you'll get yourself through somehow. The important thing is to study hard now.' But if the parents don't teach a kid this, then it's up to us to teach him."

Most students who join the Project enter it in the seventh grade. "This is the age," Schreiber feels, "when a kid begins to get a general idea of his vocational plans." Only the top fifty per cent of the students in each school, selected on the basis of I.Q. and reading scores, are admitted to the program. These, organized into separate "Project" classes, then become Schreiber's particular concern.

"Our first problem is to give these kids a worthwhile self-image of themselves. We want to make them feel that they have what it takes to go to college and be want they want to be. There are several devices we use to accomplish this. For one thing we use what we call 'hero and heroine worship': if someone from the school got into a good college or became a doctor or a lawyer, we tell the kids about it and put his picture in the classroom. Then the kids can say 'see, somebody from our school made it' and they begin to think that maybe they can make it too.

"We also have an extensive guidance program. We meet with the parents and with the kids, both individually and in groups. We talk to them about different kinds of vocations and we take them to places like hospitals, laboratories, and nursing schools so they can see what different professions are like.

"Another big problem," Schreiber explained, "is to give these youngsters cultural experiences of the sort most middle class kids get from their families. We take them to museums, concerts, plays and sometimes we even get the conductor or lead actor to talk to them. We try to make each visit an excursion. If we take them to Carnegie Hall, we make sure they walk down 57th Street afterwards and go to the Automat, say, for something to eat. We want them to get the idea that they can walk on 57th Street and go into a restaurant just like anyone else.

"Then we sometimes take them on what we call 'Dream Trips' to different colleges. We'll all go up to a school like Harvard, Amherst, or Princeton; we'll walk around the grounds, talk to students, maybe go to a football game. It's not important whether or not a particular kid actually applies and gets into a school like this. What is important is that he think in terms of applying. We want him to feel he's good enough to compete.

"Besides encouraging these kids to go to college we try to give them the tools they'll need to prepare themselves. We teach them reading skills, for instance--how to skim, how to read a science book as opposed to a novel, thinks like that. We also try to get them to read as much as possible outside of school. We have what we call a 'Readers Are Leaders' program. If a student reads six outside books he gets a button, like a Boy Scout merit badge, which says 'Reader'; then if he reads twelve books he gets another badge with 'Leader' on it.

"We also have book fairs from time to time. We know the kids can't afford hard covered books, so we sell paperbacks. We just want them to get in the habit of buying books."

While it is still too early really to evaluate the effectiveness of the Project, the results which have been tabulated all point to its success. Of one group of 140 students who went from Jr. H.S. 43 to George Washington H.S., thirty-four per cent went on to post-secondary schools. But the achievement of the Project seems even more impressive when one listens to some of the students who are in it. One young man, visiting Harvard on a "dream trip" this fall said that, because of the Project, "I saw a big door opened and everything I wanted inside."