Here Am I, Lord

I watched this video this past weekend with 700 other Young Life leaders and committee members, who, at the video's end, felt a collective sense of urgency and empowerment to do something - anything - to help end injustice worldwide. For Young Life leaders, that is among high school students, in whom we hope to surmount general apathy and lives lived by pop culture's example, and to spread the hope of Jesus and the peace of the Holy Spirit. For me next year in the Czech Republic, the challenge will be related, now simply taken up in a land dominated by secularism and distrust of religion and the idea of a God. For so many others, the tasks are endlessly different: offering aid, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, empowering the poor, etc.



Matthew 9:35-38 (NLT)
"35 Jesus traveled through all the towns and villages of that area, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom. And he healed every kind of disease and illness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 He said to his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. 38 So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.” [emphasis added].

Jesus is in charge of the harvest. It is not up to us! We can, however, be used by Him as compassionate, loving, persistent tools of this holistic evangelism.

Hope Given, Justice Brought Forth

The battle against human trafficking and modern-day slavery is raging in this country.

Good news found on yahoo.com:

FBI, police rescue child prostitutes around US

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Devlin Barrett, Associated Press Writer – Mon Feb 23, 3:05 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The FBI has rescued 48 suspected teenage prostitutes, some as young as 13 years old, in a nationwide sweep to remove kids from the illegal sex trade and punish their accused pimps.

Over a three-night initiative called Operation Cross Country, federal agents working with local law enforcement also arrested more than 571 suspects on a variety of federal and state prostitution-related charges, the bureau said.

The teenage prostitutes found in the investigation ranged in age from 13 to 17.

"We may not be able to return their innocence but we can remove them from this cycle of abuse and violence," said FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tenn., a man pleaded guilty Monday to federal civil rights charges for sex trafficking in minors. Leonard Fox faces at least 10 years in prison after admitting that he arranged for underaged girls to engage in sex for money.

"To sexually prey upon young girls in this manner for financial gain is particularly damaging to the victims and an affront to the society in which we live," said Loretta King, acting head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

Historically, federal authorities rarely play a role in anti-prostitution crackdowns, but the FBI is becoming more involved as it tries to rescue children caught up in the business.

"The goal is to recover kids. We consider them the child victims of prostitution," said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Daniel Roberts.

"Unfortunately, the vast majority of these kids are what they term 'throwaway kids,' with no family support, no friends. They're kids that nobody wants, they're loners. Many are runaways," Roberts said.

Most of the children are put into the custody of local child protection agencies.

Agents in cities from Miami to Chicago to Anchorage, Alaska took part in the operation.

Special Agent Melissa Morrow of the FBI's Washington office said the operation has put them on the trail of a particular 16-year-old prostitute they still haven't found.

Adult prostitutes arrested during the operation provided key tips about the girl, the agent said.

"She is currently 16 and started when she was 13. Now she is out there recruiting other juveniles as well," said Morrow, adding that finding the girl is "at the top of our list."

The federal effort is also designed to hit pimps with much tougher prison sentences than they would likely get in state criminal courts.

Government prosecutors look to bring racketeering charges or conspiracy charges that can result in decades of jail time.

"Some of these networks of pimps and their organizations are very sophisticated, they're interstate," said Roberts, requiring wiretaps and undercover sting operations to bring charges.

The weekend's roundup marked the third such Operation Cross Country, and is part of a broader federal program launched in 2003 to crack down on the sexual exploitation of children.

_____

On the Net:

FBI: http://www.fbi.gov

Outliers: Success and Education, Part 2

One of the repeating themes in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success is that all of the individuals who are identified by society as most successful at their trades -- Bill Gates, professional athletes, 19th century entrepreneurs, pioneering lawyers, etc -- did not surf their way to success on intelligence and hard work alone. True, they no doubt possessed some natural ability and, at the very least, the drive to push themselves, but they also were children of exceptional circumstance whose successes were the products of so many different factors that popular press normally ignores. One of these is the fact that they put in an extraordinary amount of time practicing their trades -- many upwards of 10,000 hours -- before big time success ever hit them. I bring this up in relation to education because in its constant practice -- either in a classroom or through self-education in one's own time -- is the cause of a person's climb to success. This is especially important to defeating the old class explanation for why the educational gap exists; this class explanation, particularly relevant to geographic regions strongly dominated by an additional race-class paradigm, suggests that middle- and upper-class achievement is the result of an innate intelligence greater than that of the lower-class. I hope all agree with me that this argument is completely unfounded, on top of being disgusting.

Gladwell points out, though, that in the face of this class intelligence argument not holding water, public opinion and educational policy professionals have transferred responsibility for the educational gap to the schools themselves. "An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding -- all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the jobs schools are doing (259)." Gladwell, on the other hand, has done his homework and agrees with sociologist Karl Alexander that the research shows schools are, in fact, doing a fine job. In analyzing standardized tests given at both the beginning and end of any given school year, from first to fifth grade students of lower-class actually make more academic progress than the wealthiest of students. So how does the gap occur then? It's in the summer months away from school during which lower-class students fall behind. Wealthy students reap the benefits of being cultivated by their parents and by being surrounded by books, and intellectual conversation, and summer camps, and extra classes. In other words, they get to continue to practice their knowledge and gain some of the 10,000 hours other big shots like Bill Gates earned before he really stood out from the crowd. Their counterparts, on the other hand, are limited by their background and don't get to practice academics over the summer, which also means they forget some of what they learned during the year, and they're academically farther behind their wealthy peers at the start of the following school year.

This is especially true in my schools in Washington County, where the school year is traditionally several days shorter than many schools across the country, so as to allow students to help their families during planting and harvesting seasons. That may happen less these days, but the legacy of a farming calendar endures. Then add to it a 2 1/2 month summer vacation and schools in which students too often wander the halls and sign up for courses where homework can be completed during class, and you have the perfect formula for a culture in which students at an early age under-perform their peers across the country and therefore become more and more discouraged from making academic progress as they grow older. Hopefully they make it to high school graduation, but for many the next step is to drop out. This scenario is just another reason I have a job; this is how a college-going culture has escaped so many towns in rural Southwest Virginia.

So what is the solution? Gladwell says it's really a lot simpler than we'd think: "[Karl] Alexander, in fact, has done a very simple calculation to demonstrate what would happen if the children... went to school year-round. The answer is that poor kids and wealthy kids, would, by the end of elementary school, be doing math and reading at almost the same level (259)." And this, I failed to mention earlier, is in spite of poorer children starting at a disadvantage to the wealthy children. In Alexander's study, in the first standardized test of the 1st grade, poor children scored a full 32 points (significantly) below the high-income average. Summer schooling would more than help students make up for this initial disadvantage.

Highlighted as an example in Gladwell's books are the famous KIPP schools -- schools that don't require an intelligence test or entrance exam to be admitted, but merely a commitment to attend classes longer than an average school, to do extensive homework in the evenings, and to go to school for three weeks in the summer. It's the added classtime that enables success in students of all economic and racial backgrounds. Sure, it takes great sacrifice on the part of teachers, parents, and students themselves, but if working extra hours and changing the vacation schedule are the solutions for finally providing equal educational opportunities for all, then I think it's a sacrifice that I, personally, can be more than willing to make.

Outliers: Success and Education, Part 1

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, and found that several of his points, though all were well outlined and supported, struck a special chord with me after working for the past 19 months in two rural, low-income high schools based in communities where the traditional occupation is farming.

Following a discussion on the relevance of genius level IQs to an individual's chance for success (there was discovered to be a threshold after which additional intelligence provides no special advantage), Gladwell provides markedly different life trajectories of two individuals who have been considered to be smarter than, well, just about everyone. Gladwell explains how this could have happened by diving into a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, in which she found the single influencing factor in the success of third graders was class. While we'd think there'd be more more divergent results -- not merely two options -- on the assumption that there are endless philosophies on parenting, Lareau instead found that "wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way (104)."

At first, this doesn't appear to be much of a surprise; wealthier children have many obvious advantages: particularly, access to money, books and educational resources in the home, parents who have more free time to devote to them, and a greater variety of extracurricular activities (such as dance and sports and music lessons, all of which normally require the availability of extra spending money and parents who can shuttle their children to and from all of their appointments). We all understand the basic advantages of being born rich or being born poor, and how poor parents are often stretched thin on resources and time, with little left to give to their children. But what I previously didn't realize, before reading Gladwell's book, was in what way the differences in parenting styles caused by the availability of resources to people of middle/upper and lower classes influences the future success of children.

Gladwell really does put it best:
"Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style 'concerted cultivation.' It's an attempt to actively 'foster and asses a child's talents, opinions and skills.' Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of 'accomplishment of natural growth.' They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own. Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau's words, the middle-class children learn a sense of 'entitlement' (104-5)."

Gladwell takes care to emphasize this is entitlement not in the negative way that we normally think of it, but in a way that implies individuals have "'the right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings'(105)." Because individuals coming from poorer backgrounds typically have not had parents who could (1) devote the time and effort to the concerted cultivation of their children, nor (2) recognize the importance of concerted cultivation because they themselves grown up poor and remained poor, the individuals lack the comfort in institutional settings and skill of speaking up and advocating for themselves that is so defines the most successful of individuals. Indeed, it can make or break those with even the highest measurable IQs. That is because, in many settings, individuals coming from poor backgrounds are distant and distrustful and unable to tailor their environments to their personal use (105).

When reading this in Outliers, a light-bulb turned on for me. It completely explains how my students, 14-18 years old with habits and traits ingrained in them from childhood, much more often than not do not take advantage of so many opportunities presented to them. They fail to meet deadlines, they don't bring in materials when I ask, they are afraid to call any person of "authority" on the phone, they are wary of involving their parents in their schooling, and they don't understand the importance of going the extra mile (especially in relation to college applications and proving themselves worthy to their choices schools). And when things don't go their way as a result, they shrug off their dreams, calling them opportunities lost.

The saddest part of it, of course, is that just as often, those dreams are not lost. They would still have been capable through further work and research and finding the right people with which to converse. And on top of that, better opportunities are oftentimes presented in the face of these "lost" opportunities, but my students are so consumed with discouragement that they cannot see them. This phenomenon is crystal clear in the life of the high school football star profiled on Diane Sawyer's recent 20/20 special on Appalachia (Children of the Mountains). This student was homeless, living in a truck because his family was taken over by violence, alcoholism, drug dealing, and poverty, but he received a football scholarship to a nearby college. After a first semester struggling to keep up with his peers, both in classes and (especially) in a college social life where money was necessary to keep up, he dropped out, moving back to the poverty of the hills, hoping for any job to come his way, facing a coal mining future, and picking coal off the side of a highway hill to warm his family's home.

This attitude of defeatism is perpetuated all around me in the hills of Southwest Virginia, too. It's like, if one thing ever goes wrong in someone's life, it's a sign for him/her not to push through it because the world doesn't want him/her to succeed. And so they don't push through, and of course they never climb that ladder. It's all because these people don't have the attitude of entitlement instilled in them by their parents. And what follows is nothing less than heartbreaking.

*All quotes from Outliers.

Czech It Out!

TeachOverseas has placed me on the Czech Republic team for the 2009-2010 school year! I am really looking forward to serving the Lord in the land of Kafka, Kundera, Knedliky, and castles! I will be placed in one of five cities, so stay tuned for more info about that.