Diversity in action: a school’s story
“There’s a difference between tolerance and acceptance. Here we go beyond acceptance, to celebration”
With 380 pupils from more than 30 different countries, many unable to speak English, the International Community School in Atlanta should be on the educational scrapheap. Instead, it is winning awards and increasing its pupils’ grades every year. Dan Weeks finds out how dedicated teachers following a single vision can change lives
As the day begins at the International Community School (ICS), buses are pulling up and crowds begin to form. A boy of about eight years old runs up to the school’s principal.
“Mr. Moon!” he says urgently, “I need a colander.”
Bill Moon is a tall European-American in his 60s with large glasses, a neat, white beard and ethnic headgear that changes daily (today, it’s a Greek sailor’s cap). Striding through swirling crowds of children – many recently arrived from Somalia, Burma, Kurdistan, Vietnam, the Congo, China, Bosnia and more than 30 other countries – he looks like the patriarch of the most diverse community on earth.
“You need a calendar, Desmond?” he says, bending down to listen. Accents
are so varied here that double-checking meaning is always a good idea.
“A colander,” Desmond Laing, a young African-American student, repeats solemnly. “I want to build something. Because if I build something, ICS might be making two thousand a day.”
Bill nods. “You mean fundraising?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Desmond,” he says sincerely. “I’ll look at home and see if I have one I can bring in.”
“And some spare parts, like a radio and some tubes and a fire hydrant thing and a big screen and a spray bottle,” adds Desmond, his voice trailing off as he runs off to play.
“Desmond is so creative,” Bill explains. “He’s always inventing something.”
The same can be said of the school.
Every day, in a churchyard crammed with temporary buildings in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, USA, the school creates what has perhaps never existed before: a learning community composed of students and staff as varied as Desmond’s wish-list.
Roughly half the student body of 6-to-11-year-olds is African- or European-American from the surrounding area. The other half is mostly refugees. Many have been on the run from violence, famine or other hardships for years. Some have severe post-traumatic stress, health problems, a complete inability to speak English or illiteracy in their native language. For some of the children here, this is the first school they’ve ever attended.
It would be understandable to find chaos here, or the world-weary hopelessness of a refugee camp transported to an American suburb. Indeed, the facility itself, though spotlessly clean, is bare bones and hard-worn.
At the Decatur campus – one of two in the area – chain-link fences surround a dirt playground. Inside, even the head of school’s office is furnished with donated, mismatched chairs from out-of-style dining sets; classroom desks are so old the metal feet have worn off and are replaced by split-open tennis balls to ward off further floor damage. Money, equipment and space are in chronically short supply: the band room at the Stone Mountain campus is also the art room, a Spanish classroom and a storage locker.
But the magic begins as soon as the school day starts. Many classroom assistants and teachers are also parents of students here, and they enlarge their definition of family daily to include the school’s 380 pupils. “I am your mother when your mother’s not here,” April Russ, an African-American teaching assistant is fond of reminding her charges. Other assistants are volunteers sponsored by various international and local social service and religious organizations (although the school is relentlessly ecumenical, to the point of covering up religious iconography in the former church-school classrooms).
The playground quickly comes to life, as soccer and volleyball games flow around one another in the confined space as though that’s the way the sports were meant to be played. Soung Oo Hlaing, a student from Burma with dwarfism, leaps into the air and spikes a ball over the net to the cheers of both his team-mates and the soccer players. Meanwhile, the soccer ball is played past benches, off the metal skirting of the temporary buildings, over ruts and tree roots, and around supervising staff. “In Africa, you have to make your own soccer ball,” says Marbati Joel, a student from Eritrea, “but we play.”
A similar can-do spirit seems to infuse everything at ICS. “We’re survivors,” explains Sanela Misimovic, a parent and classroom assistant who left Bosnia with her family 11 years ago before finally settling here. “We’ll find a way to do it, without nice offices, without enough computers. We’ll find a way.”
And they have: the school is one of only two for disadvantaged children that was recently commended by the Georgia Board of Education as a National Distinguished Title One School – one of only 41 such schools in the country. ICS has met the annual requirement under the USA’s No Child Left Behind Act for each of the past four years. It was cited for closing the performance gap between low- and high-scoring students, without lowering its higher scores – and ICS students’ average scores on state-wide tests equal or exceed district and state averages. The school has also added an additional grade level for every year of its existence, and made the front page of The New York Times recently as a model for refugee education.
So how does ICS achieve such success with so many challenges? There is certainly no formula to follow. “We don’t know of any other schools like us,” says Bill, pointing out that while most international schools have a great diversity of language and basic culture, few have much socio-economic diversity and many are private.
ICS, on the other hand, is a public charter school, meaning that any child in the DeKalb County, Georgia school system can attend at no cost. That’s especially attractive to the Atlanta area’s many refugees, who want a place where their children will be given the extra understanding and help with language and cultural adaptation they need. As a bonus, ICS offers it without stigmatizing students as ‘different’ on the one hand or assimilating them beyond recognition into mainstream American culture on the other.
The idea was born about 10 years ago, after American aid agencies decided Decatur was ideal for refugees because of its low housing costs and the abundance of jobs in Atlanta. As a result, thousands arrived. Three people who had volunteered in the Atlanta refugee community – Bill Moon, Sister Patty Caraher, a nun, teacher and long-time civil rights activist, and Barbara Thompson, a writer – decided refugee children needed more help than the city’s public schools could offer.
They envisioned a school modeled on Martin Luther King Jr’s concept of “the beloved community” – a community that transcended, in his words, “our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation” and on American educational reformer Horace Mann’s idea of the “common school” as one available and equal for all and focused on promoting social harmony. In 2002, after obtaining seed money from local non-profit organizations and help from many volunteers, the school opened as a charter school. It offers the IB Primary Years Programme as part of its commitment to an international education.
American-born students here are generally the children of progressive parents – some affluent, many not – who believe a multicultural perspective and lots of personal attention will serve their children well in a world of increased globalization. They find their children learn as well here as at a more ‘regular’ school – because their education is given just as much focus as that of the refugees – with the bonus of learning first-hand about different languages and cultures.
If every child feels she is really, really appreciated here, and her culture is really appreciated here, she’ll have confidence and perform better
The unique mix means that everyone is a minority here, so, paradoxically, no one feels out of place. “We’re all different together,” is a commonly repeated observation, offered with no trace of irony. As a result, the school feels more like a tribe than an institution: visitors immediately get a sense that these people care for one another, and are actively involved in helping each other succeed.
Newcomers are greeted with a glad-you’re-here, you’re-one-of-us sentiment that seems a solvent for any number of traditional barriers: language, race, culture, or simple misunderstanding.
The school’s chief festival among many is ‘UN Day’, which celebrates the dozens of cultures that make up the school’s family. Nazdar Amedi, a teaching assistant from Kurdistan whose son is one of the students, explains: “UN Day was a touching moment for me, because we got to raise our flag and yell for our country.” She pauses. “We never get to raise our flag, even in our own country. It touches your heart till you want to cry, that here every country has the right….” She trails off, overcome with emotion.
“There’s a difference between ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’,” points out Inye Durham, an African-American from Dallas, Texas who is the school’s registrar. “Here, we go beyond even acceptance to celebration.”
The result isn’t just a good feeling, says Bill. It’s sound academic practice. “It’s common sense to me that if every child feels she is really, really appreciated here, and her culture is really appreciated here, she’ll have confidence and perform better,” he says.
“I see that with my son, Amar,” says Sanela. “He is self-confident, he is open-minded, he is willing to learn from others. He says ‘Mom, people are like pizza: different flavours.’ Yet he is also so proud to be Bosnian, to wear the traditional uniform on UN Day. He’s translating things into Bosnian for new Bosnian students, he’s teaching English to kids after school. He’s so proud that he can contribute.”
These kids are very intelligent. They have been through so much. They need a teacher who can listen to them also. They can offer something beautiful
Visitors quickly notice that in spite of their differences, most of the children do have several things in common: quiet confidence, openness, curiosity, a tendency to pause reflectively before answering questions, and no fear of being labeled ‘wrong’. That’s at least partly because they’re all teachers as well as students.
“In America, one problem with the school system is they want to teach,” says Isaac Baroi, a classroom assistant and political refugee with a long history as a journalist, author and activist in his native Bangladesh. “They don’t realize it’s a two-way process. These kids are very intelligent. They have been through so much. They need a teacher who can listen to them also. They can offer something beautiful.”
That kind of sharing of experience among students and the rest of the school community, says Bill, can take the IB where it’s never gone before. “I’ve been with the IB since 1972, four years after it started, and we’ve been faulted for being a Euro-centric programme. Our school could be a beacon if we can connect Georgia-state curriculum [required of Georgia’s public schools, including charters] with what is happening in the world.”
“If we’re studying the US civil war, how does that connect with civil wars elsewhere?” Bill asks in a teaching assistant’s meeting. “The IB can’t tell us how to do it. Each one of us has to take this personally.”
If ICS seeks to evolve the IB, it does so on the firm foundation of the programme’s basic tenets, such as the IB Learner Profile. Those provide a set of core values that guide the school’s own culture, while encouraging respect for all cultures. In fact, the profile is mentioned frequently and enthusiastically by students themselves as one of the reasons they love the school.
“When you do something really bad, they come to you and they help you learn: this is a bad thing, you shouldn’t do it, this is a good thing, you should do it,” says Alex Kaseba, newly arrived from the Congo.
The result is an infectious, almost utopian vision and welcoming, family feeling that attracts people to ICS in droves. Salaries are low to non-existent and facilities are strained to the limit, but there is never a shortage of students, staff, ideas or volunteers. Bill says if you count everyone who contributes to the school community each week, ICS has more volunteers and staff than it does students.
That’s fortunate, because often students have to be persuaded to go home at the end of the school day – and, eventually, to leave for good. “For some graduates, it’s tough,” says Alison Gay, who helps older students in the classroom. “But they still have our cell phone numbers. They know they can lean on us, because this extended family still exists. One student, a girl from Nigeria, moved away to Boise in Idaho. No one invited her to the prom, but she said she was going to go anyway, so we surprised her and sent her a dress.”
Such extraordinary commitments to confidence-building are commonplace at ICS. Near the end of the last academic year, final-year students celebrated their successful completion of the ICS curriculum by putting on a fashion show.
At first glance, the event seems an odd way to celebrate academic achievement, but the school didn’t want to sponsor a more culture-bound activity such as a prom or a graduation ceremony. The fashion show allowed students to come as they pleased.
The lunchroom was crammed with staff, parents and elaborately dressed students. As each proudly swaggered down the ‘runway’ of blue construction paper lined with battery-powered closet lights, the audience clapped and cheered with an enthusiasm normally reserved for Olympic gold medalists, and many had tears streaming down their cheeks.
One guest, visibly moved, told Bill he’d never before felt such a sense of warmth, pride and belonging. “It’s tribal, isn’t it?” said the guest, groping for a definition.
Bill stopped amid the swirl and din of the festivities and looked at him intently. “Yes!” he said, as though shocked by the revelation. “No one’s ever described us that way before, but that’s what we are, aren’t we?”
The students
Name Ahmed Alshlani
Born Iraq
“Someone was trying to kill my father, that’s why we came here,” says Ahmed. “My dad, the only way he got to escape, he used to dig holes under trees and hide there. And one time they caught him and were about to kill him, and America said we could come here. The other [American] school I went to, many people used to tease me. But here, now, everything’s normal. You have fun. All the teachers are watching out for you. Now, we’re so happy.”
Name Amina Osman
Born Somalia
Amina recently arrived in the USA with her parents. “We didn’t have food, good school, no water. You have to go far away to pick food,” she says. “Here my parents are working, they get money, we got a lot of food in the house.” Like many of ICS’s students, Amina is a linguist. She’s proficient in Swahili, Somali and Kiziguwa, and reads the Koran in Arabic. She’s just starting to learn English and French at ICS: “Every day, my parents, we sit in a circle and we practice our languages so we don’t forget.”
The head of school
Principal Bill Moon saves his heavy load of administrative work for after the children have left campus. By day, he’s chief elder: listener, storyteller, team motivator, hug-giver, consensus builder. Originally from California and a lifelong teacher in international schools, he’s brought IB programmes to six schools in three countries. He closes a meeting with volunteer associates about scheduling problems with a sentiment he often shares with staff: “It ain’t perfect. We could do better. But it’s great to be with everybody here.”
State of the nations: the IB and government
Across the world, the IB is working hand-in-hand with regional and national governments to ensure state access to its programmes
Engaging regional and national governments is at the centre of the IB’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity. Andrew Bollington, the IB’s regional director for Africa, Europe and the Middle East, explains why:
“At one point, it was true that IB was largely for private schools – but not any more. Now more than fifty per cent of IB World Schools, and many more IB students, are in state systems.
“There’s a growing awareness among governments that education systems have to work in an international society, not just a national one. That will eventually lead you to the IB. We’ve been talking to a lot of governments about either creating more IB World Schools or influencing national education systems. After all, you can reach far more people through state systems than by authorizing one school at a time.
“We stand for diversity and global-mindedness but we’re also about an international, consistent standard – and that can bring its own challenges. In my inbox is an email from a school in Lebanon trying to hold exams in the middle of a war. We had schools in China affected by the earthquake and one in Burma affected by the cyclone. Others are affected by state censorship, which poses interesting questions about how we deliver our curricula. Educational inclusivity is the ideal, but we live in a world that isn’t like that. That’s why we have a lot of work to do.”
Nova Scotia, Canada
It is one of North America’s most remote and unspoiled areas, but the Canadian province of Nova Scotia is working with the IB to ensure its students enjoy all the benefits of an internationally focused education. “The IB is the only programme committed to healthy values such as international-mindedness, critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, community service and leadership,” says John Messenger, head of IB programmes at Nova Scotia Department of Education.
Twelve public and two private schools in the province currently offer the Diploma Programme and 10 per cent of next year’s graduates are expected to be IB students. The department aims to give every student the choice of joining an IB programme.
Ecuador
The South American country’s president, Rafael Correa, has made education a priority as he seeks to advance the economy – and ensuring more students have access to IB programmes is seen as essential.
“The academic requirements of the IB are important because they set challenges for our state schools and mean the education given is measured according to international standards,” says Raul Vallejo, former minister of education and now a government advisor on IB programmes. “This allows the professional development of teachers, the pride of belonging and the real possibility of creating a critical mass of students in the state education system that will benefit the country.”
When you want to be known as the ‘Smart State’, it pays to invest in education. Queensland – Australia’s second-largest state, famed for its sun, coastline and the city of Brisbane (left) – aims to increase the number of graduates it produces for the country’s top universities, as well as its contribution to the Australian economy.
Queensland, Australia
Three Queensland Academies have already opened their doors, and two more are expected to be announced by the state governor as part of an AUS$45.8m investment made in 2003. They offer the IB Diploma Programme to Queensland’s brightest state-educated pupils and each has a different focus, from science to the creative industries.
Cambodia
Since the Khmer Rouge rule of the late1970s, during which Cambodia lost many of its teachers and higher education students to genocide, schools have suffered from poor funding and high dropout rates. In 2003, the Cambodian Ministry of Education set out to turn things around in collaboration with IB Asia-Pacific.
Under the Cambodia Teacher Training Project (CTTP), IB teachers have worked with a Cambodian teacher training college and local schools to develop a model for interactive teaching that can be replicated throughout the country. IB World Schools have raised funds for classroom refurbishments, and some local authorities are contributing.
Since his first visit to Cambodia two years ago, IB CAS coordinator Nick Mavrogordato says he’s witnessed a transformation. Attendance figures have vastly improved – in some schools by up to 95 per cent. The next stage, says Nick, is for the newly trained teachers to pass on their skills to the next generation: “In doing this, they will create their own small revolution.”
