Letters to the Editor

Write a Letter »  Read Letters »

 Email this page  Print this page

High Hopes

(page 1 of 2)

Poverty and violence, uplifted by passionate dreams for the future. Brown’s newly minted inner-city teachers confront all these in their struggle to shape young minds.

By Gail Braccidiferro | Photography by Patrick O’Connor

On the northern fringe of Providence, in a neighborhood of tiny storefront businesses, hulking brick mills and pale-hued multi-family houses, Sophia Academy sits surrounded by an asphalt parking lot. Across the lot from the aging, three-story brick building is St. Edwards Church. Next door to the church is a community food pantry.

From the outside, the staid Academy building is readily recognizable to any of the generations of immigrant sons and daughters who attended classes there when it housed St. 
Edwards Elementary School. Once past the stoop, however, the private middle school for girls from low-income families is anything but your grandparents’ school.

Hallways and stairwells glisten with mosaics. Student artwork covers bulletin boards. Fliers and brochures from top local high schools are prominently displayed. White boards welcome student suggestions about art projects.


Purple is ubiquitous.

In Tatiana Cozzarelli’s classroom, historic features mix with this contemporary vibrancy; walls resplendent with a rainbow of student work soften the wood floors and hulking steam radiators. On an October day, one board features student writing that acquaints the girls with each other and with their teacher, personal lists that complete the phrase: “I am from…”

The lists are a jumble of little-girl innocence and worldly-beyond-their-years insight, simple yet telling. Italy, Spanish, funniness, Sweet 15s, cop cars, broken glass, flowers, peace, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Dr. Seuss, drunk people, prostitutes, blood spatter, gunshots, no happily ever after endings, and I love you and you can do anything as long as you try. Another bulletin board displays the girls’ goals — pediatrician, wedding planner, lawyer, actress, judge, dancer, teacher, obstetrician, good student and good friend.

As a first-year social studies teacher, Cozzarelli stepped into this fusion of adolescent dreams and high drama, coupled with poverty’s often brutal realities, in the fall of 2009. At twenty-four, she is the youngest teacher at Sophia. She now strives daily to focus the girls on working hard and stretching their minds. Her dark hair pulled into a ponytail and dressed in a button-down white blouse and gray slacks, she is soft-spoken, confident and straight-talking as she directs the class.

In October, she also was just five months out of Brown University’s Graduate School. Cozzarelli was a member of the university’s first class of nine to complete a program that is part of Brown’s grapple with its historic dependence on the spoils of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave trade. The Urban Education Fellows program provides master’s degree tuition of about $40,000 per student in return for student commitment to work at least three years in urban education in and around Providence. The aim: to improve schools and districts serving large numbers of disadvantaged students.

The first fellows were chosen from more than thirty applicants, says Professor Kenneth K. Wong, who heads Brown’s education department.

“We are looking for them to have a passion for making a difference, a maturity and a clarity of goals,” he says.

Passion is in no short supply for Cozzarelli and her classmates. After a year of typical tribulations and successes, they remain committed to and enthusiastic about the students statistics show are most at risk of dropping out of school, never attending college, becoming teen parents or even ending up in prison. In 2008, the graduation rate for Rhode Island students living in poverty was 61 percent.

Educators, policy makers, philanthropists and scholars have attacked these dismal statistics for decades. Methods aimed at eradicating the so-called achievement gap between wealthier, white students and their poorer, minority peers have achieved mixed results. Cozzarelli and her classmates believe deeply in continuing the assault.

On an October day, Cozzarelli prepares her seventh graders to culminate a week-long “going green” project with oral presentations to their class of fifteen. The girls organize in small groups and are all business, reviewing note cards and putting finishing touches on posters.

Before presentations begin, Cozzarelli reminds the girls to respect their classmates. No poking fun. Be attentive. The girls listen as each group stands in front of the class and cites conservation facts and tips. They applaud each group’s work.

After the presentations, Cozzarelli begins the next lesson with another gentle reminder about respect. She has chosen reading partners, she tells them, and wants no moans when the pairs are announced. She reads the names. No protests are audible. Most of the class settles into reading. Several girls head out the door for their turn as food pantry volunteers.

The lunch bell rings. Two girls with wide smiles pop in to hug Cozzarelli. Also in the rush, a sixth grader approaches her, eager to share details of a writing project of a friend in another class. It’s a 
story in which a girl in foster care is raped. The story is fictional, but its mature themes are more than abstract concepts to many of Sophia’s girls.

The challenges of urban teaching also play out in another city classroom, where Tarryn Maynard, one of Cozzarelli’s classmates, tackles the job of making literature intriguing to fourteen-, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds at Providence Career and Technical Academy. Academy director Ramon Torres was impressed enough by Maynard to choose her as one of thirty teachers hired from a pool of 180 applicants to work at the new, nearly 300,000-square-foot school of chrome, glass and brick.

Maynard’s students are typical teens who cop a “too cool” aloof demeanor as she cajoles them through lessons with a smiling voice and never-fading cheeriness. On a mid-October day, Maynard, thirty-seven, is a figurative ray of sunshine with her blond hair and yellow shirt, discussing the Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe with twenty-four sophomores. Small groups of students each have a book passage from which Maynard has asked them to write about motif, symbol and theme. They will present their work in the class.