School and Moral Justice: The School Development Program as a Case Study

I began to sense that school failure contributed to undesirable outcomes and social injustice for many people during my internship at St. Catherine’s Hospital in my hometown of East Chicago, Indiana in 1960-61. My life plan at that time was to become a general practitioner of medicine there. This location afforded me an opportunity to observe many of my friends, particularly three African American men with whom I began elementary school; already on a downhill life course. One of the three eventually died early from alcoholism complications, another after a continuous struggle with mental illness, and the third spent a large part of his life in jail.

My thought was, “Why?”

We were all African Americans from similar backgrounds. Our parents were migrants from a racially abusive South and therefore had low levels of education. My mother attended school for less than 2 years and my father about six. They were employed at the lowest levels of the work force; my mother as a domestic servant and my father as a steel mill laborer and janitor. In non school interactions my friends were intelligent and lively yet they did not do well in the racially integrated, large majority white school we attended. My four siblings and I achieved at a high level, collectively earned 13 college degrees and had productive careers in health care and education (Comer, 1988a).

Why did the school not compensate for whatever it was that limited their potential? Could it have done so? While “moonlighting” (working with local doctors outside the formal internship) I observed many people in difficult situations and conditions that I would not have predicted from the potential I observed in them in school. I began to read about slavery and exclusion and abuse of African Americans during and after slavery. But nothing I read explained why so many were not succeeding in school and in life. I felt a need to get a better understanding and try to do something about the problem.

I decided to do my required military service time in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) rather than go directly into practice and serve in the National Guard part time. While in the USPHS I did work with a volunteer group helping mothers and children who had been removed from public support because of alleged rule violations. There I met many energetic, smart children, most of who were destined for life trajectories like those of my childhood friends. The service agencies were fragmented and ineffective. The school was insensitive and not helpful.

For example, a child was quietly crying in a corner when I stopped by one noon hour. I learned that he had been told that if he did not bring a dime back for the Easter egg hunt in school, he should not come back. The family was penniless, their meager belongings stacked in a little pile on the front street curb. No effort to understand and include him had been made. I gave him a dime and he went back to school but I knew that dime charity was not the answer. The nature of the economy was continuing to change rapidly, poor families were under great stress, and the schools were not helping. There would be negative individual and societal consequences. What could be done? How were the negative social consequences of these conditions to be prevented?

Much of the public felt that families and children that were underachieving brought these outcomes on themselves; that their plight was due to a lack of interest and effort. And yet it was clear that most wanted to succeed. A quiet sense of outrage began to build in me because society played a major role in their distress but laid the responsibility on those being closed out of opportunities (Ryan, 1976).

My interest in prevention led me in 1963-64 to the University Of Michigan School Of Public Health. The concept of social ecology had not yet strongly emerged but the parallel in the ecology of disease was a useful model. The interactivity of elements in the biological and physical world served as a useful model for the social world.

I began to think about the way the family and child is embedded in a primary social network of friend and kin and the way good child rearing and interactions at home and in the family network could promote desirable child performance in school and prevent problem behaviors Clark (1983). I also thought about how the conditions in the family and child rearing were being influenced by the economy most significantly, but were also being influenced by an increased amount of outside information, greater mobility, and other factors. I argued in my University of Michigan School of Public Health “Child and Family” course paper that the school ought to be able to approximate supportive home conditions and compensate for the under preparation of many students in a way that could lead to school and life success even in a fast changing world; benefiting individuals and the society.

Because of the power of adults to greatly influence the preparation of children and/or students, I felt a need to know more about adult functioning, and then child development and behavior. This led me in 1964 to training in adult and then child psychiatry at Yale University. It was in these settings that I began to appreciate how my own developmental experience had been a major determinant of my readiness for positive opportunities, and the absence of similar experiences had been a major determinant of opposite outcomes for so many of my friends.

This did not seem fair or just; even morally wrong. Before many young people even had a chance to keep up and excel in a competitive society, they were being excluded by sociocultural determinants experienced in their primary family networks that were beyond their control, and even that of their families. And in the most difficult settings, their individual moral development was being negatively influenced (Kohlberg, 1964). I felt that an open, competitive rapidly changing democratic society was putting itself at risk by not preparing many able young people to meet life’s tasks. Again, it appeared that the only institution in our society strategically located and potentially equipped to help was and is the school.

Also, a problem that is even now often too sensitive to discuss was emerging. In part in the face of economic realities, families that were functioning well began to have fewer children. The most vulnerable families, experiencing the most social stress, continue to have the most children. Our social service arrangements, and our schools, should but do not adequately help the latter function well enough to prepare their children for school and life. I believed that because it was becoming more difficult to earn a living without reasonably good functioning and education, and the generation to generation denial of opportunity to young people to gain the capacity to do so, our social problems would become precipitously worse in two or three generations.

Just as I finished my residency training and a final year in the USPHS I was asked to return to Yale and its Child Study Center to create a pilot program; to try to understand why schools failed so many nonmainstream children, create an effective intervention that was portable, and to disseminate it widely. In the balance of this paper I will describe how I worked with our Child Study Center staff, the New Haven Public School System staff and parents, and then many other districts, schools of education, and local, state and national advocates and policy makers to try to achieve these tasks.

Our pilot intervention program was a collaborative effort between our Yale Child Study Center team and the New Haven Public School System. The two elementary schools selected served a 95% African American, poor community that ranked 32nd and 33rd in achievement out of33 schools, had the worst attendance, and had very serious behavior problems. There was conflict between the mostly White and young teachers and the parents. Organization, management and communications were poor. Anger, alienation, and distrust permeated the schools and led to acting out behavior by students, staff and parents. In short the social ecology of this setting could not promote adequate development, teaching and learning; and had to be changed (Comer, 1980).

By 1983 the two pilot schools were tied for third and fourth in academic achievement, had the best attendance records in the city and had no serious behavior problems. To our knowledge this was the first published demonstration of significant academic improvement among poor African American students in public schools. But our Yale team and the schools had to learn much and make many adjustments before these outcomes were possible (Comer, 1988a).

Our planned strategy was to take a holistic approach; to live largely as observers in the pilot schools, learn about and work with them to promote organic or self change and continuous growth. The decision to take this approach grew out of a review with Albert Solnit and William Kessen, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a research methodologist respectively, in which we considered the appropriate research and intervention approaches indicated. Given the complexity of the task and subject requirements, we ruled out experimental, quasi-experimental and other research designs.

Also, we believed that if we imposed an intervention on the system before identifying the underlying problems we could make matters worse, and interfere with the opportunity for the participants to empower themselves and make self and/or organic system change (Genzuk, 2003). But because of the degree of difficulty in the schools we could not observe over a long period, we had to take an active role within the first few days. Fortunately, the five person team that I directed—a psychologist, two social workers and a special education teacher—was able to simultaneously take a diagnostic and treatment approach. This allowed us to do and learn through holistic action research, and simultaneously create structures and processes that would gradually change the social ecology of the pilot schools from negative and dysfunctional to positive and supportive of development and learning.

There was little school change literature that discussed child and adolescent development and school practice. But because of my background, my professional training experiences, and what I was observing in this early experience in schools, I was fully convinced that the difference between my school and life outcomes and that of my childhood friends had been influenced greatly by my more supportive developmental experience in my family and its network and my school. Thus, I began to intentionally draw from my personal life experience to inform our work. Because my life experience greatly informed our work, I will provide a brief summary of it here.

I have often made the point that the development of children is influenced by the experiences of their parents even prior to the birth of the child; and that these experiences can be a more powerful determinate of parental behavior than their socioeconomic conditions. As mentioned, both of my parents were poor and undereducated. But my mother’s peculiar early life experience greatly influenced her selection of a spouse, my father, and the resultant developmental experience and outcomes of their five children.

My mother was born in 1904 to a poor but hardworking and kind sharecropper (one who works somebody else’s land and is paid by receiving a portion of the crop) in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, with perhaps most difficult racial conditions. She remembered his warmth and her special favored place and bond with him, even in a family of five children. He was killed by lightening when she was 6 years old. None of the children were old enough to continue to farm and there were no social support programs. As a result a step-father who was physically and verbally abusive was in her life for the next 10 years. Throughout the decade they moved often, a blended family of nine, and lived in extreme poverty. But she did not accept these experiences as her destiny.

From my many interviews with her for our book, Maggie’s American Dream (Comer, 1988b), (her oral history; my miniautobiography) I concluded that her sense of worth and determination grew out of her experiences with and memories of her father; and an antagonistic and oppositional attitude and response toward her stepfather. Whatever his attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, about her and his overall style and social functioning, she chose the opposite. Also, it appears that she processed the trauma in her life, reversed and expressed her feelings in strong positive care giving in my generation (Fromm, 2012).When she was 8 years old it occurred to her that a good education could provide her with a better life. When she was 16 she ran away to an older sister in East Chicago, Indiana; determined to get an education. But her sister did not believe education was useful for “colored girls” and did not support her effort. When she had to leave school she declared that, “If I ever have children I am going to make certain that they all get a good education.” This goal influenced her search for a husband, her child rearing, and intentional, focused preparation of their children for school and adult life.

My father was from rural Alabama, poor but from better family and community conditions. He attended about six grades in school and went north in 1918 to work in a steel mill to save the farm his family was purchasing after the boll weevil crisis destroyed the crops.

He and my mother met in church and were married in 1920. He also believed strongly in the power of education. He had had an unsuccessful marriage and had a 7-year-old daughter, and between 1934 and 1939 had four children by my mother. I was the first of their children. He was a powerful, positive model of responsible family and community behavior, but he was greatly incapacitated by an industrial respiratory illness from the time I was about 10 years old and passed away when I was 20. Nonetheless, together, they provided me and my four siblings with a primary family network experience that prepared us for school and life success. This experience was instructive and has greatly influenced my thinking about the role that schools can play.

Five characteristics of our family life, and resultant outcomes, are relevant here in the way they facilitated our growth, development and preparation for academic learning; and can be approximated in a school setting, particularly in the early years. They were (1) nurturance in a warm, supportive environment, (2) intentional transmission of mainstream social-interactive knowledge and skills, (3) exposure to and participation in mainstream African American and societal cultures, (4) abundant opportunities for self expression and effective problem solving, (5) and appropriate expectation of improving self regulation and the channeling of free floating aggressive energy into that needed for successful learning, work and play

Nurturance was probably the foundation. Every Sunday evening my mother would sit and read the “funny paper” to the four younger children. Two of us would sit on her lap and two would sit on the floor in front leaning back on her legs. She was just barely literate and the comics are not great literature. But that was not what was important. We enjoyed being close to her and each other, the emotional warmth and sense of belonging. To extend the time we each had our favorite column read again until she had read the paper two or three times. Also, they played with us at the Lake Front Park or sat and talked as we played in their view. Home made pop corn, popsicles and much more, often on the front porch on warm nights made us feel cared for.

Such caring promotes a sense of worth and value and entitlement to a rewarding future. Thus, it is not surprising that when the doctor—a special and important person—finished treating me, I stood up and said, “I’m going to be a doctor when I get to be a big man!” My parents responded to that by buying me a toy doctor’s kit, and reminded me in a good natured way that the candy pills were for the patients, not the doctor.

A neighbor observed the supportive play and asked, “Why are you encouraging him like that? We are poor people; you know that he will never be a doctor.” My mother detoxified a belief that was not uncommon even in our family primary social network of friend and kin by telling her that she would have to leave if she made a statement like that again.

We were taught all the social interaction skills needed for the grocery store, visiting friends, and many other social situations. The dinner table was the place where we learned the family attitudes, beliefs, values and effective ways of expression and problem solving most of all. Everybody was expected to be on time, talk about their experiences, listen, exchange, have fun appropriately, and be serious and concerned appropriately. Efforts to have fun at the expense of others was not unusual but discouraged in sometimes stern but often simple facial expressions of disapproval. Birthdays and other special occasions brought special meals and fun celebrations.

We were exposed to all things educational from their perspective. We visited the Field Museum, Brookfield Zoo, the Wrigley Field baseball park in Chicago; and every Christmas, the Marshal Field Department Store. Often we were the only African Americans present. I recall that once when we entered a restaurant to have lunch many stopped eating to stare. They dropped their heads and returned to their meals after a stern stare back from my mother; followed by pleasant interactions with us, the wait staff and others, as if nothing unusual had happened. My father often said; never let your race stop you from doing whatever it is you would like to do.

Every year we attended the Bud Billiken Parade, part of a large African American Fair. My parents were leaders in our church, models for us of participation and service. All of these activities provided opportunities for them to mediate and guide our growth along all the developmental pathways important for academic learning and preparation for adult life—cognitive, social-interactive, physical, linguistic, psycho-emotional, moral-ethical. My sister recalled one experience that is relevant here.

My father was the moderator of a church contest for children in which the players had to find a bible verse and answer a question; the first finder won points. On one occasion my sister gave an answer just as someone in the audience whispered the same. Because of the need for fairness without question, my father disallowed her answer. She expected her father to give her a break. But for him transparency, fairness, ethical, moral, reasonable and responsible conduct was the litmus test for all behaviors and questions; demonstrated in big and small things. My mother would often bring us a chocolate bar as a treat while we were out playing. They were not grooved to break evenly back then, so she brought along a ruler to make certain that we each got our fair share.

When I was 55 years old my mother was hospitalized in our hometown. An 80 plus year-old spry hospital volunteer had been my first grade teacher. In greeting she threw her arms around my neck and said, “Oh, my little James!” It was a reignition of the previous powerful teacher-student bond. She then stepped back and looked me over and said, “We all just loved the Comer children. You came with those bright eyes, eager to learn, so smart. And you got along so well with the other children and the teachers!”

What she was describing was the preparation and development that our home experiences made possible, and how it allowed us to interact in school in a way so that we elicited a positive feedback from the adults and students in school. This made possible a critical dynamic interaction in school that was similar to that which should be made with the earliest caretakers—attachment and bonding with the people, things, and activities that promoted learning. This took place for me but not for my friends; reflected in one school activity in particular.

Our fourth grade teacher organized a library usage contest in which we had to obtain a membership card, take out, read and report on books; and the winner was the one who read the most. I won. But my three friends did not read any books. My teacher was so frustrated and angry that she said in front of the class, “If you three little colored boys don’t want to participate, you should not come to our school” I experienced hurt but I had been taught to understand negative racial expressions as the shortcoming of the person who made them, that I was fine. But my friends were not so prepared. I am sure that those remarks added another layer of “not belonging” and inadequacy to a negative sense of racial and/or personal identity that was already growing steadily and harming their social and psycho-emotional development.

But my teacher was not a die-hard racist. I walked to school holding her hand on many days. If she had understood that my friends were the grand and great grand children of slaves and share croppers whose families were intimidated by mainstream institutions like the library, even the school, she would have taken them by the hand and helped them get a card and participate. But the idea that belonging and social skills had anything to do with academic learning was a completely foreign notion in education at that time; and unfortunately for many, remains so today.

This lack of understanding is at the heart of most problems in schools serving low income, minority or marginalized families. It was the root cause of the problems our intervention team faced in 1968.

The core belief in our conceptual framework is that a critical dynamic takes place that facilitates child development, academic learning and preparation for life. Children and their caretakers interact in a way that promotes a powerful emotional attachment and bond between them. Children identify with, imitate, internalize and utilize many attitudes, values, and ways of expression modeled by their caretakers. This enables the caretakers to mediate child growth and development along many developmental pathways; six most related to responsible expressive behavior and academic learning—physical; social-interactive; psycho-emotional; moral-ethical; linguistic, receptive and expressive; cognitive-intellectual (Lewis, 1982). Neuroscience research over the last 25 years now confirms that a supportive environment for a child facilitates brain development. Caretaker-child engagement and interactions promote the growth and direction of the neurocircuitry of the brain. This can facilitate good learning and can better position a child for academic learning than a dysfunctional, neglectful or nonmainstream environment (Gunnar & Fisher, 2006).

Chaotic conditions existed in our pilot schools—difficult interactions between home and school, between staff and students and among school staff; As a result there were many student and staff behavior problems, poor parent involvement, poor staff and student attendance, and more, These schools were widely regarded by outsiders as hopeless products of community and family poverty and perhaps staff neglect or limited ability. And the staff and students carried some of the same feelings.

The critical dynamic needed—positive interactions between students and caretakers that promoted student development and engagement—could not take place in the way necessary for good academic learning to take place in the dysfunctional setting of our two pilot schools. To overcome the major and pressing causes of dysfunction, we first created a governance and management structure or team of about 12 people who were selected by and representative of all the adult stakeholders in each building—principal, teachers, and professional and nonprofessional support staff. They worked out a comprehensive academic and social program directed toward achieving goals they established for the school, with input from all of the school participants.

Two more teams were gradually created as our work indicated were needed—a parent team, a mental health team (now called a school-staff support team). Three operations emerged, first the comprehensive school plan as mentioned, a staff development program, and an assessment and modification program that took place on a regular basis.

Three guidelines made it possible for people, who previously did not know, like or trust each other, to begin to work together with diminishing conflict—no fault problem solving, consensus decision making based on the developmental needs and best interest of students, and collaboration. The ability to adhere to and promote these guidelines increased as all of the nine elements in this framework or structure helped all the participants to experience better interactions, relations, school behavior and school success; among staff, parents and students.

As each element of this nine element framework began to work simultaneously and synchronously, the school climate improved; with the no fault, consensus, and collaboration guidelines contributing most to climate change. The improved school climate in time became the school culture—or the expressed attitudes, values and ways of managing individual behavior and performance and life in the building. For example, a 9-year-old student who had been in three schools during the first semester was transferred to one of our pilot schools in the second. Someone accidentally stepped on his foot and he was ready to fight his way in as had been the need previously. A classmate expressing the established school culture, said, “Hey man, we don’t do that in this school. He dropped his posture and gladly accepted the culture of the new school.

The shared leadership through the Planning and Management Team, with appreciation of the fact that the principal had ultimate responsibility, decreased the isolation of the principal, and created a sense of practice and outcome ownership by all. This team’s focus on a school plan that addressed the relationship, developmental and academic needs of the students most, but also the curriculum and the needs of staff, and parents, created a clear but flexible, sense of direction. Assessment and Modification allowed academic and social program study teams to reflect on what worked and what did not, and to change, or carry-out school based professional development—instructional and developmental—to produce better outcomes.

The Parent Team and the School-Staff Support Team (helping professionals such as social workers, psychologists, others) helped the entire school keep the focus on creating conditions that supported students; and the school staff and support team provided knowledge and skills that helped parents and staff better address developmental and/or student behavior needs. The overall improved relationship climate greatly reduced the frequency and severity of behavior problems, and made more staff time available for the students with more challenging needs. The SSST was then able to work with these students individually and in small groups, and more intensively

As the problematic behaviors decreased and social and academic improvement increased the critical development and learning dynamic could take place; staff, students, and the parents became more available for learning and personal development. The schools gradually began to function well.

Our SDP staff training in social work, the social sciences, medicine, public health and prevention, special education, psychology, adult and child psychiatry and development informed the action we took that helped to greatly improve the social ecology of the schools. By the third year relationships in the schools had improved to the point that some teachers enrolled their own children in them. But by the fifth year for reasons we could not explain at the time the test scores had not improved very much. An incident in one of the schools sparked a memory from my preteen years that caused me to begin to think even more deeply about my own developmental experience compared to that of many friends. This helped us begin to sharpen our focus on development and the way development and learning are inextricably linked.

The large front hallway of the school was being used as a polling place for a city election. A teacher who usually warmly greeted her students every morning in the same area was mildly irritated by the interference. Her comments led me to recall a time when I was 10 or 12 when my mother was serving as a poll worker and her colleagues allowed her to let me pull the lever for her vote. I recalled the incident as a powerfully positive and exhilarating experience. I thought about Erickson’s description of this period as the “age of work” and the joy children experience in imitating adult activities. The idea for a project was born.

We reasoned that we should be able to simulate important adult life task activities outside of school in school, and in the process give nonmainstream children the opportunity to engage in them while interacting with supportive adults similar to the way mainstream children often engage with parents and others outside of school.

The simulation of life tasks provided more opportunities for the critical relationship dynamic to take place in an intentional way between students and their adult caretakers; most important for students who do not receive enough such experiences outside of school. Again, the interactive process helps the young people attach and bond to the people and the work of the school and to feel belonging and worth, making the adults more meaningful, enhancing their ability to facilitate student growth and positive performance. The adults provide conscious and intentional guidance of the young people toward self-regulation and channeling of their energies into adaptive learning, work and play.

This interaction is probably a more powerful determinant of school and life outcomes than socioeconomic and education levels; probably even more than the intelligence levels of the child or caretaker. Remembering that my parents intentionally provided us with educational experiences in a supportive environment, we created a program in the two schools designed to approximate to the extent possible homelike conditions that promote development and learning; “A Social Skills Program for Inner City Children.”

We discussed with the parents the adult life goals they had for their children and what experiences we together thought might help the students achieve them. The outcome was a four unit project—politics and government, business and economics, health and nutrition, spiritual and leisure time—in which activities in each integrated the teaching of basic academic skills, social skills and appreciation of the arts and athletics. These four units or venues—based on the professional knowledge and personal experiences of parents and staff—were selected as the areas in which they would need knowledge and skills in order to be successful as family and community members and citizens in an open democratic society as adults.

We expected the opportunities for students to express themselves and solve problems under the intentional guidance of their caretakers to spark their interest in achievement and to “flip the switch”—to help them engage with school people and school work and to take more responsibility for their own learning than to have the teachers “feeding” them knowledge, sometimes against their will, and often without significant engagement. It worked.

The best example of how this worked was in the politics and government area. The candidates for mayor of New Haven were invited through invitations written by the 4^th grade students to make presentations to the students, staff, and parents; and to enjoy a dance-drama program put on by the students; and all accepted. Selected parents and staff took tours of the city with students to consider the role and responsibilities of government; students discussed and wrote about their thoughts and experiences. They planned and rehearsed for the dance-drama program, and they were taught and practiced the skills necessary to host their guests and to interview the candidates. And because it was important for the students to have a success experience, teachers were assigned as backup support to student performers; to act only if necessary.

The activity had a stunningly powerful positive emotional impact on the students, parents, school staff and the candidates. One youngster who did not appear to be a good learner had a remarkable personal presence in his interactions with the candidates. The overall behavior and performance of the students helped to greatly improve teacher appreciation of their potential. Some of the parents who got involved were motivated to register and vote for the first time in their lives.

Similar student centered activity development and learning projects were designed in the other venues—business and economics, health and nutrition, spiritual and leisure time. The students did much of the planning with the guidance and support of their development and learning by their teachers and other adults involved. There was reflection and planning for future activities. After the first year of this project, and for the first time in our 7 years, the test scores in language arts and mathematics jumped, 7 months. By1983 the fourth-grade students in both schools were significantly above grade level in reading and mathematics. Attendance remained high and behavior problems were negligible (Comer, 1988a).

We began to field test the model in other schools in New Haven, the state of Connecticut and eventually in widely different areas of the country, about 12 in all. While there was some success, it became quickly apparent that we could not simply lecture about the framework and process and expect even willing and competent partners to implement with fidelity. This led to the creation of a training program, headed by our program director Edward Joyner, using a trainer of trainers approach. Districts selected one of their own who met criteria similar to that of our staff members—a person or persons with a track record of good interpersonal skills, with a developmental perspective, flexible and open to change, and with the organizational skills needed to facilitate change (Haynes, Ben-Avie, Squires, Howley, Negron & Corbin, 1996).

Eventually, with our CSC coordinator (trainer)/district facilitator (trainer) arrangement, we worked with about 10 schools of education, who sometimes involved other parts of their universities, and a social service agency. The preparatory schools participated in our SDP training, worked directly with us in school districts, with a planned decrease contact with us as they gained the necessary knowledge and skills to support schools on their own. This project was designed so that the preparatory programs could both serve and learn from school districts; and simultaneously allow preservice students to learn from classroom work informed by the real world work of their faculty; and through real school work supervised by their faculty and district teachers.

In a couple cases the centrality of development became apparent and moved to the center of the preservice curriculum. And in all, attention was given to the integration of the developmental sciences and the learning sciences in preservice and in in-service practice. Our SDP team continued to work with districts, on our own, and with university, social service, and district partners in an SDP network. In this way we worked with more than 1,000 schools in more than 150 school districts in 30 states over a more than 40 year period.

When we began to disseminate this process model the Social-Skills Curriculum approach could not be sustained in its initial format, but the principles were retained and eventually reemerged in a process that is as effective, maybe more effective. It is called “Comer in the Classroom.” In this approach many of the nine elements of the SDP framework used to create a good whole school culture are used in each classroom. Teachers intentionally and continuously promote the development of students along the physical, social-interactive, psycho-emotional, moral-ethical, linguistic, and cognitive-intellectual pathways in all their activities.

In some schools and classrooms each student had a personal plan for progress that included both academic subject matter and each of the developmental pathways. Others used diaries. Academic subject matter materials are embedded in activities used to support curriculum goals. Student behaviors, relationship issues, and all that went on in a classroom became writing, reading, self assessment and reflection activities; serving as both academic and growth and development opportunities. The judgmental and punitive approach that is used to control student behavior in most schools gradually shifted at all grade levels to an opportunity to help students learn how to make better decisions, gain greater self-regulation or personal control, and to move toward self accountability.

Using this approach, gradually the switch is flipped and the students are taking responsibility for their own learning, planning and sometimes with their teacher coconstructing some of their academic learning projects, reflecting on their experiences, even taking some responsibility for teaching. This process is a powerful force for self motivation and engagement in the work of the school.

With this approach moral and ethical issues are lived, considered as pathway growth and development issues, and learned in real time and not as abstract concepts. Literature and other aspects of the curriculum are used as examples of good versus evil. The purpose of and commitment to living by classroom rules is even more meaningful when the students themselves are involved in creating them. Role playing appropriate behaviors, choices, and the factors that complicate choice decision making deepens thought about what is and is not moral, ethical, fair, beneficial and useful for individual and collective classroom functioning.

When students learn to respect differences of all kind—national, ethnic, racial, gender, even performance levels—it makes it possible for them to participate in classroom activities without fear of ridicule; encouraging greater participation, intellectual chance taking and creativity. The benefits are even greater when the culture of the classroom is embedded in and a reflection of the culture of the school. A school and classroom that prepares a student to be a fair and respectful person is promoting moral and ethical development and increases the possibility of the person performing in a similar way in adult life.

The framework is deliberately designed to provide some nonnegotiable structures and processes, along with flexibility in areas that do not violate the rights of others; all in line with preparing students to successfully manage the realities of adult life. Our focus on the integration of the developmental sciences, and the learning sciences, facilitated by a culture supportive of academic learning, provides direction and is efficient and effective. Because staff, parents and sometimes students and community, helped to establish goals and strategies peculiar to their own setting, each school often looks different but achieves similar desired outcomes, when implemented appropriately.

From before the first day we began our work in 1968 we encountered resistance to the notion that child and adolescent development is inextricably linked with and central to academic learning. In the pilot schools we were able to use our clinical skills to help teachers and administrators have success with individual students where it had not been possible previously. As a result some began to “buy in.” Success begat success and gradually enough were willing to take a developmental perspective and work to change school organization and management, development of students, parents, and themselves, and the integration of development and academic learning. Teachers and administrators who did not or could not work in this way gradually moved to other schools.

We faced significant doubt and resistance during field testing and dissemination of our model but we could point to and expose new schools to successful outcomes elsewhere; and their own local success slowly reduced resistance. In an effort to decrease resistance more quickly, we began to require support for a developmental perspective from district leadership, and worked with clusters of schools in districts. Eventually we successfully worked with entire districts. The support of top leadership and district wide involvement encouraged individual schools to “buy in” more quickly, but a more serious problem became apparent.

Because most educators do not have a preparatory experience that gives them a developmental perspective, there is not a deep pool of practitioners interested in or able to use developmental principles. Many come to real world practice underprepared to compensate for student underdevelopment. Many new administrators seek to put their own stamp, but traditional approach, on a school even when a developmental approach is working; or permit teacher turnover without training in the developmental approach for the replacement staff. The result is that the developmental knowledge and skills being applied in a school are reduced and lost. Academic, developmental, and behavioral gains that took several years to promote can be lost in a few months.

Because we experienced resistance in classrooms, schools, clusters and even districts, it appeared that it was probably not possible to sustain a developmentally oriented school staff in an education culture that does not highly regard developmentally oriented people and practices. It had long occurred to us that our intervention probably would not be needed if every teacher and administrator began their preparation with the understanding that their core mission was to promote the development of their students and to integrate developmental and academic learning sciences; and were prepared to do so. Thus, our next step was to look to education preparation programs and policies as a probable major source of resistance to a developmental perspective.

While continuing to work in pre-K 12 schools and districts, we began to focus more on teacher preparation and overall education policy. It was our impression that teachers and administrators did not just willfully resist using child and adolescent development principles in their practice, but usually did so because it had not been a central part of the knowledge and skill base they received. As a result of their preparatory experience their identity as a teacher is that of a transmitter of academic knowledge and skills and not that of a child developer who helps children become learners through the integration of the developmental and learning sciences in their practice.

The transmitter notion is reinforced and rewarded in practice. Thus, efforts to infuse developmental knowledge and skills into their practice were often met with resistance; was slow and fragile even in reasonably stable school conditions. We reasoned that one of the places to begin to sustain child development centered practice and to inform policy would be to work with preparatory institutions that recognized the need to help their students gain a developmental perspective, related knowledge and skills and the ability to apply it in practice.

Thus, when we designed our Rockefeller Foundation supported dissemination proposal in 1990, we included collaborations with schools of education. Through our SDP University Partnership component we have worked with ten schools or departments of education. One of the most successful collaborations was with the Detroit Public School System and Eastern Michigan University (EMU); promoted and supported by the Skillman Foundation. A team from the EMU education leadership faculty received conceptual and application training from our SDP faculty then worked with us in 14 underachieving schools in the Detroit Public School System. As their capacity increased the level of our SDP team direct involvement decreased, but we continued to work and learn together.

Over a 5-year period they achieved outstanding academic and social development achievement in about one third of the schools, good improvement in about one third, and little improvement in the other third (Emmons, 2002). One school had the highest level of academic achievement for schools of its size in the state of Michigan. An assessment showed that the schools that bought into the developmental concept most, applied the principles best had the highest levels of academic achievement; as determined by external evaluators (Panjwani, 2011).

The other planned benefit was to enable student interns to work in the schools under the supervision of faculty from EMU and the district. The number of interns who worked in the schools went from none to 180 per year in just 2 years. Feedback from their participating faculty and students helped the college of education begin to shape their program to the needs of practitioners. Drury University had similar success in Springfield, Missouri, and all 10 had some success.

But political issues at the city and state level in Michigan, turnover of leadership and changing support at the university, district and school levels, illness and death of key people, floods, diminished financial support and other factors made it very difficult to sustain these programs and the full University Partner approach for much more than 5 years; although one of our initial pilot schools in New Haven continued to thrive and did not even have a teacher change for 13 years, and then for career advancement reasons. The turnover of teachers and administrators who are able to apply developmental principles to school practice weakens and often ends this critically beneficial approach.

But these conditions are the way of life, more troublesome in communities under economic and social stress; and more negatively consequential for the students and families in such communities. This realization led us into an effort to understand what kind of policy and practice changes would be needed to create a deep pool of practitioners who could promote optimal conditions for teaching and learning regardless of political and social conditions.

Our SDP colleague Dr. Valerie Maholmes pushed for and led this effort in the late 1990s. Over a 5-year period we held three conferences, one in New York City and two in Washington, DC. In the first conference we met with representatives of all the education enterprise leaders—city and state school board and legislative leaders, parents, teachers and administrators. In Washington, DC, we met with about 40 Congress-people, their aides, and women, children and black caucus leaders.

The complexity of the issues and obstacles to change these leaders described and demonstrated was not encouraging. Only a few months after a conference a very intelligent, thoughtful and child friendly state legislator who participated in it voted against important supportive child legislation because of the need for a legislative compromise. We needed a more direct way to inform and influence practice and policy.

Shortly after the last conference Dr. Maholmes joined the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) and connected our SDP concerns to the same concerns of the National Association for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). I was appointed Chair of the Roundtable on Child and Adolescent Development Research and Teacher Education, sponsored by NCATE and NICHD, 2005-2007 (NICHD & NCATE, 2007)

The central finding was that science strongly suggested the need for an educator child and adolescent development knowledge base but that the preparatory institutions were providing minimum and largely superficial overview knowledge for the most part. Few were doing so in a way that would prepare future teachers to apply the knowledge in practice. Two years later I was appointed cochair of the NCATE/Foundation for Child Development expert panel on “Increasing the teaching of the application of child and adolescent development in schools of education and Other Preparatory Programs,” 2008 to 2010. The panel produced a report, title: The Road Less Traveled: How the Developmental Sciences Can Prepare Educators to Improve Student Achievement: Policy Recommendations (NCATE, 2010).

One of the outcomes of this work is that NCATE will probably create standards for university accreditation that will require their graduates to demonstrate in practice that they know and can apply child and adolescent development principles. This can create pressure on preparatory institutions to give their students experiences that will allow them to gain some of the knowledge and skills, and a mindset they will need before they enter the work force. It should lead to greater university involvement with proximal school districts. It should also put pressure on legislative and on state boards to create policies to facilitate changes in preparatory institutions that will enable them to prepare students to meet accreditation standards.

In some of our SDP University Partnerships, working with districts has led to engaging some district practitioners in both teaching and learning at the university. Interest, incentives and accessibility factors determine how these connections take place. With this good and close quality of relationships, improved supervision of student teachers and formal induction and continuous learning through in-service reflection of practice is more possible. Improved preservice, induction programs, and developmentally oriented in-service programs could go a long way toward creating the kind of integration and application of the developmental and learning sciences that will be needed before we can create a large enough pool of people who can routinely do so in practice (Daniels & Shumow, 2002). This must be the case before we can create improved development and learning on the scale that is needed to achieve the kind of world class education system we need.

The school is an important context in which to facilitate individual moral development and to facilitate the expression of social justice in our society. But the school is a very complex institution; greatly influenced by other equally complex institutions.

The School Development Program is a case study of how education and schools can create cultures that enable most students to achieve at a level needed for success in our current and future world. In addition to being a description of this process, this paper is an exploration of key sources of resistance and obstacles to large scale and sustained adaptive change among the key people and institutions that influence education. While multiple factors contribute to the problem, we concluded that those which interfered with the crucial supportive interaction between students and school staff and parents far outweigh all others in adverse impact.

Thus, the current work of SDP is to try to help influential national, state, and local parts of the education enterprise to focus on protecting and promoting interactions that facilitate development and learning. But this will require ongoing pressure for accountability on the part of policy makers, educator preparatory programs and practitioners. Such pressure can only come from more robust and informed involvement of the groups whose children are most vulnerable—parent groups and advocacy organizations within the most marginalized communities, teacher and administrator unions and other educator groups. There are early and fragile but determined efforts to work in this way emerging in New Haven and elsewhere. Our SDP work continues.

Only when the system of schooling is effective can schools effectively promote moral and ethical development of students and effectively promote social justice.