The Roosevelt community is the most challenging of 16 experiments so far in applying the moral-stage theories of the late Harvard educator Lawrence Kohlberg. The group includes about 80 students from the cavernous school of 3,000; they spend a third of each day either in a class oriented to ethical studies or in committees and full community meetings. They don’t make all their own rules, but they can debate anything, and the school lets the group handle its own incidents of fighting, cheating, stealing and other such offenses.
That’s the theory. But there are 15 languages spoken in this rainbow coalition, and at least as many cliques: West Indians snub the Bronx blacks, Dominicans won’t eat with Puerto Ricans. Today’s meeting verges on chaos. Tessa, a sophomore from Belize, has the chair and the attention of perhaps a third of the kids there. The question: should RCS make community service a requirement for graduation? Five sullen boys talk steadily in the rear. Kids wander to the sandwich table, chat, write in their diaries. Debaters shout: “Hey, Tiffany, why you opposed, ya dumb bitch?” Allan Sternberg, the history teacher who runs the program, struggles to maintain order.
Somebody objects that students have more than enough to do already. Somebody else asks, reasonably, how the ideal of community service squares with a mandatory chore. A motion is made: make community service voluntary. The vote is 33-9 in favor. Sternberg tries a plaintive note of regret but they cut him off. “You asked us, we said ’no,’ now it’s over with,” says one member. “Word,” agrees another.
How does this make the world better? There’s no statistical measurement. RCS students don’t get better grades than their classmates but do come to school more often. They also progress in Kohlberg’s moral stages, while students outside the program are unchanged. And teachers say RCS students break up fights rather than start them; they still get into trouble, but it tends to be less serious.
Progress is fragmentary at best. But it’s worth noting the day’s fragment: after the noisy debate, the group has agreed that there should be voluntary community service. Until then, hardly anyone was thinking about community service at all.
