The boys of inner-city Baltimore don't get to be boys for long. Brandon Harlee was two years old, in his mother's arms, when his father shot her, leaving her legs paralyzed. His dad left the family, and Brandon grew up in a neighborhood rife with drugs and gangs, where even little kids learn to act tough. By sixth grade, Brandon was becoming too much for his mom--and his school--to handle. Though he showed promise on aptitude tests, he scored Ds and Fs in his classes and was constantly in trouble for fighting with other students.
Brandon was well on his way to joining the two-thirds of black males in Baltimore who don't graduate from high school--and perhaps the nearly 50% who end up in jail or on probation--when almost miraculously he was lifted out of that hellish environment and settled into a boarding school in rural Kenya. There, he and other Baltimore boys who had been forced to grow up too hard and fast got a second chance to experience childhood--to climb trees, collect insects, do their homework together, read mystery novels. After attending seventh and eighth grades in Kenya, Brandon was named Most Improved Student; last month he returned to a highly regarded magnet school in Baltimore, where he just aced his first Latin test.
An author of Brandon's transformation was Robert Embry, head of the Abell Foundation, which invests $5 million a year in education in Baltimore. Six years ago, Embry canvassed principals of local middle schools to see what they needed most. More computers? New after-school programs? Every principal said the same thing: Help us remove the 5% of students who are disruptive and make it almost impossible for the other 95% to learn. It's a problem familiar to schools all over the U.S., especially urban ones like those in Baltimore--underfunded, often with unwieldy classes of 30 or more students, many of whom have grown up in broken homes and with little discipline.
Working with the Baltimore schools, Abell came up with an innovative solution: send some of the class cutups and brawlers 6,000 miles away to a school the foundation dubbed Baraka--Swahili for "blessing." So far, the program has accommodated only about 40 students a year, less than 1% of the middle school enrollment--not nearly enough to achieve the classroom tranquillity in Baltimore that was the initial goal. But in its four years, Baraka has delivered an unexpected bonus. It has turned around the lives of most of the students who have gone there. Many of them, like Brandon, were bright and able to learn once they were removed from the negative influences of their neighborhoods and from their often troubled families. "The pattern for a lot of our kids is so devastating," says Kristy Ward, a teacher at Northeast Middle School in Baltimore. "They don't just need smaller classes and better-run schools. They need to get out."
This is a controversial idea. When Newt Gingrich in 1994 advocated bringing back state-run orphanages for children most at risk of becoming criminals, he was ridiculed and called a racist. But since then, a movement toward residential learning has been quietly gaining steam--and often wins support from the parents of troubled youth. Residential schools focusing on needy children have opened in Philadelphia, West Trenton, N.J., and Washington, and three pilot programs have started in Minnesota.