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High school can be a difficult time for many young people, who struggle to fit in or keep up with the demands of a variety of classes. But for teenagers who have been incarcerated for a period of time, integrating back into an educational environment where they may not have thrived in the first place is an even greater challenge.

To help young offenders overcome the obstacles they face when they return to high school after spending time in a secure facility, the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services (DYS) and the Boston Public Schools (BPS) have launched the Boston Success Initiative. Its goal is to ensure that juveniles have a smooth and successful journey back into the classroom.

"It's a transition that can be difficult for kids," said Jan Manfredi, a senior program manager for the DYS Education Initiative at Commonwealth Corporation, which provides educational services to DYS youth. "This provides them with a little bit of a cushion."

That cushion comes in the form of a transitional school, where juveniles who are being released from DYS facilities can go to prepare for their return to public high school. It is an intermediary step for these kids, providing them with an opportunity to catch up to their peers, so that when they enter a regular classroom, they won't be too far behind.

According to Acting DYS Commissioner Edward Dolan, the juveniles receive a solid education while they are in the department's custody. The Success Initiative is intended to keep them on that steady educational track.

"The idea is to invest in the kids to make them a success [while they are incarcerated] and to build on that," said Dolan.

He added that it is not effective to drop them back into a public high school in the middle of the year when the school might not even be prepared for their return.

To avoid this from happening, DYS has, for years, collaborated with BPS to place teachers at a DYS day reporting center to work with kids who are in the process of transitioning back into the community. But in the last year, through the Boston Success Initiative, that effort has been stepped up and an entire school is now dedicated to young offenders who are rejoining the BPS system.

"We learned a lot from [earlier] experiences and it got translated into a better designed program," said Dolan.

The Community Transition School opened last month in Roxbury, Mass., with the capacity for 25 students. According to Dolan, it's a "small, stand-alone structure" that "looks and feels more like a school."

Staff at the new facility include three teachers, a lead teacher, a community field coordinator and a headmaster, said Amy Chris Elliott, Senior Coordinator with the BPS Office of High School Renewal. She added that, for the next school year, an additional teacher and a program director will be hired.

According to Elliott, there are currently about 19 students at the school that DYS and BPS have jointly selected for placement there. When they arrive, school staff assess the students to determine their academic levels and needs, she said.

Because of the low student-to-teacher ratio, the kids receive a lot of individual attention, which they truly need to help them prepare for the public high school they will be returning to, Elliott said. What the teachers at the Community Transition School aim to do is get the kids on track so that they can return to high school at the end of the next quarter or semester without missing a beat, she said.

Dolan added that the whole idea of the Success Initiative is to get the students back on a natural school schedule. DYS and BPS try to move the students from the transitional school back to high school during breaks, between quarters or semesters, so that it is not such a drastic shift for the adolescent and it is less disruptive for the school.

"We weren't in synch with the other high schools [prior to this program],"said Dolan. "We'd take kids that weren't doing well in the first place and drop them into high school in the middle of November."

Now, with the Community Transition School up and running, DYS and BPS are on the same page and can time the release of students back into the school system so that it benefits all parties involved.

"[We decided] we ought to manage that transition back better and we ought to have a place where kids can be brought up to speed and catch up and get in synch with a conventional school setting," said Dolan.

Aside from better scheduling the release of young offenders back into the school system, the Boston Success Initiative also includes a more focused effort on what the best options are for the student upon his or her departure from the Community Transition School.

Three weeks before a child is going to be heading back to a traditional high school, he or she sits down with a transitional assessment panel to make decisions about the future, Elliott said.

"The panel is comprised of people involved in their lives in a real way," said Elliott.

She added that family members, staff from the school and DYS and people from community-based organizations may all sit on the panel. Their job is to talk with the teenagers and their parents about what they need to be successful in both high school and the community.

According to Manfredi, having all of those different people sitting around the same table to determine the best course of action for the high schooler has been powerful. She said that in one case, the plan was for the student to return to a school across the city, which would have required him to take two buses and a train to get there each morning.

One of the women sitting on the panel from a community organization pointed out the potential travel problems, so the team proceeded to find a better alternative for the youth, Manfredi said.

"The plan sounded great until somebody kind-of looked at the application of it in reality," Manfredi said. "We short-circuited the plan, but to the kid's advantage."

Keeping the young person's best interests in mind is the goal of the panel and the Success Initiative, as a whole. According to Dolan, the desired outcome is for the teenager to succeed and graduate high school.

"It's really the right way to transition youth from one setting to another in a careful and caring way," said Dolan.

SAO PAULO, Brazil " In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.

This is one of Brazil's Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil's cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country's poor into new forms of expression.

The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil's minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country's most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.

"These phenomena cannot be regarded negatively, because they encompass huge contingents of the population for whom they are the only connection to the larger world," he said in a February interview. "A government that can't perceive this won't have the capacity to formulate policies that are sufficiently inclusive to keep young people from being diverted to criminality or consigned to social isolation."

As a result of the Culture Points and similar programs, Mr. Gil said, "you've now got young people who are becoming designers, who are making it into media and being used more and more by television and samba schools and revitalizing degraded neighborhoods." He added, "It's a different vision of the role of government, a new role."

As the ministry sees it, hip-hop culture consists of four elements: M.C.'s (rappers), D.J.'s, break dancers and graffiti artists. At the Projeto Casulo, a community center here on a narrow, winding street at the foot of a favela, or squatter slum, all four art forms are being taught to dozens of young residents.

"This program has really democratized culture," Guin Silva, a 32-year-old rapper who is the director of the center, said during a tour of its simple concrete building. "We've become a multimedia laboratory. Getting that seed money and that studio equipment has enabled us to become a kind of hip-hop factory."

Though links to music run strong and deep in Brazilian culture, the notion of using taxpayers' money to encourage rap and graffiti art is not universally accepted. But because Mr. Gil's musical judgment is widely respected, the level of skepticism and resistance is lower than might be expected.

"Gil still has to fight against other parts of the government in favor of things that everyone else there thinks are alienating junk, but he's willing to do that, whether it's on behalf of rap or funk or brega," another style of music considered vulgar and lower class, said Hermano Vianna, a writer and anthropologist who works in digital culture programs. "He looks at that sort of thing not with prejudice, but rather as a business opportunity."

On the other hand, some important exponents of hip-hop culture in Brazil, like the rapper Manu Brown and the writer Ferraz, remain skeptical and have chosen to keep their distance from the government program. Others are participating but complain of the bureaucracy involved.

"The idea is great because it has brought about a level of recognition we didn't have before," said the rapper Aliado G., president of an entity called Hip Hop Nation Brazil. "But people get frustrated when a project of theirs is approved, and they can't get the money because they don't know how to do all the paperwork."

Brazilian rap, at least as it has developed in poor neighborhoods here in the country's largest city, tends to be highly politicized and scornful of lyrics that boast about wealth or sexual conquests. In contrast, the funk movement in Brazil, also imported from the United States but centered in Rio de Janeiro, is unabashedly about celebrating sex, bling and violence.

"When U.S. rap groups come here and try to be ostentatious or do the gangster thing, they get booed off the stage," Mr. Silva said. "We feel a kinship with Chuck D and Public Enemy" known for their political commentary but we don't have any respect for people like Snoop Dogg and Puff Daddy."

Since established commercial radio stations and publishing houses have shown minimal interest in the music and poetry that new hip-hop artists are producing, or want to impose contract terms that are too stringent, rappers have developed their own channels to distribute their work. These range from selling their discs and books themselves on the streets and at shows to having the works played on a network of low-power but linked community radio stations.

"There is an entire industry being built in the informal sector," Mr. Vianna said. "If you were to apply all the laws in place today, no producer can release a record from a favela. So you have to create a new model, and Gil is willing to do that."

At the Projeto Casulo, the Culture Points program has produced a pair of documentaries about housing problems, complete with a rap accompaniment, that were broadcast on commercial television. The center has also generated a radionovela, a fanzine and a community newspaper and plans next to set up an online radio station to broadcast the rap songs that its musicians and those at similar community centers here have composed and recorded.

In addition, a Culture Ministry grant enabled Hip Hop Nation Brazil to publish a book called "Hip Hop in Pencil," a collection of rap lyrics. After a first edition of 2,000 copies quickly sold out in 2005 and was nominated for a literary prize, a conventional publishing house was interested enough to negotiate a deal to publish subsequent editions.

"We had never before seen our story told in a book, and at first the publishing houses didn't take us seriously," said Toni C, one of the editors and authors of the collection. "Books had always been used as a weapon against us, and people didn't know that such a thing as hip-hop literature existed. Now they do."

Brazilian law also offers tax breaks to companies that contribute to cultural endeavors like films, ballet and art exhibitions. Rap music has now been granted similar standing, and as a result, some of the country's largest corporations have begun underwriting hip-hop records and shows.

At a recent event in Campinas, a city of one million an hour's drive from here, the sponsors included a power company, a bank, a construction business and an industrial conglomerate. As a troupe of break dancers strutted their most flashy moves, D.J.'s and M.C.'s railed against social, economic and racial inequality with lyrics like "Reality is always hard/for those who have dark skin/if you don't watch out/you'll end up in the paddy wagon."

"It took a while for companies to wake up to the potential this offers," said Augusto Rodrigues, an executive of the power company and the director of the cultural center where the show was held. "But there's a hunger for cultural programs like this, in which for the first time in 20 years, the ideology of the periphery can express itself."

Hip-hop is an increasingly popular art form in Israel. Strolling along in Jerusalem, Haifa or Tel Aviv, you never know when you might stumble across a group of kids standing around on a streetcorner, beatboxing, freestyle rhyming, and even breakdancing, as they're surrounded by dozens of onlookers, smiling, dancing, and cheering them on.

The current generation is the first to grow up regularly hearing hip-hop on the radio and watching it on television. As popular Jerusalem underground MC Sagol 59 has said, what took twenty years to happen with hip-hop in the U.S., has happened here in only a few short years.

Every month, I organize a freestyle event called The Old Jeruz Cipher under the banner of promoting cultural diversity and dialogue between the various ethnic and religious communities of this fair Holy City.

Most older folks generally tend to get hip-hop wrong. "It's too violent," they say. Or, "it promotes sexism and negative stereotypes." That has been the slant of articles in the mainstream media covering the trend here in Israel, and my events in particular.

However well-intentioned such remarks tend to be, they generally ignore the fact that hip-hop is much more than just music; it's a reflection of the social circumstances from which it emanates. While not always level-headed in its expression, the goal of such music is ultimately to confront and challenge the listener, and to provide them with alternative viewpoints which lead them to question their own personal assumptions about issues such as race, class, and sexuality.

True, rap lyrics can contain sometimes shocking or disturbing language and imagery. Some hip-hop artists are known to offer rhymes which are certain to cause outrage when offered out of context. But such lyrics are not necessarily intended to advocate in favor of the content expressed, nor to incite the public, so much as incense them. Many hip-hop artists seek to raise awareness of the issues that inspire their lyrics, drawing them to the surface in the fevered intensity these artists often exhibit on stage, bringing attendant crowds to nod and bounce in concurrence. These lyrics are internalized by audiences who later reflect upon them in more depth, who perhaps learn and grow from what they have heard.

Alienation is a theme most often touched upon, and one to which all youth can relate, and Israeli youth live in an especially complex and trying society that often leaves them confused and stressed. This has the potential to lead to depression, low self-esteem, criminal activity and drug abuse. These concerns affect Israelis across the spectrum of society, within the religious and secular communities, the Jewish and Arab communities, the Russian and Ethiopian communities, and so forth.

The organization I have initiated, a hip-hop collective called Corner Prophets, which facilitates these monthly concerts, was created with the intention of bringing aspiring young hip-hop artists from throughout Israel's divergent communities together on a stage to share their art with one another and to hone their skills in the process. Further, it provides them with a positive, artistic outlet through which to express their thoughts and emotions.

Seizing upon the rising interest in hip-hop in Israel, we take advantage of hip-hop as a means to address the issues Israel's youth find themselves faced with by accepting them for who they are, encouraging their exploration of hip-hop, and welcoming them into a community.

So far we've enjoyed a great amount of success. We've brought together European Hareidim with Israeli Arabs, Modern Orthodox women with secular Russian men, African-American olim with lower-class kids from Ofakim, Tel Aviv punks with Jerusalem yeshiva students, and all sorts of folks from around the country. They come together to share a unique experience and explore this new art form which is attracting an ever-growing audience of teens and young adults from across religious, political and ethnic lines.

Sure, they're not always being enlightened or even necessarily civil with their lyrics. And due to the fact that we encourage artists to participate in their native tongues, sometimes the majority of the audience don't have a clue as to what an MC might be saying. But this is irrelevant, because ultimately, our goal is just to get these folks to hang out with one another and have a shared experience built around a common interest. Beyond a doubt, we have succeeded in accomplishing this goal, and this is what believe makes hip-hop a truly uniting force unlike most others.

Thus regardless of the content - whether Palestinian MC Tamer Nafar gets up on stage and rages against the Zionist entity, the French Hasid Shmoopafly awkwardly boasts about Jewish unity, neo-Hasidic feminist hippie Oshra rhymes about the other artists being sexist jerks, Russian immigrant MC Klin fantasizes about vigilante justice for victims of police brutality, or A7 throws a fit because some white kid thinks he can get away with saying "nigga" - we've got them all hanging out and talking with each other, having a good time with one another, and forming friendships and relationships. Together we've built a real community.

At the end of the day, I'm happier to see these folks blowing off steam and taking their frustrations out on a microphone than out on each other, contributing ever more to the tensions which would otherwise drive wedges between these individuals and their communities.

It may not always be pretty, but I think it's beautiful, and I will forever be proud and privileged that I could be a part of making it happen.

One more steaming day in Baghdad, word filtered out to the artillery regiment that some of the younger guys were not going to get to fly home for their promised rest-and-relaxation break. Soldiers fumed. They'd spent months of long hours in this crazy place, knowing that at any moment a homemade bomb might explode, a rocket-propelled grenade might land or an Iraqi child might spit at them.

But though they were armed to the teeth, they chose to respond with a different kind of weapon. They stepped outside and, of all things, began to rap.

"I started doing some of the most outlandish freestyle you can imagine," Javorn Drummond, an Army specialist from Wade, N.C., recalled the other day. "We were just going off about how we do all the work, but we can't go home. We didn't care who could hear. We didn't have to care. I'll tell you, it felt good. At that time, they were killing us. We were working so hard we weren't getting sleep."

Moments like those, when service members turn to rap to express, and perhaps relieve, fear, aggression, resentment and exhaustion, have become a common part of life during nearly two years of war in Iraq. "Rap is the one place," Specialist Drummond said, "where you can get out your aggravation - your anger at the people who outrank you, your frustration at the Iraqi people who just didn't understand what we were doing. You could get out everything."

If rock 'n' roll, the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival, was the music of American service members in Vietnam, rap may become the defining pulse for the war in Iraq. It has emerged as a rare realm where soldiers and marines, hardly known for talking about their feelings, are voicing the full range of their emotions and reactions to war. They rap about their resentment of the military hierarchy. But they also rap about their pride, their invincibility, their fallen brothers, their disdain for the enemy and their determination to succeed.

Plenty of soldiers still listen to the twang of country music or the scream of heavy metal. Many, in fact, said that metal - and albums like Slayer's "Reign in Blood" - helped psyche them up for combat as they roared across the desert in the very first days of conflict. But a great many say it was 50 Cent, Pastor Troy or Mystikal (himself, a Gulf war veteran) that kept them chugging along in trucks and Humvees - in one case, manning the Humvee machine gun - miniheadphone lines tucked away under Kevlar vests. They listened to get stirred up on the way to house raids, before tense guard duty assignments or simply when they awoke to another tedious day under that enormous sun.

The more than 1,450 American service members killed in Iraq have also left behind traces of hip-hop scattered in the memories. Sgt. Jack Bryant Jr., of Dale City, Va., who died last Nov. 20 when a makeshift bomb blew up near his convoy in Iraq, had written rap, his father remembered the other day. And Pfc. Curtis L. Wooten, of Spanaway, Wash., who was killed on Jan. 4 when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Balad, had planned to go to school when he got home, his brother said, to become a producer in the hip-hop world.

As for the many soldiers who are writing and performing their own raps, their lyrics sample the lexicon of the war - the Sandbox, I.E.D.'s (improvised explosive devices), I.C.D.C. (the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps) and Haji (the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy) - and the wide scope of their feelings about it. "There is a great potential for ambivalence in their words," said Jeff Chang, author of a new book, "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" (St. Martin's Press). "That's part of the ambivalence hip-hop has often carried. You hear two ideas in what they are saying here: An implicit critique of 'what am I doing here?' but at the same time, the idea of loyalty to your street soldiers, loyalty to your troops, loyalty to the guys you ride with."

It is the music of Specialist Drummond and his colleagues in the First Armored Division's Second Battalion, Third Field Artillery that makes up much of the background sounds in a new documentary, "Gunner Palace," about the experience of one group of ordinary soldiers in Iraq. The movie, which will open in theaters on March 4 and was directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, records the everyday lives of 400 soldiers living in the bombed-out palace of Saddam Hussein's son Uday after the fall of Baghdad.

Rap might seem at odds with the conformity of military life, but Mr. Tucker, who served in the reserve in the 1980's, sees it as an extension of the cadence, or the calling-out songs to which troops run. And from the lyrics they write, it's clear that some of these soldiers identify their role - urban guerilla warriors fighting an unseen enemy - with that of the heroes of the genre. Even the USO has responded: They sent Nappy Roots, Bubba Sparks, 50 Cent and G-Unit to perform for soldiers in Iraq, and Ludacris appeared at a giant welcome home for soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex.

"Rap has become another part of barracks culture," Mr. Tucker said in a phone interview. "As far as soldiers go, rap is almost the perfect medium: they are able to say so much, to let off steam and also to have so many hidden meanings in what they say."

One day in April 2004 Sgt. Nick Moncrief, who said he had felt close to death many times during his 14 months in Iraq, felt at least four bullets whiz past his face while he was guarding the perimeter of an area in Baghdad. "Those bullets were close to me the way you're close when you're getting ready to kiss a girl."

Not long after that, he scribbled down a rap: "I noticed that my face is aging so quickly/Cuz I've seen more than your average man in his fifties/I'm 24 now/Got two kids and a wife/Having visions of them picturing me up out of they life."

Now back at his post in Germany, Sergeant Moncrief, who also appears in Mr. Tucker's film, has turned 25. "My message in my rap is that I have a lot of anger about the war," he said. "Why are we there? Why me? That's basically what I want to say when I write: Why?"

Some soldiers described jotting down lyrics on scraps of paper at night, between power failures. They rapped to whatever beat they could find - a homemade CD on a boom box or just some drumming on the metal armor of a Humvee. The soldiers joked that they could have even rapped to the beat of gunfire.

In fact, they very nearly did in "mortar alley," a Baghdad spot where service members held freestyle contests outside their sleeping quarters. Half a dozen soldiers or more would gather around; when the mortar rounds started coming - as they so often did between 7 p.m. and midnight - the music swiftly ended and everyone raced inside. As Specialist Terry Taylor, 27, recalls, those raps tended to come particularly fast. "You wouldn't want to wait too long," he said. "We got caught outside with mortars coming more than a few times."

Other nights, Specialist Taylor said, he and his friends would sneak a radio along when they had to escort some high-ranking officer, and rap while they waited through his appointment.

Usually, violence was the inspiration. After a June 2003 shootout that left one man dead, Specialist Taylor wrote: "I can't believe Iraqis are after me/It's got to be a tragedy/The way these people bust and blast at me/Dear God, is this the way it has to be?"

It was one of his "aggression" raps. "For me, this was a way to stand up and say, 'hey, I'm not going to take it,'" he said. "If I didn't feel that, if I didn't get that out there and say that out loud, I just don't think you'd make it. A lot of guys didn't make it. You can't show kindness or weakness out there. This was a way to make it out safe."

His song went on: "You have no success with your bombs now it's mortar attacks/Oh! So you think that we not ready for that/We got snipers on the roof flipping cats like acrobats/And I am the living proof, I'm on guard and I'm going to be there all night/And to me your guerilla tactics is nothing to me but a little monkey fight."

While working on "Soundtrack to War," a film about the role of music in the Iraqi conflict that was broadcast on VH1 last summer, the director George Gittoes said he found that rap had not fully crossed over for all white soldiers, who tended instead to listen to country music. If true, it's a distinction affecting more than just what CD's get played in the barracks. For while country music has by and large been wildly supportive of soldiers and the war, hip-hop's relationship to the conflict and to military life in general, has been a lot more ambiguous and shifting.

Rap was already infusing the culture of soldiers in the first Gulf war, in 1991, when many artists were critical of the administration. Paris wrote "Bush Killa," about the current president's father, and Ice Cube came out with "A Bird in the Hand," a biting look at government policy. (He also appeared in David O. Russell's 1999 film, 'Three Kings," a dark comedy about soldiers in the aftermath of that war.) Still, the symbol of the fearless street soldier was gaining in popularity.

In the months after the terrorist attacks of 2001, Mr. Chang said, some rappers wrote about defending the country. But as the war in Iraq has gone on, more pointedly antiwar songs have emerged. In Jay-Z's 2003 "Beware of the Boys," he wrote: "We rebellious, we back home/Screaming, 'Leave Iraq alone!/But all my soldiers in the field, I will wish you safe return/But only love kills war, when will they learn?"

According to Bakari Kitwana, the author of "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture," "the contradiction that people in the hip-hop culture see is that the war is creating job options and life possibilities not just for Iraqi people but for large American corporations, and meanwhile, the soldiers have no such options."

As for the soldiers, some say the war has helped break down whatever barriers of race or taste there may have been before among the troops on questions of music. Rap, country, metal - it's all Iraq.

"I guess I don't even see the difference between rap and country anymore, except the beat," said Specialist Richmond Shaw, 21, who grew up in Pontiac, Mich., and wrote jarring raps in Iraq. "We're talking about the same things. We're all out here in the middle of this oven. There's nothing going on. It's desolate. We're basically stuck. Dirty, dusty, windy, blowing, miserable."

"I might be part of the Tupac generation," he went on, "but we're all trying to avoid getting shot, and we're all wondering whether people will remember us and we're trying to make difference before we die. Isn't that what country music is about, too?"

Three days after Specialist Shaw's friend was shot in Iraq, he wrote a song. He said he knew he was "living on borrowed time" and needed people back home to know that life there was real, not something on the news, not something in a press conference, not an idea. He sat in his room to write it, looking out, he said, at a river, listening to the constant flapping of choppers going by, and once in a while, gunfire somewhere:

'Trials and tribulations daily we do/And not always life's pains wash away in our pool/When we take a dip, we try to stick to the script/But when those guns start blazing and our friends get hit/That's when our hearts start racing and our stomach gets whoozy/Cuz for y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie."

Rap music, it seems, has been for many soldiers a bridge between their normal lives and the strange, surreal world of their Iraqi service. Their lives, they said, were changed dramatically by war, but their music helped them understand it. Rap, with its stories of crumbling neighborhoods, street violence , wild economic disparities and life-or-death swagger, helped them make sense of what they saw there.

"When you start looking at the fighting between the Sunnis and the Shiites," said Specialist Drummond, 22, who finished four years of service in November after spending more than a year in Iraq, "it's at least as complicated as the fighting between the Bloods and the Crips back home. People can't tell who is who and who is mad at who. Truth is, there are some very scary similarities between what you see in the neighborhoods and what you see in Iraq. I think that's why rap fits both so well."

Unless pressed, Sergeant Moncrief does not talk much about what he saw in the war. He is trying to live in the now, he says. But his raps are still coming.

"I don't know any other way to get my feelings out," Sergeant Moncrief said. "I was scared over there, and frankly, I think if you weren't scared, there was something wrong with you. I rap because I feel it."

For Colombia's Angry Youth, Hip-Hop Helps Keep It Real
The New York Times
April 16, 2004

BOGOTA, Colombia, April 7 - In the living room of their mother's modest cinderblock home, beneath the glare of two bare light bulbs, the Rodriguez brothers, Juan Emilio and Andrey, whirled into action, arms swinging, as they burst into a rap about Colombia's drug-fueled guerrilla war.

"Blood in the fields, colonized lands, invisible bonds of slavery, in the Amazon," they sang in rhyming Spanish in "Criminal Hands," a song about Washington's war on drugs.

In another, "Exodus," about the refugees who have fled Colombia's civil conflict, they say, "as the war advances, there's only a ticket out."

"The exodus continues, burden of the violence," they chant, "The war is uncertain, incomprehensible, absurd science."

Juan Emilio and Andrey, rappers in a threesome called Cescru Enlace, are hardly household names. But they have released two CD's, their first in 1999, and their politically charged songs are catching on among young Colombians.

Today rap is produced and heard virtually the world over, as young people nearly everywhere mimic the lyrical styles and fashion of America's hottest selling music. Rap has spread across the Spanish-speaking world, too, but in few other countries are rappers as political in their lyrics as they are in Colombia.

"They've become like poet reporters for their neighborhoods," said Ruth Kathryn Henry, who studied Colombian hip-hop as a Fulbright scholar. "They're speaking for the people around them who don't necessarily have a voice."

They have seized on rap to vent about a world filled with Marxist rebels, right-wing death squads, poverty and a greedy elite - the kind of material rappers elsewhere could only dream of.

"Here in Colombia, there is so much to say," said Kany, 33, the leader of one of Colombia's oldest rap groups, La Etnnia, which translates roughly as the Ethnics. "You go out and you find inspiration. You do not need to go out and make things up."

Though their style is sometimes comically imitative of American artists, Colombia's rappers take special pride in the authenticity of their adopted art, to the point of professing disdain for their more famous counterparts to the north, who they say have sold out to get big record deals.

"This is real rap, not fake," said Juan Emilio Rodriguez, Cescru Enlace's 30-something leader, who goes by the name 3X. "It is contrarian. It is political. It is not about cars and women. They do not do this in the U.S. anymore. We are doing it."

Rap has not quite reached the mainstream here but is part of a diverse Colombian music scene that has come to dominate in Latin America. Juanes, the mournful rocker, won five Latin Grammys last year. The music of Carlos Vives, known for its jubilant accordion-laced vallenato songs, is spreading across borders. And the swivel-hipped singer Shakira has become one of the most successful Latin American crossover artists in recent years.

But increasingly, rap is what young Colombians want to hear. What they see as hip-hop culture, with its baggy jeans and big jewelry, is high urban fashion. Rap has taken over at parties where salsa or boleros once ruled. Even major radio stations are offering hip-hop oriented shows.

"I like the rhythm, the beat, the boom, boom, boom," said Waira Zamora, 19, a university student. "I can listen to rap all night long."

The biggest sellers remain Americans, artists like 50 Cent and the group NWA. Some American rappers, like Eminem, have had phenomenal success here, selling even more albums than better-known stars of more traditional popular music, like cumbia.

Colombian hip-hop artists, whose music is frequently suffused with anger against their government or the United States, have so far ignored the big record labels and made their own CDs, selling them at neighborhood record shops or sprawling street markets. But the musical establishment is taking notice.

"This has been an underground movement for a while, and now it is surfacing," said Maria Isabel Ramirez, who markets rap in Colombia for Universal Records and is working on a compilation of 14 local rap groups.

A city-financed rap festival has blossomed, attracting thousands of fans. In Bogota's colonial center, a group of rappers has even started a hip-hop cultural center, founded with the help of a European cultural group, which offers classes in music mixing, break dancing and spraying graffiti.

But rappers who have come out of neighborhoods like Las Cruces, a collection of ramshackle colonial homes, dark passageways and narrow streets near the presidential palace, learned on the streets.

The Pimienta brothers, rap lore has it, became the first rappers in Bogota, in the 1980's, after hip-hop and American urban culture began to surface in Las Cruces, founding La Etnnia.

The possibility of telling lyrical stories about poverty-stricken lives made rap instantly popular with young people who felt they never had an outlet.

Kany, the leader of La Etnnia, said the group simply sings about the lives people lead. "We were in a ghetto and we started singing about what we saw happening," he said. "The streets are full of stories and we are like chroniclers."

Still, while the rappers here style themselves after American gangsta rappers, Colombian rap is more about braggadocio than bullets. Even the street poets of Cescru Enlace live like most Colombian young people - with their elders.

Andrey Rodriguez, 26, of Cescru Enlace, goes by the name Batalla, or Battle. He has the swagger, the big jeans and the skull cap, and his music reflects the violent, chaotic country in which he lives. But he still rubbed his grandmother's hair as he said goodbye after rehearsal on a recent day.

"You see things and you say to yourself, 'These are things I can sing about,' " he said. "We try to just keep the rap real, always keep it real."

It's a sunny, breezy, spring day in New York City on the Upper West Side. Sonyetta Hilton, 17, a Brooklyn resident, dressed in a black Lacrosse shirt (collar popped), Antik jeans, and Prada shoes, wears her hair fashionably swooped to the side. She ambles unenthusiastically to her sixth period English class. The class is half empty. Many students, in her primarily black and Latino high school, have already left - due to lack of interest. But on this particular day, at Louis D. Brandeis High, their teacher, a 50 year old, blond white woman, peers through her cat eye glasses to announce that they are embarking on a new project, called the Hip Hop Handbook: From Hip Hop to Wall Street.

The lesson is the first of an entire language arts unit, which explores how slang can be used to teach verb conjugation, sentence diagramming, and other critical writing skills. Sonyetta decides to stick around in anticipation of what's to come.

Public schools in urban areas are like what hip hop once was: under-resourced, ripe for social change, and full of organic creativity. It makes sense that schoolteachers would eventually find a way to bring hip hop into the classroom. Songs, videos, and artist profiles provide much-needed texts, adding flavor to dry social studies and civics classes. They offer the missing commentary on the lasting effects of racism and classism stories that are not typically found in mainstream history textbooks.

Analyzing rap lyrics offers the opportunity to create rhyming dictionaries, expand vocabulary, and encourage poetry and creative writing skills, giving voice to students who often feel powerless in schools that aren't meeting their needs.

Teachers use case studies of young hip hop entrepreneurs to teach successful business strategies. Some teachers have even begun using hip hop to educate younger children in mathematics, memorizing times tables to popular beats. While gym teachers are capitalizing on the "pop" of hip hop, to motivate kids to enjoy physical education classes.

Hip hop in the K-12 classroom mirrors hip hop's takeover of the academy, representing growing numbers of hip hop heads turned hip hop scholars. Over two hundred courses on the subject are currently offered at colleges and universities throughout the country. There are hip hop archives at both Harvard and Stanford. After becoming the first to bring hip hop to the academy in 1991, Howard is officially offering a hip hop studies minor this fall.

Such creative strategies are redefining the way we think about curriculum. The "classics" as we know them generally refer to books authored by and primarily about dead, white men. NYU Professor, David Kirkland, 30, says, 'I have argued that you can learn just as much about language and literature from reading Tupac as you can from Shakespeare. The themes and conflicts present in Shakespeare are all present in hip hop.'

Tupac confirmed this, in a 1995 interview, "I love Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories, man. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto stuff. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff."

Intermediate School 109 in Queens, N.Y., Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School, and the Kuumba Academy in New Orleans, as well as a few others, have been dubbed "Hip Hop Schools." I.S. 109's principal Shango Blake, 35, (the "Rappin' Principal") took over three years ago and has used hip hop to create a holistic learning experience where students make their own videos and short films. In the process, they end up learning production and graphic design, script writing, editing, marketing, and sequencing. Their student videos have been featured on HBO and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The results are dramatic-and have proven that teaching from a "culturally-relevant" perspective at I.S. 109, decreased drop-out rates, boasted a 12% increase in reading test scores, an 8% increase in math test scores and attendance is up to 93% overall, while simultaneously producing well-rounded, civic minded community members.

"Teachers have no other choice but to learn how to use hip hop in the classroom," says Talib Kweli, whose parents are both college professors. "It's the language of the children. They have to respect the culture of hip hop."

But can all teachers use hip hop effectively? "Those seeking a long-term career teaching hip hop (for a living) need to be educated and then accredited themselves with legitimate certification from legitimate hip hop institutions," says KRS-One. "We can't just make stuff up!" Stic Man, of Dead Prez co-signs, "If we are gonna put hip hop in schools it shouldn't just be taught by teachers and scholars, it should be taught by people who actually do hip hop; real DJs, real graffiti artist, it will make it relevant."

Harlem rapper Juelz Santana, 23, adds his two cents, "How can hip hop be taught if it is a culture, a way of life?"

Some artists are up for the challenge, such as Patrick Douthit, better known as Little Brother producer 9th Wonder, who will be teaching a course on hip hop this fall at North Carolina Central University. 9th Wonder, 31, says he will teach as an artist-in-residence for the year. "I plan to spend the rest of my life teaching about the real history of hip hop - especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities," he says. "I'm in the unique position of still being in the industry while teaching about the industry." His fall history course will begin with the "birth" of hip hop in 1973 spanning through March 9, 1997, the day Biggie was killed.

"I have encountered people that said hip hop has no socially redeeming value, that it's destructive to the minds of students, but I can always find a teachable moment. I laugh at the critics, I am a living example of an academic and artist," laments Gabriel Benn, 31, special education teacher, also known as MC Asheru, creator of the Boondocks soundtrack. "While it runs the risk of becoming a fad, we must continue to add fuel to 'the hip hop education movement' because it promises real and radical social and educational change," says Kirkland. Toni Blackman, U.S. State Department Hip Hop Ambassador, has traveled all over the globe educating teachers about how to maximize the use of hip hop in the classroom. "When people say it's not a movement, maybe they should say 'I don't know about this movement."

Some skeptics claim hip hop is too riddled with violence, commercialism, and misogyny to be useful in the classroom. Dr. Ishmail "Dr C" Conway, community educator in Washington D.C. warns, "Schools need artists not just performers, some hip hop is a lot of hype and not up to school standards." But, Daniel Zarazua, 31, an Oakland, Calif. based teacher confirms the value, "Through hip hop my students and I have tackled everything from immigration to homophobia and sexism."

Despite the positive results, for many educators, it's been an uphill battle to prove the merits of formally infusing hip hop into education. Blackman recalls, "It's only recently that hip hop in education has been embraced. I remember getting cancelled by the principal the day of an event, they didn't care that I had a Masters degree, they didn't give a damn that I traveled the world, all they knew is that this girl is "a rapper."

As word spreads like wild fire around Sonyetta's school the next day, she enters the classroom and sees posters of Jay-Z, Beyonce and Aaliyah on the wall, and nearly all twenty-eight seats are filled for the first time. She smiles and takes her seat.

Students have been buzzing about the innovative English class in all her other classes, discussing the possibilities of being able to talk about something of interest in school. Sonyetta pulls out her Hip Hop Handbook, her homework, an essay on "Jesus Walks", completed with ease, her anticipation evident.

"Hip hop is a way to connect with us. It's my way of life, my way of learning really. Hip hop is in your brain all the time. So, it should be used in schools all time, it's the way for teachers to understand us," says Sonyetta.

And, as for the teachers who don't naturally relate, "Although it might be hard," Sonyetta urges, "all teachers should learn how to use hip hop in the classroom, not to be like us, but to understand us, to connect with us."

On the documentary Rikers High, Island Academy on Rikers Island, the subject of a documentary film directed and produced by Victor Buhler and shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.
http://www.wnbc.com/tribecafilm/4383753/detail.html

In 1983, a cost/benefit analysis was done by Dr. Lawrence Brewster, Sociology Professor at California State University at San Jose. He found that the prison arts program reduced incidents of violence within the prison by 75-81% and saved close to double the cost of the program in measurable benefits such as security and medical costs. It showed that in the four institutions reviewed, Arts-In-Corrections produced $228,522 in measurable benefits as compared with a cost to the department of $135,885. By 1987, it was proven that the program lowered recidivism rates by 51% at a cost of $19/per class hour for each student. There is now an Arts-In-Corrections program in every prison in the state funded by legislative line item in the California Department of Corrections Budget. No such program exists in youth corrections.

Brewster, L. "A Cost Benefit Analysis of the California Department of Corrections Arts in Corrections Program." Santa Cruz, Calif.: William James Association, 1983.

The goal of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) (http://www.p-c-i.org) is to use theater arts to offer inmates a safe and supportive structure in which to build skills and develop leadership, community, respect for self and for others and a sense of achievement. In the brutalizing and harsh prison environment these are precious and rare attributes.

Objectives are:
To allow inmates to constructively express their thoughts, feelings and emotions through developing plays, poems and stories, and by acting out the emotions of other characters.

To provide participants with improved communication skills through workshop activities including reading plays and literature, writing original material in a structured way, and presenting their ideas to the group.

To improve conflict management skills to help participants learn non-violent responses to conflict through participating in group processes.

To help build community in the prison, where the atmosphere is each man for himself, through group work that stresses that contribution from all members is essential for the group to reach its goal.

To help participants develop self-confidence and self-esteem, trust and respect for others.

To help build literacy skills through reading aloud, listening and memorizing lines.

The New York Times
www.nytimes.com

November 16, 2006

Editorial Observer; Oedipus Max: Four Nights of Anguish and Applause in Sing Sing

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

To enter a maximum-security prison to see inmates put on a Greek tragedy -- in this case ''Oedipus Rex'' at Sing Sing -- is to descend into an echo chamber of ironies. An ancient story of murder and banishment brought to life by banished murderers. Imaginary horrors summoned in solid flesh by men whose own stories are horrifying and real.

It's a lot to ponder as you hand over wallet, keys, watch and train schedule at the prison entrance. As for your illusions and misperceptions about inmates and prison life -- those you surrender inside.

I went to Sing Sing with the play's director, Sister Joanna Chan of the Maryknoll order, whose headquarters is not far from the Hudson River bluffs on which Sing Sing has hunkered since the 1820s. Sister Joanna, who is petite, Chinese and in her 60s, had been working with the inmates since June, and Friday's performance was the last in a four-night run. The cast and crew, serving time for murder, rape, robbery, assault and other crimes, called her Grandma.

We walked through long, low corridors to the auditorium, called the Chapel, with a high ceiling of exposed steel beams and the grimy yellow light of bare bulbs. Nuns and other visitors from town nibbled cheese cubes and drank coffee from paper cups. A few mingled with inmates, easy to pick out not by their air of menace but by their green pants.

There were jitters in the room, not in the audience but in the cast and crew -- the bustling nerves of any amateur production. Previous nights had gone well, I was told. The play had even won over B-block, a brutal crowd. Tonight's show was for guests, and the final chance to shine.

I met the assistant director, an inmate with a white skullcap and deep-set eyes who went by his Muslim name, Bilal. He told me how faith helped him to face his guilt -- murder -- and how theater polished the tarnished gem inside. Like other inmates I met, he had the taut intensity of someone gripping his beliefs tightly, so as not to let them get away.

Sing Sing, the former home of Old Sparky, is not widely known as a progressive place. But its theater program is a rarity in New York prisons. It relies on a nonprofit group, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and the savvy benevolence of Sing Sing's superintendent, Brian Fischer, who considers its virtues self-evident.

The inmates chose ''Oedipus Rex'' because they had done more than a dozen productions -- including ''Jitney,'' by August Wilson -- and wanted something really difficult. Sister Joanna persuaded them to choose Sophocles over Shakespeare, since it was more accessible and would fit in the maximum allowed two hours.

She took me backstage before the curtain rose. The cast and crew held hands in a circle and prayed for a good show. Jocasta, Oedipus's wife and mother, was an actress from New York City and the cast's only non-inmate. She told everyone how proud she was. Oedipus, with tongue-in-cheek pomposity, demanded silence and offered encouragement. ''Please, let's kill 'em,'' he said. We all knew what he meant.

Then everyone came in close to lay hands on Bilal's head and to give the program shout: ''R.T.A.!''

The room went dark, gloomy music rumbled, and the lights came up on the temple pillars and plague-wracked citizens of Thebes, who wore bedsheet togas over T-shirts and green pants. Oedipus entered, his raised arms N.F.L.-thick, his dreadlocks wrapped in regal gold ribbons. The cast was almost all black or Hispanic, except for the Priest, a lanky bearded Shepherd and a dark-haired fireplug of a Messenger No. 1.

This production went to Greece by way of the five boroughs, as the ancients were summoned to be asked important questions about a foretold murdah. But the men hit their marks precisely, and moved and spoke with elegance and conviction. If they were haunted by the play's resonance in their lives, they didn't show it. They seemed like people trying to produce art, and in so doing to somehow assert an identity better than the one -- murderer, rapist, robber -- that had overwhelmed all others.

As I watched, I wondered what it would be like to be defined by my own worst sins. It struck me that when people are locked up for horrible crimes, a lot of goodness and beauty necessarily get locked up too. It also seemed that the Theban society onstage -- though afflicted by plague, vengeance and divine cruelty -- was probably gentler and saner than the one the inmates knew. Its members clearly cared for one another, and were not numb to grief.

When Oedipus made his final entrance, blinded and lurching, from stage left, the Chorus trembled, and shock and sorrow rose on cue in the hushed auditorium, just as it has for the last 2,500 years.

Sister Joanna told me later that chorus members had been reluctant in rehearsal to touch one another, though they eventually got past it. Oedipus, a man of conspicuous self-control, had particular trouble losing it for his final breakdown, when he collapses into the arms of Creon, his uncle and brother-in-law. He didn't pull it off until Monday's dress rehearsal. On Friday, Sister Joanna thought she saw real tears.

After the curtain fell and the cheers and applause finally died, the crew joined the cast onstage, with officers quickly posted on the left and right steps. The inmates crowded the footlights, straining for the hands of audience members who filed slowly past to say thank you, great job, wonderful show. Clearing the room of visitors in small escorted groups took nearly an hour. The inmates never stopped chattering and hugging, their faces shining with relief, and with the yearning to savor every moment before the spell was broken and they were taken to their cells.

The ArtsLiteracy Project (ArtsLit) is dedicated to developing the literacy of youth through the performing and visual arts. Based in the Education Department at Brown University, ArtsLit gathers an international community of artists, teachers, youth, college students, and professors with the goal of collaboratively creating innovative approaches to literacy development through the arts.
http://artslit.org/home.html

It is fall. Fourth-graders in a Chicago school in a low-income neighborhood are focused and coiled with excitement. They are drawing portraits of each other in a lesson that is part of a unit on descriptive writing. They are deeply engaged, and the rich writing and art on the walls are evidence of real learning and accomplishment. Most other classrooms in the building also integrate the arts with other subjects and buzz with the intensity of discovery.

The same day, in another low-income Chicago school, fourth-graders slump in their chairs, waiting to read a bit of advice to their classmates. They mumble, "Don't hit your sister," and "Do your homework." There is no children's work on the walls, no evidence of learning. Instead, posters remind students of rules they must follow. One asks, "What is freedom?" The answers suggest freedom is a reward for self-control.

The new economy may require higher-order skills such as creativity, adaptability and teamwork, but most schools in low-income areas focus narrowly on "basic" academic skills, testing and discipline. The student boredom and academic failure that follow prompt calls for yet more testing and discipline.

The first school and others like it are proving that integrating the arts into the core of the academic program is a far more productive strategy. Recently the principal of Edgebrook, Chicago's highest-scoring non-selective elementary school, attributed her school's success to its embrace of the arts. "We were concerned we might see a negative impact on test scores," Diane Maciejewski said. "But actually, just the opposite happened."

A growing body of research is yielding data that support her claim. A study of 23 arts-integrated schools in Chicago showed test scores rising up to two times faster there than in demographically comparable schools. A study of a Minneapolis program showed that arts integration has substantial effects for all students, but appears to have its greatest impact on disadvantaged learners. Gains go well beyond the basics and test scores. Students become better thinkers, develop higher-order skills, and deepen their inclination to learn.

The studies also show that arts integration energizes and challenges teachers. Karen Seashore, a distinguished sociologist who studies urban schools, called the Minneapolis program "one of the most powerful professional development experiences we have seen for large numbers of teachers."

When the arts are an interdisciplinary partner with other subjects, they generate conditions that cognitive scientists say are ideal for learning. The curriculum becomes more hands-on and project-based, offering what University of Chicago researchers have called authentic and challenging intellectual work. Learning in all subjects becomes visible through the arts. Teachers' opinions of their students rise.

Students invest emotionally in arts-integrated classrooms, where the curriculum often connects lessons to their own experience, and where they often work in groups and turn classrooms into learning communities. These classroom changes lead to a cascade of broader school changes. Schedules change to accommodate sustained attention to meaningful questions. Parents become more involved in schools. Teachers collaborate and take on new leadership roles.

These successes make clear that the arts are not just affective and expressive. They are also deeply cognitive. They develop the tools of thinking itself: careful observation of the world, mental representation of what is observed or imagined, abstraction from complexity, pattern recognition and development, symbolic and metaphoric representation, and qualitative judgment. We use these same thinking tools in science, philosophy, math and history. The advantage of the arts is that they link cognitive growth to social and emotional development. Students care more deeply about what they study, they see the links between subjects and their lives, their thinking capacities grow, they work more diligently, and they learn from each other.

Students will not be prepared for work in an economy that demands higher-order skills if their schools focus exclusively on the basics. Students will not learn to think for themselves if their schools expect them just to stay in line and keep quiet. Successful programs in Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere have proven that arts integration is within the reach of most schools and districts. Now research is showing that connecting the arts to learning across the curriculum is a strategy that helps close the achievement gap and make schools happier places by moving beyond a crippling focus on basics and discipline. It is time for more districts and schools to make use of this strategy.

Nick Rabkin is executive director of the Center for Arts Policy, Columbia College Chicago, and Robin Redmond is its associate director. They edited "Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century."

New Research Finds Gaps in Juvenile Justice Education
Corrections.com
November 8, 2004

During a recent juvenile justice education conference in Maryland, an audience member asked a panel of youths if there was anything they wanted to say to the adults who attended. A 15 year-old offender raised his hand.

Joseph Gagnon, Project Leader of the Day, Residential, and Juvenile Correctional Schools Project (DRJC), a nation-wide research and dissemination project that investigates multiple aspects of juvenile education, took this comment seriously.

I could tell that this kid understood he had his entire life ahead of him, Gagnon says.

Gagnon was inspired by the youth, and fueled by a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education, he started a research-based initiative, collecting data about juvenile education programs from correctional facilities across the country.

After completing the first phase of the program, the DJRC discovered a discrepancy. Research indicated the education juveniles receive in correctional facilities didnt match what they were expected to know in the schools they return to after they are released. And although some facilities address this issue, a larger percentage of facilities have not.

Maybe a fourth of our juvenile facilities actually have a link between regular expectations of a high school and expectations in their particular juvenile education program, says Gagnon. Otherwise, the issue has not really been explored.

The research, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, focused on four areas of juvenile education: curriculum, state assessments, accountability for assessment report results and special education. Following analysis of his initial research, Gagnon found that although budget problems are a large part of the juvenile education issue, it is still clear that juvenile education standards needs to be addressed. Gagnon also says that the release of this data might prompt legislators to create new requirements for juvenile education in correctional facilities across the country.

According to Gagnon, the problem with the current state of juvenile education in corrections is two-fold. First, a number of facilities do not administer required state assessment tests, leaving many juveniles to fall behind in work appropriate to their age-levels. Second, there is an obvious challenge in making the transition back

to a traditional education setting. Many juveniles become so frustrated while they are re-entering traditional high schools that they fail classes, become discouraged and then, re-offend.

We have information, tons of information, Gagnon says. It is shown over and over again that kids who have high school diplomas have lower recidivism rates, make more money, and are employed more often. All of these things are linked very closely to their level of education.

While many facilities do not offer high school diploma programs, they do offer vocational courses and GED programs. Gagnon says this option is fine for some offenders but not all.

Lets say there is a group of juveniles who are maybe 17-years old when they enter [the correctional facility] and they only have two high school credits, maybe they werent going to class. Gagnon says. For those particular individuals, it makes sense for them to have a vocational option which many states offer. The problem comes when that is all the state has to offer. It is an issue when you have a 14 or 15 year-old kid that really has the opportunity to get their degree and do not have that option.

Gagnon hopes that once DJRC research is completed and published, policy makers and legislators will realize that juvenile education needs to be addressed. For one thing, he hopes legislation will be created that requires each facility to have an education budget.

Its understandable, to a point, that some of these facilities do not have the budget and the staff for this type of program, Gagnon says. The prison system in general is under-funded as it is. Education is competing with other valid components of the facility, like sanitation. Even if a juvenile facility has the best of intentions, it takes an outside budget and policies to really get these programs going. Teachers in these facilities are underpaid too, and that needs to be addressed as well.

Gagnon adds that regardless of the results of his research, it will take collaborative efforts to provide an education framework for correctional facilities to work within.

This process is going to have to happen between facilities, district and state departments of education, Gagnon says. There are juveniles that definitely want this program, that definitely want their high school diplomas. They dont realize this is an option, because its not being offered.

To Gagnon, the benefits of addressing these educational standards, and changing the current juvenile education program in most facilities, are also two-fold.

When I go into a facility that has a really strong school program, Gagnon says, I find that kids are getting pulled in to the education. When these kids get into a program and are given a chance to actually read for the first time, and experience success it opens the doors up amazingly for these juveniles. They dont just get an education. They get new opportunities when they are released.

Third Space: New Study Of How The Arts Transform Schools
Arts Education Partnership www.aep-arts.org.
November 15, 2005

Schools with large populations of students in economic poverty often places of frustration and failure for students and teachers alike can be transformed into vibrant and successful centers of learning and community life when the arts are infused into their culture and curriculum, a new book reports.

Titled Third Space: When Learning Matters, the book is based on a three-year research study and describes the process of transformation in ten elementary, middle, and high schools serving economically disadvantaged students in urban and rural regions of the country. It draws on current research in cognitive science, student engagement, and youth development to explore how and why the arts have enabled the schools to succeed where others often fail.

The book suggests an alternative vision of both the process and result of school reform, harvard researcher steve seidel, director of project zero at the graduate school of education, writes in a foreword. It points to reform that occurs not as a result of accountability measures, but as a natural transformation through the building of a new kind of community of learners, a community of creators.

Third Space is published by the National Arts Education Partnership (aep). Aeps previous research reports have drawn attention in congress and among educators for revealing the potential of the arts to engage all students actively in learning that advances their intellectual and personal development.

The authors, Lauren M. Stevenson, who led the research team studying the schools, and Richard J. Deasy, the director of the Arts Education Partnership, who commissioned the research, adopt the metaphor of third space to describe the positive and supportive relationships that develop among students, teachers, and the school community when they are involved in creating, performing or responding to works of art. In the arts the term describes the transformation in individuals and ensembles when they enter the new worlds and take on the new roles demanded by an art form - a play, a dance, a song, a painting. The authors explore how these experiences can shape the everyday life of the school.

According to Third Space, students are at the epicenter of school transformation. The arts, more than other school subjects, require students as individuals and groups to create something that is original, new, and personal. Creating these works necessarily requires students to draw on experiences from their own lives, making meaningful connections between what they are learning in school and their lives outside the school the key identified by cognitive scientists for engaging students in schoolwork and making them agents of their own development.

The student works also reveal their lives and abilities in new and often surprising ways to teachers, allowing the two to meet in a third space of new perceptions and understandings, connecting and collaborating in ways different from normal student/teacher relationships.

Teachers and principals point out the particular importance of the experience for students hampered by lack of English or in other ways subject to stereotyping as poor learners.

They report an increase in their own satisfaction and delight in teaching and a renewed commitment to their profession as they see the change and growth in students.

A strong sense of community and belonging develops within the schools as students and teachers collaborate in studying and creating art works and the schools make a conscious effort to create understanding, empathy and tolerance among their highly diverse student populations.

For instance, students at an elementary school in Brooklyn studied by the researchers speak seventeen different languages and many are from mid-eastern nations locked in historic conflicts. The principal calls the school a school of peace since students discovered their ability to live and learn together as they collaborate in arts activities.

The third space experiences are not confined by the walls of the schoolhouse the arts lead to strong relationships between schools and their surrounding communities. All of the schools involve artists and arts organizations from the community who become an integral part of school life, partnering with teachers and students in programs during and beyond the school day.

The arts make the student learning and achievements public, altering previously negative images of the students and schools as their works and performance are on display within the school and at local galleries, stages, and public venues including the busy post office in a tiny rural town.

Parents tell the researchers of the changes in the personalities and behavior of their students and of their own increased desire to become active in the schools leading to the increased parental involvement also seen as essential to a healthy and high performing school.

The authors call the development of supportive communities the single most compelling message we found in the schools. The arts create a third space . . . within which young people and adults are creative and vital, are liberated from the barriers self-imposed or imposed by other . . . from the fear of failure. It is a space in which students and teachers succeed and do so together as learners, as an open and inclusive community with a fulfilling and meaningful present and a hopeful future the type of community that can be the foundation of a democracy, fulfilling the primary purpose of American public schools.

A Reentry Campaign resource, Children Left Behind, deals with children and families. Produced by David Freudberg, part one of the 59-minute audio documentary provides background information on issues related to children whose parents are incarcerated. In the second part, Freudberg looks at programs trying to reach out to this vulnerable population of children left behind. The program was distributed by Public Radio International and National Public Radio. The full documentary can be heard on the Human Media Web site at www.humanmedia.org/children. Outreach Extensions has developed a companion guide in collaboration with the Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners. The guide can be found on the Reentry Web site (www.reentrymediaoutreach.org/leftbehind).

Separated by a prison sentence, a child and her mother find ways to stay connected in this story. Sugar and Mama are extremely close. They share the same birthday and love to spend time together telling stories. Life takes an unexpected turn when Mama is incarcerated- Copyright 2004 Boyds Mills Press, Ages 4-8

This book offers well organized, truthful, and easy to understand explanations about the various aspects of having a parent in jail. The book even mentions how sometimes children go to live in a foster home when their parent is in jail. It addresses a difficult topic in a way that young children can understand.

This picture book chronicles a joyful girl narrator's hard-to-bear anticipation and special preparations for a journey with her grandmother to see her father. Both text and artwork keep the destination a mystery, focusing instead on the excitement of the upcoming reunion. Ultimately, "the bus pulls up in front of a

big old building where, as Grandma puts it, Daddy is doing a little time." The story is told completely from a child's perspective and the narrative makes no judgment about what Daddy did or why he's incarcerated.