By Rob Gurwitt

I just spent a week at an elementary school in inner-city Philadelphia, which is about the last place you’d think to look for basic insights into schooling young children. The neighborhood isn’t the worst you can imagine: There are plenty of working families, and the homes are scruffy but not in ruins. But in warm weather there are also a couple of crack houses nearby and a prostitution trade that starts up along one neighboring street about dusk. The vast majority of the kids who go to the school are poor enough to qualify for subsidized breakfasts and lunches.

I should say from the outset that this is not a story about some inspired math teacher getting startling results, or a principal who’s created a school of academic miracles. The people who run and teach at Julia Ward Howe Elementary are doing the best they can in sorry circumstances, but test scores out of the school hardly catch the eye, and with class size averaging 31children, there’s a palpable sense that most teachers have their hands full just meeting basic expectations.

Where Howe does seem to be making some improvement, though, is with its youngest, most marginal kids. And the reason is a small cluster of men and women in their late 60s and early 70s who spend a chunk of their days in a trailer on one side of the school’s homely cement yard.

They are members of a program called the Experience Corps, which operates in a growing number of cities across the country, but in each case is administered locally; the Philadelphia program, which was one of the first, is now in 13 schools, and is run by Temple University’s Center for Intergenerational Learning. The idea is to tap into the resources that retired people can bring to bear on the most vulnerable of young students, children in kindergarten through third grade who are having trouble keeping up.

These “resources” have nothing to do with training or money. Many of the volunteers only finished high school, and then spent their lives raising children or working for the post office or serving as administrators in some bureaucracy. What they do have is patience, steadiness, calm, wisdom and, above all, dedication. They are among the few stable forces in the lives of some of the children they tutor, whose mothers are working long and inflexible hours, or are on drugs, or for some other reason can’t be a sturdy presence.

The kids thrive on the attention. For an hour two or three times a week, they get undivided attention and love from someone who cares a great deal about whether or not they learn to read, write and understand the world around them. And if the teachers at Howe are to be believed, the results show up in better comprehension, steadier classroom behavior and a new readiness to learn.

For policy-makers, there is much to ponder in what the Experience Corps tells us about how much older Americans have to contribute to their communities. But that’s not on the docket at the moment; reforming education is what legislators and politicians care about, and Howe and other Experience Corps sites have a message for them, too. It is that no matter how much money and curricular resources and test-taking standards get thrown at our schools, unless they can somehow make it easier for children to form meaningful relationships with the adults in their school community, they’re bound to fall short of expectations.

Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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