Urban Sanctuaries

Drawing on a five-year study funded by Chicago's Spencer Foundation, the authors present an encouraging look at six organizations that provide supportive environments for inner-city youth in three pseudonymous cities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the Southwest. The backgrounds of the authors are as disparate as the groups they survey: McLaughlin is a professor of education at Stanford, Irby is a policy analyst in Washington, D.C., and Langman teaches at the Linguistics Institute in Budapest. The organizations they examine have one element in common: they work with young people as resources to be encouraged instead of as problems to be managed. One group is presented as a virtual dictatorship, but the others are democratic and give teens the opportunity to participate in the planning and execution of projects. All of the leaders (whom the authors call ``wizards'') are selfless, work long hours for low salaries, and realize that they serve in loco parentis to the kids. (Apr.)