From Projects to Penthouse, It's One Family

I really enjoyed this article (from the front page of today's NYT) and applaud what the Rosens have done.  It certainly underscores the importance of "cultural capital".  Occasionally, lightning will strike and five kids will be saved by people like the Rosens, but that's hardly a replicable model -- the key is for SCHOOLS to provide this type of "cultural capital" to ALL children.  KIPP does this AMAZINGLY well -- you often hear kids there saying things like "Mr. Levin's got my back" -- among the highest of compliments. 

The group of five black and Latino boys — Carlos, Philippe, William, Kindu and Juan-Carlos — would return to that penthouse thousands of times over the next eight years. They would undergo an unlikely assimilation into the Rosen family, beginning a pairing that would traverse the gaping divides of race, class, culture and wealth that exist in a single neighborhood.

And today, as families of all types across the city and the country sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, the Rosen Family Extended will give thanks to that serendipitous meeting on a blacktop ball field.

In the Rosen penthouse, in a neighborhood much changed from 1998, they will be celebrating a milestone: those five boys were able to surpass the stumbling blocks of street life and land in college, with the assistance of baseball and of the Rosens, who became, essentially, their adoptive parents.

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From Projects to Penthouse, It’s One Family

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

From left: Juan-Carlos Robinson, Philippe Medina, Michael Rosen, Leslie Gruss, Ripton Rosen and William Torres at the kitchen table.

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: November 23, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/nyregion/23york.html

The weather was as unlike today’s as can be imagined: summer, sweaty, a humid evening on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Teenagers played pickup baseball on the steamy blacktop in Tompkins Square Park, sharing the water fountain with homeless men washing themselves.