There are some things that one hesitates to even mention, simply because so much has already been said about them and to so little avail. Iraq is one. Globalization is another, and a third the public schools. I’ve never fought in Iraq so I’m not going to put myself in among those who have, and in the way of globalization I’ve done little more than consume the products of China, it being either that or no new shoes. But the schools, well there I don’t fear to tread, having been either a teacher or an administrator most of my life, and I’m now well into my seventh decade.
But I’ll speak only about the schools in our inner cities, because these are the schools that are failing the kids, or the kids in these schools are failing to learn, which is the same thing. This has been going on for a long time, and it seems to be getting worse as the inner city populations become ever more isolated from mainstream America. For a long time now, how long, when did our failing inner city schools begin? I don’t know (a future research project) but I have never ceased to be amazed that the politicians, the school administrators, and the teachers’ unions, all doing quite well in these otherwise failing inner city school environments, go on doing and saying pretty much the same unhelpful things, year after year, and all the time their schools go on failing the kids. Why is this so? Why aren’t they shouting for change and reform from the rooftops?
Is the failure because these kids are poor, that they come from single parent families, that they frequently are victims of physical abuse at home, that they have little or no contact with positive and caring adult role models? Is it because they lack proper health care? Is it because the schools are more segregated than ever before, in Boston more segregated now than before busing began in the seventies? Is it because these poor and disadvantaged kids have little of a positive nature to give to or take from one another?
And busing is still going on! How can that be? No one seems to know how to stop it. The kids are bused throughout the inner city where there are only poor kids like themselves. Why is this so? Is there a bus drivers’ union that is responsible? Just as there is a superintendents’ union responsible for the schools being closed in the afternoons and evenings. But the busing stops at the city limits (although I believe there is an exception to this in St. Louis, and there is the Metco program in Boston). There is a wall, a red line, not to be crossed, between the city and the suburbs, those suburbs where the suburban kids, from whom the city kids in a real integrated environment might learn, live with others just like themselves in their own segregated environments.
Is the failure the result of the classwork being conducted in English when many of the students are themselves only learning English and speak another language at home? Is it because so little is expected of them in class? Is it because the bar has been set too low and they have lost respect for what they are expected to learn? Is it because the teachers no longer care? Well it’s because of all of this and more.
Unbelievable isn’t it, that we go on as if nothing could be done, and therefore do nothing. Actually that’s not quite true. There are exceptions that prove the rule. There are a few school people, the leaders of a few pilot, charter, and nativity prep schools that have sprung up during the past 10 or 15 years or so and that don’t fail these kids. These schools are there quite clearly in response to the failure of so many kids in our inner cities to learn. The charter, pilot and nativity kids are no less attending segregated schools with poor kids like themselves, but in these schools much is expected of them, and that seems to make all the difference. But then, and would you believe this, these few schools that are serving these kids well, instead of being celebrated and looked to as models of change, are scorned by the same politicians, school administrators and teachers’ unions that are continuing to run the failing schools. Are they somehow like the Emperor in Andersen’s story the Emperor’s New Clothes, refusing to see what more and more everyone else sees, their own nakedness, the clear absence of even the appearance of a successful public school system?
Every ten years or so the situation in the schools becomes so obviously in need of reform that the Federal government steps in. The NoChildLeftBehind law of 2002 is the latest instance of this. In part the Feds got it right. The kids did need to be held accountable, the kids needed to learn to read and to write and to figure, and this law requires that they now pass statewide standardized tests in math and language arts in order to graduate from high school. But the law does nothing about all those things that are wrong and probably at fault for much of the failure. The law does nothing about segregation. The law does nothing about unruly classrooms. The law does nothing about teachers who have given up. Worse, the law probably contributes to more kids dropping out of school, from fear of failure. For those kids who stay in school, the ones who always do what they’re told, the new law, because of al the test preparation that it requires of them, allows them no time for such no less important activities as art and music, discussions in social studies class, the preparation of science fair experiments and demonstrations, all these and other intangibles which are so important to every child’s healthy growth and development. For these kids who stay in school doing well in school has been reduced to doing well on a test.
I haven’t finished. But my subject, the plight of our inner city schools, is not going away. It will probably be around a long time after we’ve left Iraq, and probably well after the opponents of globalism have ceased to matter.
