The Working Poor (40 page)

For Mrs. C and many other teachers, the truth was tainted with exasperation. “They’re lazy,” she said. “They don’t want to read, don’t do their homework. Homework is like pulling teeth. A lot of them don’t get attention at home, so they want it in school,” and they misbehave to get it. Were there rewards and punishments at her disposal? She shook her head. “They’re perfectly happy making Fs,” she declared. “They don’t care. We’re the ones who care.”

Shamika was already caught in the cycle of mutual resentment. She was cute and talkative. Two charming braids began high on her head and hung down over her ears, testimony to her mother’s attentive affection. Her words tumbled out so fluently that her teacher called her parents to complain that she talked too much in class; Shamika insisted that she was being confused with another Shamika. And so her parents did not like her teacher, she reported with relish, and she tried not to care about her teacher’s evaluations. “I got a paper back, and she was being smart on the paper,” Shamika said acidly. “I had missed this word, and she was being smart, told me, ‘You need to study, gril.’ and she put it G-R-I-L. And then when my report card came, she gave me a D, and she didn’t even know how to spell ‘girl’!”

Children can be trapped in corrosive relationships between home and school. Some parents with little education or busy work schedules cannot help with homework, cannot take the time for meetings with teachers, and do not know how to be constructive advocates for their children. Some had such bad experiences as students—sometimes in the very same building— that now, as mothers and fathers, they perceive school as a hostile place to be avoided. When they hear from teachers, the news is rarely good (most
teachers call with problems not praise), so the conversation may be humiliating and adversarial.

Across all socio-economic classes, parents adopt various postures in dealing with schools: the confrontational, the conciliatory, the cooperative, the indulgent, the negligent. At the lower end of the spectrum, however, a mother or father confronts particular problems. For many a parent in poverty, love for a child is akin to anxiety. In the context of danger and failure, against a life history of little achievement, raising a son or daughter offers another chance at success. But that goal stands at the end of a long road sown with the land mines of drugs and gangs, of disrupted schools and decaying households. So, for a few parents, the aggressive methods that have worked best for survival in rough families and rough neighborhoods are the favored techniques of interaction. Having defended themselves effectively in their homes and streets, they carry the confrontational manner into their children’s schools. It is a crude form of support for their children, and some of their children imitate the style.

“The first day I came in, I was called a white bitch by a kid, like, a second-grader,” said Miss V, a brand-new graduate of Columbia who taught second grade at Kenilworth Elementary in Washington. “I was hit on several occasions by the children, like, punched.” More frightening, though, was the hostility from parents, many of whom were children themselves when their babies were born. Among the “very young adult mothers and sometimes fathers,” she observed, “if you say something like, ‘Your child’s doing this and this in the classroom,’ they’re very defensive because they feel that it’s a reflection of their parenting.… Sometimes they will be like, ‘Well, my son or daughter said this about you in the classroom, and what are you doing to him and her, because they’ve never had problems like this before.’ And we also got a lot of, like, ‘I’m gonna come and beat the shit out of you white bitches.’ ”

Normal teaching duties became risky, even such an innocuous gesture as a note home inquiring about a girl’s long absence, Miss V said. The child’s mother, who had assaulted a teacher two years before, “wrote me a threatening letter in response: ‘If I want my daughter to be out of school, she’s gonna be out of school.’ ” Then the classroom next door was invaded by neighborhood toughs brought by another parent to threaten the teacher, who was also a young white woman. “I feared for my life,” Miss V said, and both she and her colleague transferred to other schools at the end of the year.

At the opposite extreme, whites are often stereotyped by African-American parents as permissive and unduly lax in disciplining children. It is an image that emerges repeatedly in interviews about attitudes across racial lines. Miss V was seen that way by a few parents who tried to enlist her as an ally by giving her license to hit their kids. “ ‘Just take ’em in the bathroom,’ ” she quoted one of them as saying, “ ‘and I’ll give you a letter saying you can do that.’

“ ‘Well, I can’t,’ ” Miss V replied. “A lot of teachers do a little of that,” she admitted, but it was against the law.

Across the gulf of race and class, encounters between parents and teachers can perplex both sides. Miss V was puzzled to find most of her students’ parents “very, very concerned with their kids, even the children that were very messed up and whose parents I knew had been through crack.” She could not quite sort this out. “They love their kids dearly, and their kids are very precious to them,” she said with surprise and admiration.

If the combative parents stand at one end of the spectrum, the absent parents are at the other, and they are much more numerous. Low turnouts at parent-teacher meetings have become a chronic disease of low-income school districts. “They can live one block from the school, they’ll never come down and visit,” complained Theodore Hinton, principal of Washington’s Harris center, which educates children from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. “Out of my seventy students,” said Mr. I, a math teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, “at my last parent-teacher conferences I saw eight parents.” Even where schools have opened their doors to accommodate the odd hours of low-wage workers, or have offered child care during meetings, or have tried to lure parents by requiring them to pick up their children’s report cards in person, the successes have not been overwhelming. At Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, parents were supposed to get report cards at the main desk, then walk around to meet teachers. Suzanne Nguyen, who taught math there, usually saw the parents of about ten of her sixty students.

The absence sets a bad tone and is often misread by school personnel. In Akron’s Mabel M. Riedinger Middle School, 85 percent of the children were poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and most were black, Latino, or Asian. When I asked several white staff members in the teachers’ lunchroom what problems the youngsters had, the answers were brutal. “They don’t value education, values that should have been
taught at home,” complained a librarian. “They don’t care if they get suspended.” Other teachers at the table endorsed the contemptuous appraisal. It was part of a pattern in which students blame teachers, teachers blame parents, and parents blame schools. The fault always lies elsewhere.

Ted Hinton, principal of the Harris school, set out to break that cycle by seeing through parents’ eyes and getting inside their minds to the extent possible. “They don’t feel comfortable in the school,” he observed. “They feel a sense that the school is somewhat above them, not treating them with respect, or has not shown that love or that we’re in this together.” The answer? “You communicate with them, be friendly, you talk to them, you welcome them, you put out a welcome policy: Come in, not only when a child does something wrong but a positive thing. You constantly bombard them with information, tell them that your child has done something [good], this child has won a mayor’s essay contest. Put everything out. Let them see it’s an open atmosphere.… Yesterday morning I had a father-son breakfast for the first time, for Black History Month. I guess we had probably thirty, forty-five guardians that came out with their sons. Those are the kind of things. You have to keep on testing all sorts of strategies to get the parents into the school. Parents will come and volunteer in the classroom. Do a side program for parenting training. We’re trying anything to get them into the school, no matter whether it’s twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour, or a whole day. Take what you can get to get them into your school.”

My unscientific sample of teachers turned up no consensus on whether parental attendance at school meetings correlated with their children’s performance. Some thought it did, but others could readily think of contrary cases. Mr. N, a black math teacher at Riedinger who described himself as a “product of the inner city,” insisted that he could predict which kids’ parents would be involved. “The ones who have a row of zeros, their parents won’t show up,” he said categorically. By contrast, Suzanne Nguyen observed that several of the ten parents who came to her meetings had children who did badly in class. She thought it strange. Miss V, the second-grade teacher who moved from Kenilworth to Webb Elementary in Washington said: “Even some of my most disturbed kids had very involved parents.” Mr. I, the math teacher at Dunbar, found that while the turnout was sparse, “I had one of my worst student’s parents show up.” A team of three teachers at Paul Junior High, who saw about half the parents of their 150 students, told me at first that they saw a high correlation between parental
attendance and good schoolwork. Then one exception occurred to them, and another, until one of the teachers concluded: “There are some instances also where parents have been trying really hard and kids aren’t performing.”

Teachers ought to get to know their students’ families, according to Teach for America, a program that accepts eager, bright graduates of good colleges for a summer training session and a two-year teaching assignment in poverty-ridden schools. The fledgling teachers are urged to go to church with families, get invited to birthday parties, and give out their home phone numbers. “I had dinner with probably over one hundred of my students in the two years,” said Leigh Anne Fraley, who taught French in the tiny farming town of Lake Arthur, Louisiana. Teachers in urban ghettos find it a much harder task, but many make the effort.

Mr. L, who taught seventh-grade English at Washington’s Paul Junior High, put it this way: “I know quite a bit about many of my families. Some families I never see. Some families I have regular communication with. They call up my house once a week, I drive their kid home, I hang out with their kid on the weekends. It just depends on the family. I give them my phone numbers and let them take the initiative.” Of his 150 students, 25 or 30 made regular use of his home number.

Having a picture of a student’s home life can help teachers interpret a student’s shortcomings, make allowances, and give help. “Usually parents don’t check to see if they do any homework,” said Mrs. M, a middle-aged math teacher in Akron. “Usually parents are in lower-income jobs, they’re working the evening shift, the students are home alone, they’re usually watching younger brothers and sisters, so the kids are in bed by the time the parents get home, so they’re pretty much on their own.”

She intervened when she could. “Let’s take right here the first child here in my grade book,” she said, pointing to a name at the top of a list. “He comes from an extremely poor family, and he’s a behavior problem for almost every teacher.” She learned of his poverty from his brother, to whom she had given a few cookies and cupcakes after a field trip. The following day, the brother told her gratefully that the meager leftovers would be the family’s desserts for a week, which brought home to her the family’s deprivation. She saw her student in a new light. “I think he does most of his misbehavior for attention, so I try to give him a little extra attention,” she said. “He didn’t have the ability to be in algebra, but he wanted to be there. So I said, OK, let him come in. He’s in here, and he’s getting Cs, but
he comes to a tutoring program that we have here, so he’s getting extra attention through that, with adult volunteers coming in. And then he comes into my class during a study hall and works on math on the computer. He comes in here at lunchtime every day and gives it up so he can get the tutoring. So I have him three periods a day. He never gives me any discipline problems. Last year he was getting suspended every few weeks. So this year he’s hardly ever getting in trouble.” Students try to get attention because that is what they need, like food or water or oxygen.

Showing interest and respect is a simple technique that Mrs. M, who once taught in affluent schools, had adopted as a creed. “I try to teach every student as, what if this is the mayor’s child?” she said. “Or what if this is the councilman’s child? Not that this child maybe doesn’t even have a home or a parent. And if you think of them as special and let them think of themselves that way, then they can see that you have respect for them … just taking that few extra minutes to listen to them.”

That’s not always enough, however, and rescue operations by teachers are not always feasible. Some children are hungry. Some suffer from the constant, enervating ache of teeth decayed, abscessed, and untreated.
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Others need eyeglasses and cannot read what’s projected or written in the front of the room. Others, like little Latosha in Washington, just don’t make it to school very often. “Her mother works at night,” said the girl’s third-grade teacher at Harris, and “may be tired in the morning,” unable to get her daughter moving on time. This caused the teacher particular pain because she saw brightness in Latosha under the surface of incapability. “She has a lot of weaknesses as far as the mechanics of writing are concerned,” the teacher said, “but her thoughts are very good. She’s very teachable.” She pulled out a page from Latosha’s journal, an answer to the question: “If you could give a homeless person a gift, what would it be?”

Latosha had written: “I would give them a per of closs. To were. Becous thay have nouthing. Towere thay hift to were closs, from out the gobitch can.”

In Akron, when Mrs. L kicked “Pamela” out of English class and sent her to the office “for mouthing off,” the assistant principal at Riedinger couldn’t figure out what adult to notify. “Who’s got custody of you?” he asked the seventh-grader. She shrugged her shoulders. She honestly didn’t know.