The Working Poor (41 page)

“ We had a three-week assignment due Monday,” said Mrs. L. “She didn’t turn it in. She wrote me a long note explaining that … she didn’t
spend the weekend at her house because her mother’s boyfriend was hitting her mother around, and they had to leave that house. So she went to somebody else’s house, and she said, ‘I kept bugging my mother to go back and get my work, but Mom was afraid to go back ’cause she was afraid he would hit her.’ ” Mrs. L, white and middle-class, felt as helpless as Pamela did. “That’s why a lot of these kids are failing,” she said. “They don’t have the basics, you know. If you don’t have a roof over your head, you don’t know who you’re living with—I wouldn’t care about English either.”

“A bout half of my students need a counselor,” said Judith Jacob. She taught literacy to immigrant teenagers who brought practically no educational experience from their home countries. One boy of sixteen did not know how to hold a pencil, sit still, or get to classes on time when he arrived at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, she said. The youngsters were adrift in personal problems. A girl whose father had been murdered in Honduras “was in space, really didn’t know how to deal with it.” Other students were distracted from learning by drug use, pregnancy, family violence, and the complicated transition into American culture. “They just get really discouraged if they’re not doing well in the class,” she observed. “Their peers are working and making money and aren’t in school. A lot of them told me that, like, ‘Miss, I’m not learning. Why am I wasting my time? I’m sixteen, I’m eighteen years old, I need to be working, I have a future.’ And they only see tomorrow and they don’t see that if they do get an education they’ll be better in the long run. They can’t see that, and no one in their family is like that. It’s all about survival.”

The education that they are receiving doesn’t open a vista on any expansive universe of possibilities. Unless they happen to find themselves in a classroom with an unusually gifted teacher, or in a home with an exceptionally visionary adult, their schooling limits them, narrows them, closes them down. If it offers a route out of the place they’re in, they cannot see it. If it brings deferred reward, they cannot calculate it. So, as the educational machinery processes them year after year, pushing them along on its conveyor belt toward graduation or less, they lose their imaginations about what can be.

When I visited schools and said I was doing a book on the working poor, teachers often had a wry response: “Oh, you can write about me.” Because the United States funds its schools largely through local property taxes,
disparities between one community and the next are huge, and the poorest districts, which need the greatest services, cannot afford them. Underpaid and low in status, the teaching profession draws an assortment of under-qualified people and mixes them into the ranks of the competent and dedicated.

“It’s real easy to work with students who have always gotten As and Bs,” said a teacher in Akron. “They have discipline in the home, they have expectations in the home. But I think it takes a master teacher, it takes a teacher who cares, a teacher who’s concerned—it takes something special, I think, to work with the students that nobody else wants.”

In poor neighborhoods, many dreams are trampled under the weight of struggling instructors faced with large classes, unruly pupils, and insufficient materials. On a Thursday at Dunbar High, Mr. I was trying to prepare his ninth-graders for a math test the next day. He always worked against “a general feeling of dysfunction and chaos,” he said. “It’s never relaxed. It’s never a comfortable place to come in and teach. It’s always on edge, worrying about something: conflict between the students and each other, conflict between me and students.” That Thursday, his fifth-period students “were bouncing off the walls,” and Mr. I couldn’t figure out why. He threw some questions at them: “ ‘How was your day earlier? What did you do?’ Finally I narrowed it down. ‘What’s your fourth-period class, the class before this one?’

“They said, ‘We can’t tell you.’

“ ‘Why can’t you tell me?’

“ ‘Yo u’ll be mad.’

“ ‘What’d you do?’

“ ‘We played Nintendo.’ ”

It had been a science class, and the teacher had given up and allowed a student who had brought in a Nintendo game to plug it into the television set in the classroom. “If there was like a school-wide, comprehensive structured environment,” Mr. I lamented, “things like that wouldn’t happen. They’d come into my class ready to work, because in the fourth-period class the teacher would have expected them to work, in second period they’d have been working hard, in first period they’d have been working hard.”

The day before, consulting with a boy who had not been doing his homework, Mr. I inquired about assignments in his other courses. The student had no homework from any other classes. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. I. Teachers also suffer from dying dreams.

It has long been understood that expectations influence achievement. When teachers and parents believe that a child will do well, the child usually does better than when he is thought to be incapable. Teachers’ assessments are sometimes based on stereotyping by race or class, as in the longstanding American image of blacks as less intelligent, less competent. That notion, deeply planted, can lead a white Ivy League professor to look straight at the only black student in the room when he warns, “This assignment will be difficult.” Many African-American students report such incidents.

But the reduced assumptions are also generated by hard experiences in impoverished schools, where both teachers and children are caught in a whirlpool of low predictions and performance. “My definition of smart has changed,” Suzanne Nguyen admitted after a year of teaching at Bell High. “I’ll come to a student and say, ‘Oh, my God, look at you, you can do this!’ when I know if they were my classmates in college I would never think that they were smart for doing the same thing.”

Discouraged children and inadequate teachers make a corrosive combination. Even in Washington’s Harris school, which was striving hard, some teachers showed signs of fatigue and inability. Harris was a fairly modern building without windows, so bleak that adding a high fence and guard towers would have made it look like a prison. Only one door was kept unlocked, and it opened to a metal detector that was overseen by Board of Education security guards—two young black women in navy blue uniforms. Inside, however, all resemblance to a penal institution vanished. The school had practically no interior walls, because it was built during the open-classroom fad of the seventies. Incomplete partitions now delineated “rooms” and allowed considerable noise to flow among them. Students ambled throughout, and controlling their movements was difficult.

The youngsters, from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, came from one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, soaked in drugs and violence. In front of the school on Livingston Road, a bold sign produced by the city’s fiction department stated: “Drug Free Zone.” Just before school let out one March afternoon, a sporty red car cruised up and parked under the sign. Two people sat in front. As if on cue, a man shuffled down from the apartments across the street, had a word through the driver’s window, then loped around the car and got into the back. Five minutes later, he left. A young woman approached the automobile, had a brief
conversation, then took a seat in the back for a few minutes. There were no policemen in sight.

The children brought the handicaps from their neighborhood and families into the school, and some of the teachers had deficiencies of their own. “Describe 3 effects of a snowstorm,” read a third-grade assignment. A pupil wrote: “Three effects of a snowstorm are that power knockout, people fall, and cars have a hard time getting throw the snow.” Under “throw” the teacher wrote a correction in ink: “threw.”

A seventh-grade math teacher, Ms. D, was befuddled by her own course in thinking and reasoning skills as she struggled through a problem projected onto a screen: “Slippery Jake bought a pony for $50. After a week, he sold it for $60. Two weeks later, he bought it back for $70. A week later he sold it for $80. How much money did he make or lose?”

She set it up correctly as the sum of positive and negative numbers:

—50, +60, —70, and +80

The total came out to +20. To get into this course, students had to have relatively high test scores, but not all the children were following her, not all were paying attention. One who was, a girl in a yellow shirt, raised her hand and went to the projector with a different solution. On the transparency next to the 60 she wrote, “made 10;” next to the 70, “lost 10;” and next to the 80, “made 10.” This had enough deceptive logic to stump the class and Ms. D as well. How could you get two different answers? Ms. D couldn’t find another way of looking at it: that the first three transactions had cost Slippery Jake a total of $60 before he finally ended up with $80. Nobody could unravel the confusion. More disturbing was how quickly they stopped trying. Neither the students nor the teacher of the class on problem-solving seemed devoted to solving the problem. They dropped it and went on to something else.

The failure was subtler in a sixth-grade grammar lesson at Riedinger in Akron. Miss B, young and agile, watched her twenty-two students like a hawk, never missing a single squirm or wandering eye. Discreetly she glanced at a seating chart to call on students by name (it was the first month of school). She had thorough control of the class’s deportment but hardly any command over their intellect. She had taught them about the simple subject of a sentence the previous day, and today it was the complete
subject—the noun with all its modifiers. She told them to open their textbooks to page 345. In the sentence “A bright red cardinal sat on the windowsill,” she explained, “cardinal” was the simple subject, “a bright red cardinal” the complete subject. Had these youngsters ever seen a cardinal? Why not “a big blue police car” or “a red brick building”? It would not be pandering to limitations if schoolwork were relevant to children’s experiences. Decades after progress began toward that end, long after black youngsters in inner cities stopped seeing only blond white suburban kids in their reading books, there is still a distance to travel. In the same school, when a math teacher had given a problem on calculating a 15 percent tip, she was stunned to discover that hardly any of her eighth-graders knew what a tip was. If they had eaten out, it had been at fast-food restaurants only.

“If I said, ‘A big red sat on the windowsill,’ does that make sense?” Miss B asked facetiously.

“Noooooo!” the class replied. If she felt an impulse then to make the exercise wonderfully funny and entertaining, she suppressed it effectively. Tedium reigned through example after example as many of her students mistook the direct object for the simple subject. “Have you heard the new CD by Gloria Estefan?” She asked for the simple subject.

“CD?” one kid asked.

“No. Who are they talking to?”

“You.”

“Right.”

What a confusing way to identify a sentence’s subject, instead of explaining that it represents what or who is performing the action.

“Those reporters have been interviewing the mayor all day.”

“Those reporters.”

“Right. Damion, can you tell us what the simple subject is?”

“Mayor.”

“No. Stan?”

“Reporters.”

“Because reporters is what we’re focusing on.” With such terrible explanations, it was no wonder that most of the kids didn’t get it. But Miss B moved briskly along, leaving a wake of puzzlement.

One measurement of classroom bewilderment is the standardized test, which has become an all-important index of success, justifying career
advancement (or derailment) for principals and funding increases (or decreases) for schools. By that yardstick, Harris in Washington was disastrous but improving. The principal, Ted Hinton, had a soft-spoken determination to effect change, and he was making headway. He ran an extensive preschool and after-school program that kept many kids occupied from 7 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. He had obtained plentiful computer equipment, though most teachers didn’t know how to make the best use of it. Test scores, still very low, were on the rise: The percentage of students scoring below basic, which meant “little or no mastery of fundamental knowledge and skills,” declined from 43.1 to 31.8 percent in math and from 25 to 21.8 percent in reading between 2000 and 2001. The “proficient” rates, which meant “solid academic performance” on grade level, rose from 16.6 to 19.3 percent in math and 19.3 to 24.6 percent in reading. The figures did not include immigrant children with limited English or those in special education for learning disabilities.

How much true learning improvement the numbers represented was a question that divided teachers who were required to devote considerable class time to test-taking preparation. The emphasis permeated the year and rose to a pitch in the weeks before testing every spring. At Bell, for example, it began in the fall with twenty minutes in a fifty-minute period three times a week, then went to thirty minutes every other day starting in January, and finally thirty minutes every single day. Some teachers found the preparation relevant to math and reading skills, but the math teacher Suzanne Nguyen did not. “Not at all,” she declared emphatically. “It just makes them more comfortable with the format. I think it’s more like a self-esteem builder, nothing else. I don’t think it was really helping them learn.”

Some teachers found the tests’ subject matter biased against low-income children with limited experience. Such expressions as “the center of attention” and “leave up in the air” baffled youngsters who had no way to interpret them except literally. They tried to imagine an idea hovering above the ground. A math problem used “frankfurter” instead of “hot dog,” leading to confusion. “Who calls hot dogs ‘frankfurters’ anymore?” their teacher at Harris asked impatiently.

“My kids are reading this story about camping,” said Miss V, the second-grade teacher at Webb Elementary in Washington. “You’re supposed to guess what the children in the story are doing, and they come and they get on a bus with their sleeping bags. My children have never been camping before … or gone to camps even. They’re not going to know that’s
what’s going on.” Their attention spans were so short, she added, that they couldn’t concentrate as the teacher giving the test dictated math problems to youngsters who couldn’t yet read. “They’re just gonna zone out,” she said.