The Working Poor (42 page)

Furthermore, when a school became obsessed with test results that determined whether money was received or forfeited, the youngsters farthest behind were least likely to get attention, some teachers conceded. “Kids on the borderline get support,” said a teacher from Shreveport, Louisiana. “Kids on the bottom, even if they move up a little bit, it’s not going to make any difference in the school’s test scores.”

Drained of spontaneity, the teachers I observed in the months before testing seemed hurried and relentless. They rushed through exercises like speeding trains, scattering the slower children aside like trash blown off the track. It was easy to spot the lost children in classrooms. They were the ones who were talking or dozing or reading something unrelated to the lesson. They were the failing, crushed, insolent kids who stopped understanding the material and stopped trying. As you looked around a room you could pick them out, and they seemed numerous.

A week before the tests at Harris in Washington, most of the twenty children in a fourth-grade class were getting away without putting much effort into the drills, and the teacher was hastily feeding them answers without requiring much thinking. Most didn’t know the solution for ½ = ?/8, and most couldn’t read a bar graph well enough to figure out which two fruits to combine to get 100 servings in all. The answer was obvious from the graph: 80 servings of apples and 20 servings of grapes. Two girls in back were getting almost everything wrong and weren’t working at understanding why. Neither was the teacher. It was not a large class, but she never circulated to find individual students’ hang-ups and problems.

Mr. N, the math teacher at Riedinger who could predict which parents would never come to meetings, was doing a spreadsheet instruction one day. His computer projected the grid onto a screen as he led them through a calculation. “Hold on fast and follow my lead,” he told his twenty-five sixth-graders, then raced through a lesson that few kids seemed to grasp. The cells of the spreadsheet were set up to compute earnings after entering the time that work started, the time it ended, and the hourly wage. Mr. N was trying to get his class to write the appropriate formulas to stick into the cells, and only one child, Julie, was getting it. She was one of six whites in the class, and one of the few who had a computer at home. Time and
again, she put up her hand so high she practically dragged herself out of her seat. The number of hours worked, in cell D2, would be =(C2~B2), she said. The total wage at $6 an hour would be =(D2*6). Mr. N called on other kids to give them a chance, but they never got it. Julie always did, and each time he invited her up to the computer to press the Enter key, she was joyful. Presto! The right answer appeared in the cell—instant gratification, positive reinforcement. She smiled like a pixie.

Most of the other kids were sullen and inattentive. One boy in the back began to hum; others murmured to each other. Mr. N sent the boy to the office and made a girl stand to the side for several minutes. He then walked up and down rows looking at work, saying, “Good job. Good job. You’re in the wrong column,” giving as much individual attention as possible in a reasonably large class. But his lesson left many youngsters behind.

Sitting there and not understanding must have been miserable. With a whirl of numbers and letters spinning far beyond reach, the mind would surely shut down or wander to more pleasant thoughts, away from the dull throb of incapability. The fun of making a computer display a right answer, the fun of solving a little puzzle, the fun of learning had escaped most of those youngsters that day.

It doesn’t look so great from the front of the room, either. “I use the light-switch analogy,” said a vocational teacher in Akron. “When the switch is off, there’s just no input and there’s no output. Certain students have just learned to walk in a classroom, no matter whose it is, no matter who the teacher is, and turn off the switch.… And I try to keep the switches on. It’s difficult.”

In several schools, I asked groups of students what percentage of the time they did not understand what was being taught. Their answers were chilling. Typical were the comments of seventh-graders at Paul Junior High in Washington:

“Half.”

“It’s not half the time. It’s like maybe 25 percent. Some teachers talk too fast.”

“Some write sloppy.”

“Most of the time I don’t understand, but then I just stop listening because they just keep on.”

“They don’t try to make learning fun.”

What do you do when you don’t understand?

“You act like you do understand.”

“Nod and smile.”

“ ’Cause if you act like you don’t understand, other children will laugh at you.”

Do you ever ask the teacher to explain?

“Yeah, sometimes, but then … they get mad at you … ‘Just stop asking. We’ve got to move on.’ ”

“Sometimes, teachers, if they see you talking and then you have a question, and you ask them again, they won’t answer it. ’Cause it’s like your fault ’cause you were talking before.”

If you don’t understand the homework you’re being given, what do you do?

“I don’t do it.”

“I will call one of my smart friends.”

“I still do the homework. I just do it my way. If I got it wrong, it’s not my fault because they didn’t explain it.”

In every school, students could point to at least one or two teachers who stood out because they answered questions and showed the kids respect. More often, though, children felt deterred from asking. “They give you a smart remark or a disrespectful answer,” said an eighth-grade boy in Akron. His classmates added that they were made to feel stupid by teachers’ tone of voice and body language.

“They give you an answer like you supposed to know it,” a girl complained.

“They won’t give an answer,” said a boy, “so then when you go and ask a friend, they tell you not to talk in class. And all you trying to do is get the answer, but they won’t tell you. Either way it goes, you’re not going to get the answer.”

“It’s scary sometimes when you don’t understand something,” said a seventh-grade boy. “It’s scary to ask the teacher.”

You don’t have to be poor to have this experience, of course. Incompetent, insensitive teachers can be found in wealthy school districts, just as inspired teaching also occurs in classrooms of impoverished children. But youngsters from affluent, highly educated families have a safety net. If they don’t understand, they can get help at home. If they have learning disabilities,
their parents can hire tutors and consultants and even lawyers to press for services. As trying as it can be for prosperous parents to confront school problems, it is practically impossible for a mother with little education and no time or money or know-how to work the system.

A child with attention deficit disorder, for example, has less chance for a productive outcome in a poor family than in a wealthy one, in the experience of Dr. Robert Needlman, a behavioral pediatrician. As he moved back and forth between relatively well-to-do and low-income patients in a Cleveland hospital and clinic, he saw the vivid contrast. The condition, known as ADD and characterized by inattentiveness and impulsivity, “is not more prevalent among lower-income kids,” he said. “What I often see among lower-income kids is that the parent, frequently a single parent, has much less in the way of resources to help them deal with attention deficit disorder.… When you’re poor you have to prioritize. You can’t do everything. You can’t pick your kid up from school and go shopping and get the check cashed [and] also go to therapy.”

A family of means “can send the kid to day care and to a wonderful school,” and the parent gets a break from the strain by leaving the child with a baby-sitter. “Then when I change hats and go down to the clinic, I see children with the same biology, but parents don’t have any money. The kids are in crowded classrooms getting yelled at all the time, other kids with similar problems are yelling. If parents take time off they’re threatened with the loss of jobs.… The resources available realistically to handle solutions are different. The first kid, without too much difficulty, gets sent to a psychologist, and the mom pays every week and brings him. The second, you refer to a psychologist, but the mom can’t bring him every week because she’s working and can’t afford it. The psychologist is a talented intern, but she leaves after a year.

“A t the end of the line,” Dr. Needlman concluded, “there is a dramatic difference in the two children. One is getting into fights and gets suspended, just a step away from juvenile detention and real-life failure. And the other one is getting Bs and Cs in a fairly well-to-do private school.”

In that affluent private or public school, it’s a safe bet that that child will have the relevant textbook for the class, access to computers, and a dazzling array of extracurricular activities from orchestra to chess club. That’s not necessarily so in a poor part of town. Bell High had no orchestra, just a small jazz band. It had no gymnasium, only a soccer field across
the street that had to be shared with a middle school. Some teachers there, including Judith Jacob and Suzanne Nguyen, had no permanent classrooms, so they loaded all their teaching equipment onto rolling carts that made them look like the educational version of the homeless. Ms. Nguyen’s students joked with her as she pushed through the hallways behind her two-tier cart stacked with books, files, and a shoebox full of graphing calculators. Her tiny desk stood with two others in a narrow, windowless storeroom among racks of textbooks and paper supplies.

Even paper can be hard to come by. At Harris, a third-grade class got diagrams of a tornado Xeroxed on the back of stationery from the United States Information Agency, complete with the seal of the United States and the legend “Office of the Director.” The teacher called it “renegade paper” and paid tribute to the school’s principal, Ted Hinton. “Mr. Hinton, he’s very resourceful,” she said. In an eighth-grade classroom, $300 worth of new maps, replacing outdated versions from the 1980s, stood rolled up along a wall because the school had nobody to hang them; holes for screws had to be drilled into cinder block above the chalkboard. Outdated geography textbooks, on the other hand, had just been replaced with gleaming new volumes at $80 apiece, and there were enough for the students to leave at home while a classroom set was used in school.

That was testimony to the unevenly equipped nature of impoverished public schools—deprived in one corner, suffused in another with sudden surges of supplies. Harris was full of computers—in two computer labs, in the library, in practically every classroom, purchased with a federal grant. Three new turquoise and gray iMacs sat in the back of Mrs. C’s seventh-grade math classroom, but the two-day training she received hadn’t been enough to teach her how to use them effectively with her students. Besides, the computers didn’t have floppy disk drives, the external drives hadn’t yet arrived, and she couldn’t get them to print, so she summoned a gangly boy from another seventh-grade class to hook them up and get them working. He was part of an after-school computer maintenance group much like the old audiovisual crew of mechanically minded kids who got to roam around schools and run movie projectors.

At Bell High, however, the computers were limited to a lab that was always full, said Ms. Nguyen, who could have used the accounting program Excel in class to run “mindless calculations that current statisticians don’t do now,” she said. “It would be great to just quickly emphasize a
point with that, and to learn the skill.” But there were no computers in her classroom.

Dunbar High bought Mr. I a set of sixteen graphing calculators, at $100 apiece. Two students could share one, which would have been a problem if all thirty-six of his enrolled students ever showed up at once. But the usual attendance was about twenty, he said, so the supply was adequate. The usefulness was limited, though. “They spent about $1,600 for this set of calculators,” he noted. “What’s missing is, there’s an extra calculator you can buy that has an overhead projector setup, so you can project the calculator screen on the board. I don’t have that, so it’s very hard to show them what I’m doing on the calculator because they can’t see it. I have this great tool, but then it breaks down because I don’t have this extra $300 piece of technology so everybody can see what the teacher’s doing.”

Mr. I, in his early twenties, was a member in good standing of the technology generation, but he was not enamored of computers as an instructional device. As he watched a colleague entertaining his students with computer games to teach math, he declared: “I like kids writing, thinking, and talking.”

So did Kaya Henderson, a supervisor of Teach for America, who had taught Spanish at I.S. 162 in the South Bronx, a school with plenty of computers, internet connections, and pen pals in Japan. “All of that was great and wonderful,” she remarked, “except for the fact that I had kids in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade who couldn’t write a friendly letter, let alone communicate with kids in Japan. So the fact that we were getting all these computers meant absolutely nothing when the students hadn’t mastered the basic skills. I think that’s the hugest issue in urban or in under-resourced education: that people continue to hold these very low standards for students, don’t ensure that they master the things that they need to master in order to be successful in this life.”

Her own background had shaped her passions. Like most of her students, she was black, although she came from a middle-class family in Mount Vernon, New York, and had graduated from Georgetown University. “You know, somebody can teach you how to use a computer when you get to work,” she observed. “You don’t necessarily have to grow up using a computer all through school. I didn’t. But somebody taught me how to read, so that I could read a computer book and figure it out. Somebody taught me problem-solving skills. Somebody taught me how to multiply.

And my kids were gonna be tip-tapping three words every fifteen minutes to kids in Japan, and they couldn’t write a letter across town.”

Furthermore, while the school was swimming in computers, Ms. Henderson had only 22 books for her 240 students. “I did everything on a Xerox machine,” she said.