Life on the Mississippi:
East St. Louis, Illinois*
Jonathan Kozol
“East of anywhere,” writes a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
“often evokes the other side of the tracks. But, for a first-time visitor suddenly
deposited on its eerily empty streets, East St. Louis might suggest another
world.” The city, which is 98 percent black, has no obstetric services, no
regular trash collection, and few jobs. Nearly a third of its families live on less
than $7,500 a year; 75 percent of its population lives on welfare of some form.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development describes it as “the
most distressed small city in America.”
Only three of the 13 buildings on Missouri Avenue, one of the city’s
major thoroughfares, are occupied. A 13-story office building, tallest in the
city, has been boarded up. Outside, on the sidewalk, a pile of garbage fills a
ten-foot crater.
The city, which by night and day is clouded by the fumes that pour
from vents and smokestacks at the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, has
one of the highest rates of child asthma in America.
It is, according to a teacher at the University of Southern Illinois, “a
repository for a nonwhite population that is now regarded as expendable.” The
Post-Dispatch describes it as “America’s Soweto.”
Fiscal shortages have forced the layoff of 1,170 of the city’s 1,400
employees in the past 12 years. The city, which is often unable to buy heating
fuel or toilet paper for the city hall, recently announced that it might have to
cashier all but 10 percent of the remaining work force of 230. In l989 the
mayor announced that he might need to sell the city hall and all six fire stations
to raise needed cash. Last year the plan had to be scrapped after the city lost
its city hall in a court judgment to a creditor. East St. Louis is mortgaged into
the next century but has the highest property-tax rate in the state.
Since October 1987, when the city’s garbage pickups ceased, the
backyards of residents have been employed as dump sites. In the spring of
*Jonathan Kozol, “Life on the Mississippi: East St. Louis,
Illinois,” Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1991), 7-39.
1988, a policeman tells a visitor that 40 plastic bags of trash are waiting for
removal from the backyard of his mother’s house. Public health officials are
concerned the garbage will attract a plague of flies and rodents in the summer.
The policeman speaks of “rats as big as puppies” in his mother’s yard. They
are known to the residents, he says, as “bull rats.” Many people have no cars
or funds to cart the trash and simply burn it in their yards. The odor of smoke
from burning garbage, says the Post-Dispatch, “has become one of the scents
of spring” in East St. Louis.
Railroad tracks still used to transport hazardous chemicals run
through the city. “Always present,” says the Post-Dispatch, “is the threat of
chemical spills.... The wail of sirens warning residents to evacuate after a spill
is common.” The most recent spill, the paper says, “was at the Monsanto
Company plant.... Nearly 300 gallons of phosphorous trichloride spilled when
a railroad tank was overfilled. About 450 residents were taken to St. Mary’s
Hospital.... The frequency of the emergencies has caused Monsanto to have a
‘standing account’ at St. Mary’s.”
In March of 1989, a task force appointed by Governor James
Thompson noted that the city was in debt by more than $40 million, and
proposed emergency state loans to pay for garbage collection and to keep
police and fire departments in continued operation. The governor, however,
blamed the mayor and his administrators, almost all of whom were black, and
refused to grant the loans unless the mayor resigned. Thompson’s response,
said a Republican state legislator, “made my heart feel good.... It’s unfortunate,
but the essence of the problem in East St. Louis is the people” who are running
things.
Residents of Illinois do not need to breathe the garbage smoke and
chemicals of East St. Louis. With the interstate highways, says a supervisor of
the Illinois Power Company, “you can ride around the place and just keep
going. . . .”
East St. Louis lies in the heart of the American Bottoms -- the floodplain on the east side of the Mississippi River opposite St. Louis. To the east
of the city lie the Illinois Bluffs, which surround the flood-plain in semicircle.
Towns on the Bluffs are predominantly white and do not welcome visitors
from East St. Louis.
“The two tiers -- Bluffs and Bottoms --“ writes James Nowlan, a
professor of public policy at Knox College, “have long represented...different
worlds.” Their physical separation, he believes, “helps rationalize the
psychological and cultural distance that those on the Bluffs have clearly tried
to maintain.” People on the Bluffs, says Nowlan, “overwhelmingly want this
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separation to continue.”
Towns on the Bluffs, according to Nowlan, do not pay taxes to
address flood problems in the Bottoms, “even though these problems are
generated in large part by the water that drains from the Bluffs.” East St.
Louis lacks the funds to cope with flooding problems on its own, or to
reconstruct its sewer system, which, according to local experts, is
“irreparable.” The problem is all the worse because the chemical plants in East
St. Louis and adjacent towns have for decades been releasing toxins into the
sewer system.
The pattern of concentrating black communities in easily flooded
lowland areas is not unusual in the United States. Farther down the river, for
example, in the Delta town of Tunica, Mississippi, people in the black
community of Sugar Ditch live in shacks by open sewers that are commonly
believed to be responsible for the high incidence of liver tumors and abscesses
found in children there. Metaphors of caste like these are everywhere in the
United States. Sadly, although dirt and water flow downhill, money and
services do not.
The dangers of exposure to raw sewage, which backs up repeatedly
into the homes of residents in East St. Louis, were first noticed, in the spring of
1989, at a public housing project, Villa Griffin. Raw sewage, says the PostDispatch, overflowed into a playground just behind the housing project, which
is home to 187 children, “forming an oozing lake of...tainted water.” Two
schoolgirls, we are told, “experienced hair loss since raw sewage flowed into
their homes.”
While local physicians are not certain whether loss of hair is caused
by the raw sewage, they have issued warnings that exposure to raw sewage can
provoke a cholera or hepatitis outbreak. A St. Louis health official voices her
dismay that children live with waste in their backyards. “The development or
working sewage systems made cities livable a hundred years ago,” she notes.
“Sewage systems separate us from the Third World.”
“It’s a terrible way to live,” says a mother at the Villa Griffin homes,
as she bails raw sewage from her sink. Health officials warn again of cholera and, this time, of typhoid also.
The sewage, which is flowing from collapsed pipes and dysfunctional
pumping stations, has also flooded basements all over the city. The city’s
vacuum truck, which uses water and suction to unclog the city’s sewers, cannot
be used because it needs $5,000 in repairs. Even when it works, it sometimes
can’t be used because there isn’t money to hire drivers. A single engineer now
does the work that 14 others did before they were laid off. By April the pool
of overflow behind the Villa Griffin project has expanded into a lagoon of
sewage. Two million gallons of raw sewage lie outside the children’s homes.
In May, another health emergency develops. Soil samples tested at
residential sites in East St. Louis turn up disturbing quantities of arsenic,
mercury and lead -- as well as steroids dumped in previous years by stockyards
in the area. Lead levels found in the soil around one family’s home, according
to lead-poison experts, measure “an astronomical 10,000 parts per million.”
Five of the children in the building have been poisoned. Although children
rarely die of poisoning by lead, health experts note, its effects tend to be subtle
and insidious. By the time the poisoning becomes apparent in a child’s sleep
disorders, stomach pains and hyperactive behavior, says a health official, “it is
too late to undo the permanent brain damage.” The poison, she says, “is
chipping away at the learning potential of kids whose potential has already
been chipped away by their environment.”
The budget of the city’s department of lead-poison control, however,
has been slashed, and one person now does the work once done by six.
Lead poisoning in most cities comes from lead-based paint in
housing, which has been illegal in most states for decades but which poisons
children still because most cities Boston and New York among them, rarely
penalize offending landlords. In East St. Louis, however, there is a second
source of lead. Health inspectors think it is another residue of manufacturing including smelting - in the factories and mills whose plants surround the city.
“Some of the factories are gone,” a parent organizer says, “but they have left
their poison in the soil where our children play.” In one apartment complex
where particularly high quantities of lead have been detected in the soil, 52
children with high levels in their blood have been identified.
“I anticipate finding the whole city contaminated,” says a health
examiner.
The Daughters of Charity, whose works of mercy are well known in
the Third World, operate a mission at the Villa Griffin homes. On an
afternoon in early spring of 1990, Sister Julia Huiskamp meets me on King
Boulevard and drives me to the Griffin homes.
As we ride past blocks and blocks of skeletal structures, some of
which ate still inhabited, she slows the car repeatedly at railroad crossings. A
seemingly endless railroad train rolls past us to the right. On the left: a
blackened lot where garbage has been burning. Next to the burning garbage is
a row of 12 white cabins, charred by fire. Next: a lot that holds a heap of auto
tires and a mountain of tin cans. More burnt houses. More trash fires. The
train moves almost imperceptibly across the flatness of the land.
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Fifty years old, and wearing a blue suit, white blouse, and blue headcover, Sister Julia points to the nicest house in sight. The sign on the front
reads MOTEL. It’s a whore house,” Sister Julia says.
When she slows the car beside a group of teen-age boys, one of them
steps out toward the car, then backs away as she is recognized.
The 90 units of the Villa Griffin homes -- two-story structures, brick
on the first floor, yellow wood above -- form one border of a recessed park and
playground that were filled with fecal matter last year when the sewage mains
exploded. The sewage is gone now and the grass is very green and looks
inviting. When nine-year-old Serena and her seven-year-old brother take me
for a walk, however, I discover that our shoes sink into what is still a sewage
marsh. An inch-deep residue of fouled water still remains.
Serena’s brother is a handsome, joyous little boy, but troublingly thin.
Three other children join us as we walk along the marsh: Smokey, who is
nine years old but cannot tell time; Mickey, who is seven; and a tiny child with
a ponytail and big brown eyes who talks a constant stream of words that I can’t
always understand.
“Hush, Little Sister,” says Serena. I ask for her name, but “Little
Sister” is the only name the children seem to know.
“There go my cousins,” Smokey says, pointing to two teen-age girls
above us on the hill.
The day is warm, although we’re only in the second week of March;
several dogs and cats are playing by the edges of the marsh. “It’s a lot of
squirrels here,” says Smokey. “There go one!”
“This here squirrel is a friend of mine,” says Little Sister.
None of the children can tell me the approximate time that school
begins. One says five o’clock. One says six. Another says that school begins
at noon.
When I ask what song they sing after the flag pledge, one says “Jingle
Bells.”
Smokey cannot decide if he is in the second or third grade.
Seven-year-old Mickey sucks his thumb during the walk.
The children regale me with a chilling story as we stand beside the
marsh. Smokey says his sister was raped and murdered and then dumped
behind his school. Other children add more details: Smokey’s sister was 11
years old. She was beaten with a brick until she died. The murder was
committed by a man who knew her mother.
The narrative begins when, without warning, Smokey says, “My sister
has got killed.”
“She was my best friend,” Serena says.
“They had beat her in the head and raped her,” Smokey says.
“She was hollering out loud,” says Little Sister.
I ask them when it happened. Smokey says, “Last year.” Serena then
corrects him and she says, “Last week.”
“It scared me because I had to cry,” says Little Sister.
“The police arrested one man but they didn’t catch the other,”
Smokey says.
Serena says, “He was some kin to her.”
But Smokey objects, “He weren’t no kin to me. He was my
momma’s friend.”
“Her face was busted,” Little Sister says.
Serena describes this sequence of events: “They told her go behind
the school. They’ll give her a quarter if she do. Then they knock her down
and told her not to tell what they had did.”
I ask, “Why did they kill her?”
“They was scared that she would tell,” Serena says.
“One is in jail,” says Smokey. “They can’t find the other.”
“Instead of raping little bitty children, they should find themselves a
wife,” says Little Sister.
“I hope,” Serena says, “her spirit will come back and get that man.”
“And kill that man,” says Little Sister.
“Give her another chance to live,” Serena says.
“My teacher came to the funeral,” says Smokey.
“When a little child dies, my momma say a star go straight to
Heaven,” says Serena.
“My grandma was murdered,” Mickey says out of the blue.
“Somebody shot two bullets in her head.”
I ask him, “Is she really dead?”
“She dead all right,” says Mickey. “She was layin’ there, just dead.”
“I love my friends,” Serena says. “I don’t care if they no kin to me. I
care for them. I hope his mother have another baby. Name her for my friend
that’s dead.”
“I have a cat with three legs,” Smokey says.
“Snakes hate rabbits,” Mickey says, again for no apparent reason.
“Cats hate fishes,” Little Sister says.
“It’s a lot of hate,” says Smokey.
Later, at the mission, Sister Julia tells me this: “The Jefferson School,
which they attend, is a decrepit hulk. Next to it is a modern school, erected
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two years ago, which was to have replaced the one that they attend. But the
construction was not done correctly. The roof is too heavy for the walls, and
the entire structure has begun to sink. It can’t be occupied. Smokey’s sister
was raped and murdered and dumped between the old school and the new
one.”
As the children drift back to their homes for supper, Sister Julia stands
outside with me and talks about the health concerns that trouble people in the
neighborhood. In the setting sun, the voices of the children fill the evening air.
Nourished by the sewage marsh, a field of wild daffodils is blooming.
Standing here, you wouldn’t think that anything was wrong. The street is
calm. The poison in the soil can’t be seen. The sewage is invisible and only
makes the grass a little greener. Bikes thrown down by children lie outside
their kitchen doors. It could be an ordinary twilight in a small suburban town.
Night comes on and Sister Julia goes inside to telephone a cab. In
another hour, the St. Louis taxis will not come into the neighborhood....
In the night, the sky above the East St. Louis area is brownish yellow.
Illuminated by the glare from the Monsanto installation, the smoke is vented
from four massive columns rising about 400 feet above the plant. The garish
light and tubular structures lend the sky a strange, nightmarish look.
Safir Ahmed, a young reporter who has covered East St. Louis for the
Post-Dispatch for several years, drives with me through the rutted streets close
to the plant and points out blocks of wooden houses without plumbing:
Straggling black children walk along a road that has no sidewalks. “The soil is
all contaminated here,” he says.
Almost directly over our heads the plant is puffing out a cloud of
brownish smoke that rises above the girders of the plant within a glow of
reddish-gold illumination.
Two auto bridges cross the Mississippi River to St. Louis. To the
south is the Poplar Street Bridge. The bridge to the north is named for Martin
Luther King. “It takes three minutes to cross the bridge,” says Ahmed. “For
white people in St. Louis, it could be a thousand miles long.”
On the southern edge of East St. Louis, tiny shack-like houses stand
along a lightless street. Immediately behind these houses are the giant
buildings of Monsanto, Big River Zinc, Cerro Copper, the American Bottoms
Sewage Plant and Trade Waste Incineration - one of the largest hazardouswaste-incineration companies in the United States.
“The entire city lies downwind of this. When the plant gives off
emissions that are viewed as toxic, an alarm goes off. People who have
breathed the smoke are given a cash payment of $400 in exchange for a release
from liability….
“The decimation of the men within the population is quite nearly
total. Four of five births in East St. Louis are to single mothers. Where do the
men go? Some to prison. Some to the military. Many to an early death.
Dozens of men are living in the streets or sleeping in small, isolated camps
behind the burnt-out buildings. There are several of these camps out in the
muddy stretch there to the left.
“The nicest buildings in the city are the Federal Court House and the
City Hall -- which also holds the jail -- the National Guard headquarters, and
some funeral establishments. There area few nice houses and a couple of highrise homes for senior citizens. One of the nicest buildings is the whore house.
There’s also a branch of the University of Southern Illinois, but it no longer
offers classes; it’s a social welfare complex now.
“The chemical plants do not pay taxes here. They have created small
incorporated towns which are self-governed and exempt therefore from
supervision by health agencies in East St. Louis. Aluminum Ore created a
separate town called Alorton. Monsanto, Cerro Copper and Big River Zinc are
all in Sauget. National Stock Yards has its own incorporated town as well.
Basically there’s no one living in some of these so-called towns. Alorton is a
sizable town. Sauget, on the other hand, isn’t much more than a legal fiction.
It provides tax shelter and immunity from jurisdiction of authorities in East St.
Louis.”
The town of Sauget claims a population of about 200 people. Its
major industries, other than Monsanto and the other plants, are topless joints
and an outlet for the lottery. Two of the largest strip clubs face each other on a
side street that is perpendicular to the main highway. One is named Oz and
that is for white people. The other strip club, which is known as Wiz, is for
black people. The lottery office, which is frequented primarily by black
people, is the largest in the state of Illinois.
“The lottery advertizes mostly in black publications.” Ahmed says.
So people who have nothing to start with waste their money on a place that
sells them dreams. Lottery proceeds in Illinois allegedly go into education; in
reality they go into state revenues and they add nothing to the education fund.
So it is a total loss. Affluent people do not play the lottery. The state is in the
business here of selling hopes to people who have none. The city itself is full
of bars and liquor stores and lots of ads for cigarettes that feature pictures of
black people. Assemble all the worst things in America -- gambling, liquor,
cigarettes and toxic fumes, sewage, waste disposal, prostitution -- put it all
together. Then you dump it on black people.”
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East St. Louis begins at the Monsanto fence. Rain starts falling as we
cross the railroad tracks, and then another set of tracks, and pass a series of dirt
streets with houses that are mostly burnt-out shells, the lots between them piled
with garbage bags and thousands of abandoned auto tires. The city is almost
totally flat and lies below the Mississippi’s flood-line, protected by a levee. In
1986 a floodgate broke and filled part of the city. Houses on Bond Avenue
filled up with sewage to their second floors.
The waste water emitted from the sewage plant, according to a recent
Greenpeace study, “varies in color from yellow-orange to green.” The toxic
substances that it contains become embedded in the soil and the marshland in
which children play. Dead Creek, for example, a creek bed that received
discharges from the chemical and metal plants in previous years, is now a
place where kids from East St. Louis ride their bikes. The creek; which
smokes by day and glows on moonless nights, has gained some notoriety in
recent years for instances of spontaneous combustion. The Illinois EPA
believes that the combustion starts when children ride their bikes across the
creek bed, “creating friction which begins the smoldering process.”
“Nobody in East St. Louis,” Ahmed says, “has ever had the clout to
raise a protest. Why Americans permit this is so hard for somebody like me,
who grew up in the real Third World, to understand....
“I’m from India. In Calcutta this would be explicable, perhaps. I
keep thinking to myself, ‘My God! This is the United States!’”
By midnight, hardly anyone is out on foot. In block after block, there
is no sense of life. Only the bars and liquor stores are open - but the windows
of the liquor stores are barred. There is a Woolworth’s store that has no
windows. Silently in the persistent rain a dark shape looms before us and cuts
off the street: a freight train loaded with chemicals or copper, moving slowly
to the north. There is no right or wrong side of the tracks in East St. Louis.
The tracks are everywhere. Behind us still: the eerie specter of the lights and
girders of Monsanto. In front of us, perhaps two miles away: the beautiful St.
Louis Arch and, under it, the brightly lighted skyline of St. Louis.
“The ultimate terror for white people,” Ahmed says, “is to leave the
highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis. People speak of
getting lost in East St. Louis as a nightmare. The nightmare to me is that they
never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the
children here. They ought to get off that highway. The nightmare isn’t in their
heads. It’s a real place. There are children living here.
Jesse Jackson came to speak at East St. Louis High. There were three
thousand people packed into the gym. He was nearly two hours late. When he
came in, the feeling was electric. There was pin-drop silence while he spoke.
An old man sat beside me, leaning forward on his cane. He never said a word
but he was crying.
You would think, with all the chemical and metals plants, that there
would be unlimited employment. It doesn’t work that way. Most of these are
specialized jobs. East St. Louis men don’t have the education. I go into the
Monsanto plant and almost every face I see is white.”
“The biggest employer in the town is public education. Next,
perhaps, the Pfizer plant, which is situated just behind one of the high schools.
After that, the biggest businesses may be the drug trade, funerals and bars and
prostitution. The mayors family owns the largest funeral home in East St.
Louis. The Catholic high school was shut down last year. There’s talk of
turning it into a prison.”
There is a pornography theater in the center of the town but no theater
showing movies suitable for children. East St. Louis is the largest city south of
Springfield in the State of Illinois but was left off the Illinois map four years
ago. The telephone directory that serves the region does not list phone
numbers of the residents or businesses of East St. Louis, even though the city
lies right at the center of the service area that the directory is supposed to
cover. Two years ago, the one pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi River
to St. Louis was closed off to East St. Louis residents.
“It’s a third bridge, smaller than the others,” Ahmed says, “very old -the only one that’s open to pedestrians. It puts you right into downtown St.
Louis, quite close to the Arch. The closing of the bridge was ordered on the
day before a street fair that takes place each summer during the July Fourth
celebration. Three or four million people flood into the city. There are booths
for food, and rides and music. For people in East St. Louis, it’s an opportunity
to bring their children to the city and relax. Mothers walk their kids across the
bridge....
“The police announced that they were shutting down the bridge. The
reason they gave was chat there had been some muggings in the past. They
were concerned, they said, that teen-age blacks would mug the people at the
fair, then run across the bridge and disappear into the streets of East St. Louis.
Regardless of the reason, it was a decision that denied the folks in East St.
Louis access to the fair.”
According to a story published later in Life magazine, black leaders in
East St. Louis said “it looked suspiciously like a racist action.” The fact that it
was pegged to Independence Day intensified the sense of injury. The president
of the NAACP in East St. Louis said, “We seem to have been isolated....”
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The bridge was later opened by court order.
“In recent years, says Ahmed, letters have been going out to people
who have homes in a half-mile zone next to Monsanto. The letters offer to buy
your home, no questions asked, for cash: $4,000 flat for any house. The
speculation is that Monsanto wants a buffer zone to fend off further suits for
damages from chemical emissions. These offers are appealing to poor people
who have nothing and who have no faith the courts would ever honor their
concerns....”
“The land between the two main bridges and along the river is
regarded as prime real estate by white developers. Given the fantastic view of
the St. Louis skyline and the Gateway Arch, the land would be immensely
valuable if its black residents could be removed. When people ask, ‘What
should we do with East St. Louis?’ they don’t speak about the people. They
are speaking of the land.”
Emerging from another rutted street of houses that do not appear to be
inhabited, but from the interior of which some lights are seen, we pass the
segregated topless joints again and stop the car along Monsanto Avenue to
scrutinize Big River Zinc, Cerro Copper (America’s Largest Recycler of
Copper,” according to its sign) and the Monsanto plant. Then making a Uturn, we head west onto the access road that climbs back to the bridge across
the Mississippi.
“Every time I cross that bridge I feel that I am getting off a plane
within a different country,” Ahmed says.
From the St. Louis side, one sees the dark breadth of the river, another
wider strip of blackness where the dwellings of East St. Louis lie, and the
glowing cluster of industrial illumination slightly to the south. Off to the east
lie the Illinois Bluffs, far above the chemical pollutants.
East St. Louis -- which the local press refers to as “an inner city
without an outer city” -- has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66
cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature
birth, and third in infant death. Among the negative factors listed by the city’s
health director are the sewage running in the streets, air that has been fouled by
the local plants, the high lead levels noted in the soil, poverty, lack of
education, crime, dilapidated housing, insufficient health care, unemployment.
Hospital care is deficient too. There is no place to have a baby in East St.
Louis. The maternity ward at the city’s Catholic hospital, a 100-year-old
structure, was shut down some years ago. The only other hospital in town was
forced by lack of funds to close in 1990. The closest obstetrics service open to
the women here is seven miles away. The infant death rate is still rising.
As in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, dental problems also
plague the children here. Although dental problems don’t command the instant
fears associated with low birth weight, fetal death or cholera, they do have the
consequence of wearing down the stamina of children and defeating their
ambitions. Bleeding gums, impacted teeth and rotting teeth are routine matters
for the children I have interviewed in the South Bronx. Children get used to
feeling constant pain. They go to sleep with it. They go to school with it.
Sometimes their teachers are alarmed and try to get them to a clinic. But it’s
all so slow and heavily encumbered with red tape and waiting lists and
missing, lost or canceled welfare cards, that dental care is often long delayed.
Children live for months with pain that grown-ups would find unendurable.
The gradual attrition of accepted pain erodes their energy and aspiration. I
have seen children in New York with teeth that look like brownish, broken
sticks. I have also seen teenagers who were missing half their teeth. But, to
me, most shocking is to see a child with an abscess that has been inflamed for
weeks and that he has simply lived with and accepts as part of the routine of
life. Many teachers in the urban schools have seen this. It is almost
commonplace.
Compounding these problems is the poor nutrition of the children
here -- average daily food expenditure in East St. Louis is $2.40 for one child
-- and the under-immunization of young children. Of every 100 children
recently surveyed in East St. Louis, 55 were incompletely immunized for
polio, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough. In this context, health
officials look with all the more uneasiness at those lagoons of sewage outside
public housing.
On top of all else is the very high risk of death by homicide in East St.
Louis. In a recent year in which three cities in the state of roughly the same
size as East St. Louis had an average of four homicides apiece, there were 54
homicides in East St. Louis. But it is the heat of summer that officials here
particularly dread. The heat that breeds the insects bearing polio or hepatitis in
raw sewage also heightens asthma and frustration and reduces patience. “The
heat,” says a man in public housing, “can bring out the beast....”
The fear of violence is very real in East St. Louis. The CEO of one of
the large companies out on the edge of town has developed an “evacuation
plan” for his employees. State troopers are routinely sent to East St. Louis to
put down disturbances that the police cannot control. If the misery of this
community explodes someday in a real riot (it has happened in the past),
residents believe that state and federal law-enforcement agencies will have no
hesitation in applying massive force to keep the violence contained.
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As we have seen, it is believed by people here that white developers
regard the land beside the river and adjacent sections of the city as particularly
attractive sites for condominiums and luxury hotels. It is the fear of violence,
people believe, and the proximity of the black population that have, up to now,
prevented plans like these from taking shape. Some residents are convinced,
therefore, that they will someday be displaced. “It’s happened in other cities,”
says a social worker who has lived here for ten years. “East St. Louis is a good
location, after all.”
This eventuality, however, is not viewed as very likely -- or not for a
long, long time. The soil would have to be de-leaded first. The mercury and
arsenic would have to be dealt with. The chemical plants would have to be
shut down or modified before the area could be regarded as attractive to
developers. For now, the people of East St. Louis probably can rest assured
that nobody much covets what is theirs.
“The history of East St. Louis,” says the Post-Dispatch, is “rife with
greed and lust and bigotry.” At the turn of the century, the city was the second
largest railroad center in the nation. It led the nation in sale of horses, mules
and hogs, and in the manufacture of aluminum. Meat-packing, steel, and paint
manufacture were important here as well. Virtually all these industries were
owned, however, by outsiders.
Blacks were drawn to East St. Louis from the South by promises of
jobs. When they arrived, the corporations used them as strikebreakers. In
1917 a mounting white resentment of strikebreaking blacks, combined with
racial bigotry, ignited one of the most bloody riots in the nation’s history.
White mobs tore into black neighborhoods. Beatings and hangings took place
in the streets. The mob, whose rage was indiscriminate, killed a 14-year-old
boy and scalped his mother. Before it was over, 244 buildings were destroyed.
It may be said that the unregulated private market did not serve the
city well. By the 1930s, industries that had enticed black people here with
promises of jobs began to leave for areas where even cheaper labor could be
found. Proximity to coal, which had attracted industry into the area, also
ceased to be important as electric power came to be commercially available in
other regions. The Aluminum Ore Company, which had brought 10,000
blacks to East St. Louis to destroy the unions, now shut down and moved to
the Deep South. During the Depression, other factories -- their operations
obsolete -- shut down as well.
The city underwent a renaissance of sorts in World War II, when
deserted factory space was used for military manufacturing. Cheap black labor
was again required. Prostitution also flourished as a marker answer to the
presence of so many military men at nearby bases. Organized crime set up
headquarters in the city. For subsequent decades, East St. Louis was the place
where young white men would go for sexual adventures.
Population peaked in 1945 at 80,000, one third being black. By 1971,
with the population down to 50,000, less than one-third white, a black mayor
was elected. A second black mayor, elected in 1979, remained in office until
1991.
The problems of the streets in urban areas, as teachers often note,
frequently spill over into public schools. In the public schools of East St.
Louis this is literally the case.
“Martin Luther King Junior High School,” notes the Post-Dispatch in
a story published in the early spring of 1989, “was evacuated Friday afternoon
after sewage flowed into the kitchen.... The kitchen was closed and students
were sent home.” On Monday, the paper continues, “East St. Louis Senior
High School was awash in sewage for the second time this year.” The school
had to be shut because of “fumes and backed-up toilets.” Sewage flowed into
the basement, through the floor, then up into the kitchen and the ‘students’
bathrooms. The backup, we read, “occurred in the food preparation areas.”
School is resumed the following morning at the high school, but a few
days later the overflow recurs. This time the entire system is affected since the
meals distributed to every student in the city are prepared in the two schools
that have been flooded. School is called off for all 16,500 students in the
district. The sewage backup, caused by the failure of two pumping stations,
forces officials at the high school to shut down the furnaces.
At Martin Luther King, the parking lot and gym are also flooded.
“It’s a disaster,” says a legislator. The streets are underwater; gaseous fumes
are being emitted from the pipes under the schools,” she says, “making people
ill.”
In the same week, the schools announce the layoff of 280 teachers,
166 cooks and cafeteria workers, 25 teacher aides, 16 custodians and 18
painters, electricians, engineers and plumbers. The president of the teachers’
union says the cuts, which will bring the size of kindergarten and primary
classes up to 30 students, and the size of fourth to twelfth grade classes up to
35, will have “an unimaginable impact” on the students. “If you have a high
school teacher with five classes each day and between 150 and 175 students...
it’s going to have a devastating effect.” The school system, it is also noted, has
been using more than 70 “permanent substitute teachers,” who are paid only
$10,000 yearly, as a way of saving money.
Governor Thompson, however, tells the press that he will not pour
7
money into East St. Louis to solve long-term problems. East St. Louis
residents, he says, must help themselves. “There is money in the community,”
the governor insists. “It’s just not being spent for what it should be spent for.”
The governor, while acknowledging that East St. Louis faces
economic problems, nonetheless refers dismissively to those who live in East
St. Louis. “What in the community,” he asks, is being done right?” He takes
the opportunity of a visit to the area to announce a fiscal grant for sewer
improvement to a relatively wealthy town nearby.
In East St. Louis, meanwhile, teachers are running out of chalk and
paper, and their paychecks are arriving two weeks late. The city warns its
teachers to expect a cut of half their pay until the fiscal crisis has been eased.
The threatened teacher layoffs are mandated by the Illinois Board of
Education, which, because of the city’s fiscal crisis, has been given
supervisory control of the school budget. Two weeks later the state
superintendent partially relents. In a tone very different from that of the
governor, he notes that East St. Louis does not have the means to solve its
education problems on its own. “There is no natural way,” he says, that, “East
St. Louis can bring itself out of this situation.” Several cuts will be required in
any case -- one quarter of the system’s teachers, 75 teacher aides, and several
dozen others will be given notice -- but, the state board notes, sports and music
programs will not be affected.
East St. Louis, says the chairman of the state board. “is simply the
worst possible place I can imagine to have a child brought up.... The
community is in desperate circumstances.” Sports and music, he observes, are,
for many children here, “the only avenues of success.” Sadly enough, no
matter how it ratifies the stereotype, this is the truth; and there is a poignant
aspect to the fact that, even with class size soaring and one quarter of the
system’s teachers being given their dismissal, the state board of education
demonstrates its genuine but skewed compassion by attempting to leave sports
and music untouched by the overall austerity.
Even sports facilities, however, are degrading by comparison with
those found and expected at most high schools in America. The football field
at East St. Louis High is missing almost everything -- including goal posts.
There are a couple of metal pipes -- no crossbar, just the pipes. Bob Shannon,
the football coach, who has to use his personal funds to purchase footballs and
has had to cut and rake the football field himself, has dreams of having goal
posts some day. He’d also like to let his students have new uniforms. The
ones they wear are nine years old and held together somehow by a patchwork
of repairs. Keeping them clean is a problem, too. The school cannot afford a
washing machine. The uniforms are carted to a corner Laundromat with
fifteen dollars’ worth of quarters.
Other football teams that come to play, according to the coach, are
shocked to see the field and locker rooms. They want to play without a
halftime break and get away. The coach reports that he’s been missing
paychecks, but he’s trying nonetheless to raise some money to help out a member of the team whose mother has just died of cancer.
“The days of the tight money have arrived,” he says. “It don’t look
like Moses will be coming to this school.”
He tells me he has been in East St. Louis 19 years and has been the
football coach for 14 years. “I was born,” he says, “in Natchtez, Mississippi. I
stood on the courthouse steps of Natchez with Charles Evers. I was a teen-age
boy when Michael Schwerner and the other boys were murdered. I’ve been in
the struggle all along. In Mississippi, it was the fight for legal rights. This
time, it’s a struggle for survival.
“In certain ways,” he says, “it’s harder now because in those days it
was a clear enemy you had to face, a man in a hood and not a statistician. No
one could persuade you that you were to blame. Now the choices seem like
they are left to you and, if you make the wrong choice, you are made to
understand you are to blame....”
“Night-time in this city, hot and smoky in the summer, there are
dealers standin’ out on every street. Of the kids I see here, maybe 55 percent
will graduate from school. Of that number, maybe one in four will go to
college. How many will stay? That is a bigger question.”
“The basic essentials are simply missing here. When we go to
wealthier schools I look at the faces of my boys. They don’t say a lot. They
have their faces to the windows, lookin’ out. I can’t tell what they are
thinking. I am hopin’ they are saying, ‘This is something I will give my kids
someday.’”
Tall and trim, his black hair graying slightly, he is 45 years old.
“No, my wife and I don’t live here. We live in a town called
Ferguson, Missouri. I was born in poverty and raised in poverty. I feel that I
owe it to myself to live where they pick up the garbage.”
In the visitors’ locker room, he shows me lockers with no locks. The
weight room stinks of sweat and water-rot. “See, this ceiling is in danger of
collapsing. See, this room don’t have no heat in winter. But we got to come
here anyway. We wear our coats while working out. I tell the boys, ‘We got
to get it done. Our fans don’t know that we do not have heat.’”
He tells me he arrives at school at 7:45 A.M. and leaves at 6:00 P.M.
8
-- except in football season, when he leaves at 8:00 P.M. “This is my life. It
isn’t all I dreamed of and I tell myself sometimes that I might have
accomplished more. But growing up in poverty rules out some avenues. You
do the best you can.”
In the wing of the school that holds vocational classes, a damp,
unpleasant odor fills the halls. The school has a machine shop, which cannot
be used for lack of staff, and a woodworking shop. The only shop that’s
occupied this morning is the auto-body class. A man with long blond hair and
wearing a white sweat suit swings a paddle to get children in their chairs.
“What we need the most is new equipment,” he reports. “I have equipment for
alignment, for example, but we don’t have money to install it. We also need a
better form of egress. We bring the cars in through two other classes.”
Computerized equipment used in most repair shops, he reports, is far beyond
the high school’s budget. It looks like a very old gas station in an isolated
rural town.
Stopping in the doorway of a room with seven stoves and three
refrigerators, I am told by a white teacher that this is a class called
“Introductory Home Ec.” The 15 children in the room, however, are not
occupied with work. They are scattered at some antiquated tables, chatting
with each other. The teacher explains that students do no work on Friday,
which, she says, is “clean-up day.” I ask her whether she regards this class as
preparation for employment. “Not this class,” she says. “The ones who move
on to Advanced Home Ec. are given job instruction.” When I ask her what
jobs they are trained for, she says: “Fast food places -- Burger King,
McDonald’s.”
The science labs at East St. Louis High are 30 to 50 years outdated.
John McMillan, a soft-spoken man, teaches physics at the school. He shows
me his lab. The six lab stations in the room have empty holes where pipes
were once attached. “It would be great if we had water,” says McMillan.
Wiping his hand over his throat, he tells me that he cannot wear a tie
or jacket in the lab. “I want you to notice the temperature,” he says. “The
heating system’s never worked correctly. Days when its zero outside it will be
100 Fahrenheit within this room. I will be here 25 years starting September -in the same room, teaching physics. I have no storage space. Those balance
scales are trash. There are a few small windows you can open. We are on the
side that gets the sun.”
Stepping outside the lab, he tells me that he lives in East St. Louis,
one block from the school. Balding and damp-looking in his open collar, he is
a bachelor 58 years old.
The biology lab, which I visit next, has no laboratory tables. Students
work at regular desks. “I need dissecting kits,” the teacher says. “The few we
have are incomplete.” Chemical supplies, she tells me, in a city poisoned by
two chemical plants, are scarce. “I need more microscopes,” she adds.
The chemistry lab is the only one that’s properly equipped. There are
eight lab tables with gas jets and water. But the chemistry teacher says he
rarely brings his students to the lab. “I have 30 children in a class and cannot
supervise them safely. Chemical lab work is unsafe with more than 20
children to a teacher. If I had some lab assistants, we could make use of the
lab. As it is, we have to study mainly from a text.”
Even texts are scarce, however. “We were short of books for four
months last semester. When we got replacement copies, they were different
from the texts that we already had. So that presented a new problem....”
“Despite these failings, I have had two students graduate from MIT.”
“In how many years?” I ask.
He tells me, “Twenty-three.”
Leaving the chemistry labs, I pass a double-sized classroom in which
roughly 60 kids are sitting fairly still but doing nothing. “This is supervised
study hall,” a teacher tells me in the corridor. But when we step inside, he
finds there is no teacher. “The teacher must be out today,” he says.
Ira Solomon’s history classes, which I visit next, have been described
by journalists who cover East St. Louis as the highlight of the school.
Solomon, a man of 54 whose reddish hair is turning white, has taught in urban
schools for almost 30 years. A graduate of Brandeis University in 1961, he
entered law school but was drawn away by a concern with civil rights. “After
one semester, I decided that the law was not for me. I said, ‘Go and find the
toughest place there is to teach. See if you like it.’ I’m still here....”
“This is not by any means the worst school in the city,” he reports, as
we are sitting in his classroom on the first floor of the school. “But our
problems are severe. I don’t even know where to begin. I have no materials
with the exception of a single textbook given to each child. If I bring in
anything else -- books or tapes or magazines -- I pay for it myself. The high
school has no VCRs. They are such a crucial tool. So many good things run
on public television. I can’t make use of anything I see unless I can unhook
my VCR and bring it into school. The AV equipment in the building is so old
that we are pressured not to use it.”
Teachers like Mr. Solomon, working in low-income districts such as
East St. Louis, often tell me that they feel cut off from educational
developments in modern public schools. “Well, it’s amazing,” Solomon says.
9
“I have done without so much so long that, if I were assigned to a suburban
school, I’m not sure I’d recognize what they are doing. We are utterly cut off.”
Of the 33 children who begin the history classes in the standard track,
he says, more than a quarter have dropped out by spring semester. “Maybe 24
are left by June. Mind you, this is in the junior year. We’re speaking of the
children who survived. Ninth and tenth grades are the more horrendous years
for leaving school.”
“I have four girls right now in my senior home room who are
pregnant or have just had babies. When I ask them why this happens, I am
told, ‘Well there’s no reason not to have a baby. There’s not much for me in
public school.’ The truth is, that’s a pretty honest answer. A diploma from a
ghetto high school doesn’t count for much in the United States today. So, if
this is really the last education that a person’s going to get, she’s probably
perceptive in that statement. Ah, there’s so much bitterness -- unfairness -there, you know. Most of these pregnant girls are not the ones who have much
self-esteem....
Very little education in the school would be considered academic in
the suburbs. Maybe 10 to 15 percent of students are in truly academic
programs. Of the 55 percent who graduate, 20 percent may go to four-year
colleges: something like 10 percent of any entering class. Another 10 to 20
percent may get some other kind of higher education. An equal number join
the military....
“I get $38,000 after nearly 30 years of teaching. If I went across the
river to one of the suburbs of St. Louis, I’d be earning $47,000, maybe more.
If I taught in the Chicago suburbs, at a wealthy high school like New Trier, for
example, I’d be getting close to $60,000. Money’s not an issue for me, since I
wouldn’t want to leave; but, for new, incoming teachers, this much differential
is a great deterrent. When you consider that many teachers are afraid to come
here in the first place, or, if they are not afraid, are nonetheless offended by the
setting or intimidated by the challenge of the job, there should be a premium
and not a punishment for teaching here.”
“Sometimes I get worried that I’m starting to bum out. Still, I hate to
miss a day. The department frequently can’t find a substitute to come here,
and my kids don’t like me to be absent.”
Solomon’s advanced class, which soon comes into the room, includes
some lively students with strong views.
“I don’t go to physics class, because my lab has no equipment,” says
one student. “The typewriters in my typing class don’t work. The women’s
toilets...” she makes a sour face. “I’ll be honest,” she says, “I just don’t use
the toilets. If I do, I come back into class and I feel dirty.”
“I wanted to study Latin,” says another student, “But we don’t have
Latin in this school.”
“We lost our only Latin teacher,” Solomon says.
A girl in a white jersey with the message DO THE RIGHT THING on
the front raises her hand. “You visit other schools,” she says. “Do you think
the children in this school are getting what we’d get in a nice section of St.
Louis?”
I note that we are in a different state and city.
“Are we citizens of East St. Louis or America?” she asks.
A tall girl named Samantha interrupts. “I have a comment that I want
to make.” She then relates the following incident: “Fairview Heights is a
mainly white community. A friend of mine and I went up there once to buy
some books. We walked into the store. Everybody lookin’ at us, you know,
and somebody says, ‘What do you want?’ And lookin’ at each other like,
What are these black girls doin’ here in Fairview Heights?’ I just said, ‘I want
to buy a book!’ It’s like they’re scared we’re going to rob them. Take away a
privilege that’s theirs by rights. Well, that goes for school as well.
My mother wanted me to go to school there and she tried to have me
transferred. It didn’t work. The reason, she was told, is that we’re in a
different ‘jurisdiction.’ If you don’t live up there in the hills, or further back,
you can’t attend their schools. That, at least, is what they told my mother.”
“Is that a matter of race?” I ask. “Or money?”
“Well,” she says, choosing her words with care, “the two things, race
and money, go so close together -- what’s the difference? I live here, they live
there, and they don’t want me in their school.”
A boy named Luther speaks about the chemical pollution. “It’s like
this,” he says. “On one side of us you have two chemical corporations. One is
Pfizer -- that’s out there. They make paint and pigments. The other is
Monsanto. On the other side are companies incinerating toxic waste. So the
trash is comin’ at us this direction. The chemicals is comin’ from the other.
We are right in the middle.”
Despite these feelings, many of the children voice a curiously resilient
faith in racial integration. “If the government would put a huge amount of
money into East St. Louis, so that this could be a modern, well-equipped and
top-rate school,” I ask, “with everything that you could ever want for
education, would you say that racial segregation was no longer of
importance?”
Without exception, the children answer, “No.”
10
“Going to a. school with all the races,” Luther says, “is more
important than a modern school.”
“They still believe in that dream,” their teacher says. “They have no
reason to do so. That is what I find so wonderful and...ah, so moving.... These
kids are the only reason I get up each day.”
I ask the students, “What would happen if the government decided
that the students in a nearby town like Fairview Heights and the students here
in East St. Louis had to go to school together next September?”
Samantha: “The buses going to Fairview Heights would all be full.
The buses coming to East St. Louis would be empty.”
“What if East St. Louis had the very best computer classes in the state
-- and if there were no computer classes in the school of Fairview Heights?”
“The buses coming here,” she says, “would still be empty.”
When I ask her why, she answers in these quiet words: “I don’t know why.”
Sam Morgan, principal of East St. Louis High, was born and raised in
East St Louis. He tells me he didn’t go to East St. Louis High, however. “This
was the white high school in those days,” he says.
His office was ruined in a recent fire, so he meets me in a tiny room
with space for three chairs and a desk. Impeccably dressed in a monogrammed
shirt with gold links in his cuffs, a purple tie and matching purple handkerchief
in his suit pocket, he is tall, distinguished looking and concerned that I will
write a critical report on East St. Louis High. When I ask, however, what he’d
do if he were granted adequate funds, he comes up with a severe assessment of
the status quo.
“First, we’re losing thousands of dollars in our heating bills because
of faulty windows and because the heating system cannot be controlled. So I’d
renovate the building and install a whole new heating system and replace the
windows. We’ve had fire damage but I see that as a low priority. I need
computers -- that’s a low priority as well. I’d settle for renovation of the
typing rooms and new typewriters. The highest priorities are to subdivide the
school and add a modern wing, then bring the science laboratories up to date.
Enlarge the library. Buy more books. The books I’ve got, a lot of them are
secondhand. I got them from the Catholic high school when it closed. Most of
all, we need a building renovation. This is what I’d do to start with, if I had an
extra $20 million.”
After he’s enumerated all the changes he would like to make, he
laughs and looks down at his hands. “This, of course, is pie in the sky. You
asked me what I need so I have told you. If I’m dreaming, why not dream the
big dreams for our children?”
His concerns are down-to-earth. He’s not pretentious and does not
appropriate the cloudy jargon that some educators use to fill a vacuum of
specifics -- no talk of “restructuring,” of “teacher competency” or any of the
other buzzwords of the decade. His focus is on the bare necessities:
typewriters, windows, books, a renovated building.
While we are speaking in his temporary office, a telephone call from
the police informs him that his house has just been robbed - or that the theft
alarm, at least, has just gone off. He interrupts the interview to try to reach his
wife. His poise and his serene self-discipline do not desert him. I gain the
impression this has happened before. He’s a likable man and he smiles a lot,
but there is tremendous tension in his body and his fingers grip the edges of his
desk as if he’s trying very hard to hold his world together.
Before I leave the school, I take a final stroll along the halls. In a
number of classrooms, groups of children seem to be involved in doing
nothing. Sometimes there’s a teacher present, doing something at his desk.
Sometimes there’s no adult in the room. I pass the cooking class again, in
which there is no cooking and no teaching taking place. The “supervised”
study hall is still unsupervised.
In one of the unattended classrooms on the second floor, seven
students stand around a piano. When I stick my head into the room, they smile
and invite me to come in. They are rehearsing for a concert: two young
women, five young men. Another young man is seated at the piano. One of
the students, a heavyset young woman, steps out just before the others. When
she sings, her pure soprano voice transforms the room. “Sometimes I feel like
a motherless, child,” she begins. The pianist gazes up at her with an attentive
look of admiration.
The loveliness and the aesthetic isolation of the singer in the squalor
of the school and city bring to my mind the words of Dr. Lillian Parks, the
superintendent of the East St. Louis schools. “Gifted children,” says Dr. Parks,
“are everywhere in East St. Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty and turmoil
and the damage done by knowing they are written off by their society. Many
of these children have no sense of something they belong to. They have no
feeling of belonging to America. Gangs provide the boys, perhaps, with
something to belong to....
There is a terrible beauty in some of these girls -- terrible, I mean,
because it is ephemeral, foredoomed. The language that our children speak
may not be standard English but there still is wisdom here. Our children have
become wise by necessity.”
Clark Junior High School is regarded as the top school in the city. I
11
visit, in part, at the request of school officials, who would like me to see
education in the city at its very best. Even here, however, there is disturbing
sense that one has entered a backwater of America.
“We spend the entire eighth grade year preparing for the state exams;”
a teacher tells me in a top-ranked English class. The teacher seems devoted to
the children, but three students sitting near me sleep through the entire period.
The teacher rouses one of them, a girl in the seat next to me, but the student
promptly lays her head back on her crossed arms and is soon asleep again.
Four of the 14 ceiling lights are broken. The corridor outside the room is filled
with voices. Outside the window, where I see no schoolyard, is an empty lot.
In a mathematics class of 30 children packed into a space that might
be adequate for 15 kids, there is one white student. The first white student I
have seen in East St. Louis, she is polishing her nails with bright red polish. A
tiny black girl next to her is writing with a one-inch pencil stub.
In a seventh grade social studies class, the only book that bears some
relevance to black concerns -- its title is The American Negro -- bears a
publication date of 1967. The teacher invites me to ask the class some
questions. Uncertain where to start, I ask the students what they’ve leaned
about the civil rights campaigns of recent decades.
A 14-year-old girl with short black curly hair says this: “Every year in
February we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We
read it every year. ‘I have a dream....’ It does begin to seem -- what is the
word?” She hesitates and then she finds the word: “perfunctory.”
I ask her what she means.
“We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King,” she says.
“The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every
student in that school is black. It’s like a terrible joke on history.”
It startles me to hear her words, but I am startled even more to think
how seldom any press reporter has observed the irony of naming segregated
schools for Martin Luther King. Children reach the heart of these hypocrisies
much quicker than the grown-ups and the experts do.
“I would like to comment on that,” says another 14-year-old student,
named Shalika. “I have had to deal with this all of my life. I started school in
Fairview Heights. My mother pushes me and she had wanted me to get a
chance at better education. Only one other student in my class was black. I
was in the fifth grade, and at that age you don’t understand the ugliness in
people’s hearts. They wouldn’t play with me. I couldn’t understand it.
During recess I would stand there by myself beside the fence. Then one day I
got a note: ‘Go back to Africa.’”
“To tell the truth, it left a sadness in my heart. Now you hear them
sayin’ on TV, ‘What’s the matter with these colored people? Don’t they care
about their children’s education?’ But my mother did the best for me she
knew. It was not my mother’s fault that I was not accepted by those people.”
“It does not take long,” says Christopher, a light-skinned boy with a
faint mustache and a somewhat heated and perspiring look, “for little kids to
learn, they are not wanted.”
Shalika is small and looks quite young for junior high. In each ear
she wears a small enameled pin of Mickey Mouse. “To some degree I do
believe,” she says, “that this is caused by press reports. You see a lot about the
crimes committed here in East St. Louis when you turn on the TV. Do they
show the crimes committed by the government that puts black people here?
Why are all the dirty businesses like chemicals and waste disposal here? This
is a big country. Couldn’t they find another place to put their poison?”
“Shalika,” the teacher tells me afterward, “will go to college.”
“Why is it this way?” asks Shalika in a softer voice again. But she
doesn’t ask the question as if she is waiting for an answer.
“Is it separate but equal, then?” I ask. “Have we gone back a hundred
years?”
“It is separate. That’s for sure,” the teacher says. She is a short and
stocky middle-aged black woman. “Would you want to tel the children it is
equal?”
Christopher approaches me at the end of class. The room is too hot.
His skin looks warm and his black hair is damp. “Write this down. You asked
a question about Martin Luther King. I’m going to say something. All that
stuff about ‘the dream’ means nothing to the kids I know in East St. Louis. So
far as they’re concerned, he died in vain. He was famous and he lived and
gave his speeches and he died and now he’s gone. But we’re still here. Don’t
tell students in this school about ‘the dream.’ Go and look into a toilet here if
you would like to know what life is like for students in this city.”
Before I leave, I do as Christopher asked and enter a boy’s bathroom.
Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilets stalls, which are eaten away by
red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a
rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door
there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll.
“This,” says Sister Julia, “is the best school that we have in East St.
Louis.”
In East St. Louis, as in every city that I visit, I am forced to ask
myself if what I’ve seen may be atypical. One would like to think that this
12
might be the case in East St. Louis, but it would not be the truth.
At Landsdowne Junior High School, the St. Louis Sun reports, “there
are scores of window frames without glass, like sockets without eyes.”
Hallways in many schools are dark, with light bulbs missing or burnt out. One
walks into a school, a member of the city’s board of education notes, “and you
can smell the urinals a hundred feet away....”
A teacher at an elementary school in East St. Louis has only one fullcolor workbook for her class. She photocopies workbook pages for her
children, but the copies can’t be made in color and the lessons call for color
recognition by the children.
A history teacher at the Martin Luther King School has 110 students
in four classes -- but only 26 books. Some of the books are missing the first
hundred pages.
Each year, Solomon observes of East St. Louis High, “there’s one
more toilet that doesn’t flush, one more drinking fountain that doesn’t work,
one more classroom without texts.... Certain classrooms are so cold in winter
that the students have to wear their coats to class, while children in other
classrooms swelter in a suffocating heat that cannot be turned down.”
Critics in the press routinely note that education spending in the
district is a trifle more than in surrounding districts. They also note that public
schools in East St. Louis represent the largest source of paid employment in
the city, and this point is often used to argue that the schools are overstaffed.
The implication of both statements is that East St. Louis spends excessively on
education. One could as easily conclude, however, that the conditions of
existence here call for even larger school expenditures to draw and to retain
more gifted staff and to offer all those extra services so desperately needed in a
poor community. What such critics also fail to note, as Solomon and principal
Sam Morgan have observed, is that the crumbling infrastructure uses up a great
deal more of the per-pupil budget than would be the case in districts with
updated buildings that cost less to operate. Critics also willfully ignore the
health conditions and the psychological disarray of children growing up in
burnt-out housing, playing on contaminated land, and walking past acres of
smoldering garbage on their way to school. They also ignore the vast expense
entailed in trying to make up for the debilitated skills of many parents who
were prior victims of these segregated schools or those of Mississippi, in
which many of the older residents of East St. Louis led their early lives. In
view of the extraordinary miseries of life for children in the district, East St.
Louis should be spending far more than is spent in wealthy suburbs. As things
stand, the city spends approximately half as much each year on every pupil as
the state’s top-spending districts.
It is also forgotten that dramatic cuts in personnel within the East St.
Louis schools -- for example, of 250 teachers and 250 nonprofessional
employees, as demanded recently by state officials -- would propel 500
families with perhaps 2,000 children and dependents to the welfare lists and
deny the city the stability afforded by a good chunk of its rapidly diminished
lower middle class. Nothing, in short, that the East St. Louis school board
does within the context of its penury can benefit one interest in the city without
damaging another.
It is accurate to note that certain of the choices and priorities
established by the East St. Louis school board do at times strike an observer as
misguided, and state politicians are not hesitant to emphasize this point. The
mayor of the city for many years, a controversial young man named Carl
Officer, was frequently attacked by the same critics for what sometimes was
alleged to be his lack of probity and of farsighted planning. There may have
been some real truth to these charges. But the diligence of critics in observing
the supposed irregularities of his behavior stands in stunning contrast to their
virtual refusal to address the governing realities of destitution and near-total
segregation and the willingness of private industry to flee a population it once
courted and enticed to East St. Louis but now finds expendable.
In very few cases, in discussing the immiseration of this city; do
Illinois officials openly address the central fact, the basic evil, of its racial
isolation. With more efficient local governance, East St. Louis might become
a better-managed ghetto, a less ravaged racial settlement, but the soil would
remain contaminated and the schools would still resemble relics of the South
post-Reconstruction. They might be a trifle cleaner and they might perhaps
provide their children with a dozen more computers or typewriters, better
stoves for cooking classes, or a better shop for training future gas station
mechanics; but the children would still be poisoned in their bodies and
disfigured in their spirits.
Now and then the possibility is raised by somebody in East St. Louis
that the state may someday try to end the isolation of the city as an all-black
entity. This is something, however, that no one with power in the state has
ever contemplated. Certainly, no one in government proposes busing 16,000
children from this city to the nearby schools of Bellevue, Fairview Heights or
Collinsville; and no one intends to force these towns to open up their
neighborhoods to racially desegregated and low-income housing. So there is,
in fact, no exit for these children. East St. Louis will likely be left just as it is
for a good many years to come: a scar of sorts, an ugly metaphor of filth and
13
overspill and chemical effusions, a place for blacks to live and die within, a
place for other people to avoid when they are heading for St. Louis.
14
Still Separate, Still Unequal:
America’s Educational Apartheid *
Jonathan Kozol
Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no
firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem
to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of
racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirtyfive or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent
years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has
been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated
twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of
other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or
by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.
In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of publicschool enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in
the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were
black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of
the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland,
79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89
percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or
Hispanic.
Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how
deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these
cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for
instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95
percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93
percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and
Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S.
Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of
the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson
*Jonathan Kozol, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s
Educational Apartheid,” Harper’s Magazine, 311:1864 (September 1, 2005).
This article was adapted from The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of
Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).
High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97
percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were
white.
A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of
the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was
something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how
many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. “I’ve been at
this school for eighteen years,” she said. “This is the first white student I have
ever taught.”
One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in
the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to
visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored
leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that
took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find
out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. It is
even more disheartening when schools like these are not in deeply segregated
inner-city neighborhoods but in racially mixed areas where the integration of a
public school would seem to be most natural, and where, indeed, it takes a
conscious effort on the part of parents or school officials in these districts to
avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door.
In a Seattle neighborhood that I visited in 2002, for instance, where
approximately half the families were Caucasian, 95 percent of students at the
Thurgood Marshall Elementary School were black, Hispanic, Native
American, or of Asian origin. An African-American teacher at the school told
me -- not with bitterness but wistfully -- of seeing clusters of white parents and
their children each morning on the corner of a street close to the school,
waiting for a bus that took the children to a predominantly white school.
“At Thurgood Marshall,” according to a big wall poster in the
school’s lobby, “the dream is alive.” But school-assignment practices and
federal court decisions that have countermanded long-established policies that
previously fostered integration in Seattle’s schools make the realization of the
dream identified with Justice Marshall all but unattainable today. In San Diego
there is a school that bears the name of Rosa Parks in which 86 percent of
students are black and Hispanic and only some 2 percent are white. In Los
Angeles there is a school that bears the name of Dr. King that is 99 percent
black and Hispanic, and another in Milwaukee in which black and Hispanic
children also make up 99 percent of the enrollment. There is a high school in
Cleveland that is named for Dr. King in which black students make up 97
percent of the student body, and the graduation rate is only 35 percent. In
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Philadelphia, 98 percent of children at a high school named for Dr. King are
black. At a middle school named for Dr. King in Boston, black and Hispanic
children make up 98 percent of the enrollment.
In New York City there is a primary school named for Langston
Hughes (99 percent black and Hispanic), a middle school named for Jackie
Robinson (96 percent black and Hispanic), and a high school named for Fannie
Lou Hamer, one of the great heroes of the integration movement in the South,
in which 98 percent of students are black or Hispanic. In Harlem there is yet
another segregated Thurgood Marshall School (also 98 percent black and
Hispanic), and in the South Bronx dozens of children I have known went to a
segregated middle school named in honor of Paul Robeson in which less than
half of one percent of the enrollment was Caucasian.
There is a well-known high school named for Martin Luther King Jr.
in New York City too. This school, which I’ve visited repeatedly in recent
years, is located in an upper-middle-class white neighborhood, where it was
built in the belief -- or hope -- that it would draw large numbers of white
students by permitting them to walk to school, while only their black and
Hispanic classmates would be asked to ride the bus or come by train. When the
school was opened in 1975, less than a block from Lincoln Center in
Manhattan, “it was seen,” according to the New York Times, “as a promising
effort to integrate white, black and Hispanic students in a thriving
neighborhood that held one of the city’s cultural gems.” Even from the start,
however, parents in the neighborhood showed great reluctance to permit their
children to enroll at Martin Luther King, and, despite “its prime location and
its name, which itself creates the highest of expectations,” notes the Times, the
school before long came to be a destination for black and Hispanic students
who could not obtain admission into more successful schools. It stands today
as one of the nation’s most visible and problematic symbols of an expectation
rapidly receding and a legacy substantially betrayed.
Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial
segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our
northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would
have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation
fifty years before -- and which, moreover, they still castigate today in
retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly
concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon
convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor
like “racial segregation’’ in a narrative description of a segregated school.
Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are
repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students
may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance -and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanic -- are referred
to as “diverse.” Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated
meaning of the word, which is no longer a proper adjective but a euphemism
for a plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable.
School systems themselves repeatedly employ this euphemism in
describing the composition of their student populations. In a school I visited in
the fall of 2004 in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, a document distributed
to visitors reports that the school’s curriculum “addresses the needs of children
from diverse backgrounds.” But as I went from class to class, I did not
encounter any children who were white or Asian—or Hispanic, for that
matter—and when I was later provided with precise statistics for the
demographics of the school, I learned that 99.6 percent of students there were
African American. In a similar document, the school board of another district,
this one in New York State, referred to “the diversity” of its student population
and “the rich variations of ethnic backgrounds.” But when I looked at the racial
numbers that the district had reported to the state, I learned that there were
2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, 1 Asian child, and 3 whites.
Words, in these cases, cease to have real meaning; or, rather, they mean the
opposite of what they say.
High school students whom I talk with in deeply segregated
neighborhoods and public schools seem far less circumspect than their elders
and far more open in their willingness to confront these issues. “It’s more like
being hidden,” said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel* I met some years ago
in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her
classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and
schools. “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have
room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there
where they don’t need to think of it again.”
I asked her if she thought America truly did not “have room” for her
or other children of her race. “Think of it this way,” said a sixteen-year-old girl
sitting beside her. “If people in New York woke up one day and learned that
we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would
they feel?”
“How do you think they’d feel?” I asked.
*The names of children mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their
privacy.
16
I think they’d he relieved,” this very solemn girl replied.
Many educators make the argument today that given the
demographics of large cities like New York and their suburban areas, our only
realistic goal should be the nurturing of strong, empowered, and well-funded
schools in segregated neighborhoods. Black school officials in these situations
have sometimes conveyed to me a bitter and clear-sighted recognition that
they’re being asked, essentially, to mediate and render functional an
uncontested separation between children of their race and children of white
people living sometimes in a distant section of their town and sometimes in
almost their own immediate communities. Implicit in this mediation is a
willingness to set aside the promises of Brown and -- though never stating this
or even thinking of it clearly in these terms -- to settle for the promise made
more than a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling
in which “separate but equal” was accepted as a tolerable rationale for the
perpetuation of a dual system in American society.
Equality itself -- equality alone -- is now, it seems, the article of faith
to which most of the principals of inner-city public schools subscribe. And
some who are perhaps most realistic do not even dare to ask for, or expect,
complete equality, which seems beyond the realm of probability for many
years to come, but look instead for only a sufficiency of means --“adequacy”
is the legal term most often used today -- by which to win those practical and
finite victories that appear to be within their reach. Higher standards, higher
expectations, are repeatedly demanded of these urban principals, and of the
teachers and students in their schools, but far lower standards -- certainly in
ethical respects -- appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates
these children in unequal institutions.
“Dear Mr. Kozol,” wrote the eight-year-old, “we do not have the
things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean
bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.
You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help
us?”
The letter, from a child named Alliyah, came in a flit envelope of
twenty-seven letters from a class of third-grade children in the Bronx. Other
letters that the students in Alliyah’s classroom sent me registered some of the
same complaints. “We don’t have no gardens,” “no Music or Art,” and “no fun
places to play,” one child said. “Is there a way to fix this Problem?” Another
noted a concern one hears from many children in such overcrowded schools:
“We have a gym but it is for lining up. I think it is not fair.” Yet another of
Alliyah’s classmates asked me, with a sweet misspelling, if I knew the way to
make her school into a “good” school --”like the other kings have” -- and
ended with the hope that I would do my best to make it possible for “all the
kings” to have good schools.
The letter that affected me the most, however, had been written by a
child named Elizabeth. “It is not fair that other kids have a garden and new
things. But we don’t have that,” said Elizabeth. “I wish that this school was the
most beautiful school in the whole why world.”
“The whole why world” stayed in my thoughts for days. When I later
met Elizabeth, I brought her letter with me, thinking I might see whether, in
reading it aloud, she’d change the “why” to “wide” or leave it as it was. My
visit to her class, however, proved to he so pleasant, and the children seemed
so eager to bombard me with their questions about where I lived, and why I
lived there rather than in New York, and who I lived with, and how many dogs
I had, and other interesting questions of that sort, that I decided not to interrupt
the nice reception they had given me with questions about usages and spelling.
I left “the whole why world” to float around unedited and unrevised in my
mind. The letter itself soon found a resting place on the wall above my desk.
In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many other schools
in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had
made repeated visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down
one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds
were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large
blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In
one makeshift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a
funeral establishment in yet another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of
the Bronx, class size rose to thirty-four and more; four kindergarten classes
and a sixth-grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows.
The air was stifling in many rooms, and the children had no place for recess
because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym.
In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000
children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out
his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached
somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. “This,” he told me, pointing to
the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay
and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, “would not
happen to white children.” Libraries, once one of the glories of the New York
City school system, were either nonexistent or, at best, vestigial in large
numbers of the elementary schools. Art and music programs had also for the
most part disappeared. “When I began to teach in 1969,” the principal of an
17
elementary school in the South Bronx reported to me, “every school had a fulltime licensed art and music teacher and librarian.” During the subsequent
decades, he recalled, “I saw all of that destroyed.”
School physicians also were removed from elementary schools during
these years. In 1970, when substantial numbers of white children still attended
New York City’s public schools, 400 doctors had been present to address the
health needs of the children. By 1993 the number of doctors had been cut to
23, most of them part-time -- a cutback that affected most severely children in
the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where medical facilities were most deficient
and health problems faced by children most extreme. Teachers told me of
asthmatic children who came into class with chronic wheezing and who at any
moment of the day might undergo more serious attacks, but in the schools I
visited there were no doctors to attend to them.
In explaining these steep declines in services, political leaders in New
York tended to point to shifting economic factors, like a serious budget crisis
in the middle 1970s, rather than to the changing racial demographics of the
student population. But the fact of economic ups and downs from year to year,
or from one decade to the next, could not convincingly explain the permanent
shortchanging of the city’s students, which took place routinely in good
economic times and bad. The bad times were seized upon politically to justify
the cuts, and the money was never restored once the crisis years were past.
“
If you close your eyes to the changing racial composition of the
schools and look only at budget actions and political events,” says Noreen
Connell, the director of the nonprofit Educational Priorities Panel in New
York, “you’re missing the assumptions that are underlying these decisions.”
When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, “the
assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who
just don’t count -- children we don’t value.”
This, then, is the accusation that Alliyah and her classmates send our
way: “You have.… We do not have.” Are they right or are they wrong? Is this
a case of naive and simplistic juvenile exaggeration? What does a third-grader
know about these big-time questions of fairness and justice? Physical
appearances apart, how in any case do you begin to measure something so
diffuse and vast and seemingly abstract as having more, or having less, or not
having at all?
Around the time I met Alliyah in the school year 1997-1998, New
York’s Board of Education spent about $8,000 yearly on the education of a
third-grade child in a New York City public school. If you could have scooped
Alliyah up out of the neighborhood where she was born and plunked her down
in a fairly typical white suburb of New York, she would have received a public
education worth about $12,000 a year. If you were to lift her up once more and
set her down in one of the wealthiest white suburbs of New York, she would
have received as much as $18,000 worth of public education every year and
would likely have had a third-grade teacher paid approximately $30,000 more
than her teacher in the Bronx was paid.
The dollars on both sides of the equation have increased since then,
but the discrepancies between them have remained. The present per-pupil
spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be
compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-todo suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island. The present New York City
level is, indeed, almost exactly what Manhasset spent per pupil eighteen years
ago, in 1987, when that sum of money bought a great deal more in services and
salaries than it can buy today. In dollars adjusted for inflation, New York City
has not yet caught up to where its wealthiest suburbs were a quarter-century
ago.
Gross discrepancies in teacher salaries between the city and its
affluent white suburbs have remained persistent as well. In 1997 the median
salary for teachers in Alliyah’s neighborhood was $43,000, as compared with
$74,000 in suburban Rye, $77,000 in Manhasset, and $81,000 in the town of
Scarsdale, which is only about eleven miles from Alliyah’s school. Five years
later, in 2002, salary scales for New York City’s teachers rose to levels that
approximated those within the lower-spending districts in the suburbs, but
salary scales do not reflect the actual salaries that teachers typically receive,
which are dependent upon years of service and advanced degrees. Salaries for
first-year teachers in the city were higher than they’d been four years before,
but the differences in median pay between the city and its upper-middleincome suburbs had remained extreme. The overall figure for New York City
in 2002-2003 was $53,000, while it had climbed to $87,000 in Manhasset and
exceeded $95,000 in Scarsdale.
There are expensive children and there are cheap children,” writes
Marina Warner, an essayist and novelist who has written many books for
children, “just as there are expensive women and cheap women.” The
governmentally administered diminishment in value of the children of the poor
begins even before the age of five or six, when they begin their years of formal
education in the public schools. It starts during their infant and toddler years,
when hundreds of thousands of children of the very poor in much of the United
States are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education for no reason
but the accident of birth and budgetary choices of the government, while
18
children of the privileged are often given veritable feasts of rich developmental
early education.
In New York City, for example, affluent parents pay surprisingly
large sums of money to enroll their youngsters, beginning at the age of two or
three, in extraordinary early-education programs that give them social
competence and rudimentary pedagogic skills unknown to children of the same
age in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The most exclusive of the private
preschools in New York, which are known to those who can afford them as
“Baby Ivies,” cost as much as $24,000 for a full-day program. Competition for
admission to these pre-K schools is so extreme that private counselors are
frequently retained, at fees as high as $300 an hour, to guide the parents
through the application process.
At the opposite extreme along the economic spectrum in New York
are thousands of children who receive no preschool opportunity at all. Exactly
how many thousands are denied this opportunity in New York City and in
other major cities is almost impossible to know. Numbers that originate in
governmental agencies in many states are incomplete and imprecise and do not
always differentiate with clarity between authentic pre-K programs that have
educative and developmental substance and those less expensive child-care
arrangements that do not. But even where states do compile numbers that refer
specifically to educative preschool programs, it is difficult to know how many
of the children who are served are of low income, since admissions to some of
the state-supported programs aren’t determined by low income or they are
determined by a complicated set of factors of which poverty is only one.
There are remarkable exceptions to this pattern in some sections of
the nation. In Milwaukee, for example, virtually every four-year-old is now
enrolled in a preliminary kindergarten program, which amounts to a full year
of preschool education, prior to a second kindergarten year for five-year-olds.
More commonly in urban neighborhoods, large numbers of low-income
children are denied these opportunities and come into their kindergarten year
without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in
class activities and without even such very modest early-learning skills as
knowing how to hold a crayon or a pencil, identify perhaps a couple of shapes
and colors, or recognize that printed pages go from left to right.
Three years later, in third grade, these children are introduced to what
are known as “high-stakes tests,” which in many urban systems now determine
whether students can or cannot be promoted. Children who have been in
programs like those offered by the “Baby Ivies” since the age of two have, by
now, received the benefits of six or seven years of education, nearly twice as
many as the children who have been denied these opportunities; yet all are
required to take, and will be measured by, the same examinations. Which of
these children will receive the highest scores? The ones who spent the years
from two to four in lovely little Montessori programs and in other pastelpainted settings in which tender and attentive and well-trained instructors read
to them from beautiful storybooks and introduced them very gently for the first
time to the world of numbers and the shapes of letters, and the sizes and
varieties of solid objects, and perhaps taught them to sort things into groups or
to arrange them in a sequence, or to do those many other interesting things that
early childhood specialists refer to as prenumeracy skills? Or the ones who
spent those years at home in front of a TV or sitting by the window of a slum
apartment gazing down into the street? There is something deeply hypocritical
about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child “accountable” for
her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high
officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their
own kids six or seven years earlier.
Perhaps in order to deflect these recognitions, or to soften them
somewhat, many people, even while they do nor doubt the benefit of making
very large investments in the education of their own children, somehow -paradoxical as it may seem -- appear to be attracted to the argument that
money may not really matter that much at all. No matter with what regularity
such doubts about the worth of spending money on a child’s education are
advanced, it is obvious that those who have the money, and who spend it
lavishly to benefit their own kids, do not do it for no reason. Yet shockingly
large numbers of well-educated and sophisticated people whom I talk with
nowadays dismiss such challenges with a surprising ease. “Is the answer really
to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools?” I’m often asked.
“Don’t we have some better ways to make them `work’?” The question is
posed in a variety of forms. “Yes, of course, it’s not a perfectly fair system as
it stands. But money alone is surely not the sole response. The values of the
parents and the kids themselves must have a role in this as well you know,
housing, health conditions, social factors.” “Other factors” -- a term of overall
reprieve one often hears -- ”have got to be considered, too.” These latter points
are obviously true but always seem to have the odd effect of substituting things
we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious solutions like cutting
class size and constructing new school buildings or providing universal
preschool that we actually could put in place right now if we were so inclined.
Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite
an answer because the answer seems to be decided in advance. “Can you really
19
buy your way to better education for these children?” “Do we know enough to
be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we
make?” “Is it even clear that this is the right starting point to get to where we’d
like to go? It doesn’t always seem to work, as I am sure that you already
know,” or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who
ask them.
Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy
districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don’t even send their
children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive
private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the
New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than
$20,000 a year. During their children’s teenage years, they sometimes send
them off to very fine New England schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton,
where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000.
Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time, so
they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children’s education every
year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been
served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally
sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes
and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the
children of the poor.
As racial isolation deepens and the inequalities of education finance
remain unabated and take on new and more innovative forms, the principals of
many inner-city schools are making choices that few principals in public
schools that serve white children in the mainstream of the nation ever need to
contemplate. Many have been dedicating vast amounts of time and effort to
create an architecture of adaptive strategies that promise incremental gains
within the limits inequality allows.
New vocabularies of stentorian determination, new systems of
incentive, and new modes of castigation, which are termed “rewards and
sanctions,” have emerged. Curriculum materials that are alleged to be aligned
with governmentally established goals and standards and particularly suited to
what are regarded as “the special needs and learning styles” of low-income
urban children have been introduced. Relentless emphasis on raising test
scores, rigid policies of nonpromotion and nongraduation, a new empiricism
and the imposition of unusually detailed lists of named and numbered
“outcomes” for each isolated parcel of instruction, an oftentimes fanatical
insistence upon uniformity of teachers in their management of time, an openly
conceded emulation of the rigorous approaches of the military and a frequent
use of terminology that comes out of the world of industry and commerce -these are just a few of the familiar aspects of these new adaptive strategies.
Although generically described as “school reform,” most of these
practices and policies are targeted primarily at poor children of color; and
although most educators speak of these agendas in broad language that sounds
applicable to all, it is understood that they are valued chiefly as responses to
perceived catastrophe in deeply segregated and unequal schools.
“If you do what I tell you to do, how I tell you to do it, when I tell you
to do it, you’ll get it right,” said a determined South Bronx principal observed
by a reporter for the New York Times. She was laying out a memorizing rule
for math to an assembly of her students. “If you don’t, you’ll get it wrong.”
This is the voice, this is the tone, this is the rhythm and didactic certitude one
hears today in inner-city schools that have embraced a pedagogy of direct
command and absolute control. “Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B.
F. Skinner...,” says the Times, proponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula
articulate their aim as the establishment of “faultless communication” between
“the teacher, who is the stimulus,” and “the students, who respond.”
The introduction of Skinnerian approaches (which are commonly
employed in penal institutions and drug-rehabilitation programs), as a way of
altering the attitudes and learning styles of black and Hispanic children, is
provocative, and it has stirred some outcries from respected scholars. To
actually go into a school where you know some of the children very, very well
and see the way that these approaches can affect their daily lives and thinking
processes is even more provocative.
On a chilly November day four years ago in the South Bronx, I
entered P.S. 65, a school I had been visiting since 1993. There had been major
changes since I’d been there last. Silent lunches had been instituted in the
cafeteria, and on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been
introduced as well. On those days the students were obliged to sit in rows and
maintain perfect silence on the floor of a small indoor room instead of going
out to play. The words SUCCESS FOR ALL, the brand name of a scripted
curriculum -- better known by its acronym, SPA -- were prominently posted at
the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost every room.
Also frequently displayed within the halls and classrooms were a number of
administrative memos that were worded with unusual didactic absoluteness.
“Authentic Writing,” read a document called “Principles of Learning” that was
posted in the corridor close to the principal’s office, “is driven by curriculum
and instruction.” I didn’t know what this expression meant. Like many other
undefined and arbitrary phrases posted in the school, it seemed to be a dictum
20
that invited no interrogation.
I entered the fourth grade of a teacher I will call Mr. Endicott, a man
in his mid-thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of
about a dozen teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a
single summer of short-order preparation. Now in his second year, he had
developed a considerable sense of confidence and held the class under a tight
control.
As I found a place to sit in a far corner of the room, the teacher and
his young assistant, who was in her first year as a teacher, were beginning a
math lesson about building airport runways, a lesson that provided children
with an opportunity for measuring perimeters. On the wall behind the teacher,
in large letters, was written: “Portfolio Protocols: 1. You are responsible for
the selection of [your] work that enters your portfolio. 2. As your skills
become more sophisticated this year, you will want to revise, amend,
supplement, and possibly replace items in your portfolio to reflect your
intellectual growth.” On the left side of the room: “Performance Standards
Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6
Mathematical Skills and Tools...”
My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children
sitting to the right of me. The teacher’s response to this distraction was
immediate: his arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand
straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this, too. When they saw
their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it, too.
“Zero noise,” the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be
unneeded. The strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which
turned out to be one of a number of such silent signals teachers in the school
were trained to use, and children to obey, had done the job of silencing the
class.
“Active listening!” said Mr. Endicott. “Heads up! Tractor beams!”
which meant, “Every eye on me.”
On the front wall of the classroom, in hand-written words that must
have taken Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe, was a list of terms that could
be used to praise or criticize a student’s work in mathematics. At Level Four,
the highest of four levels of success, a child’s “problem-solving strategies”
could be described, according to this list, as “systematic, complete, efficient,
and possibly elegant,” while the student’s capability to draw conclusions from
the work she had completed could be termed “insightful” or “comprehensive.”
At Level Two, the child’s capability to draw conclusions was to be described
as “logically unsound”; at Level One, “not present.” Approximately 50
separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in this wallsized tabulation.
A well-educated man, Mr. Endicott later spoke to me about the form
of classroom management that he was using as an adaptation from a model of
industrial efficiency. “It’s a kind of ‘Taylorism’ in the classroom,” he
explained, referring to a set of theories about the management of factory
employees introduced by Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s. “Primitive
utilitarianism” is another term he used when we met some months later to
discuss these management techniques with other teachers from the school. His
reservations were, however, not apparent in the classroom. Within the terms of
what he had been asked to do, he had, indeed, become a master of control. It is
one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing
even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced
while I was there.
The teacher gave the “zero noise” salute again when someone
whispered to another child at his table. “In two minutes you will have a chance
to talk and share this with your partner.” Communication between children in
the class was not prohibited but was afforded time slots and, remarkably
enough, was formalized in an expression that I found included in a memo that
was posted on the wall beside the door: “An opportunity...to engage in
Accountable Talk.”
Even the teacher’s words of praise were framed in terms consistent
with the lists that had been posted on the wall. “That’s a Level Four
suggestion,” said the teacher when a child made an observation other teachers
might have praised as simply “pretty good” or “interesting” or “mature.” There
was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school:
“Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Accountable Talk.” The ardor to
assign all items of instruction or behavior a specific name was unsettling me.
The adjectives had the odd effect of hyping every item of endeavor. “Authentic
Writing” was, it seemed, a more important act than what the children in a
writing class in any ordinary school might try to do. “Accountable Talk” was
some thing more self-conscious and significant than merely useful
conversation.
Since that day at P.S. 65, I have visited nine other schools in six
different cities where the same Skinnerian curriculum is used. The signs on the
walls, the silent signals, the curious salute, the same insistent naming of all
cognitive particulars, became familiar as I went from one school to the next.
“Meaningful Sentences,” began one of the many listings of
proficiencies expected of the children in the fourth grade of an inner-city
21
elementary school in Hartford (90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic) that I
visited a short time later. “Noteworthy Questions,” “Active Listening,” and
other designations like these had been posted elsewhere in the room. Here, too,
the teacher gave the kids her outstretched arm, with hand held up, to
reestablish order when they grew a little noisy, but I noticed that she tried to
soften the effect of this by opening her fingers and bending her elbow slightly
so it did not look quite as forbidding as the gesture Mr. Endicott had used. A
warm and interesting woman, she later told me she disliked the regimen
intensely.
Over her desk, I read a “Mission Statement,” which established the
priorities and values for the school. Among the missions of the school,
according to the printed statement, which was posted also in some other
classrooms of the school, was “to develop productive citizens” who have the
skills that will be needed “for successful global competition,” a message that
was reinforced by other posters in the room. Over the heads of a group of
children at their desks, a sign anointed them BEST WORKERS OF 2002.
Another signal now was given by the teacher, this one not for silence but in
order to achieve some other form of class behavior, which I could not quite
identify. The students gave exactly the same signal in response. Whatever the
function of this signal, it was done as I had seen it done in the South Bronx and
would see it done in other schools in months to come. Suddenly, with a
seeming surge of restlessness and irritation -- with herself, as it appeared, and
with her own effective use of all the tricks that she had learned -- she turned to
me and said, “I can do this with my dog.”
White children made up “only about one percent” of students in the
New York City schools in which this scripted teaching system was imposed,*
according to the New York Times, [“Fearing a Class System in the Classroom;
A Strict Curriculum, but Only for Failing Schools, Mostly in Poor Areas of
New York,” New York Times [(January 19, 2003)] which also said that “the
prepackaged lessons” were intended “to ensure that all teachers -- even novices
or the most inept” -- would be able to teach reading. As seemingly pragmatic
and hardheaded as such arguments may be, they are desperation strategies that
come out of the acceptance of inequity. If we did not have a deeply segregated
system in which more experienced instructors teach the children of the
privileged and the least experienced are sent to teach the children of minorities,
*SFA has since been discontinued in the New York City public schools, though it is
still being used in 1,300 U.S. schools, serving as many as 650,000 children. Similar scripted
systems are used in schools (overwhelmingly minority in population) serving several million
children.
these practices would not be needed and could not be so convincingly
defended. They are confections of apartheid, and no matter by what arguments
of urgency or practicality they have been justified, they cannot fail to further
deepen the divisions of society.
There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education.
There ought to be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in
their schools. Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend
in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You do not find the
answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific
methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance.
Documents like these don’t speak of happiness. You have to go back to the
schools themselves to find an answer to these questions. You have to sit down
in the little chairs in first and second grade, or on the reading rug with
kindergarten kids, and listen to the things they actually say to one another and
the dialogue between them and their teachers. You have to go down to the
basement with the children when it’s time for lunch and to the playground with
them, if they have a playground, when it’s time for recess, if they still have
recess at their school. You have to walk into the children’s bathrooms in these
buildings. You have to do what children do and breathe the air the children
breathe. I don’t think that there is any other way to find out what the lives that
children lead in school are really like.
High school students, when I first meet them, are often more reluctant
than the younger children to open up and express their personal concerns; but
hesitation on the part of students did not prove to be a problem when I visited a
tenth-grade class at Fremont High School in Los Angeles. The students were
told that I was a writer, and they took no time in getting down to matters that
were on their minds.
“Can we talk about the bathrooms?” asked a soft-spoken student
named Mireya.
In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force
of their directness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend
to capture your attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about
some of the serious academic problems that were common in the school, but
her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her
schoolmates had to under go cut to the heart of questions of essential dignity
that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with all over the nation.
Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the
state of California document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law
requires. Of the limited number of bathrooms that are working in the school,
22
“only one or two...are open and unlocked for girls to use.” Long lines of girls
are “waiting to use the bathrooms,” which are generally “unclean” and “lack
basic supplies,” including toilet paper. Some of the classrooms, as court papers
also document, “do not have air conditioning,” so that students, who attend
school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round, “become red-faced and
unable to concentrate” during “the extreme heat of summer.” The school’s
maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms. Rat
droppings were found “in the bins and drawers” of the high school’s kitchen,
and school records note that “hamburger buns” were being “eaten off [the]
bread-delivery rack.”
No matter how many tawdry details like these I’ve read in legal briefs
or depositions through the years, I’m always shocked again to learn how often
these unsanitary physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools
that serve our poorest students -- even after they have been vividly described in
the media. But hearing of these conditions in Mireya’s words was even more
unsettling, in part because this student seemed so fragile and because the need
even to speak of these indignities in front of me and all the other students was
an additional indignity.
“The problem is this,” she carefully explained. “You’re not allowed to
use the bathroom during lunch, which is a thirty-minute period. The only time
that you’re allowed to use it is between your classes.” But “this is a huge
building,” she went on. “It has long corridors. If you have one class at one end
of the building and your next class happens to be way down at the other end,
you don’t have time to use the bathroom and still get to class before it starts.
So you go to your class and then you ask permission from your teacher to go to
the bathroom and the teacher tells you, ‘No. You had your chance between the
periods...’”
“I feel embarrassed when I have to stand there and explain it to a
teacher.”
“This is the question,” said a wiry-looking boy named Edward,
leaning forward in his chair. “Students are not animals, but even animals need
to relieve themselves sometimes. We’re here for eight hours. What do they
think we’re supposed to do?”
“It humiliates you,” said Mireya, who went on to make the interesting
statement that “the school provides solutions that don’t actually work,” and
this idea was taken up by several other students in describing course
requirements within the school. A tall black student, for example, told me that
she hoped to be a social worker or a doctor but was programmed into “Sewing
Class” this year. She also had to take another course, called “Life Skills,”
which she told me was a very basic course -- ”a retarded class,” to use her
words -- that “teaches things like the six continents,” which she said she’d
learned in elementary school.
When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that
she’d been told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so.
What was required was that high school students take two courses in an area of
study called “The Technical Arts,” and which the Los Angeles Board of
Education terms “Applied Technology.” At schools that served the middle
class or upper-middle class, this requirement was likely to be met by courses
that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance to college
preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts
requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture,
the designing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced
computer graphics, a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and
sculpture, or an honors course in engineering research and design. At Fremont
High, in contrast, this requirement was far more often met by courses that were
basically vocational and also obviously keyed to low-paying levels of
employment.
Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she
had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she’d been assigned to
take a class in hair-dressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya
could not skip these subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue
her college aspirations, she replied, “It isn’t a question of what students want.
It’s what the school may have available. If all the other elective classes that a
student wants to take are full, she has to take one of these classes if she wants
to graduate.”
A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted
up across her hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that
she’d taken hairdressing twice! When I expressed surprise that this was
possible, she said there were two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont
High. “One is in hairstyling,” she said. “The other is in braiding.”
Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly
began to cry. “I don’t want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I
knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I’m trying to go to
college. I don’t need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for
something else.”
“What would you rather take?” I asked.
“I wanted to take an AP class,” she answered.
Mireya’s sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys
23
who had been silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who
had long hair down to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and
spoke into the silence that followed her last words.
“Listen to me,” he said. “The owners of the sewing factories need
laborers. Correct?”
“I guess they do,” Mireya said.
“It’s not going to be their own kids. Right?” “Why not?” another
student said.
“So they can grow beyond themselves,” Mireya answered quietly.
“But we remain the same.”
“You’re ghetto,” said Fortino, “so we send you to the factory.” He sat
low in his desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded
with a cynical intelligence. “You’re ghetto—so you sew!”
“There are higher positions than these,” said a student named
Samantha.
“You’re ghetto,” said Fortino unrelentingly. “So sew!”
Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected
to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But,
even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or
six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about “successful
global competition.” Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian
adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value
to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a
perishable piece of life itself.
Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have
any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes
and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of
these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for
instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his
critics said, was turning children into “robots,” found no reason to dispute the
charge. “Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your
home?” he asked, and “will never snatch your pocketbooks.... These robots are
going to be producing taxes.’’
Corporate leaders, when they speak of education, sometimes pay lipservice to the notion of “good critical and analytic skills,” but it is reasonable
to ask whether they have in mind the critical analysis of their priorities. In
principle, perhaps some do; but, if so, this is not a principle that seems to have
been honored widely in the schools I have been visiting. In all the various
business-driven inner-city classrooms I have observed in the past five years,
plastered as they are with corporation brand names and managerial
vocabularies, I have yet to see the two words “labor unions.” Is this an
oversight? How is that possible? Teachers and principals themselves, who are
almost always members of a union, seem to be so beaten down that they rarely
even question this omission.
It is not at all unusual these days to come into an urban school in
which the principal prefers to call himself or herself “building CEO” or
“building manager.” In some of the same schools teachers are described as
“classroom managers.”* I have never been in a suburban district in which
principals were asked to view themselves or teachers in this way. These
terminologies remind us of how wide the distance has become between two
very separate worlds of education.
It has been more than a decade now since drill-based literacy methods
like Success For All began to proliferate in our urban schools. It has been three
and a half years since the systems of assessment that determine the
effectiveness of these and similar practices were codified in the federal
legislation, No Child Left Behind, that President Bush signed into law in 2002.
Since the enactment of this bill, the number of standardized exams children
must take has more than doubled. It will probably increase again after the year
2006, when standardized tests, which are now required in grades three through
eight, may be required in Head Start programs and, as President Bush has now
proposed, in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades as well.
The elements of strict accountability, in short, are solidly in place; and
*A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with “Help
Wanted” signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think about the
jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a poster that displayed
the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and a few others. “It’s
like working in a store,” a classroom aide explained. “The children are learning to pretend they’re
cashiers.” At another school in the same district, children were encouraged to apply for jobs in
their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the children in this school, there was an
“Absence Manager” and a “Behavior Chart Manager,” a “Form Collector Manager,” a “Paper
Passer Outer Manager,” a “Paper Collecting Manager,” a “Paper Returning Manager,” an “Exit
Ticket Manager,” even a “Learning Manager,” a “Reading Corner Manager,” and a “Score Keeper
Manager.” I asked the principal if there was a special reason why those two words “management”
and “manager” kept popping up throughout the school. “We want every child to be working as a
manager while he or she is in this school,” the principal explained. “We want to make them
understand that, in this country, companies will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself,
no matter what you’ve done.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by “no matter what you’ve done,” and
asked her if she could explain it. “Even if you have a felony arrest,” she said, “we want you to
understand that you can be a manager someday.”
24
in many states where the present federal policies are simply reinforcements of
accountability requirements that were established long before the passage of
the federal law, the same regimen has been in place since 1995 or even earlier.
The “tests-and-standards” partisans have had things very much their way for an
extended period of time, and those who were convinced that they had
ascertained “what works” in schools that serve minorities and children of the
poor have had ample opportunity to prove that they were right.
What, then, it is reasonable to ask, are the results?
The achievement gap between black and white children, which
narrowed for three decades up until the late years of the 1980s -- the period in
which school segregation steadily decreased -- started to widen once more in
the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by
dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision. From that point on, the gap
continued to widen or remained essentially unchanged; and while recently
there has been a modest narrowing of the gap in reading scores for fourthgrade children, the gap in secondary school remains as wide as ever.
The media inevitably celebrate the periodic upticks that a set of scores
may seem to indicate in one year or another in achievement levels of black and
Hispanic children in their elementary schools. But if these upticks were not
merely temporary “testing gains” achieved by test-prep regimens and were
instead authentic education gains, they would carry over into middle school
and high school. Children who know how to read -- and read with
comprehension -- do not suddenly become nonreaders and hopelessly disabled
writers when they enter secondary school. False gains evaporate; real gains
endure. Yet hundreds of thousands of the inner-city children who have made
what many districts claim to be dramatic gains in elementary school, and
whose principals and teachers have adjusted almost every aspect of their
school days and school calendars, forfeiting recess, canceling or cutting back
on all the so-called frills (art, music, even social sciences) in order to comply
with state demands those students, now in secondary school, are sitting in
subject-matter classes where they cannot comprehend the texts and cannot set
down their ideas in the kind of sentences expected of most fourth- and fifthgrade students in the suburbs. Students in this painful situation, not
surprisingly, tend to be most likely to drop out of school.
In 48 percent of high schools in the nation’s 100 largest districts,
which are those in which the highest concentrations of black and Hispanic
students tend to be enrolled, less than half the entering ninth-graders graduate
in four years. Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools
graduating less than half their ninth-grade class in four years has increased by
75 percent. In the 94 percent of districts in New York State where white
children make up the majority, nearly 80 percent of students graduate from
high school in four years. In the 6 percent of districts where black and
Hispanic students make up the majority, only 40 percent do so. There are 120
high schools in New York, enrolling nearly 200,000 minority students, where
less than 60 percent of entering ninth-graders even make it to twelfth grade.
The promulgation of new and expanded inventories of “what works,”
no matter the enthusiasm with which they’re elaborated, is not going to change
this. The use of hortatory slogans chanted by the students in our segregated
schools is not going to change this. Desperate historical revisionism that
romanticizes the segregation of an older order (this is a common theme of
many separatists today) is not going to change this. Skinnerian instructional
approaches, which decapitate a child’s capability for critical reflection, are not
going to change this. Posters about “global competition” will certainly not
change this. Turning six-year-olds into examination soldiers and denying
eight-year-olds their time for play at recess will not change this.
“I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low
expectations,” said President Bush in his campaign for reelection in September
2004. “It’s working. It’s making a difference.” Here we have one of those
deadly lies that by sheer repetition is at length accepted by surprisingly large
numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth; and it is not an innocent
misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the
parents of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not forcefully resisted it
will lead us further in a very dangerous direction.
Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the
labyrinthine intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the
work that it will take to change this. If it takes people marching in the streets
and other forms of adamant disruption of the governing civilities, if it takes
more than litigation, more than legislation, and much more than resolutions
introduced by members of Congress, these are prices we should be prepared to
pay. “We do not have the things you have,” Alliyah told me when she wrote to
ask if I would come and visit her school in the South Bronx. “Can you help
us?” America owes that little girl and millions like her a more honorable
answer than they have received.
25
America and the Contemporary World
2nd Quarter
Semester Exam
Part 1: Questions (30%)
Using the film Crash, and the readings from Kozol, design questions which you and your
classmates will use as the class discussion.
Write at least ten thoughtful questions, using this guideline:
a) Personal Questions (2-4 questions): General questions about race or poverty that will create
interest in order to get people talking about the article. It often helps to develop a question that
asks people to think about their own personal experiences.
b) Closed Questions (2-4 questions): Question about specific details of the articles and film for
which there is only one right answer
c) Open Questions (2-4 questions): Questions about specific details from the articles and film
for which there is no single right answer
d) Context Questions (2-4 questions): Questions that addresses the overall themes of this unit.
Part II: Graded Oral Discussion (50%)
Using the questions you have just designed, we will conduct a Graded Oral Discussion. Make
sure that you help to keep the discussion flowing and that you encourage everyone to participate.
Part III: Book Report/Interview (20%)
Using another piece of paper, explain how your book report and interview intersect with the
content of this quarter. Does your book’s themes still relate to the issues of race and class in
America today? Compare your interview with the themes of your book and the issues of race in
America today. Are they saying the same thing?
Using all the information you have learned this quarter, answer the following question:
Does America have a race problem? What should we do about it?
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