Education Reform: Race to the Top, a Long Way to Go

When I was in graduate school on Chicago’s Southside, I helped out at a few local public schools, tutoring kids and serving as an extra adult body in classrooms overflowing with children. One afternoon, the regular teacher was out and a substitute had set the children on edge. A little girl, let’s call her Shana, was whiny and couldn’t find her homework.

The sub turned on her, “Of course you can’t find it. You know why? Because you’re wicked!”

Shana’s eyes grew wide and wet.

As the substitute circled in on another child, I kneeled to assure Shana that she’d done nothing wrong, to help her search her backpack for the missing worksheets. I noticed she was rubbing her arms. There were ringed bruises the size and shape of an adult’s fingers. With little prompting, she told me that things weren’t good at home.

I think about that little girl sometimes. I imagine abuse at home and finding a maniac substitute teacher at her one place of solace. This was a school that had been on the brink of failure, but reforms were slowly turning it around. Yet the surrounding neighborhood kept bleeding in. The teachers tried hard and most loved their students, but a number of them were under-qualified. More than once, I heard basic math facts taught incorrectly. Kids came with bags under their eyes (kept up late listening to mom fighting with her boyfriend). They knew about sexuality and made explicit comments to one another by third grade (because they’d heard these words at home). Some of these kids had a world of hurt trailing them into school, but if you asked, they’d tell you they wanted to be surgeons, or authors, or astronauts—even the kids who could barely read.

I frequently found myself in the school social worker’s office, reporting one thing or another (that substitute teacher, some situation at home). She was a woman who could be surprised by little and had a seemingly bottomless reserve of empathy for the children. Somehow, she continued to cling to the conviction that some, if not most, of these kids would make it.

In this, the year of the education documentary, The Lottery shows how four families wait for a number drawn which will mean the difference between success (charter school) and an uncertain future for their kids. Waiting for Superman tells a similar story—and the trailers for each make me cry every time, because these kids just want an education, because I can picture all the kids who are losing. It’s not always done so dramatically with numbered tickets, but in so many ways, the luck of the draw defines our children’s futures.

Thursday, President Obama talked about education reform in a speech before the National Urban League. He shared the sort of figures that once startled, and now have become part of the American landscape—failure, in the education of our children, has become a standard measure. In one generation, America went from first to twelfth globally in college graduation rates. We broadly acknowledge that black students trail white students in the US, but American black students also trail kids in every other developed nation. It’s a systemic problem, and one understood for quite some time as somehow just part of how the education system works.

What gets lost so often in the mix is the day-to-day experience of attending a low-income school. We look at family income levels, number of kids receiving free lunches, and often are not surprised when these numbers directly correlate to students’ future success, or lack thereof.

What is significant is that they don’t have to. I was a free lunch kid (one mortified when our lunch lady would offer extra meals to those of us on the public docket). I grew up in a Rust Belt school system well-stocked with other kids whose families had modest or no incomes. Certainly, much has been and should be said about the racial disparities that define much of our education system’s failure in black and Hispanic communities. But those differences have nothing to do with the kids themselves nor their race. It’s two parts circumstance of neighborhood (and ten parts the broader disparities that lodge some kids in communities segregated by race, income or crime).

But when schools work, when they turn around, it happens with white, brown and black kids, and it has everything to do with a shift in attitude among their teachers, administrators and parents. The president spoke about young children, five and six years old, their eyes brimming with hope and aspiration for their futures:

“I remember the principal telling me that soon, all that would change. The hope would start fading from their eyes as they started to realize that maybe their dreams wouldn’t come to pass -- not because they weren’t smart enough, not because they weren’t talented enough, but because through a turn of fate they happened to be born in the wrong neighborhood. They became victim of low expectations, a community that was not supporting educational excellence.”

I grew up in a family where two of my brothers were in prison. It was obvious that there would be little money for college (because there was barely enough for groceries). But what made the difference for me was being encouraged, cajoled and tricked by my teachers into believing I was special. I’m certain they did the same for my classmates, but their words made me believe I could be something. An ethos of being more was drilled into me, and that’s what was missing in Chicago—and that’s what’s missing in schools all over the country.

It’s easy, when you hear about kids living in homes with drugs and weapons, or living in vans on streets with frequent drive-bys, to adjust to just hoping they live to adulthood. The social worker I knew in Chicago did what she could, but after her years of work, was immune to shock. In his speech, the president spoke about the Race to the Top program, saying our education crisis is about lifting up all our failing schools. It’s his administration’s hope that in reforming these schools, the disparities of race in education will be dealt with in kind.

That answer seems at once callow and too close-reaching, but likely, the only way to start. Throughout my lifetime the debate over education reform has raged on, and schools have only declined. There are layers of dysfunction that manifest in a child’s failure at school, but since school can only do so much, it’s about time that at least in that place, we come to expect the best for all of our kids, and from all of our teachers. If we can’t yet bring ourselves to demand better lives for all of our neighbors (and deal with the gulf between have and have not), then at the very least, our schools should be a sanctuary, a refuge for learning, and a safe harbor for leaving the occasional darkness of our upbringings behind.