“Who
needs to know what the word ‘fetiparous’ means?” the Nephew complained. I told him since he’s graduated with a master’s
degree in mechanical engineering, still doesn’t have a job, and is still living
with his father (and occasionally his mother) that he ought to look it up,
because that’s what he and his generation are becoming. They need to know what the word means,
actually.
Oh,
I was no better. If it hadn’t been for
Jane Eyre, I’d never have gotten past community college and my typing and
shorthand classes. Elementary school was
not just a social challenge, but an educational obstacle as well. The Sixties was the era of Noam Chomsky
grammar, “new math”, and social studies as a replacement for history. Our school library was a janitor’s closet
with a nasty librarian who enforced strict, grade-level reading rules.
For
reading material, we were given the dreary short stories of Langston Hughes and
Ring Lardner Jr., and the plays of Arthur Miller. I could read the words well enough – I had a
good vocabulary, thanks to my parents.
But I fell down in comprehension.
No , indeed, I could not comprehend the notion of a totalitarian society
where down was up and up was down and ugliness was beauty.
By
the time I got to middle school, I’d pretty much given up on reading. The middle school librarian was a very nice
lady and she tried to entice me with offerings of Anne of Green Gables and
National Velvet, traditional children’s literature. But I refused even these, not trusting
anything anyone gave me to read, except Mom and Dad.
It
was only in my freshman year of high school that I discovered – or I should
say, rediscovered – the joys of reading when my English teacher assigned Jane
Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I read it
through in one afternoon and was completely hooked on reading after that. My next foray into the adventures of reading
was A Tale of Two Cities (a parental recommendation) and then The Lord of the
Rings, recommended by a book store clerk.
Ultimately, I got by on my SATs, but I was no scholar. At least, not yet. I wasn’t convinced that reading would do me
any good; my parents had assured me that I was going to be a secretary.
According
to an article in the Wall Street Journal, only 43 percent of 1.66 million
private and public school students who took the college-entrance exam posted
accepted scores that indicated they would do well in college. The scores are unchanged from last year, and
the lowest the scores have been since 1972.
Students
need a score of 1550 out of the total 2400 to achieve college readiness,
defined as a 65 percent chance of maintaining at least a B-minus as a college
freshman. Nationwide 44 percent of high
school freshmen continue on to college and 21 percent of those earn a
bachelor’s degree within six years.
The
SAT data mirror scores from the ACT college-entrance exam—which showed about
75% of students failed to meet college-readiness standards—and served to
increase the hand-wringing over whether U.S. high-school students are prepared
to attend college and compete in a global economy. Colleges generally accept
results of either test.
College Board officials and other experts
noted that the declining scores could have much to do with the testing pool,
which is growing and becoming more diverse. Last year, 45 percent of students
who took the exam were members of a minority group, up from 38% of the 1.56
million who took it in 2008. And 28% of test takers reported that English
wasn't exclusively their first language, up from 24% in 2008.
Minority and low-income students are
less likely to take a core curriculum—defined as four years of English and
three or more of math and the sciences—that would help them prepare to do well
on the exam.
David
Rusk (Cities Without Suburbs; Inside Game, Outside Game); Myron Orfield, (Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability);
and Peter Dreier, et al. (Place
Matters: Metropolitics for the
Twenty-First Century) blame white flight and suburban sprawl for this
educational apartheid. The flight of the
middle class to the suburbs and safer neighborhoods and better schools, left
the metropolitan cities with no one to pay the bills or serve as role models
for at-risk students.
All
the authors recommend some form of regionalization or annexation by the cities
to recapture the fleeing middle class before they get so far out of reach that
there will be no possibility of taxing them for their “fair share” of urban
education. They admit that all the money
that has been thrown at the schools has been for nought, as the most current
SAT scores demonstrate.
They
accuse the middle class of being selfish racists who have dragged the jobs too
far away for the most poverty-stricken to reach. No word is said of the heavy taxation and
union rates that drove those manufacturing jobs out of the cities, and finally,
out of the country.
Someone
must have told Rusk to dial down the racism charges after Cities Without
Suburbs, for he’s more willing to admit, in his second book, Inside Game,
Outside Game, that the inner cities bear some of the responsibility for their
plight. One of the prime reasons for their
failing schools is lack of stable, two-couple homes. Female-headed households are more likely to
be lower down on the poverty scale.
Rusk
rode around with some inner city cops to get a feel for the neighborhoods. He asked them what they thought was the
biggest single contributor to urban blight.
“The drugs,” the policeman replied.
“Get rid of the drugs, and you won’t have any more problems.”
Rust
tells a story of the creation of the Sprawl Machine by an evil enemy of
America. His advisor suggests luring the
middle class out of the cities with dream homes and low-cost mortgages, without
any money down on the property. My
parents paid the 20 percent down on our house in 1961, probably on Mom’s
insistence. My grandfather didn’t raise
a stupid daughter. But the real
introductory agent that caused America’s economic spiral downward was not dream
homes. My parents weren’t all that happy
about living 20 miles outside of the city where they both grew up.
The
introductory agent was drugs, and other illegal activities. White flight didn’t swallow up my great-grandmother’s
house (which we drove by in the 1970s) in the Lake Edenwald (now called Mount
Eden) section of the North Bronx. The
way Mom described her childhood home, we expected to find a neat little
bungalow-type house with a tidy front yard and painted shutters. What we found was a dilapidated house with a
dirt yard, surrounded by barbed wire.
The local deli, which her friends’ parents owned, was a lonely outpost
of commerce in a desert of vacant lots, long since burned out. The neighborhood looked more like Mount Doom out of The Lord of the Rings than Mount Eden.
“Mount
Eden” was in the news recently, when the north Bronx community unveiled a brand
new school for the community. I thought
Edenwald was farther north than it is; it’s actually below the Cross-Bronx
(Rusk and the other Regionalists bitterly hate this roadway – as does everyone
who’s ever been stuck on it in traffic – for dividing the Bronx. It wasn’t the highway that divided the Bronx,
though). Evander Childs H.S., both Mom
and Dad’s alma mater, was farther north near the border with Mount Vernon. The public schools in that area have dismal
ratings; the charter schools are faring a little better, though only one was
ranked “above-average.”
Things
were no better in Camden, N.J., 12 years ago.
The city’s elementary schools were ranked dead last in the state. The residents couldn’t participate in a
volunteer garden planting for fear of the drug dealers. Anyone who thinks legalizes drugs is a great
idea should visit this section of Camden.
But be warned; in an effort at “efficiency,” the city disbanded its
police department.
Drugs,
alcohol, and sexual promiscuity. What
Rusk and the others claim about intense segregation is undoubtedly true. At least that’s what I remember from my
linguistics class back in the early days of college, when I finally broke free
of the secretary track. Isolated
communities tend to retain their original language, oral traditions, and even
accents, if they aren’t exposed to other cultures.
Urban
planners find it easier to blame “racist” white people for their urban ills
rather than face up to the failures of the minority communities. Excuse us white folks if we don’t want our
children robbed in or on the way to and from school. The urban schools are a hell of no
discipline, gang wars, drug dealing, and intimidation. That’s straight from a lucky group of
students who got the opportunity to attend a charter school in Harlem.
The
Regionalists believe that the low-income students will learn better if their
blighted communities are broken up and Section 8 voucher holders be allowed to
plant themselves, through federal legislation, in any community they choose. Only a few here and a few there, we’re
promised.
None
of this is the fault of the kids. Well,
not exactly. I’ve met some of them
through Read for American programs.
There are minority kids willing to give reading a try. The older kids are fans of the Vampire
series. The younger kids loved all the “lily-white”
happy family, exciting adventures people donated. They might take more of an interest in
reading if someone wrote books about black and Hispanic kids in happy families,
going on Harry Potter-type adventures, and so forth. Most of their literature is about slavery and
civil rights, and I’d bet that the average black student cherishes these
stories about as much as I cherished Ring Lardner.
Giving
them some readable, relatable literature would carry the minority kids a long
way. But before that can happen,
something has to be done about their parents.
Kids are like ducklings – they pattern after their parents. If they don’t see Mom and especially Dad,
reading, they’re not likely to take up the reading habit themselves. But of course, first, you have to find the
black Dads, who may be in prison or wandering the streets. Someone has to tell them, “Go home!”
Rusk
notes that a large part of the problem with black marriages is
unemployment. True enough. During the Great Depression, marriages took a
huge nose-dive, and that included my maternal grandparents. Kids who don’t have a father they see – and see
going to work – have no path to follow.
So they’ll follow a gang leader or drug dealer instead.
Until
black families get their acts together, white suburbanites are going to keep on
fleeing. The object of annexation or
regionalization is to stop the flight by preventing the building of anymore
suburbs. In other words, we’ll be
trapped ourselves, with no way out.
Regionalists who tout the positive aspects of their plans only need look
across the Hudson at New York City, the most taxed city in the nation. Crime isn’t as bad in New York as it is in
Chicago, Murder Capital of the Nation, but the taxation is. New York tried annexation over a century ago
and it didn’t help the city much. As
soon as the George Washington Bridge was built, people started up buying up
land here in New Jersey and the subdividing it.
In
1983, ethnographer Shirley Brice Heath published the now-discredited and out of
print study, “Ways With Words: Language,
Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms.”
Heath studied two mill towns in North Carolina, only a few miles apart: one, white working-class, the other, black
working class, and a third, wealthier white group referred to as “the
Townspeople.”. She recorded the
differences in spoken language and reading habits between the two
communities. Heath found that even in
two, fairly equal working class communities, there were noticeable differences
in parental styles of teaching their toddlers to speak, read and learn (i.e.,
white townspeople began reading to their children much earlier and had books in
the home, whereas the white working class people were not as focused on
education and looked upon reading as a way to escape chores, and the black
families had no books at all).
It
took a long time to find a copy of this book, which I first learned about in a
Teaching Reading class in college. This
is the book I told my former colleague about.
She’s deeply involved in community outreach, and education in particular. I started to tell her about it, but our
department manager (both women are black) shushed me up. Still, AL sounded interested and as I’m going
to have lunch with my former boss this week (something I never did when I
worked for him) I wanted to have him give her the book.
Only
it didn’t come and it didn’t come. I
paced the floor every day last week waiting for the delivery truck. Finally, it arrived today, along with the
news about the SAT scores.
The fetiparous graduating class of 2012
posted an average score of 496 in reading, a one-point drop from 2011 and a
34-point decline since 1972, the first year the College Board began tracking
the scores of “college-bound” seniors. The way the test is scored changed in
the mid-1990s, but the mean scores in prior years were recalibrated to make
them comparable.
You
get past the SATs and into college in much the same way musicians get to
Carnegie Hall (“Practice, practice, practice”).
Practice, practice, practice for the tests and read, read, read.
