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."
I’m reading Kozol again, which is, by its nature, a slow dance with despair. Shame of the Nation is about the continuous resegregation of our public schools, not only in urban settings where the problem is most visible urgent, but increasingly more so in smaller suburbs and even rural areas especially in the North. Since my 4 year stint in the north, I had suspected as much. My experience on the streets of NYC seemed to verify that suspicion.
“During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968. . . . Almost three fourths of black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority,” and more than two million, including more than a quarter of black students in the Northeast and Midwest, “attend schools which we call apartheid schools” in which 99 to 100 percent of students are nonwhite. The four most segregated states for black students, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California. In California and New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.”
And I looked up the rest of that report and the next in line behind those top three were not South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama. They were Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Maryland. Only one of our dirty South states made the list. Now, I’m not one to make excuses for the South, especially it’s embarrassing history, but I will say that I am less guilt-stricken in my white skin being from South Carolina than I would be if I were from...lets say...Great Neck, NY. I’m not sure why that is exactly, but I think the resegregation of northern cities and suburbs has a hell of a lot to do with it. When I think about my high school experience, while not being delusional, I can pretty safely say that GS was more culturally and economically diverse that any other “alternative” or private high school around. I don’t have the numbers or anything, but, venturing a guess, I’d say it was about 70-75% white. SC’s population in 2006 was around 73% (used my trusty Isle / Of = Palms/ 100 method) white. Of course, things inevitably changed after I left when the school implemented a $3000 dollar meal plan, because the economic disparity between white and black or Latino, while not being as grossly pronounced as it is in NYC, is substantial to say the least. And, GS has never been able to tap into the local Latino population as it so desperately needs to in order to truly reflect the now 4.3 % of SC’s documented Latinos.
Meanwhile, I have a white friend from Oakland where the white population is only 30%, who went to a high school where, out of a 300 person senior class, there were only two black kids, 4 latino kids, and 6 asians. The black population of Oakland is 35% and the latino population is 21% and the Asian population is 14%. I was just floored by this...especially when she commented on how backwards the South is. And I have never seen as much blatant residential segregation as I did when I was in Manhattan. Once you get up to 110th street, you just stop seeing white people altogether until you get up to Ft. Tryon and the Cloisters with the exception of a few gentrified, trendy streets around 125th. And the same things happens in Brooklyn, when you walk from the Slope down to Sunset Park. Hell, I worked next to what used to be MLK High School (an almost all minority school despite its UWS location) which Bloomberg closed in 2005 due to low performance. Now the white kids are back, but the name has changed. The building is now divided into three or four competitive magnet schools where white families that can’t afford Cathedral or Ethical Culture send their kids.
I’ve come to the conclusion that contemporary racism is triggered and enhanced by money, not by some ignorant moral/ideological misconception. While I don’t doubt that the philosophical racism our nation’s historical psyche does manifest itself into today’s population, I think the real instigator is wealth. Which is why, I gather, the South has an advantage over the North. Face it, most white “upper middle class” South Carolinians are paupers in comparison with their “upper middle class” neighbors in places like Connecticut or New York. At Liberty High School, I knew of about 3 people that were considered “rich” in my eyes. And most of my peers would have probably considered me rich as a teacher’s kid, even though your typical Park Slope “Business Administration” Dad would spew his coffee all over the living room if you told him what my mother made last year. About half the kids I was close to, growing up in Liberty, were free-lunch kids. I remember staying over at my friend Sara’s house in the 5th grade, a crumbling single-wide trailer with tires holding a tarp over the roof to keep it from leaking where she lived with her mom, dad, and three siblings. It was sort of around that time period that I began to understand that my family’s financial strife paled in comparison to the poverty I grew up around, white and black.
Something Kozol talks about in Shame of the Nation is the rubrics of value that “underachieving” schools have put into place all over the country. He describes a system of rating individual student performance in a school. Level 4 is at the top, where a student is considered proficient and up to his or her grade level in math and reading. Level 1 is where a student is placed when he or she is essentially non-functioning in their current level. While I don’t have a problem with using these levels to keep track of where a student is academically, I was just devastated when reading how these children have started to refer to themselves by level. Kozol described a little girl named Pineapple, who pointed to other children on the playground and told him what level so and so was. “Shavaun is a Level 3” not Shavaun is AT Level 3.” She is. When he asked Pineapple was her level was, she looked down at her feet and mumbled, “Oh, I’m a Level 2.” It reminds me of middle school, before the age of scanned id cards that you put your lunch money on, when lunch tickets were color-coded based on if you had full price, reduced, or free lunch. Blue for full. Gold for reduced. Red for Free.
It’s kinda scary how these places are being run. Reading about them, I was eerily reminded of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish or Bentham’s Panopticon. Foucault talks about the 4 characteristics of a system that can maintain institutional discipline: cellular, organic, combinatory, and the other one that I can’t remember. Cellular being a way to evenly and effectively distribute bodies, organic making sure that activities are natural to the bodies, combinatory allowing for the movement and cooperation of the bodies as a single entity, and the last one being the one I STILL don’t remember. Well these school systems, implemented for improving student performance, have completely neglected the organic. Emotion and discussion has been outlawed and been replaced by “active listening.” Creativity and analysis have been replaced by “Authentic Writing.” What the fuck is Authentic Writing? And why on God’s green earth are we using this kind of terminology around 7 and 8 year olds?
In the face of the failure of these schools due to their isolated, segregated, under-funded status, have we just given up on education? We can’t teach these kids and no one really cares so we’ll just pay lip service to public education by babysitting them for 10 years until they can drop out or move on to another panopticon...prison. Because that’s what some of these places are: prison-shaped waiting rooms, where all these kids learn is to distrust each other and themselves.
