Confessions of a “Failing” Teacher

Like most teachers I’ve gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching—a lesson “wasn’t bad,” or a particular class was “sorta interesting.” I’ve even been told that I was a “pretty good teacher.” High praise coming from teenagers.

But the truth is I wasn’t a “good teacher.” I was a “failure,” at least according to America’s “education reformers”—that “odd coalition of corporate-friendly Democrats, right-wing Republicans, Tea Party governors, Wall Street executives, and major foundations” as Diane Ravitch aptly defines them—because the kids I taught consistently lagged behind their peers in every measure, performing well below grade level, failing state standardized tests.

Given the present state of teacher evaluations, with a significant portion allotted to student performance on mandated tests, I’d be in big trouble if I hadn’t left teaching recently. I certainly wouldn’t get any bonus pay. If it were up to the Obama Administration I might not even have a job since I would be one of those teachers who, as the President noted in his 2012 State of the Union address, “just aren’t helping kids.” And if I still taught in New York I’d be facing the prospect of having my name and ratings published in newspapers and on the internet if the Legislature gets its way in what the New York State Union of Teachers called the “name/shame/blame game.”

But I know that I wasn’t a “failure,” and more importantly, that the hundreds of kids I’ve taught weren’t either. My students were mostly young people of color, living in neighborhoods and families destroyed by poverty and substance abuse, racism and violence, physical and sexual abuse. Overall, life—shaped by their mistakes and by conditions they couldn’t control—left them little time for, or interest in education. Frequently that lack of time and interest led to trouble which led to repeated suspensions, expulsions and in some cases, incarceration.  But sometimes trouble translated into being placed in a small community alternative high school or the jailhouse classroom in the county penitentiary, both places I taught in.

By the time they made it to me, my students were pretty damaged. They hated school. They could barely read or do basic math. And forget about writing. “You expect me to write?” more than one teen squawked in horror at me. But eventually they did. They read, piling up grade levels like some Americans pile up debt. They calculated. They even learned the magic of connecting sentences that made sense.

But by the state’s educational rubric, they didn’t cut it. As noteworthy as their successes were—both academically and behaviorally—they were still “failures” and I along with them: success was only validated by passing the standardized tests.

One of the hardest things I had to do was send kids into those tests who weren’t ready. I tried hard beforehand to get them out of it. I’d explain, downright argue at times, with the school administration that although my students had made solid progress it wasn’t enough to tackle the exam and so they should wait and take it next time. It never worked. “It’s the law,” I was told.

Every time I think about Tyler my palms sweat. Tyler was a jailhouse student, lanky, 16, with an Afro picked out to an angel’s halo. But he was no angel, and he had the missing front teeth and two years at the county pen to prove it. When he first came to class he was reading on a second grade level. For some reason he was determined to improve this time round in school. He came every day, took work to his cell every night and returned it completed every morning. Slowly his reading level increased. He was pleased with himself. You could see it in the almost toothless smile he didn’t bother to hide anymore.

But he wasn’t close to test-ready. When I petitioned to delay Tyler’s exam the administrator refused but offered me her idea of comfort, “Look, it’s okay if he fails. Then he’ll be eligible for remediation.” I couldn’t help shooting back, “Sure, send the kid in so he can get shot down one more time.” I prepared Tyler for that test as best as I could. He worked harder than ever. He was psyched. “I’m gonna ace it, Mr. C.”

You know the end of the story. It’s the same for many damaged kids living in poverty and neglect, factors that the pundits say can be overcome by good, dedicated teachers. Once again Tyler “failed.” He never came back to class for remediation.

If Tyler and kids like him are “failures” then I—and all the other teachers who teach in tough places—are too. But I don’t think we should take the rap alone. As long as our educational policies let students like Tyler down in the name of “reform” and “the law,” continuing the “name/shame/blame game” instead of addressing the social conditions that cripple these kids’ lives and learning, then we as a country are failures as well, in need of some serious remediation.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Changing the World for Kids, One Book At a Time

She was pretty upfront about it: she didn’t want me there.

“It’s not you personally,” Marge explained. “It’s the book.”

Marge was the moderator, researcher, engine, really, of a local reading group. She was good at what she did, I was told, and I believed it. She was pretty thorough at listing all the reasons why she didn’t want to read or recommend to the group my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, about my ten years teaching teenagers in adult detention.

“The title, for one. It’s all wrong. Even the third graders I used to teach would know that it wasn’t correct,” she started off. “It’s just poor grammar. And what about that cover? It put me off.”

I happened to think Beacon Press did a terrific job with the cover—the title, in hip-hop script on a blue background and, in profile, the photograph of a young African American male, sixteen at most, looking out at the reader with a somewhat challenging look yet with the inevitable vulnerability of any teenager.

But I knew where Marge was headed.

“Besides, I don’t like the topic, sounds too depressing,” she said. And then she got blunt. “What’s it got to do with me?”

I’d heard the objections before, although not quite so frankly stated. I did some mild reassuring, but I didn’t work at it. I knew that Marge had called to invite me to speak to the group despite her opposition. Two friends who were a part of the book club had read the book, liked it, and lobbied for it.

When I arrived at the community center the night of my talk, I thought things might have changed.

“We don’t usually do refreshments, but I thought this time it might be nice,” Marge said, greeting me warmly at the door, then leading me to a table covered with plates of home-baked cookies and pastries, a coffee urn, and two pitchers of fresh-squeezed lemonade.

And indeed things had changed. At first when Marge introduced me, she was true to form. I winced as she laid out all her objections and doubts about the book in excruciating detail. “Oh boy, what kind of night is this going to be?” I thought.

But then, with equal clarity, Marge told the group of about thirty how the book had changed her thinking and answered all her doubts. How she understood now that the title reflected the fractured yet still human lives of many of the kids I wrote about, especially Ray, the young man who was damaged by years of abandonment and drugs, and from whom I took the quote for the title. She said how the cover itself mirrored these kids’ lives—on the one hand it showed the fragile world of childhood with the book jacket’s blue background and playful lettering, and on the other, the gritty world of the streets with that scowling, discontented-looking young man. How, yes, the stories that she expected to depress and alienate her did make her sad at times, as she learned about these children’s lives in and out of jail. Yet at the same time they made her smile and laugh and admire those same children for their resilience and generosity and willingness to forgive society for what it had done to them, although society didn’t forgive the children for their mistakes.

“It was pretty obvious to me by the end of the book that I had a lot more in common with those kids than I could ever have imagined,” Marge concluded.

Listening to Marge, I smiled to myself and began to wonder why I’d made the trip there (well, there were those delicious-looking brownies), since she was telling the group all the things I would have said.

And I wondered if Marge realized that what had happened to her is what I always hoped would happen whenever I handed one of my locked-up students a book: their perceptions of the world would shift; that places they’d never been to, were excluded from, would open up to them; that people they’d never gotten the chance to meet, or who they refused to meet because of all the protective barriers they put up, would suddenly became more like them than they could have ever realized.

I didn’t think Marge, now, after reading the book, would mind being in the company of Warren, who, finally, at the age of fifteen and reading on a fourth-grade level, had completed his “first-ever book,” as he put it, or Frankie, who made it through a long stint in solitary confinement devouring the novels (all good ones, I might add) I brought him; or Larry, who began to see that even a life like his wasn’t foreign to the pages of literature after he finished reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

Readers like Marge and Warren and Frankie and Larry and all the others out there are the reasons why writers like me write their books and why teachers like me stay in the classroom despite the struggles. We want to do nothing less than change the world (and a few hearts while we’re at it) book by book.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

The “Man Box”: Helping Young Men Change

In my years of teaching young men locked up in the county pen it was easy to see how the pressures of “being a man,” especially a man in the ‘hood, had devastating effects on these teens. In some cases the “man box”–the load of gender stereotypes that these young guys were born into–helped put these young offenders in jail.The lack of role models, mentors who could show them another way of navigating the world, just made it more difficult to do the right thing. I recommend checking out Amil Cook’s blog at www.amilcook.com  with an  interesting video of a talk done by Tony Porter addressing these issues from a very personal point of view. If you know any young men coming up in the world you might want to share it with them.

Global Lesson in Hope: Worldwide Concern for Juvenile Justice

In a six by eight foot jail cell there’s barely room for a bunk, a seatless toilet, and a postage-sized sink. The only other space you have in jail is in your head, and even that gets crowded with all the people you carry around in there who you resent for the things they did to you.

The world is pretty small when you’re locked up, especially if you’re a kid doing time with a healthy body that needs to move, energy sizzling through you like high tension wires, your emotions threatening to blow the power grid any second as you struggle with those nagging teenage questions, “Who am I?” “Why me?” It doesn’t help that the only answers you get come from walls and bars, gates and guards, and maybe that crowd of unreliable experts in your head.

Many of my jailhouse students lived that loneliness and isolation hour after hour, day after day, and for some, year after year until it was hard for them not to see the world as anything but confining, and brutally uncaring. It’s a vision that, as hard as they might work against it, too many of them carry throughout life.

Even though I taught high school in a county penitentiary for over 10 years and experienced in a minor way some of that same isolation and indifference I still know otherwise about the world: That there are people—teachers, social workers, clergy, parents, judges and lawyers—out there who care about real justice, not just for the “done to” but for the “doer” as well; who worry not only about “the system”—education, child welfare, juvenile and criminal justice—but about the kids, each individual kid, consigned to those systems.

But it’s hard a sell to young people whose world has taught them the opposite. Sometimes, listening to them talk about their lives, I feel as though they are living an alternative reality. Then again, maybe that is the reality of today’s America.

This summer I got to talk with various groups about these issues and met some people who could back me up on my view of the world. I just wish my students could’ve met them as well.

I’d like them to meet the 15 or so law students whom I met who were interning at the New York Center for Juvenile Justice (NYCJJ) in New York City, an organization working to ensure that kids in trouble are treated compassionately and fairly in the justice system. Even the toughest guys that I taught, and I’ve taught quite a few “thugs”—scarred, tattooed, hearts tough as stone (or so they’d like you to think)—would’ve had a hard time not being affected by the interns’ sensitivity to, genuine concern for, and insights into their lives and “the system” that had them (in so ways.) But my students were used to words—judge words, cop words, social worker words, even teacher words, so they would have been impressed by the students plans to establish juvenile justice chapters in their law schools and gotten a kick out of the fast-cut videos they made about laws that treat kids as adults when it comes to crime but not when it comes to voting or drinking or going to the movies.

And I wonder what they would’ve thought of the group of German juvenile justice professionals visiting the center. In halting English or through the slow process of translation, these professionals shared the same concerns about their criminal justice system that people in this country have about ours: a system that refuses to treat children as children; that refuses to look at the real reasons—poverty, discrimination, failing families, lack of money and resources for youth programs—that young people get drawn into crime.

At times the conversation in two languages was stumbling and drawn out. However, what translated fluently was the universality of the concern and compassion that is out there for the world’s young throwaways. It was moving to realize that there is a worldwide network of people just like me, just like the student interns and the staff at NYCJJ, just like the many other folks I know involved in this work. We may not be many but we’re out there, and, if you’re like me, it helps just knowing that.

Because the work never stops. As concerned as many of us from various nations are about the already bleak treatment young offenders—our students—receive, there are in some countries loud demands to make that treatment even harsher and more punishing. Canada for example “is planning to shift toward a jail-intensive approach” when dealing with its juveniles according to Toronto’s The Globe and Mail. And in the wake of Britain’s recent riots there are renewed calls for a retaliatory approach to young offenders rather than a rehabilitative one.

The global picture can be bleak. Nevertheless, that network of concerned and committed people is still out there. Despite everything, they keep doing what they can for the world’s locked up kids because no matter how much those kids might bad mouth their country, society, “The Man,” their own lives, they don’t give up hope. So, I ask you, how could any of us do otherwise?

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

 

Kids in Adult Jails: A Different Kind of Commencement

Now that all the high school graduations are over and the backyard barbeques celebrated, I’m finally coming down from the contact high of all that youthful exuberance and optimism.

It’s easy to get swept up into those good feelings. But now as I move into summer’s quieter months, I can’t help thinking about the high school students I taught in a county penitentiary and what “commencement” meant for them.

Success never came easily to my students. Why should it? They came from lives wrecked by poverty and discrimination. It tried to wreck their spirit, but it never could, not completely. In that way my students weren’t any different from the kids at our local high schools—like their peers, they believed that life was there for the shaping.  That faith in success, though, didn’t always translate onto the streets. So they got caught up in crime, got arrested, did their time.

When that time was served, their “commencement” was being released from jail. The “graduation ceremony” wasn’t much: Down to booking to sign papers, their clothes stuffed into black garbage bags. Then the booking officer handed the “graduate” bus money and delivered the keynote address, “Stay out of jail.”

And that’s exactly what they intended to do. My jailhouse students talked a lot about “starting over again,” and I believed each of them. Because while they were locked up, most worked to change things for the better. They studied for their diploma or GED. They worked at staying clean and sober. They grappled with the rage of disappointment that tore at their guts through anger management programs. If there was a thread of family life left, they reconnected with it.

When they hit the streets, they were determined to shake the dust—and smell—of prison off them forever. But the only thing that had changed while they were locked up was them, not the streets. There was nothing out there for them, no services, no resources, no one. The only things waiting were the same predator-prey food chain, the same joblessness, and the same lure of the streets with easy money.

I knew the litany these young people heard from corrections and probation officers: Get a job. Go to school. Stay away from your buddies (the only people who even remembered your name.) Stay away from your girlfriend (the only one glad to see you.) Stay in the house. Start over. Stay out of trouble. And I’ve watched more than one kid’s face fall when he was told that he had to find someplace else to live. He couldn’t live with his mother because his probation didn’t allow him to associate with anyone with a record, and since his brother, or uncle, or cousin was already there he needed to find another home.

It’s not hard to guess what all those demands sound like to a 16 year old fresh out of prison: Stop being the only person you recognize. Stop living your life.

I often tell people that the changes we demand of young ex-offenders are things most of us, even with all our assets, would find daunting. The isolation. The loneliness. The helpless rage of unreasonable expectations. Yet these kids are told to make those changes with no one to help or guide them.

It happens, though, if rarely—some kid takes the plunge into all that fear and dynamites his life apart.

Alex was one of those kids. The judge made it clear. This time no probation. Instead a full county bid. Next arrest, a long stretch in state prison. Even at 17 Alex knew that going back to the same neighborhood, the same friends and enemies would seal his fate. “I might as well stay here and wait for the next bus to state prison,” he tried to laugh it off but couldn’t.

I can’t tell you what happened, but something did. Everybody had given up on him, with good reason or not, but somehow he hadn’t. Alex had a cousin in California that he never met but who said he could come live with him. So at his “graduation” he hopped a cross country bus. However, there was nothing quixotic about his move. Alex had never been out of his own town except to go to various jails and detention centers. He knew he had to do it. It was a terrible struggle at first. The dirt jobs. The loneliness. The disorientation. The fears of failure. Eventually, though, the jobs got better and he signed up for college. Last I heard Alex was close to a real commencement.

Watching that final moment of triumph when our local high school graduates flung their caps into the air I imagined all the hands—of family, teachers, coaches, clergy, counselors—that over the years had made that moment possible.  Young ex-offenders at their “commencement” haven’t had, and don’t have that same net of hands. And yet, there are plenty of hands in each of their communities to help, if they only would. That way kids like Alex wouldn’t have to go 3,000 miles for a chance at a new beginning.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Getting the Word Out About Kids in Adult Jails: One Author’s Reasons

The only people who think it’s fun to do book promotion and events are the ones who haven’t written a book, at least in my experience. I hear it all the time from friends and family. “How exciting!” “I wish I could do something like that.”

A writer friend squirms in sympathy over our occasionally shared breakfasts when I tell her what and where my latest book gig is. “Oh, my god!” she gasps, turning as green as her eggs, a local eatery’s homage to Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” (or in this case, tempah.) “Better you than me.”

I’m never happy about it either as I set out for yet another night of mystery, suspense, anticipation—dread, actually. A night when Life’s Big Questions loom large: Will anybody buy a book? Will anybody even show up?

So why do I—or any author—put myself through that kind of anxiety? There are the “industry” reasons, of course. Platform. Name recognition. Networking. An eye on another book contract. The old bottom line: sales.

But are those the real reasons that get me out there, that get any author out there? Are they motivation enough for me to make contacts, set up venues (and I’ve done quite a variety—libraries, bookstores, panels, organizations, agencies, college classes, reading groups), walk into empty rooms, and, if I’m lucky, meet strangers?

I have no quibble with the industry’s reasons. But I know me. I didn’t write a book to promote it, and I didn’t dream of making a lot of money from it. Fact is, I love stories—real or made up—and have an abiding faith in the power of story to change people’s lives, so I’ve always written.

I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, the book that gets me out these days, came about because of the locked up kids I met during my ten years teaching at a county jail. While their lives were packed with street adventures, heartbreaking tragedies and lost opportunities, they were also filled with humor, dreams, honesty and resilience. Kids like that don’t get their stories told too often, and if they are told, they’re usually filled with recriminations. I wanted to give those kids the words they didn’t always have to tell their tales.

Writer, storyteller—nevertheless, I’m still a peddler on the road with goods to sell.

It happened to me just the other night. Driving through a pounding rain in a Boston traffic pile-up that would make most Manhattanites pale, I arrived late at the library where I was speaking. With apologies, I began my talk to the intrepid audience who themselves had weathered the rain. It was a good night, filled with good will but not much of the “other stuff,” well, book sales. On the drive back, I asked myself once again, “Why do I do this?” That night I came up with a pretty good answer.

After the reading, as often happens, people came up to me with comments to share, experiences to compare. A former teacher in a Cleveland inner city school. A man who volunteered at a local prison working with inmates on an architecture program. A law student who wanted to specialize in juvenile justice. A parent. A therapist.

At the edge of the group, I could see a young woman waiting, her head down, looking like she wanted to be invisible. Slowly, as each person finished and left, she inched her way forward. Then when everybody else was gone she looked up at me. “I just wanted to thank you. If it hadn’t been for teachers like you I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you. I wouldn’t be able to come to something like this,” she almost whispered. “I just wanted you to know that in the darkness teachers like you are a point of light in some kid’s life. Your stories really show that.” I shook her hand with my own thanks.

Thinking about that interchange later, I realized that the young woman’s hands were empty. She hadn’t bought a book, but she gave me a lot more than the price of one. Her empty hands, her shy, quiet words and my own feeling of gratitude helped me see that there was another type of currency exchanged at events like these that has little to do with the marketplace.

Then I started to remember all the other gifts I had gotten over the months and months of readings and talks. The young security guard at Barnes and Noble who, like the woman tonight, waited until everyone was gone to tell me about her struggles with the streets and how she only managed to keep out of jail for the sake of her baby. The Viet Nam vet who overcame his years of addictions through books. The woman who had two sons locked up in jail, “I’m so worried about them. I hear horrible things happen in prison.”

That kind of currency may be spare change to some, not all, in the publishing industry, but for this writer, at least it’s what keeps me writing and in turn, gets me back on the road, ready to peddle my stories and to listen to yours.

Originally posted on HuffingtonPost

Teachers in Tough Places: Another View of Juvenile Justice

It was a busman’s holiday. 30 people in a room, all teachers in high school and GED programs in various prisons from across New York State, listening to me talk about teaching locked up kids. The conference was in Saratoga Springs with lots of other things to do. Yet there they were, nodding their heads in recognition of the stories I told, laughing in all the right places with that dark sense of humor we jailhouse teachers develop from years of working with society’s throwaways in some of the toughest schools going.

In interviews or talks I’m frequently asked why I wrote I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. I often explain that I want people to see the kind of living conditions to which young offenders are consigned in adult facilities and to show that each incarcerated kid is a real person, one who most likely grew up in a home crippled by poverty, by poor health, by addiction as well as physical and sexual abuse. It’s a picture not conveyed by the crime numbers we read in the newspapers.

But looking out over that audience of incarcerated education teachers, I knew there was another reason why I wrote these stories: to describe what it’s like to be a teacher working under some of the harshest conditions going. In this time of “education reform” and its concomitant teacher bashing, I wanted to praise the people who are committed to teaching every day, no matter what’s going on around them, around their classroom and their students.

And in jail a lot goes around. Most classrooms are right in the correctional facility, and so the closed, foul smells of overcrowded and under-washed bodies, the ubiquitous roaches, the dirt and grime of poorly ventilated buildings and the chaotic noises of slamming gates and shouting voices easily seep under a classroom door.

One of the rooms in which I taught at a county lockup was a cramped, dark space right off a major hallway going to the blocks. Students sat elbow to elbow at a long table. Getting up for a book or some paper was tricky business. Personal space in jail is as valuable a commodity as a dealer’s street corner. I never knew when a fight, or at least a face-off, might erupt. Likewise, it didn’t make it any easier for my students or me to settle down knowing that any minute one of the kids might be pulled out of class for a random search, a lawyer’s visit, or taken down to booking in handcuffs. And nobody could tell when a fight might break out and a code called with the emergency response team in full riot gear running down the hallway screaming threats and commands.

Try teaching the difference between a simple and a complex sentence, or the definition of irony, with that kind of disruption. Sometimes I felt downright silly going on about adjectives in the face of such chaos. Sometimes I’d think, “Why bother?” Nevertheless, I kept at it. I taught every day and my students learned. I want to repeat that, because so many people don’t believe it’s possible: every day I taught and my students learned.  I had high standards and expectations. We had skills to acquire and to hone. We had tests to prepare for. We had tools to fashion so that when they left jail they could repair and change their lives and, I hoped, not come back to prison.

Looking out at that conference room full of intent faces, I could see that every teacher understood what I was talking about. They knew the damaged lives their students brought into prison and in turn, into their classrooms, and they recognized their own oppressive working conditions.

I realized something else that day in Saratoga. My jailhouse colleagues were not much different from the many other educators in this country who work in similarly harsh environments in the inner city in schools that are underfunded and undersupplied, in unsafe and unhealthy buildings, and in dangerous neighborhoods. The media reports that schools fail because teachers don’t teach. All they want to do is protect their cushy, tenure-assured jobs. Don’t believe it. Teachers—especially those in the toughest places—teach because they believe that every kid can succeed and deserves a chance. If we teachers are greedy, it’s for those small triumphs that every day make a difference in our students’ lives.

Reposted from Beacon Broadside

Juvenile Justice: An Issue that the Young Generation Cares About

Since the paperback publication of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup I’ve been doing a lot of events at schools and colleges, talking to students who feel very strongly about the need for our criminal justice system to be reformed when it comes to young offenders. They are keenly aware of the injustice of locking kids up in prisons with no opportunity to change their lives around.

Indeed, they should be concerned. It is their generation that is being incarcerated, and it will be their generation who will be the responsible both morally and economically for those young people as they keep returning to jail and then become adults in the system.

I find their concern and passion about this issue heartening. Many wish to become professionals in the criminal justice or human services field so that they can make a difference. Others are active in social justice movements. Their intelligence and compassion around these issues is inspiring.

One such student has written extensively about this issue on her blog, Colleen’s Blog. It was brought to my attention by a colleague because this high school senior as a part of a social justice curriculum read my book and wrote extensively about the issues it raises. Aside from the great insights this blogger expresses I think her posts are worth reading because they show that not all our schools and their students are failing, the way the education reformers keep warning us.

With young people like the ones I’ve been meeting and talking with and students like Colleen I hope that the next generation will not be obsessed with being “tough on crime” but rather with being “smart on crime.”

Education Reform: Failing Schools, Failing Lives

No matter how tough politicians and education pundits talk the obstacles remain. Massachusetts is a good example. The Boston Globe reports that among 3^rd graders last year, minority and low income students were twice as likely as white students to score lowest in the state’s standardized tests. These are discouraging numbers for everyone, and they are pretty much replicated nationally. They raise the question: Why after all these years of No Child Left Behind are we still struggling to achieve parity between rich and poor students, between white and minority children?

Nobody is satisfied with our schools, and there’s blame all round as experts scramble for solutions: We label schools as failing. We fire whole teachings staffs. We tweak curricula. We script teachers’ every move. We increase the school day and student seat time at the expense of art, music and recreation. Still things don’t improve.

Maybe we’re not listening to the right people. Somebody like Dick Gregory, for example. Yeah, Dick Gregory. You may remember him (if you’re old enough)—African American comedian, civil rights activist, 1968 presidential candidate, author, and nutrition guru? His list of accomplishments doesn’t include education specialist, but he knew quite a lot about why schools fail and about the “achievement gap.” He went to one of those failing schools and was trapped in that gap.

Most of my students—kids serving time in an adult county jail where I taught high school—didn’t know who Dick Gregory was when I announced that we were going to read a short chapter entitled “Shame” from his autobiography. At first they weren’t interested. They assumed (like so many teenagers) that the reading, any reading would be boring. Then when I mentioned that he was black, and had marched with Dr. King there was a spark of curiosity. It was enough to get us into the chapter. After that they were hooked.

In a page and a half, Gregory tells the reader (and America if we would only listen) why poor kids of color fail in school. In heartbreaking detail he writes about being in the third grade filled with shame—the shame of poverty, of being a “welfare kid,” of being abandoned by his father, of living in the projects, of wearing dirty clothes because once again there wasn’t any hot water, of having little food, and of living with rats and bugs.

When my locked-up students read that he was a “troublemaker” in school, the little kid who spent more time in the corner facing the wall than he did at his desk, none of them was surprised. And when Gregory wonders out loud why the teacher didn’t understand that maybe he caused trouble not because he was bad or stupid but because he was poor and hungry and too tired to concentrate you could hear the whispered, “Ya got that right,” followed by, “bitch” when she berates him in front of the class, talking about “you and your kind.”

The reading may seem dated to those of us comfortable with the gifts of life; after all that was back in the late 30s. But my students had no problem with what Gregory described. Most of them lived similar lives, although I would venture to say, much harsher and more embattled ones. They grew up in neighborhoods overrun with drugs, guns and random violence, in households fractured by unemployment, disease and substance abuse. My students went to schools that never had enough books or supplies or staff to go around, in falling down buildings in neighborhoods unsafe to walk. A friend of mine works in a school where it’s not unusual that kids can’t play outside at recess because of drive-by-shootings.

If it wasn’t good in Dick Gregory’s day, it’s far from good for minority students today. The 2010 Census confirms this: Black children are three times as likely to be poor as white children. Forty percent of black children are born into poor families compared with 8% of white children. An even more alarming statistic is that an African American boy born in the past decade has a 1-in-3 chance of being incarcerated in his lifetime.

There’s a poignant moment in Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools when he goes into an East St. Louis grade school classroom that is dirty, dilapidated, and overcrowded. At one point Kozol reports that as he came into a classroom a young boy looked up at him with an expression that asked, “What did I do to deserve this?” The “achievement gap”—which is just that young boy’s unspoken question in a different form—will never be closed until our policymakers, educational and otherwise, aggressively address the underlying issues of poverty and racism that cripple every aspect of poor and minority children’s lives.  Maybe those policymakers need to stop talking and listen for a change to people who know a lot more than they do about failing schools, and about failing lives.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

 

“Scared Straight” Continues to Get Serious Review by Criminal Justice Experts

It’s good to see that juvenile and family court judges have spoken out about the “Scared Straight” approach to juvenile justice. They raise the same issue that so many of us have expressed: are kids really deterred from crime by the controlled, choreographed exposure to jail culture? Check out the judges’ statement.