It's amazing to me that with all of the research that exists, school districts, researchers themselves, teachers, and like are still shocked that there is a disparity in test scores and graduation rates exhibited between low-income African Americans and other students of other races and income levels (primarily White, Latino, and Asian). If you have never driven through a project such as Cayce Homes in Nashville, I would invite you to do so. Cayce is considered the poorest, most violent neighborhood in Nashville (according to many reports), and as a result there are tons of fabulous programs such as the Martha O'Bryan Center and a host of school-based programs that are working to help the low-income children of East Nashville succeed. However, something is not clicking and in my humble opinion, it is because we are not capitalizing on the time we have with these children when they are inside the school walls. I have mentioned this idea in a former blog post, but let me provide some more detail.
Here is a scenario of a former student of mine (school and name will not be disclosed): Get up at 5:00am to get brothers and sisters and herself ready for school. Get herself to school in time to eat breakfast. Go through class all day. Go to basketball practice. Go home and make sure brothers and sisters are taken care of, fed (if there's food), bathed (if there's water), and perhaps homework is done in time for bed. Saturdays, takes a bus to a local pizza place to work, Sundays, walks to work the football game if it is a home game. Summers are spent between the pizza place and any other small job she can pick up. Where does the money go? To Mama for "groceries" and "bills" even though they are on food stamps and recipients of welfare.
Does this sound like that typical story you hear from anyone teaching in the inner city? Well, let me now tell you about the thoughts and attitudes as they were explained to me and observed by me from this same child:
Get up at 5:00am to get herself and her brothers and sisters off to school because she doesn't want them to be home when Mama gets home from who knows wherever. When she gets to school she knows she has to make good grades because somewhere along the way she discovered that she needed to "get out" of her neighborhood. She plays basketball because she's good and it might lead to a scholarship. However, in the middle of the school year she decides she is tired of taking care of everyone and she is tired of working so hard to make it and she starts slacking. She quits one of her jobs, she starts getting in trouble with her teachers, and her attitude shift is even brought to basketball practice. All she hears is how she will never make it if she keeps up this behavior and people start writing her off. She threatens a teacher one day and gets suspended. She gives me (her coach at the time) the silent treatment for weeks because I refuse to let her slip and pick her up for weekend practice and games and take her home and talk to her constantly about her future. She didn't want to hear any of it because "what is it going to matter anyway?"
Another student I had was the complete opposite. She threatened me on an almost daily basis if I even said "good morning" to her. Calling her house was no help as the mother always told me she had nothing to say to me and her daughter was going to do whatever she wanted and she couldn't control her. This young lady came to class everyday, seemingly to socialize and cause a raucous. I would attempt to hold her after class to discuss how we could work better together and how to help her learn the material. The one day she stayed behind, she said a few choice words and stormed out. I found out a couple of years ago when I went to visit some former students that this young lady had died that year from overdosing on crack. Apparently she was snorting it off of her knees so often that she burned holes through them to the bone.
I offer you these two stories, one of a girl who had a tremendous head on her shoulders for most of her life and the other who was a stereotypical product of her environment, to make a point that neither young lady could see far enough into her respective future to realize that they both could do more than continue to exist within the cycle of poverty they were brought up in. Although the young lady from the first anecdote is working at the pizza place (still) and "trying to get into college" as she told me on a recent trip to visit her, things are looking quite grim. I say that because research tells me that the longer she stays out of college, the less likely it will be that she ever attends at all.
Using these two scenarios, which are neither special cases for inner city kids, can you see a little more clearly why "low-income blacks" succeed at a lesser rate than their peers of other backgrounds? (If not, I have a slew of other stories I would be more than happy to share.) When I was in school, I woke up in my gated community and saw the two heart doctors across the street, the coach at my high school, the business owner, and other professionals, get into their Volvo's and SUV's, and head off to work. I woke up to both parents in the kitchen, my mom making breakfast and packing our lunches and helping us get ready for school or cram last minute for a test. I did not wake up in a room with five siblings and the smell of smoke and alcohol and no food in the fridge only to walk outside to litter, a man on the corner selling drugs, or police lights. Had I lived as so many of these children live, I probably would not be sitting here writing down this information. Would you be where you are?
What is the solution? I argue it is to show these kids that there is life outside of the projects, Section 8 apartments and other government housing. Show them that they matter. I didn't say tell them, I said show them. That's where the problem lies. Kids need to see it. It's quite obvious that most children mimic their environments they are most exposed to. So why not expose kids from poverty to the best they can be? Get these kids out of their desks and quit the droning on about equations, and get them into a university math building, give them a project, and let them work hands-on with students of the university. Quit making them write paragraphs on what they did last summer and take them downtown to see all of the people going to work. Have them interview those people to discover what they do and why, and have them write about those things. Let them research people who look like them who are currently making a difference in their communities. Invite those people into the classroom to talk to them. Help them find internships that will give them insight and experience. And don't tell me it's too expensive or too hard. It's not, we have billions of dollars to spend on education, so let's make a change in how we do things and make education meaningful and purposeful. And, if you say it's too hard to change how we do it now, well then, you will get what you give and our country will continue to decline. If we can uplift impoverished communities through effective reform of our education system that word "disparity" will soon be replaced by the word "equity."
No comments:
Post a Comment