by Robert Coles
He and his deputies regularly meet with the school principals, and they meet with their teachers. They all talk about life in the South, life in the ghetto, life in East Park — for themselves and for poor children, almost all in this case black. They feel it important that they understand various social, political, and historical matters before they ask their schoolchildren to do so. In one meeting I heard a principal talk about an “undertow” that exists in every school — one that is “either positive or negative.” Later, I visited his school and spent several days there talking to him and his teachers and a number of children. What did he mean by “positive or negative undertow”? What did he think could and could not be done by the schools, in contrast, that is, to the home, the business world, or the voting booth? How did his teachers see things going with the slow learners, the “difficult black children,” to use an expression I had heard him use — sardonically.
“Well, that’s the problem. As I said at the meeting, when a teacher talks about ‘difficult children’ she’s in trouble and so am I as the principal — because she’s lumping together a lot of girls and boys; I know she is. In a way, you know, a lot of our teachers, in a progressive school system like this, have learned too much sociology and psychology, or maybe learned to use what they’ve learned in a very self-defeating way. They read and read and take extra courses on Negro History or whatever, and then they take all the phrases they’ve picked up and do the same thing with them that supposedly ignorant people do with blunter words — discount, discredit, and even slyly insult black people. It’s not easy to say something like that, but I see it happening, I hear it happening, all the time. I have some teachers in this school who obviously like clean, quiet, well-dressed, and obedient children who do just as they’re told. They don’t even like the more active and ‘wild’ — their word — white child, no matter how intelligent he is, and no matter how ‘important’ his father is. They are a little aloof and self-contained themselves, the teachers, and they don’t take to children who are ‘fresh’ or ‘undisciplined’ or ‘unpredictable.’ If that kind of boy or girl is white, and if they do manage to make some kind of peace with him or her, they’ll call the child ‘zany’ or ‘zestful’ — but in need of ‘control.’ If the child is black, and they’re honest with themselves, they’ll say they don’t like him; if not, they’re liable to fall back on a lot of lingo — he’s ‘immature,’ and he comes from a ‘culture of poverty,’ and he’s ‘disruptive,’ and he’s one more ‘difficult black child.’ That’s why we have to meet a lot, all of us, and I have to say — what I’ve just now said to you.”
One of his teachers seems not to hear his message. She refuses to attend many of his meetings and is frank to say that she “looks for excuses.” Yet she has an astonishing record of success with those “difficult black children” — something her principal and vice-principal both know. In the words of the vice-principal: “If all our teachers were like her, we wouldn’t have to have those meetings. She’s considered an oddball, and she is — but for other reasons than those who call her that realize. They think she’s brusque and outspoken — and, of course, she’s from the South. Actually she’s odd because she really makes those kids work, and sometimes she makes them do more — come out of themselves is the way I’d put it.”
So, she skips the meetings, but in class somehow gets “slow” children to speed up. I watched and watched her (and them). I asked her how she did it, realizing all the while that she was not disposed to put the whole business into a few phrases. But she did: “I’m a kind of intense person, emotional you might say. A lot of these kids, they come from families like that — where the mothers shout and scream and cry; you know, let out their feelings. I don’t do that, but I let the kids know how I’m feeling. I lean on them, you might say — and I let them lean on me. I don’t ever want them to think they can’t come up and hold to me, or have me hold to them. And I look at them — eyeball to eyeball. I tell them what I want and tell them that they’re going to do it, and no nonsense, no messing around. I’ve lived with colored people all my life, you know. In the South they’re no strangers to us. We may not have treated them as our equals, but we lived with them, right beside them and sometimes closer than that. Up here, they don’t know the Negro. They don’t know where he comes from and how he is — in his mind, I guess you’d say it. They don’t know how they talk and think and — everything.
“You know what I do. I say, ‘Hey, there,’ and I say, ‘Come on now, y’all go and get that done, and I mean now, or I’ll paddle the life out of you.’ I’d be ashamed to have some of our teachers hear that — they might call me mixed-up, some of them might. They do, I know. But I’m trying to make these kids feel at home so they can get with it! I talk about the South — many of them have relatives there. I talk about music, their music. I show them I’m not afraid of what they know, what they can do well: music and art and athletics. I show them I know about their history, their speech, their everything, I hope — and they catch on. Oh, it’s not even all that deliberate. It sounds it, now that I’m talking, but the truth is that I feel close to a lot of those children, and I guess they pick that up. Then, they also pick up that I want them to move on, get ahead in the world. I tell them that. I say it right out loud. I say are you going to mess around and amount to nothing, or are you going to take notice and get your work done and be somebody?
“They want to be somebody, too. They want to read. They’re hungrier for education than most teachers realize. We should change our teachers, that’s what I sometimes think. We should recruit different kinds of people to be teachers. It’s what you feel that counts, not only what you’ve learned in education school — I never went to one, thank God. I might have been ruined for life. I’d be afraid of my shadow — and afraid of theirs, I’ll tell you. I’d be afraid to speak up, to give it back to them when they’re messing things up, to let them know I’m alive and they’re alive and we’re going to make something out of it. I’m so tired of all this introspection, this analysis, analysis. You get to the point you watch yourself breathing in the classroom — and of course you get nowhere. The kids can spot that — spot that nervousness, the self-consciousness that takes over. It’s terrible, I think. I like to teach. I like these children. I want them to learn, and they get the message. I believe it’s as simple as that. Yes sir, I do.”
Whether things are as “simple” as she would have them or not, she does indeed reach her children. They study hard, and by everyone’s acknowledgment (even those she annoys and antagonizes) she “gets results.” Her children speak of her with pleasure and warmth and a proper bit of awe: “She makes you work. She wants you to work, and she’ll not stop until she wins you over to her way. She’s real friendly, though, at the same time.”
To one of her black children she is “the best kind of person because she won’t settle for less than everything. That’s what she says, and she makes you believe it yourself. One day she asked me what I wanted to be, and I said I didn’t know. Then she said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ Then I said I was sorry, and I did know: I wanted to be a — a teacher. Then she leaned down, and she looked right at me and said, ‘I know you’re saying that because you haven’t really thought of what you’re going to be, and you should.’ And then she said I had a good kind of mind to be a lawyer — because I was always figuring out the puzzles and asking questions and things like that. So maybe I will be one.”
I asked him to paint a picture of her (Figure 25), and to paint one of any other teacher he knew (Figure 26) — and, if he wanted, to tell me how they were alike or different. He would indeed make a good lawyer. He talked as he painted, and he outlined his case rather insistently — in paints and words. I noticed during my stay in that school that his ideas and feelings — about that teacher and about other teachers — were shared by many children.
West Park
This west-coast city has perhaps led the nation in an effort to desegregate its public school
s. In the fall of 1968 it became the first city of more than one hundred thousand residents to achieve total desegregation. Some northern cities have closed ghetto schools and bussed black children to schools in other parts of the city or to those in the suburbs, but only this city has combined that sort of bussing with the bussing of white children to former ghetto schools. School officials had to fight hard to do so; board members had to face a special “recall” election when they introduced their initial plan; but they did, and won.
The city has a population of about one hundred twenty thousand: seventy percent white, twenty-five percent black, and five percent Oriental. Many retired people have made it their home, and since they usually have no children of school age, the school population, sixteen thousand, is small for a community of its size. Among the students, fifty percent are white, forty-one percent are black, and nine percent are Oriental. Local chapters of national black organizations — CORE, NAACP and others — are numerous, articulate, and active. They started desegregation as early as 1958, though not until 1964 did anything tangible result. That year school board members decided to desegregate the city’s three junior high schools. They changed one to a ninth grade school, essentially an annex to the nearby high school, and they had seventh and eighth graders use the other two. In 1968 they were ready to desegregate the fourteen elementary schools. This has required bussing thirty-five hundred of eighty-nine hundred pupils daily and takes a considerable slice from the budget, but local citizens have complied with little fuss. Besides, the federal government pays almost half the fare. So, today the entire system is desegregated, down to individual classrooms.
Unquestionably the city of West Park wants to do more than most cities even dream to be either possible or desirable: “We want to do everything — everything that has to be done so that black children and white children can go to school together, learn, and learn from one another. That’s our purpose, and we spend long hours trying to achieve it.” He is a forceful superintendent, no stranger to social struggle. He is surrounded by equally stubborn and bold deputy superintendents and associates of various kinds. He wants, in his words, “more than the appearance of change.” He wants “real change,” which he defines as “a mixture of academic improvement and psychological transformation.” What sort of psychological transformation? “Well, a child’s sense that others who are different matter very much, and a child’s sense about himself — that he can do a lot, a lot more than he once may have thought possible.” Then comes the elaboration: “I’m talking about white children as well as black ones. A lot of black children don’t think they can live easy with books, and a lot of white children are afraid of something else — any world except the one they know and own. I’m not sure which fear is worse, but I believe we can help all our schoolchildren feel less afraid and more sure of themselves and the world — and of us, as a matter of fact, the teachers and principals and officials in the school system.”
So it is intended in West Park’s schools, at least at the top. What happens to such intentions as they work their way down the ladder — as commands struggle for obedience, as programs encounter daily events, as outlines seek to become action? The principal of an elementary school gave me some answers to that kind of question. He told me that he was in charge of a “completely and carefully integrated school,” and that “every day we see things happen here, important and worthwhile things. We’ve tried to do away with ‘tracks’ and ‘grouping,’ at least the kind that separate children by race or class or even achievement. We try to mix children and teach them not only how to read and write, but live with one another — the rich with the poor, the quick with the slow, the confident with the fearful. I don’t mean to sound pious, though. It’s not just a matter of being ‘good’ or ‘democratic.’ We’ve seen how children learn from one another and become better students as well as better citizens. And it doesn’t only go one way. I mean, I’ve seen bright white kids from well-to-do homes learn a lot, a real lot from some of our slower kids that came here from what is in comparison a ghetto. I hope you’ll ask the children about that — about what they’ve learned from one another. They might end up telling you what they’ve learned, period!”
I talked to the children with that in mind — did so before I spent time with their teachers — and found the principal’s suggestion a very good one indeed. A rather properly dressed white girl had this to say: “My mother was going to take us out of this school, me and my brother. She said she was in favor of integration, but we’re very good at school, and we need a school that can keep up with us, she said. My brother, he has an IQ that’s so high he’s in the genius range, the lady told my mother. But my father said we should stay for a year and see how everything goes; then if we’re wasting our time here, we could always go to another school, because there are some real good private ones around.
“I can’t say I’ve made real close friends with any of the Negro kids, but a couple of them, yes; we’re pretty good friends. Last week I went over to one girl’s house with her. She invited me, and my mother was real worried. When I told her I was invited, she said no, how could I possibly go over there. I said, ‘You could drive me, Mum,’ and she didn’t say anything — except that she’d talk it over with my father when he came home. I don’t know what they decided, but later the next day my mother said OK, I could go, and she would drive me, and she’d come and pick me up in a half hour or so. I think it was my dad who told her to stretch it to an hour, though.
“I had a real good time. Sally, she seemed real different in her home. She wasn’t so quiet. She was telling me this and that and — everything. She showed me around and had me meet her friends, and she took me to the store, and I met some people there, and she played me some of her records, and I had a good time. She has four brothers, and they think she’s the best person that ever lived. They’ll do anything for her. They all seem real close together, her and her brothers and her baby sister. They don’t have the things we do, they sure don’t, but they’re real good to each other. I told my mother that on the way home, and she said that’s right, because they’re poor, and they have to stick together or they won’t have anything at all left. But I told her — I told her they liked sticking together.”
Could she draw a picture or two of her home (Figure 27), and perhaps one or more of her friend’s home (Figure 28)? Yes, she could, but before she did and as she did she wanted to say one more thing: “If you go visiting, you see a lot you’d never know about. Now when I see Sally come into school, I know where she’s coming from, and it isn’t as if she was just Sally, and from nowhere that I’ve ever seen.”
Her teacher had some similar thoughts. Like most of her students and their parents she was also “in favor of integration,” but has had her doubts, too. She saw, every day she saw and struggled with, “the great disparities between ghetto children and middle-class children.” She remarked, on the favorable side, how obliging and cooperative many black children are, compared to some of the provocative, snobbish, and self-centered children who at nine or ten already know they have inherited the earth: “You hear a lot about the noise that ghetto children make in class, and how unruly they are, fresh and combative. I wonder how many articles have been written about our spiteful, spoiled suburban children, who also cause us pain in the classroom.” Yet there are, finally, those academic problems: “There is no doubt that the black children we get here are a real challenge to us. At first I tried hard to ignore all differences and simply teach, teach them hard so they would catch up with the rest of us. Then, for a while, I’ll have to admit, I became very discouraged. I began to believe that it wasn’t hopeless, but it certainly would take time — more time than we have in an elementary school, or maybe any school. But one day I decided to visit several black parents in their homes — they’d asked me several times — and it was the best decision I’ve ever made as a teacher, yes sir. I saw where those children live — but it wasn’t only bad news that I found. I realized how many selves
there are in one person. The children were different in their own neighborhood. Now they could show me things, explain things to me. They talked more, were more alive and alert. They seemed friendlier, more trusting. Oh, they were shy and scared, too, but they did something with their shyness and fear — because they felt able to. After all, they could entertain and teach me!
“When I spoke with their parents I realized that we had to do more of this, more visiting back and forth. The black children come home and say things that are picked up and distorted by parents who are as cut off from our school as they are from the rest of the middle-class world. The result is the children’s fear increases tenfold in the mother’s mind. She becomes angry and resentful. An incident here or there becomes something much larger — and there’s no way to talk about it, certainly not in a large, public, formal P.T.A. meeting. In those private conferences with each parent that we have — well, they’re held on our home ground, and they can be pretty brief and formal, too. Somehow we’ve got to bring these families and our family, the school family, nearer. I did it to some extent that day, and I’ve continued to do it ever since. I think it has made a difference. I know it has; the black children come toward me in a more open and direct way. They don’t mind being pushed and prodded. They know I’m doing it for them, not to them. I’ve seen how smart they are — and smart they can be, in a way, at acting dumb! They know how to frustrate teachers. They know how to be polite, then rude, then nasty. If they see that I’m convinced they’re hopeless or worse, they act accordingly. If they see me giving them a lot of excuses, they give them right back to me, plenty of excuses. But once I asked one of them to do something and he said, ‘No one ever asked me to do that before.’ Then I knew I was at last getting someplace. At last I’d had the sense to tell that child that he had to do something, that he was going to do something. He had seen that I knew he could do a lot more than seemed to be the case. The reason I felt he could was I’d been to his home and seen what he could do there — take care of his sister and help his mother and deal with the storekeepers and all the rest, even help out at a cafeteria.”