by Robert Coles
She did indeed seem to know her children and get them to respond to her. “Oh, yes, yes you can” were words she used — unselfconsciously and with feeling — over and over again as I sat in the back of her class and watched things move along. The children heard her and seemed to believe her. They tried one more time, and often they succeeded. And then — well, she promised to call up their mothers and fathers and tell them they’d succeeded, or, if there was no phone at home, go visit them and tell them the same thing in person. “Why should we only call parents when there’s trouble?” she asked me. I had no answer to that.
Mixed Schools
Upstate City
According to the 1960 census 216,038 people live in this northeastern city; six percent are black. In 1959 the city’s median family income for whites was $3,308, and $2,566 for blacks. There are many major industries in the city, and electronic and industrial machine industries alone employ over a quarter of the labor force. More than eighty percent of the black population lives in a small “ghetto” area in the center of the city.
About thirty thousand pupils attend the city’s schools; twenty percent are black. In May of 1962, CORE picketed the school board and organized a one-day boycott of a highly segregated elementary school. This provoked some response: meetings, confessions, promises. But in 1962–63 fifty-eight percent of all black elementary-school children attended two of the city’s thirty-three elementary schools, and most of the other thirty-one were solidly white. Since then school officials have made various efforts to eliminatesegregation and improve the education given to black children. They have closed “ghetto” schools and bussed black children to predominantly white schools. They have redrawn district lines to correct racial imbalance; they have transformed “ghetto” schools into special, experimental ones — open and attractive to applicants from all over the city. They have also recommended that schools be no more than thirty percent black and no less than ten percent, and they have started a voluntary transfer program and paid for bussing to help implement their recommendations. Still, segregation persists in certain schools.
The principal in the elementary school I visited has a quiet, old-fashioned charm. She admits to feeling “behind the times,” but in fact has very much tried to keep up with them. She has tried very hard to keep the size of the school’s classes down. To do so she has brought in aides, helpers, and part-time teachers. To do so she has worked long hours, read everything about “the disadvantaged child” she could get her hands on, and by her count, attended fourteen institutes devoted to “teaching the deprived.” She considers herself a fighter, a veteran of all sorts of battles, not all of them won: “I’ll be honest. The city isn’t much interested in some of these matters, not really interested. Some are, a lot of those who live near this school, but you lose a lot when you can’t fall back on your own superiors, on the school system as a whole. Sometimes I go to meetings downtown and the others there — they look at me as some sort of curiosity. ‘Are you still trying?’ one of the assistant superintendents says to me almost every time. I know he means well, but it doesn’t help my morale. And every once in a while I begin to ask myself that question.”
Most of the time, though, she pours her heart and soul into her school. She is proud that when the city was plagued with riots, her school was ignored. Black people live near the school but traditionally used to go to another one, in the heart of the city’s ghetto. Now, through a combination of a bussing program and a change in school-district lines, her school is integrated, and considered “progressive” and “experimental” by school officials. Much of that reputation is due to the principal’s efforts — aided by those of some white, professional people whose children make up a large percentage of the school’s population. Integration brought troubles, but the principal and her assistant made a series of responses to those troubles: “I had always been interested in retarded children. Amid all our very bright and able children we get some slow ones — who make their eager, intelligent parents feel very frustrated. I know how stubborn such children can be — and how much they can be persuaded to learn, if only we reach them and convince them that there is a point to learning. So often they’ve already learned something — about themselves. They’ve learned that they’re “slow” or “retarded” and that they can’t do this or that or whatever. No wonder they’re afraid of school, or they become angry and agitated here. I found that teachers who really liked slow children, and believed in them, in what they might do, they could do, did in fact do wonders. If the teacher feels she can succeed, if she says to you, ‘I love the work,’ if her face shows her real interest and concern — then the children feel it and respond to her and learn from her. I know that. Of course the entire school system rarely encourages such teachers. Bureaucracies don’t usually encourage much of anything — ideas, people, a philosophy. Bureaucracies just exist, I’m afraid. When I was developing my program with retarded children I never went to the bureaucrats. I went to the parents of those children. I invited them to come to the school. I called them ‘aides.’ I had them all over, learning with their children and learning what their children could learn and — just learning. You’d be surprised at the difference it made. They’d go home and feel better about their boy or girl, and at school they’d help our teachers.”
Her teachers need help. They admit to feeling troubled, uncertain, even in despair: “I feel confused. A lot of the time I feel worse than that. I think it’s just hopeless. I used to come to my classes full of enthusiasm and pleasure. Now it’s different. You never know what new kind of trouble will face you each day. We still have our bright, ambitious children, but we also have these new children — and their whole way of looking at things is different, totally different. I try. Lord knows, every day I try. If it weren’t for our principal I’d probably have given up a long time ago. But almost every day she gives us a pep talk, and I take an oath with myself to keep on trying. The trouble is they just don’t seem to want to learn — mainly the Negro children. They look bored, or they start getting spiteful, or they turn on the other kids. I don’t mean all of them, no, but enough to make every day a new source of worry, real worry for us teachers.”
She and others in the school cause some of the children to worry, also. One black child in her class, the brightest in fact, the source of least worry to her teacher, spoke these words: “It’s a joke here a lot of the time, because they keep telling you they want to help you, but they’re all out for their own kind, the white, if you ask me. She keeps giving us those talks on how everyone is created equal and all that, but she’s trying to convince herself, that’s what I think. She thinks we’re dumb, and we need all the help we can get — that’s how she’s always saying it, ‘all the help you can get.’ How about her? She could stand some help, too. She gets annoyed at us, and then she tells us we should just keep quiet and behave ourselves until lunchtime. One time we went down to get lunch and she was with us and she saw the woman throwing the food at us and shouting and I heard her say to her friend: ‘How can we expect the children to behave, when they treat them like this in the cafeteria?’ And her friend, she said they were Negroes, the people in the serving line, and that’s what we’re used to at home — getting bad treatment, I guess. If I was bigger and out of this school for good, I would have said something. But I didn’t. I went home and told my mother, though — and she said that’s the way it can go, and you have to close your ears a lot of the time, and your eyes. That’s right.”
His friend also closes his eyes and ears: “I don’t pay that much attention to a lot of things around here. A lot of the kids, they’ve got so much they don’t know what to do with all they’ve got. I can tell. I listen in. They’ll be talking about this thing they have and that thing. So I just pretend I don’t hear, and I think to myself that I could take most any of them and knock him flat down, if it came to anything. The teacher, she’ll be giving you these lectures on how we should all be friends and like that (Figure 29). But they k
eep on pressing you down, and trying to get you to talk like them and act like them. You know what I mean? They’re unhappy because we don’t speak like them, and they want us to cut it out and step along the way they do, but as I see it, we’ve got our own lives to live. That’s what my daddy says all the time — ‘Don’t you let them give you the idea it’s all their ball game, and we have to play according to their rules.’ That’s what he says, but I’m not sure he’s right.’
A white student isn’t sure either. He comes from a very liberal home. His father and mother “favor civil rights.” He has been told again and again that black children and white children are “all the same” and “learn just as well as each other, if only given a chance.” So he thinks and so he speaks. Yet he also says other things: “The way it looks, the Negro kids, they’re just not prepared like we are. They don’t speak up, and the teacher can’t understand them a lot of the time (Figure 30). She’ll lean over and tell them to say it again, only this time go slower. But they’re already talking slow. I think she does understand, but she wants them to speak like us — that’s what my dad said — and they can’t right off. It’ll take a long time — maybe our grandchildren, my mother says. A lot of the time I think the Negro kids would like to be like us and speak the same way and have the same things, but they won’t admit it, and they get mad if you say so. The principal, she’s trying to make everything go smooth — but she can’t do it all alone, and my father says she’s fighting a losing battle because of the riots, and the white people, they’re just fed up now and won’t stand for much more trouble. I asked one Negro kid if he thought integration would continue, and he said he never thought about it one way or the other. But his friend said he hoped not, and he wanted to know what I thought, and I said I was in favor of it, but we had a long road to go yet. My parents say it will take years.”
Capital City
Seventy thousand people live in this New England suburban community. Almost thirteen thousand children attend its public schools; until 1966, fewer than twenty-five were black. That year local citizens agreed to accept eighty black students from schools in the nearby city, where the population is one hundred sixty-five thousand and over half the schoolchildren are black. In the city the median income is $6,000; it is twice that in the suburb. City children were taken from schools where the black population exceeded eighty-five percent of the total student body and were assigned to suburban classrooms with vacancies. Most were elementary-school children, though some junior and senior high school students found places. Officials studied the experiment with care and great thoroughness, finally deeming it “successful.” Today the program operates on a somewhat larger scale.
“I have to say to you that I never would have dreamed a few years ago that something like this would happen, that I’d be standing out here in front of this school and watching Negro children come here from the city. Sometimes I wonder what they think as they get off that bus and go in the building and go to school.”
So he thought — and he certainly knows children, if not black children, quite well. For two decades he has worked with children in a small town near Capital City, first as a teacher, then as assistant principal, and finally as principal. He speaks forcefully, even brusquely, in a way that an older man can sometimes get away with — indeed, in doing so even gain a bit by being considered a man who is “kind underneath.” What does he think of the bussing program? What does he think about the black children, about possibilities that they may possess — as pupils and students and future citizens? Does he have any thoughts about how they think of themselves, about their view of what the future holds? How do particular teachers influence the kind and amount of learning that their pupils acquire? The questions are put forth with unusual speed and candor because he seems to invite that kind of pointed, direct conversation. He has strong opinions, he says almost immediately, and he is quite willing to make them known: “I was against this in the beginning, like a lot of people who are now willing to give it all they’ve got. I’d be fooling you if I told you I said, ‘Bring them all out here!’ What ran through my mind was — well, ‘how can this possibly work?’ I kept on asking myself that, but the town didn’t want to wait and think. They said they wanted to do something — and sometimes I think they didn’t care what, so long as they felt less guilty. One mother came to see me and practically got hysterical. She kept on saying that we’d done bad things for three hundred years, the white people, and we had to start making amends. After about ten or fifteen minutes of that I told her to stop, please. I asked her what she had done to any Negro — she or anyone she knows. Well, of course, the answer is nothing. Then I asked her why she was getting so emotional and putting the whole thing on a personal basis. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about. So, I said that the way she talked, anyone who had reservations about this bussing program or anything else having to do with Negroes — he’s just no good. They call you every name in the book. Talk about ‘tolerance’ — have the liberals ever looked at their own intolerance? I wonder.”
He went on in that vein, and then had the courage and honesty to go further: “I frankly don’t believe this is the answer. It will only work for a handful anyway, and it’s hard on everyone, the Negro kids and our own. I believe Negro kids need a kind of schooling we just don’t offer here — because our children are different. The Negro child brought out here needs discipline, firmness, and patience from teachers. I don’t believe they take easily to the kind of freewheeling and imaginative atmosphere we encourage here for our children. Yes, they are stimulated by things here, and some of them have done very well indeed. But some of them have had a very difficult time here, and so have we — with them. They have trouble academically, then they become angry and even violent. Rather than face their own inadequacies, they start striking out, provoking people — teachers and children alike — so that they can have someone to blame other than themselves. It’s a very sorry business, and I frankly don’t know how to solve it. One thing, too: I know I’m blunt, and I know some other principal will talk a lot differently to you. But they’re all facing the same problems I am, even if they put the whole thing in different words. One of my friends in the next town over — they have the same program we do — keeps talking about ‘stages’ and ‘understanding’ and ‘working out the tensions in time.’ It’ll take a long time. I think the Negro children know that better than we do, much better. We can fool ourselves, but not them.”
One of his teachers disagrees with him. She has heard him say that black children are for all practical academic purposes “different” — which he did indeed say to me — and she has even challenged him at a staff meeting: “One good thing about him is that he can say outrageous things but not hold a grudge against you for disagreeing. He even likes arguments. I do believe the Negro children respect him, too. He is gruff and stern, but he’s very personable with them, and they feel that and look up to him. I suppose he’s a lot better than the smooth-talking types who smile all the time and say the ‘right’ liberal things — but really don’t like the Negro children one bit. We have some of those, you know.
“The thing that bothers me, though, is that because of our principal’s attitude we’re not doing all we could, not by a long shot. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. Sometimes I think his attitude is good. He makes us stop and think about what we think. He makes us question the conventional wisdom, I guess you’d put it. He dares to say a lot that some of us think but are afraid to say. The trouble is that he misses a lot, too. He doesn’t see the positive side, the slow changes in the attitudes of both our white and black children. He doesn’t see how white children from suburban homes learn things from these black children, and how the black children learn — oh, they learn a lot. They learn academic things, and they learn to feel some of the hope that our kids feel. It’s hard to put your finger on hope, but if you have it you’ve got the most important thing in the world, and if you don’t, you’re in real trouble. I think our bla
ck children are doing quite beautifully, for all their troubles here. They tell me they’re learning better, and I know they are, most of them. Bussing is no panacea, I admit that, but something has to be done, to begin with. In the long run maybe we’ll have a more metropolitan kind of school system; towns like this one and the cities will join together. We either do that or we tell black people they can have their America, and we’ll have ours out here. Our children look to us for signs, too — signs to tell them we believe one thing or another. There are times I think we teachers should be graded. We should pass or flunk, depending on how our children do. I’ve had some Negro children who would confirm every one of our principal’s opinions — and yet I’ve said to myself that they’re going to do better, they’re just going to. And it’s not the class size or the equipment that made them do better. I hesitate to say it, but it was probably me, me and some of the children I enlisted to help me. I called them in, five of them, my best — not my smartest, my best — and I said we had to work together and help some of our new students, and yes, we had to let them help us. I didn’t know exactly how to put it to the children, and maybe I was condescending — I realize that now. But I wanted something to happen between all the kids, not only between me and the Negro children. So, I told some white children I wanted them to work with the black children: show them around the school and the town, and tell them things, and be told things. I had the class divide itself up, so that one child could tell a story to another and be graded — for interest, for the power in the story, not grammar. It’s not easy to tell you all this, but I think it worked; the children caught on to one another, that’s how I’d put it. No matter what their parents thought, or the principal, or after a while maybe even me, they proved they could do things side by side and be teachers, almost as much as I am, I sometimes believe.”