by Robert Coles
One of the white children she mentioned was even more vague, if just as touching to hear: “They’re all right. That’s what we discovered. And they said we are, too. They told us they wanted to grow up and buy some land out here and build themselves a huge, big house, and we could all go swimming together in the summer. They said they might want to go to high school and get their diploma, and go to college and pick up one there, the same. They said it was fun a lot of the time where they lived, but a lot of the time it wasn’t, either. I didn’t dare ask what was the matter, and my mother said they probably wouldn’t have said, and I did right to keep quiet and mind my own business and try to be friendly. She said a lot of people who live near us, they have a lot of trouble, too.”
The black children generally felt glad to be at the school, glad to be “on the inside,” one of them phrased it (Figures 31 and 32). He went on: “I don’t like everything here, and some of the kids and the teachers, too — they turn you off. But I’ve made some good friends, and they have a lot of nice things here: it’s better in the building, and they give you better food, and they really try to make you learn your lessons. Back at the old school, all they wanted was that we keep quiet and don’t make any trouble and sit still. They told us we’d never amount to anything, anyway, and they weren’t going to let us cause them any pain. So, if you squeaked your chair, they looked at you as if you’d gone and killed someone, and they were going to kill you back. Here, they’re better to you. I believe I’ll stay with it, and maybe get myself one of these fat jobs like my friends, their fathers have got. It’s getting easier for us; that’s what my mother said. So it’s worth the ride on the bus, I believe.”
Committed Schools
West City
This northern California city has a population of three hundred seventy thousand; about thirty-five percent is black, and about five percent is Mexican-American. The unemployment rate among blacks ranges from fifteen to twenty percent, and dissatisfaction with the squalor and uncertainty of daily living has turned many blacks toward militant leaders, who have considerable power in this community. Fearing “another Watts,” the federal government has anxiously responded with aid, studies, “pilot programs” — and with some success; but the sad, explosive mixture of apathy and rage still infects the air and casts a shadow on the city’s future.
The majority of schoolchildren are blacks. Schools, like the neighborhoods they serve, are pretty thoroughly segregated. Officials have tried only a small number of “experimental” bussing programs.
He was in many respects the kindest, most sensitive principal I met: a black man, a man capable of firmness and kindness both, a man very much respected by the white parents he met and spoke with every day. (Their children make up over half of his school.) He was born in the South, but brought to West City as a child: “My parents came here to escape. I think they were smart enough to know that there’s no escaping the South in some of those northern cities in the East, but the West, maybe there it would be different. They were wrong, of course. This city, West City — well, we’re known all over the country for our racial troubles. It’s a hard thing to say, but sometimes I wonder whether the long trip across the country was worth it. We’re not segregated like we used to be in Alabama, but a lot of my people came here penniless, dazed, confused, at a loss to know what to do. And their children, they don’t have much going for them at home. When they come to school they’re hungry and weak, and a lot of them, they’re sad — sadder than anyone really knows, I’m afraid.”
He knows how sad those children are. He also knows how much hope those same children have: “They’re already suspicious, a lot of them, but they’re looking for something better, too — something better than what they see all around them outside of school. The way I see it, we can try to offer them a little here in this building. We can try to show them other people — me, my secretary, the teachers, the nurse, the doctor, the people who come to help with speech problems. We can try to show them how we take care of ourselves, how we appear and act and talk and all the rest. It may be a long way from here to some of those tenements, even if they’re nearby in distance, but we can try to bring things closer together, at least a little closer together, in the child’s mind. That’s what I want to do, as well as see the children learn how to read or count or whatever. But it’s not any easier for me, I’ll tell you, than for them. They have their problems, the children, and I have mine, too — plenty of them.”
He does indeed have his problems. As a principal he feels lonely and embattled. His is in many respects a “showcase” school, one of the city’s best, the city’s only “really integrated” school. By “integrated” he means something quite specific: “I don’t mean bodies whose skin color varies. I mean children from different backgrounds learning from each other. I also mean parents learning, too. I try to get the black parents to put pressure on me, to demand things from me, to go downtown and tell the school board they’re not happy with what I’m doing, because I don’t have enough to offer their children. It’s not easy to do — to get them going and to take the risk to myself of getting them going. But I must, as I see it. Our white parents feel that there’s a point to school, that there’s a good reason to keep their eyes on what we’re doing here. Many of the black parents aren’t at all sure. In fact, they either know things are hopeless — and tell you why — or they feel things are hopeless, no matter what I say, no matter what they say to themselves. That’s pretty bad, isn’t it? And that kind of attitude gets across to children very quickly. One black girl was sent down here for being fresh to her teacher, swearing at her when she tried to be helpful. I asked her why she’d done that, and she didn’t pause a second before she gave me her answer: ‘There’s only room for one of us who’s black. The rest of us, we have to live different from you. That’s what my uncle said. He said school won’t get you far, and there’s only room for a few black people up top. They’ll never let us have our own schools, unless we build our own, and we haven’t got the money.’ That’s about what she said, and you can imagine what she really heard at home. Why should she study, if that’s what she believes, if that’s what she’s told every other day of her life, now that she’s growing up and finding out about things?”
Children like that child move about, too; from school to school they go, as their families wander within the confines of the ghetto. Children like that child or her brothers don’t want to be secretaries, teachers, nurses, professional men, or even big-name sports heroes. A teacher told me how those children think: “They don’t really have anything in mind about the future, not when they first come here. They’re not accustomed to thinking about the future, about next year and five years from now. With them it’s minute to minute. One of the things they learn here, I know, is how to plan ahead, think ahead, and anticipate things — I mean, count on them as well as wish for them. They learn that from some of our better-off children as well as us.”
It is not easy for those children to learn, though. So I was told by the principal and by all his teachers. The school has a reputation for being “a good apple in a basket full of pretty bad ones.” The school’s white children come from rather liberal homes, and as a result, this state of affairs, described by one teacher, is what holds: “The white parents have kept their children here, and as a matter of fact, kept themselves here, in this neighborhood. In the beginning they did so with a good deal of fear, but out of principle. Now they’re not afraid, and they realize that. They’ve gone through something: they’ve learned something. I know I have. I’ve learned what black children have learned before they ever step foot in a school. I’ve learned to redefine the word ‘learn.’ That’s how I’d put it. Many black children learn all the time, but don’t learn in the schoolrooms. It’s not only that they aren’t ‘motivated,’ as we say it. There’s something else: they come here afraid. Sometimes the fear is obvious, but sometimes it takes other forms — boasting, gloating, noisiness, insolence, belligerence, silence yo
u cannot penetrate, a sullen look that never leaves the child’s face, or in one case I just thought of, a half smile, a half scowl, really, that haunted me for weeks. I thought the boy was disturbed and needed to see a psychiatrist. But one day I asked him to stay after school, and I just held my breath and told him — how he looked to me and what I thought that he thought. Then he straightened up and smiled, really smiled, and said one word: ‘Yes.’ He wasn’t yessing me, either. He meant yes. After that he started doing better in class. There were no miracles, but he paid attention and asked for my help and improved — improved and improved and improved. I’d like a lot of other teachers to hear about him — but I’m sorry I can’t prove exactly how it all happened. I only know that he was a troublesome, distant child, and then at long last he and I came to an understanding with one another, and then his work in class improved a hundredfold.”
The young boy she talked about is quiet but constantly on the watch. His eyes follow his observer around the room. His eyes never stay anyplace for too long. His eyes are open but not exactly trusting. “I like it here,” he says, “but you don’t stay here after the sixth grade. So I won’t be here after that.” His family moved from Mississippi all across the country, and since then have done a good deal of moving about — from tenement to tenement in West City. It is “no picnic” moving a lot, and “no picnic” going to school — though he does indeed, with no prompting, describe his teacher as a “good lady.” He drew a picture of himself (Figure 33), and of himself twenty or thirty years from now. When he had done that he wanted to know whether I had asked any teachers to do drawings — of, say, a pupil like him. No, I hadn’t. As a matter of fact I had never thought to do so. Why? Well, actually for no reason — except that often grown-ups talk easily whereas children may prefer to keep quiet, but draw and sketch and paint their ideas and feelings. Maybe so, but still it would be a good idea to ask this one teacher to draw this one picture of this one person — him. I complied with his request, and his teacher complied with my request, but insisted that she keep the drawing she did. She said she was not very good at drawing, which is precisely what her young pupil said, too, as he did his work with the crayons — drawing a picture of his teacher (Figure 34).
Central City
Civil rights groups pressed long and hard to obtain improvements for the black poor in this city, one of the largest in the Middle West, which contains a vast and populous black ghetto, one of the largest in the country. They asked for better housing, for better streets, for playgrounds and parks, and for better schools. They also asked for school desegregation and eventual integration, which very few of the city’s schools have.
A third of the city is black, as are over half the schoolchildren, but only three blacks, and until recently only two, represent them on the eleven-man school board. Eighty percent of the schools are “segregated,” with a student body at least ninety percent black or white. Even the twenty percent labeled “integrated” are not quite that: many of them are simply changing from white to black, as blacks move into a neighborhood and whites leave it for the suburbs, ending such “integration” quickly. Most black teachers and administrators end up in nearly all-black schools, segregated like their pupils. Of seventeen black principals, sixteen run such schools. These schools are more often overcrowded, understaffed, and ill-equipped than white schools; for instance, they average thirty-four pupils per class compared to twenty-nine in white schools.
“We are trying everything, everything we can find, everything we can come across, to help these kids.” Again and again that theme made its appearance in conversations held with deputy superintendents and assistant deputy superintendents — and in fact a whole array of administrators and educators and social scientists, all working on Central City’s educational problems. What is “everything”? After visits to several elementary schools “everything” comes to a strong emphasis on relatively small classes (wherever possible) and “intensive” teaching through the use of “new and imaginative curricula.” In one school the principal talked and talked and talked: “I’ve got a lot to say, because we’re trying to do a lot; though how much we are doing, I’ll admit, is debatable. We’ve brought in more teachers, and we’ve been provided with special services for difficult children. We have a speech therapist, a psychologist, and the doctor spends twice as much time with us as before. We’ve been holding a series of conferences for our teachers, and we’ve really tried to get the community involved. I was told a few weeks ago by a young man — he went to school here — that if ever a riot broke out, our building would be spared. I’m not so sure. We’ve got some of the best reading materials in the country here for our children. What we’re attempting to do is saturate the children, saturate them with pictures, books, movies, everything audio-visual we can get our hands on. They’ve been deprived of that, and need it, a lot of it, if they’re going to make it in our society.
“And we also hope to get the parents more motivated, because without their help, it’s hard to turn these kids on. They come in here sometimes looking as though they’d been working all day in a factory or someplace. They don’t have good clothes, many of them don’t. More important, they haven’t had breakfast, we’ve discovered, or at least a good number of them haven’t, or if they have, the breakfast can’t be considered adequate. I really believe that one thing we should do that might help our children a tremendous amount would be provide nutritional education for their mothers. I know we’re a school, not a service center for the neighborhood, but when a child hasn’t had anything nourishing for breakfast, and maybe something not very healthy the night before for supper, he’s not going to be alert and responsive during the day. Sometimes I go through the school and see those lovely pictures we have posted on the walls — of glasses full of milk and big oranges and pineapples and grapefruit and eggs and bacon and children brushing their teeth — and I feel we either have to make those pictures more a part of the lives of our children here, or take them down from our walls and put up something that really speaks to these kids and doesn’t make them laugh or get angry. Yes, they do get angry and outspoken, too — more so than an outsider can believe possible, considering that they’re seven or eight, that age. Every time we try to do something for them they get fresh and nasty instead of grateful. It’s hard for some of my teachers to take. The parents are like that, too — in fact it’s the parents who say things, and the children of course, repeat what they hear at home.
“The other day one child, he must be nine, or maybe ten, told one of our best teachers that we were all wasting our time and trying to patch up a broken-down mess when a whole new thing has to be built — words to that effect. I asked the teacher what she said in reply. She hesitated for a while, I gather — she did with me, too — and then told the kid he was right, basically. You know what the kid said? He said that he knew she’d say that, because she was their favorite teacher, and that was why, because she saw things the same way they do. And that kid is slow in reading! The same teacher told me a few weeks ago that the whole business of learning and teaching in this school has to be reexamined. ‘Some of the brightest kids, clever as can be, just don’t want to learn. They mock learning.’ That’s what she said, and she’s right. Not all of our kids are like that, but enough to make us tear our hair out. And get this: Negro teachers, black teachers, have no more success with them than we do, no more. It’s not only a race issue; it’s a class issue. Many of these children have learned from their parents that there’s no hope, that if you have hope — hope about getting ahead in the system is what I mean — you’re a fool, a real jerk. The kids come here and live out that conviction — that school is a jail, a place of temporary confinement, a place where the white world rubs the black boy’s history into his face.
“If you question some of our kids closely you’ll hear that, hear their embarrassment at the little heritage they have, at the poverty of their homes — cultural poverty as well as the economic kind — and their sense of futility O
h, they’re smart about their world, but to them ours is way off, and meaningless. And under the present circumstances — well, there isn’t much I can do to persuade those kids that they’re wrong. They know how a lot of people in this city feel about them. They know they’re not wanted. They know who runs things here — and they also know what some of our leading school officials have said in the past. I’ll be honest with you: it’s only because we’ve had a change up top that I can talk as openly with you as this. What happens at the top gets right to the bottom. We feel every vibration. But there’s only so much that even the best school system in the world can accomplish when it has to contend with the things that go on in this neighborhood, and the things that each of these children live with all the time — before school and after school and on weekends and vacations, and for their entire lives, I’m afraid.”
The children did indeed respond to the “close” kind of questioning he urged. They spoke more directly, openly, and brusquely than others did in many other cities visited in the course of this study. They seemed almost waiting for a half-interested ear: “The teachers, they want you to read, but I’ve got a lot to tell you, mister, and you won’t be able to read what it is, because no one writes books that talk the way we do, I’m sure of that. The teachers, they keep on telling you tomorrow it’ll get better, and then the day after it’ll get even better than better, but they’re not even kidding themselves — we know that. You can see them driving in here from where they live, and they have that look on their faces when they park their cars, and they lock their doors and check them, and then they come into the building, and you can tell they’re worried. My dad, he says he’s worried, just like them. He can’t get a job, and someone came and stole our TV. The lock on the door didn’t mean anything. They just picked it as easy as that. They have to lock the school doors here. I don’t blame them, but then they drive away and we’re here all the time, and that’s the difference.”