The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  Ted Hinton, principal of the Harris school, set out to break that cycle by seeing through parents’ eyes and getting inside their minds to the extent possible. “They don’t feel comfortable in the school,” he observed. “They feel a sense that the school is somewhat above them, not treating them with respect, or has not shown that love or that we’re in this together.” The answer? “You communicate with them, be friendly, you talk to them, you welcome them, you put out a welcome policy: Come in, not only when a child does something wrong but a positive thing. You constantly bombard them with information, tell them that your child has done something [good], this child has won a mayor’s essay contest. Put everything out. Let them see it’s an open atmosphere.… Yesterday morning I had a father-son breakfast for the first time, for Black History Month. I guess we had probably thirty, forty-five guardians that came out with their sons. Those are the kind of things. You have to keep on testing all sorts of strategies to get the parents into the school. Parents will come and volunteer in the classroom. Do a side program for parenting training. We’re trying anything to get them into the school, no matter whether it’s twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour, or a whole day. Take what you can get to get them into your school.”

  My unscientific sample of teachers turned up no consensus on whether parental attendance at school meetings correlated with their children’s performance. Some thought it did, but others could readily think of contrary cases. Mr. N, a black math teacher at Riedinger who described himself as a “product of the inner city,” insisted that he could predict which kids’ parents would be involved. “The ones who have a row of zeros, their parents won’t show up,” he said categorically. By contrast, Suzanne Nguyen observed that several of the ten parents who came to her meetings had children who did badly in class. She thought it strange. Miss V, the second-grade teacher who moved from Kenilworth to Webb Elementary in Washington said: “Even some of my most disturbed kids had very involved parents.” Mr. I, the math teacher at Dunbar, found that while the turnout was sparse, “I had one of my worst student’s parents show up.” A team of three teachers at Paul Junior High, who saw about half the parents of their 150 students, told me at first that they saw a high correlation between parental attendance and good schoolwork. Then one exception occurred to them, and another, until one of the teachers concluded: “There are some instances also where parents have been trying really hard and kids aren’t performing.”

  Teachers ought to get to know their students’ families, according to Teach for America, a program that accepts eager, bright graduates of good colleges for a summer training session and a two-year teaching assignment in poverty-ridden schools. The fledgling teachers are urged to go to church with families, get invited to birthday parties, and give out their home phone numbers. “I had dinner with probably over one hundred of my students in the two years,” said Leigh Anne Fraley, who taught French in the tiny farming town of Lake Arthur, Louisiana. Teachers in urban ghettos find it a much harder task, but many make the effort.

  Mr. L, who taught seventh-grade English at Washington’s Paul Junior High, put it this way: “I know quite a bit about many of my families. Some families I never see. Some families I have regular communication with. They call up my house once a week, I drive their kid home, I hang out with their kid on the weekends. It just depends on the family. I give them my phone numbers and let them take the initiative.” Of his 150 students, 25 or 30 made regular use of his home number.

  Having a picture of a student’s home life can help teachers interpret a student’s shortcomings, make allowances, and give help. “Usually parents don’t check to see if they do any homework,” said Mrs. M, a middle-aged math teacher in Akron. “Usually parents are in lower-income jobs, they’re working the evening shift, the students are home alone, they’re usually watching younger brothers and sisters, so the kids are in bed by the time the parents get home, so they’re pretty much on their own.”

  She intervened when she could. “Let’s take right here the first child here in my grade book,” she said, pointing to a name at the top of a list. “He comes from an extremely poor family, and he’s a behavior problem for almost every teacher.” She learned of his poverty from his brother, to whom she had given a few cookies and cupcakes after a field trip. The following day, the brother told her gratefully that the meager leftovers would be the family’s desserts for a week, which brought home to her the family’s deprivation. She saw her student in a new light. “I think he does most of his misbehavior for attention, so I try to give him a little extra attention,” she said. “He didn’t have the ability to be in algebra, but he wanted to be there. So I said, OK, let him come in. He’s in here, and he’s getting Cs, but he comes to a tutoring program that we have here, so he’s getting extra attention through that, with adult volunteers coming in. And then he comes into my class during a study hall and works on math on the computer. He comes in here at lunchtime every day and gives it up so he can get the tutoring. So I have him three periods a day. He never gives me any discipline problems. Last year he was getting suspended every few weeks. So this year he’s hardly ever getting in trouble.” Students try to get attention because that is what they need, like food or water or oxygen.

  Showing interest and respect is a simple technique that Mrs. M, who once taught in affluent schools, had adopted as a creed. “I try to teach every student as, what if this is the mayor’s child?” she said. “Or what if this is the councilman’s child? Not that this child maybe doesn’t even have a home or a parent. And if you think of them as special and let them think of themselves that way, then they can see that you have respect for them … just taking that few extra minutes to listen to them.”

  That’s not always enough, however, and rescue operations by teachers are not always feasible. Some children are hungry. Some suffer from the constant, enervating ache of teeth decayed, abscessed, and untreated.1Others need eyeglasses and cannot read what’s projected or written in the front of the room. Others, like little Latosha in Washington, just don’t make it to school very often. “Her mother works at night,” said the girl’s third-grade teacher at Harris, and “may be tired in the morning,” unable to get her daughter moving on time. This caused the teacher particular pain because she saw brightness in Latosha under the surface of incapability. “She has a lot of weaknesses as far as the mechanics of writing are concerned,” the teacher said, “but her thoughts are very good. She’s very teachable.” She pulled out a page from Latosha’s journal, an answer to the question: “If you could give a homeless person a gift, what would it be?”

  Latosha had written: “I would give them a per of closs. To were. Becous thay have nouthing. Towere thay hift to were closs, from out the gobitch can.”

  In Akron, when Mrs. L kicked “Pamela” out of English class and sent her to the office “for mouthing off,” the assistant principal at Riedinger couldn’t figure out what adult to notify. “Who’s got custody of you?” he asked the seventh-grader. She shrugged her shoulders. She honestly didn’t know.

  “ We had a three-week assignment due Monday,” said Mrs. L. “She didn’t turn it in. She wrote me a long note explaining that … she didn’t spend the weekend at her house because her mother’s boyfriend was hitting her mother around, and they had to leave that house. So she went to somebody else’s house, and she said, ‘I kept bugging my mother to go back and get my work, but Mom was afraid to go back ’cause she was afraid he would hit her.’ ” Mrs. L, white and middle-class, felt as helpless as Pamela did. “That’s why a lot of these kids are failing,” she said. “They don’t have the basics, you know. If you don’t have a roof over your head, you don’t know who you’re living with—I wouldn’t care about English either.”

  “A bout half of my students need a counselor,” said Judith Jacob. She taught literacy to immigrant teenagers who brought practically no educational experience from their home countries. One boy of sixteen did not know how to hold a pencil, sit still, or get to cla
sses on time when he arrived at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, she said. The youngsters were adrift in personal problems. A girl whose father had been murdered in Honduras “was in space, really didn’t know how to deal with it.” Other students were distracted from learning by drug use, pregnancy, family violence, and the complicated transition into American culture. “They just get really discouraged if they’re not doing well in the class,” she observed. “Their peers are working and making money and aren’t in school. A lot of them told me that, like, ‘Miss, I’m not learning. Why am I wasting my time? I’m sixteen, I’m eighteen years old, I need to be working, I have a future.’ And they only see tomorrow and they don’t see that if they do get an education they’ll be better in the long run. They can’t see that, and no one in their family is like that. It’s all about survival.”

  The education that they are receiving doesn’t open a vista on any expansive universe of possibilities. Unless they happen to find themselves in a classroom with an unusually gifted teacher, or in a home with an exceptionally visionary adult, their schooling limits them, narrows them, closes them down. If it offers a route out of the place they’re in, they cannot see it. If it brings deferred reward, they cannot calculate it. So, as the educational machinery processes them year after year, pushing them along on its conveyor belt toward graduation or less, they lose their imaginations about what can be.

  When I visited schools and said I was doing a book on the working poor, teachers often had a wry response: “Oh, you can write about me.” Because the United States funds its schools largely through local property taxes, disparities between one community and the next are huge, and the poorest districts, which need the greatest services, cannot afford them. Underpaid and low in status, the teaching profession draws an assortment of under-qualified people and mixes them into the ranks of the competent and dedicated.

  “It’s real easy to work with students who have always gotten As and Bs,” said a teacher in Akron. “They have discipline in the home, they have expectations in the home. But I think it takes a master teacher, it takes a teacher who cares, a teacher who’s concerned—it takes something special, I think, to work with the students that nobody else wants.”

  In poor neighborhoods, many dreams are trampled under the weight of struggling instructors faced with large classes, unruly pupils, and insufficient materials. On a Thursday at Dunbar High, Mr. I was trying to prepare his ninth-graders for a math test the next day. He always worked against “a general feeling of dysfunction and chaos,” he said. “It’s never relaxed. It’s never a comfortable place to come in and teach. It’s always on edge, worrying about something: conflict between the students and each other, conflict between me and students.” That Thursday, his fifth-period students “were bouncing off the walls,” and Mr. I couldn’t figure out why. He threw some questions at them: “ ‘How was your day earlier? What did you do?’ Finally I narrowed it down. ‘What’s your fourth-period class, the class before this one?’

  “They said, ‘We can’t tell you.’

  “ ‘Why can’t you tell me?’

  “ ‘Yo u’ll be mad.’

  “ ‘What’d you do?’

  “ ‘We played Nintendo.’ ”

  It had been a science class, and the teacher had given up and allowed a student who had brought in a Nintendo game to plug it into the television set in the classroom. “If there was like a school-wide, comprehensive structured environment,” Mr. I lamented, “things like that wouldn’t happen. They’d come into my class ready to work, because in the fourth-period class the teacher would have expected them to work, in second period they’d have been working hard, in first period they’d have been working hard.”

  The day before, consulting with a boy who had not been doing his homework, Mr. I inquired about assignments in his other courses. The student had no homework from any other classes. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. I. Teachers also suffer from dying dreams.

  It has long been understood that expectations influence achievement. When teachers and parents believe that a child will do well, the child usually does better than when he is thought to be incapable. Teachers’ assessments are sometimes based on stereotyping by race or class, as in the longstanding American image of blacks as less intelligent, less competent. That notion, deeply planted, can lead a white Ivy League professor to look straight at the only black student in the room when he warns, “This assignment will be difficult.” Many African-American students report such incidents.

  But the reduced assumptions are also generated by hard experiences in impoverished schools, where both teachers and children are caught in a whirlpool of low predictions and performance. “My definition of smart has changed,” Suzanne Nguyen admitted after a year of teaching at Bell High. “I’ll come to a student and say, ‘Oh, my God, look at you, you can do this!’ when I know if they were my classmates in college I would never think that they were smart for doing the same thing.”

  Discouraged children and inadequate teachers make a corrosive combination. Even in Washington’s Harris school, which was striving hard, some teachers showed signs of fatigue and inability. Harris was a fairly modern building without windows, so bleak that adding a high fence and guard towers would have made it look like a prison. Only one door was kept unlocked, and it opened to a metal detector that was overseen by Board of Education security guards—two young black women in navy blue uniforms. Inside, however, all resemblance to a penal institution vanished. The school had practically no interior walls, because it was built during the open-classroom fad of the seventies. Incomplete partitions now delineated “rooms” and allowed considerable noise to flow among them. Students ambled throughout, and controlling their movements was difficult.

  The youngsters, from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, came from one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, soaked in drugs and violence. In front of the school on Livingston Road, a bold sign produced by the city’s fiction department stated: “Drug Free Zone.” Just before school let out one March afternoon, a sporty red car cruised up and parked under the sign. Two people sat in front. As if on cue, a man shuffled down from the apartments across the street, had a word through the driver’s window, then loped around the car and got into the back. Five minutes later, he left. A young woman approached the automobile, had a brief conversation, then took a seat in the back for a few minutes. There were no policemen in sight.

  The children brought the handicaps from their neighborhood and families into the school, and some of the teachers had deficiencies of their own. “Describe 3 effects of a snowstorm,” read a third-grade assignment. A pupil wrote: “Three effects of a snowstorm are that power knockout, people fall, and cars have a hard time getting throw the snow.” Under “throw” the teacher wrote a correction in ink: “threw.”

  A seventh-grade math teacher, Ms. D, was befuddled by her own course in thinking and reasoning skills as she struggled through a problem projected onto a screen: “Slippery Jake bought a pony for $50. After a week, he sold it for $60. Two weeks later, he bought it back for $70. A week later he sold it for $80. How much money did he make or lose?”

  She set it up correctly as the sum of positive and negative numbers:

  —50, +60, —70, and +80

  The total came out to +20. To get into this course, students had to have relatively high test scores, but not all the children were following her, not all were paying attention. One who was, a girl in a yellow shirt, raised her hand and went to the projector with a different solution. On the transparency next to the 60 she wrote, “made 10;” next to the 70, “lost 10;” and next to the 80, “made 10.” This had enough deceptive logic to stump the class and Ms. D as well. How could you get two different answers? Ms. D couldn’t find another way of looking at it: that the first three transactions had cost Slippery Jake a total of $60 before he finally ended up with $80. Nobody could unravel the confusion. More disturbing was how quickly they stopped trying. Neither the students nor t
he teacher of the class on problem-solving seemed devoted to solving the problem. They dropped it and went on to something else.

  The failure was subtler in a sixth-grade grammar lesson at Riedinger in Akron. Miss B, young and agile, watched her twenty-two students like a hawk, never missing a single squirm or wandering eye. Discreetly she glanced at a seating chart to call on students by name (it was the first month of school). She had thorough control of the class’s deportment but hardly any command over their intellect. She had taught them about the simple subject of a sentence the previous day, and today it was the complete subject—the noun with all its modifiers. She told them to open their textbooks to page 345. In the sentence “A bright red cardinal sat on the windowsill,” she explained, “cardinal” was the simple subject, “a bright red cardinal” the complete subject. Had these youngsters ever seen a cardinal? Why not “a big blue police car” or “a red brick building”? It would not be pandering to limitations if schoolwork were relevant to children’s experiences. Decades after progress began toward that end, long after black youngsters in inner cities stopped seeing only blond white suburban kids in their reading books, there is still a distance to travel. In the same school, when a math teacher had given a problem on calculating a 15 percent tip, she was stunned to discover that hardly any of her eighth-graders knew what a tip was. If they had eaten out, it had been at fast-food restaurants only.

  “If I said, ‘A big red sat on the windowsill,’ does that make sense?” Miss B asked facetiously.

  “Noooooo!” the class replied. If she felt an impulse then to make the exercise wonderfully funny and entertaining, she suppressed it effectively. Tedium reigned through example after example as many of her students mistook the direct object for the simple subject. “Have you heard the new CD by Gloria Estefan?” She asked for the simple subject.