h:\doc\web\2000\05\schm.txt


<< So what CAN we expect of these desperate inner city kids? D average
pass? Can we "Escalante" them through calculus? (evidently even he
was not able to repeat his performance) >>


May 9, 2000


Hello Arthur,


I have nothing against an "Escalante" or two, if they don't hype themselves 
against the mandatory Hollywood backdrop of the rest of those mean, uncaring, 
lazy, or corrupt teachers and principals without whom they wouldn't be stars. 
I've done everything from teaching the hard core at high levels (AP, a 
pioneering Apple Macintosh computer classroom) to facing gunfire for my 
students. But I never did it while denigrating the average teacher with whom 
I worked. There is never a "me" without a "we" in any serious social 
activity. The myths America lives by insist on the all "me" approach. We 
can't tell the American Dream story without Joe DiMaggio, leaving out the 
rest of the Yankees of those wonderful years. I won't leave out guys like Jerr
y Coleman or Bill Dickey, Hank Bauer or Tommy Hendricks. One of the reasons 
why many cultures developed such persistent records of success was that 
strong families maintained demands on every member of the units, they didn't 
just make a sacrifice for a star system to play itself out into future 
generations.    


The average inner city school needs a range of activities against a 
background that makes the school a special part of a child's life, separate 
and safe from the desperation and violence of the rest of their world.


Part of that is curriculum. I've had friends who've taught them calculus, and 
I've taught them AP English (both courses). But it takes years of working 
with an entire high school to distill a handful of kids who are actually 
ready for those classes by age 17, 18, or 19. I could cite a hundred 
examples, but all the anecdotes in the world don't count against the backdrop 
of what Conrad called "The Horror." When children are the victims of 
horrifying levels of social injustice, many of those who survive grow to 
become a part of the complex system of victims and victimizers. For every kid 
I can describe in tear-jerking detail (the struggle against the odds; the 
gritty hard work; the "no excuses" outlook), there are a half dozen caught in 
the middle and one sinking into the hard core swamp of drugs, gangs, guns and 
death. So what's the point of telling the Jaime Escalante type stories if it 
simply gives people an excuse to ignore the structural problems underlying 

the horror?


A big part of it, however, includes all the other activities that give kids 
(and their school) pride. One of the most overlooked of those is a regular, 
decent school newspaper. Others include a range of curricular, extra 
curricular, and sports offerings. Chicago's John Marshall High School hasn't 
been an academic powerhouse since the 1950s, but its sports programs help 
large number of kids maintain pride, develop their bodies (remember, we're 
dealing with teenagers during those most dangerous years), and learn how to 
make choices. (If you haven't seen the movie "Hoop Dreams", please do so. The 
exploitative Catholic high school is contrasted nicely with the ghetto school 
that actually supports the kids and doesn't just play them out in a star 
system that few master. I'm proud to have worked with every coach at Marshall 
High School who is depicted in that movie, and to have had their votes and 
support when I needed them...). 


Jaime Escalante did a great deal of harm to realistic inner city teaching, 
but he was not alone. His contribution, however, was more insidious than 
most, because he created the illusion that children could leap ahead in math 
to calculus without years of grinding (or dancing, depending upon the 
teachers) through all of the necessary prerequisites. For example, my own 
11-year-old son is in a Chicago public schools "gifted" program (placed into 
the program based on IQ tests at ages four, five, and six, the kids are). 
Last night, after baseball, his homework was calculating the volumes of 
spheres, hemispheres, and other complex geometric objects. He has a chance to 
develop his math skills all the way to calculus (and beyond) by the end of 
high school. But many kids his age from the hard core of the inner city where 
I taught will be struggling with those same math problems when they are too 
large for the seats they're stuffed into. 


Schools are more complex than the course offerings they can develop. The 
threads that bring our kids to the point where they can handle the legitimate 
challenges of certain curricula don't lend themselves to Hollywood (or 
politicians') oversimplifications. 


Joe Clark ("Lean on me"), Marva Collins ("Welcome to success!") and all the 
other inner city teacher fairy tales (down to the really silly ones, like 
"The Substitute" and "Dangerous Minds") are based on the "Hero" premise. It 
doesn't matter whether Our Hero is Latino (Escalante), black (Collins, Clark) 
or white (the various substitute teacher heroes; Robin Williams), they push a 
myth that in the face of Third World levels of desperation, all you need is a 
good dose of Mother Theresa to solve the problems. That relieves America the 
Beautiful of having to face the face that a large chunk (on a percentage 
basis) of its children are not being served by the present economic miracles 
we're all facing.


I (bitterly) reviewed "Teacher Movies" three years ago in Substance. I'm 
adding that issue to the pile I'm sending you, folded out. It's a review of 
"187" with commentary on the others, going all the way back to "Blackboard 
Jungle" and "To Sir, With Love." (I left out "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" 
because it predates the current era and deals with other issues).  


I can describe accurately what teaching and learning were like at the 17 
inner city Chicago high schools I taught at during my (recently interrupted) 
30-year Chicago teaching career. I will be working on those descriptions over 
the next year or so, regardless of the outcomes of other matters. No other 
teacher will ever get the combination of training (University of Chicago) and 
inner city experience I've had. Typically, your Jonathan Kozol (or Greg 
Mitchie) types teach a few years (not just one; those don't count at all) and 
then develop decent careers as pundits. The trouble is, when the problems of 
society are embedded in the injustices of the economic system, the illusion 
that education can work for all children (regardless of the streets they walk 
or the homes in which they sleep) is dangerous. When to that we add a demand 
that those children compete (using WASL, MCAS, SAT 9, Iowa, or whatever) 
against the children of economic rank and privilege, we are doing a great 
disservice. 


The best we can do in our schools is to train the minds of our children. 
Because reality demands it, we are often required to feed them and even help 
them learn to perform the basic routines of hygiene regularly. Those of us 
who have served America as practitioners in the hard core inner city have 
done as much as is possible. Nobody asks the hard core inner city teachers 
how and why they do what they do, year in and year out. The sanctimonious 
assumption is that we are part of the problem and shouldn't be heard. 


In fact, we are closest to a solution America has had, but those who control 
the distribution of solutions to complex social, economic and political 
problems don't want our solutions for the children of the desperately poor. 
They'd much rather take their capital gains and give a tithe to Mother 
Theresa, banking the rest of the money for a Trek in the Andes or a week of 
sky diving over the Alps. Feel-good philanthropy might help the upper and 
upper middle class ignore the grit at ground level, but it diverts from a 
close look at the problems on the ground. You'd have to double the number of 
classrooms and teachers to give all of us teaching in the inner city the time 
and incentive to work closely with more kids. Instead, we get overcrowding, 
lack of supplies, sweaty smelly places to work -- and the blame for 
everything that has gone wrong from sanctimonious suburbanites who are afraid 
to park near the places we work and the homes of the children we teach.


George Schmidt