In the wake of the war in Iraq, the papers have been full of news about “nation building.” Among our efforts to rebuild that nation have been attempts to reopen Iraqi schools, enroll children and begin lessons, not surprisingly, in our version of democracy.
“Nation building,” we assume, is what we already do here, and our schools, we also assume, are part of that effort. People everywhere in the United States, but especially professional educators, have been encouraged by President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” educational policy—which presumably supports the building of our own nation.
That’s not what’s happening.
Since early in the year, I have been a tutor in writing and reading programs in two New Jersey schools—a public school in Newark and an independent school in suburban Edison. The elementary school in Newark has a Readers’ Club for second and third graders who have great difficulty both reading and writing at all, never mind at grade level. My contribution to the Readers’ Club has been to read to the students books carefully chosen for the level of their vocabulary, the quality of the story and our ability to use each book for reading and writing lessons that complement our “story hour.”
The other school, a private school in Edison, draws its student body from several suburban communities and offers instruction from pre-kindergarten through high school. I worked with advanced placement and accelerated-level high school students who were interested in improving their writing skills.
I had ample opportunity in both schools to look around, to listen to children and teachers, to gauge the nurturing quality of the environment and, finally, to understand something about the truth of our “nation-building” efforts, at least on this local level. Here I speculate about the likely outcome of those efforts, but I am now certain of one outcome: Many children will be left behind.
Immediately upon visiting both schools, one is aware of the economic and social inequalities that undermine educational efforts, especially in our urban public schools. The private school is supported by tuitions that, from middle school upward, exceed in-state tuition at Rutgers; annual giving and capital campaigns support the balance of operational and growth costs of the school. Development staff are invariably optimistic about the success of their efforts.
Public schools, on the other hand, while they receive substantial taxpayer support, cannot turn as handily or as successfully to parent and alumni communities for additional and sorely needed funds. The poverty of these communities is not alleviated by public support or assistance, and the poverty of these communities dooms the efforts of their schools to lift their children into the educated mainstream of the country.
To illustrate: One day in the Readers’ Club, I looked up from the book Pepi’s Bell and noticed that the soles of the shoes of the little boy on the mat in front of me had holes in them the size of small fists. The bottoms of his feet were sockless and callused. When I brought this child’s clothing problems to the attention of one of the community aides, the man told me that he would buy new sneakers for the boy and that I could contribute socks and underwear. This child, he said, was only one of many who routinely avail themselves of the school’s supply of used clothing for its students.
Perhaps I would like to be a regular contributor to that supply?
I was stunned—not by the request but by the fact that the request needed to be made in the normal course of a school day. How many of us expect to clothe our children from the closets of the public schools?
Other questions I was forced to ask myself: Would my child ever complain of stomachaches, fatigue, or headaches because he had not eaten breakfast or slept in a real bed or had done his lessons without the help of a lamp? What would I do if my son complained that there weren’t enough pencils to go around in the classroom? That he’d had to share a book? That the room was too noisy to concentrate?
The context in which education is attempted in this public school is the context of extraordinary poverty. Children routinely come to school in circumstances that make learning impossible.
Mrs. C.’s fourth-grade class in Newark was small in student number but large in challenges: Every one of the 15 children in the class was either on medication for physical disorders, in psychological distress from placement in a series of foster homes or both. One sweet-faced child was in her fifth foster home and on such heavy medication that she could not keep her head up for a lesson.
What learning took place among these youngsters was minimal at best and required all of the teacher’s energy, ingenuity and commitment.
A rational and well-meaning person might anticipate that special educational provisions were made for these students: carefully selected textbooks, pencils, markers, audiovisual aids, computer-supported instruction, clean desks and comfortable chairs. In sum, one would assume that these children are covered by the president’s vow that no child will be left behind and that every effort is being made to “bring them along.”
But the efforts of teachers, administrators and aides are not adequate and cannot be adequate in these urban centers. Anecdotes about the varieties of educational deprivation these children, their teachers and the school itself endure are too many to recount. But they constitute a sharp and painful rebuttal to the empty “no child left behind” rhetoric.
You can anticipate the contrast that follows. The private school in Edison is in the second year of its “learn anywhere, anytime” experiment, which to date involves all students in the middle and upper schools (grades five through 12). Each student in these grades has a laptop computer, leased from the school with “permission to buy” options. Their homework assignments—and their teachers—are accessible by computer. More importantly, students can “cruise” across subject areas, bring information from one subject area to bear on another, engage in online conversations with classmates and instructors, surf, and “go” to libraries, newspapers and international sites. The learning opportunities are endless—not just because of the laptop program. The second- and third-grade children in this school go on field trips, learn second languages, become computer literate and travel outside of their suburbs during the summers. There is a school uniform for the pre-high school grades. Students look sharp and ready to go. And indeed they will go, directly into futures that have colleges, careers, great dental care, cocker spaniels and SUVs waiting for them. Everyone already has socks.
But the members of the Readers’ Club will be left behind.
All of these young students will grow up. They are, to use the cliché, our nation’s future. And what a Janus-faced future they promise. One population suffers chronic economic depression—meaning substandard housing and nutrition, substandard schools in which, despite the best efforts of exhausted teachers, minimal achievement at best is possible. And social adaptations that make survival possible also drive antisocial behaviors. The other population always has good shoes, never misses a meal, heads for The Johns Hopkins Talent Program every summer and is always perfectly comfortable in the upper-middle class, which increasingly defines this country’s political and corporate culture.
For Father’s Day this year, my Readers’ Club kids in Newark made cards in which they folded new handkerchiefs (bought by the teacher out of her own pocket) and which they addressed (following the teacher’s instructions) to “anyone, preferably a man because this is Father’s Day, important in your life.” Some hard thinking followed this instruction. Most cards and hankies went to big brothers; some were mailed to “uncles” in jail.
In contrast: One of my AP students in Edison couldn’t organize his college application essay easily. It was about his travels to African, Greek and South American cities, and he had difficulty finding a unifying theme. He speaks four languages but couldn’t find quite the right words in any of them. What a problem. And, really, what a delightful kid and with what prospects!
The distance between these two groups of students is much more than the 20 miles between their schools. They are effectively citizens of different countries. Everything in their experiences is different; the contrast is absolute. It is, I believe, the result of national leadership whose confidence is only in the affluent among us, whose resentment of a perpetual underclass that requires assistance is acidic in its intensity and whose purpose is to embrace the affluent and abandon the poor.
“No child left behind”? Nonsense. They already are left behind. And, the president’s rhetoric notwithstanding, even as I write this essay, Congress is debating the “merger” of Head Start into local preschool programs, run by local boards of education and, yes, funded by local districts—including poor districts that already can’t afford adequate supplies and books. The president supports the proposed legislation.
This essay began on the subject of “nation building.”
I do not begrudge Iraqis the rebuilding services and support we can bring them. But I want for Americans, of all ages and in all locales, the same services and support. We, too, are a “public,” and public neglect cannot exist without public consequences, for which we all will pay. Unless a critical mass of Americans really notices the dreadful divisions of our population and acts—with urgency, with substance—to close those divisions, we are, I fear, a nation undone.
Elizabeth Mitchell is former director of and now part-time lecturer for the Honors College at Rutgers-Newark.
