Teach Our Children Well
Op-Ed, August 2000

There's only one thing worse than sending our kids to public school: sending them to private school.

That's the conclusion I came to after spending the 1999-2000 school year at the Bay Area's most famously troubled school, Berkeley High. And what a year it was: 400 students walked out, outraged by administrative bungling; the teachers picketed and rallied, protesting their dismal salaries and working conditions; the school's accreditation was threatened; a grade-tampering scandal kept 29 seniors from graduating. And just before spring break, an arsonist burned down the school's administration building.

But in and around these crises, a lot of wonderful thingsÐand a lot of educational thingsÐhappened, too. Day after day I heard fascinating, fiery classroom discussions and creative, well-researched student presentations, on topics ranging from "Madame Bovary" to the Southern Reconstruction to Proposition 21. There were school-wide assemblies on International Women's Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day; ancient Mayan dances performed by Latino students on Cinco de Mayo; zucchini planted by the Eco-literacy class growing in a former patch of concrete, then served to homeless people at a free Christmas feast.

While shadowing the three seniors who are the subjects of my forthcoming book, Class Dismissed, I sat with AutumnÐbiracial, a super-achiever, now bound for UC BerkeleyÐin college-level Advanced Placement classes. I cried with Jordan, a white-private-school-educated, 18-year-old psychologist-in-training, during a "sharing circle" at a student retreat. I rooted for Keith, a bright, charismatic football player, long relegated to Special Ed (as are far too many bright African American boys) through his third-grade-level remedial reading classes. Although they were sometimes bored and sometimes stretched to their limits by their teachers' lessons, all three students were actively engaged in learning just about all the time: in their classrooms, in the halls, in school assemblies, at lunch.

Troubled as the school was, what I saw at Berkeley High looked to me like education for the new millennium: the kind that can only be offered when the city's poorest students and its wealthiest, its most academically advanced and its illiterate, share their wildly different perspectives born of their wildly different life experiences.

The sprawling diversity of the school's student body brings with it challenges and failuresÐsome seemingly insurmountable, all of them painful. But these are the very challenges that we, as a nation, must face.

Warts and all, Berkeley High is a microcosm of America, a mirror and a precursor of what today's high school students will find in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and families tomorrow. And this is precisely the purpose of high school: to prepare our young for the world they will soon inherit.

After witnessing a school year that gave the word "dysfunctional" new meaning, how could I have come away advocatingÐas I doÐthat every family make the public schools their business and invest their children in them? Knowing what I know, how could I have invested my own?

Making that commitment requires each of us to decide, individually and collectively, what we want schools to doÐnot only for our own children today, but for our nation tomorrow. If we want the schools to prepare a tiny percentage of children to own and run the country, a slightly larger number to ensure the profitability of our corporations, and the vast majority to flip our burgers, clean our hotel rooms and fill our prisonsÐin short, to maintain our stratified society as it now existsÐthen we should maintain our two-tiered education system exactly as it is. Those with money and power should continue to buy their children a superior private school education; those without should continue to send their children to desperately under-funded, deteriorating public high schools.

If, on the other hand, we want our schools to produce top-flight scientists, artists, businesspeople and human beings drawn from all segments of the American populationÐand to mend, not perpetuate, the sharpening division between Americans of different races and classesÐwe must radically restructure our system of education. Here's how:

1) Abolish private schools.
Private schools are a prime instrument for maintaining inequities in education and in society. If we are to fulfill the yet-unkept promise of democracy, we must first close the hatches through which those with money and privilege escape the common fate. "To the extent change is possible," Berkeley High parent and Harvard School of Education professor Pedro Noguera writes in the June 2, 2000 issue of The Nation, "it is more likely to occur in education than in any other sector." Such change cannot occur as long as wealthy children are taught in small, well-equipped classes by highly skilled professionals, and poor children founder in overcrowded, decaying classrooms with untrained Ôemergency credential' teachers. We must close the escape hatchÐbecause until public schools have to be good enough for everyone, they won't be good enough for anyone.

2) Make public schools more like private schools
Everything parents pay for when they write checks to private schools can be replicated in public schoolsÐif we as a nation are willing to write the check. (Wondering where the money will come from? Hint to legislators: check the federal budget: in fiscal year 2000 the military got 291 billion of our tax dollars; we are spending $35 billion on education.) We should exponentially increase per-pupil spending in every school, bringing to a long-overdue end the disparity between funding allotted to affluent suburban schools versus schools in poor neighborhoods. Then we will be able to offer every child a modern, well equipped campus of 1000 students or less; classes of twenty students or less, and an engaging, rigorous curriculum taught by motivated, talented teachers.

3) Abolish segregated schools and segregated classes
As long as our neighborhoods are separate and unequal, so will our neighborhood public schools be. As long as our neighborhood public schools are separate and unequal, so will our neighborhoods be. We cannot level the economic and social playing field; we cannot offer equal opportunity to all, without providing all with an equal education. We cannot offer equal education to all when our school districts and schools are segregated. Using busing combined with parent choice (as the Berkeley Unified School District does), or by any means possible, we must ensure that the population of every American schoolÐits administrators and teachers as well as its studentsÐmirrors the population of the city or region it serves.

In the interim, we must end the practice of tracking. Aptly named, it sends wealthy children down the road to greater wealth and entitlement; slams poor children into the dead-end of deepening demoralization and poverty. Let's make school a sanctuary from, not an enforcer of, inequity, divisiveness, and Ôme-first' individualism. Let's give all of our children the benefit of each otherÐby educating them in heterogeneous classes where rich and poor kids; Ôchallenged' kids and Ôadvanced' kids; native Spanish speakers and fourth-year Latin students learn together, and learn from each other. Let's include in our definition of "higher standards" the expectation that our children will learn to respect, admire, and share their gifts and needs with each other. Let's put all our children in the same boat, then work together to raise the level of the river.

4) Pay teachers what they're worth
In California, today starting teachers earn about as much per hour as sales clerks.

Whether we do it because we value our children, or we do it to sharpen America's competitive edge in the global marketplace, the important thing is that we just do it. We must be able to keep and reward excellent teachers, and promptly rescue our children from the others.

5) Get families into schools
In order to succeed, kids need their parents; schools need their parents. Currently, the parents who attend teacher conferences, back-to-school nights, and PTA meetings are mostly the parents who have the most flexible work schedules (so they can volunteer at school during the day), the most help at home (so they can attend nighttime meetings), the most disposable income (so they can sponsor field trips and donate computers). They also tend to be the parents who have reaped the benefits of education in their own lives; whose circumstances are better than their parents' because of it.

But to parents (and grandparents, and other guardians) who don't believe that the school is willing and/or able to provide their child with an education, or who believe that whatever education their child gets will not assure them a better lifeÐfor example, if they believe their child is likely to be arrested for Driving While Black, regardless of how well he does in schoolÐa PTA meeting might seem a waste of time. Not coincidentally, these are often the same parents who speak little or no English, have inflexible jobs, younger children and no babysitter at home, no extra money or computers to donate. For many of them, even those who spent more years in school than their parents did, life is harder now than it was for their forebears.

The ultimate solution to this problem and the others is the same: equity and excellence in education, with the final goal of equal opportunity for all. While we're progressing down that long, winding road, we can take baby steps in the right direction.

¥ Require employers to give parents and guardians an hour off each week to work in their children's schools. Sound like a radical idea? The U.S. military currently does exactly that.

¥ Make full family participation in schools possible, and popular: provide child care, food, and translation for all evening events; use only universally accessible communication channels (no vital information transmitted via e-mail until all families are online); recognize and utilize the contributions of families from all segments of the school community (hold tamale sales and bake sales; sell sweet potato pie and brownies).

¥ Turn high schools into community centers, where families can get the help they need to maximize their children's success in school: information on school programs and resources; referrals for employment, medical care, counseling, legal representation; training in computers, literacy, language, etc.

¥ Encourage community use of school facilities for recreation, entertainment, adult education, community service. Many high schools have the best theater, the best track, the best library in townÐand many of them lock their gates at night. Local artists can perform in the school auditorium. Cooking classrooms can be used to feed the homeless with food harvested from student gardens. Students can teach their parents to use computers in their own classrooms. Parents can shoot hoops together at midnight in the gym.

Over the years, riding my bicycle past the once-diverse public elementary school my sons attended 10 years ago, IÔve watched the children playing in the schoolyard and noticed a disturbing trend. Today, I stopped and took a closer look. Sure enough: nearly every child on the schoolyard was African American.

Where have all the white kids gone? I asked myself, watching an all-black group of 5-year-olds playing basketball. Gone to private schools, every one.

When will we ever learn? AndÐif we relinquish our public schools to segregation and neglectÐhow, and what, will our children learn?