For thirty years or more, lack of money has prevented America from creating the educational system we need. But lack of money has also given educators a convenient excuse for failure to solve some fundamental education problems which money alone cannot solve. Now it is tempting to believe --
-- with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
-- with the poverty money now available for the special educational programs -- It is tempting to believe that “prosperity for education is just around the corner.” But especially because money is available, the educational community needs to face up to problems which the dollar will not solve.
Listen to this verbatim record of a classroom dialogue where the teacher-pupil ratio was one-to-six. Just six, big city, high school, drop outs:
“I want to go to the bathroom.”
“You know you can’t go to the bathroom. It’s against the rules.”
“But I want to go to the bathroom.”
Then turning to someone else, the teacher said: “Spell ‘Nation":
“I can’t spell that man.” “You know I’m dumb.” “Ask someone else.” “All right,” said the teacher, “You spell it.” “I don’t want to spell that word.” “I want to spell antidisestablishmentarianism.” “All right, spell anti-disestablishmentarianism.” “A - N - T -- No!” “I’ll write it down, and you come over here, and see, if I’ve spelled it right.” “No, if you’re going to spell it, spell it for everybody to hear.”
And on and on it went. Six-to-one, six dropouts and one teacher. That’s an expensive ratio. Money could hardly buy more.
I am not saying that the money isn’t needed -- sorely needed. In many places, for lack of funds, the teacher has become not only an educator -- “But he is also a clerk, a custodian, an operator of audiovisual equipment and an audio-version of a printed book. In many slum schools, the impression gained is that the teacher is part lion tamer and part warehouseman.”
Those are the words of Arthur Pearl and Frank Riessman in their new book New Careers for the Poor.
And they are right. Partly by necessity -- but also party by choice, the teacher and the school system have taken on impossible burdens. The school system is supposed to provide a special reception and adjustment process for newcomers to the city. It is supposed to be a refuge for children from homes where noise, overcrowedness, and family fights make homework, even sleeping, impossible.
The school system is supposed to provide supplementary experiences -- trips, music, camping, toys, games and books, which are missing from these children’s lives. It is supposed to deal with pre-school deficiencies, with negative attitudes towards authority, and with the absence of any models for success or achievement.
That’s a lot of jobs. Some people criticize me for having even two full-time positions. . . But ten tasks are too many for any man or for any single profession -- or any institution. You have struggled, gamely, to do them all. But let’s be frank. You haven’t succeeded! No one could have succeeded. And by necessity, some of these problems have been dealt with by ignoring them, by maintaining the myth that all children have the same or very similar needs. It has been unfair to ask you to take on all the inequities and social problems of our society. It still is! More money won’t change that fact. Now is not the time or place for the educational fraternity to close ranks and to pretend that with more money everything is going to be o.k. It is too late to say, “We and we alone can do the job.” This is a time for candor -- not for cover up. Hundreds of thousands of boys and girls are flowing into our Job Corps Centers, our Neighborhood Youth Corps, and MDTA Youth Programs right now.
I met one of those “kids” the system “missed” a month ago in Ouachita, Arkansas, --
-- six feet tall
-- seventeen years old
-- cowboy hat
-- Texas boots
-- smoking a cigarette
-- cocky
Three weeks before I met him, that 17-year-old white boy read these two sentences:
“I am not an ant.”
“I am a man.”
They were the first two sentences that boy had ever read. He cried when he did. I am not blaming you. You have had to do an impossible job with too little resources, under-paid, under-appreciated. But as a consequence, our educational system has become a school system that can only be described as segregated -- segregated not simply by race, but by class and background. The result has been described by Edgar Friedenberg in his book, The Vanishing Adolescent: “The most tragic thing that happens to lower status youngsters in school is that they learn to accept the prevailing judgment of their worth.” To change that situation will require basic changes in our present system. But those changes, can only take place, those answers will only be forthcoming, if the educational community, the professionals – the leaders -- are prepared to break loose from the isolation of the past -- to abandon:
-- a middle-class orientation
-- an over-reliance on “professionals”
-- a narrow definition of the educational function
-- and a traditional, tightly circumscribed role which schools have limited themselves to playing in community affairs.
“The days of splendid isolation are over.” That isolation takes many forms -- on the most obvious level, it is an isolation in style. It is based on the assumption that the middle-class style and culture is the only correct -- and the only acceptable style. That assumption is wrong. We can no longer turn our backs on, or alternatively, look down our noses at, the culture of the so-called “culturally deprived.”
Listen to this story reported in the Syracuse-Herald Journal: The headline read -- “Students Dig Jive When It’s Played Cool” by Robert Kanasola
“I play it cool and dig all jive.
That’s the reason I stay alive.
My motto, As I live and learn, Is: Dig and Be Dug in Return.”
“This fine poem by Negro author Langston Hughes opened a new world of learning to a class of ninth graders at Madison Junior High.
The poem was presented to the class by Gerald Weinstein, curriculum coordinator of the Madison Area Project.
A teacher had complained to Weinstein that her students ‘practically fell asleep’ when she read a poem called ‘The Magic Carpet’ from a standard school anthology.
Weinstein came to the rescue with Hughes’ ‘Motto’ and distributed copies to the class. This is his account of what happened.
After the students read the poem, there was a long moment of silence. Then came the exclamations.
‘Hey, this is tough.’
‘Hey, Mr. Weinstein, this cat is pretty cool.’
‘It’s written in our talk.’
But when asked the meaning . . . the students had difficulty verbalizing the idea. One student told how he once got into trouble because he didn’t ‘dig the jive’ of a group of street corner toughs.
So the message of Hughes’ poem, the class discovered, was that he ‘stayed alive’ because he ‘dug all jive’ – understood all kinds of talk.
Hughes’ motto was to ‘dig and be dug in return’ -- understand and be understood. The students were amazed at their own analysis. Weinstein asked the students how many kinds of jive they understood.
Why all kinds, of course.
The Madison Area Project official launched into an abstract essay on the nature of truth, using all the big words he could find. The students looked blank. He then asked them to test his understanding of their jive. They threw the colloquialisms at him and he got five out of six. The class was impressed.
‘According to Hughes, who has the better chance of staying alive,’ Weinstein asked, ‘You or I?’
You, they said, because you dig more than one kind of jive.
‘The jive you have mastered is a beautiful one,’ Weinstein said. ‘But you have to dig the school jive, too, the jive that will occur in other situations.’
‘That’s what school is for, to help you dig all jive and stay alive.’ The enthusiasm of that class session led the students into more of Hughes’ poetry. Later they moved into other kinds of literature in more conventional language. But the students were not the only ones to learn from that exciting class. Weinstein learned too.
He learned the advantage of being familiar with the language of the children you are teaching and establishing a rapport with them, For if a teacher doesn’t ‘start where the child is,’ Weinstein says, he only reinforces the failure and frustration that has become the normal pattern for disadvantaged students.
Exposure to the best cultural works produces no magical result and even less effective is the ‘phony’ literature that often characterizes school readers, especially in the lower grades. Exposure must begin ‘where the child is’ and proceed to other varieties of art forms. The method applies to all kinds of students, Weinstein says. For the student who has read Shakespeare but has not read Langston Hughes, for example, is also disadvantaged.” The problem of isolation is also more than a problem of style. Style is only symbolic of a far-deeper isolation -- an isolation that has kept --
-- the schools away from the community
-- the poor away from the schools
-- and the professionals away from those without professional status.
We can no longer afford the price of such isolation. It has to go. It is on its way out already. Here are some of the signs:
In city after city -- Detroit, Chicago, New Haven, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Miami -- representatives of the school board are working with welfare agencies, industry, urban renewal, health officials, labor and civil rights leaders -- and representatives of the poor -- to put together a poverty program that deals with the whole person.
In city after city, school buildings are being put to use for the whole community --
-- not just from 9 to 3
--not just for boys and girls
-- not just for the three R’s
-- not just three-quarters of the year. But year round, all day, for every kind of activity for everybody in the neighborhood.
- Arts and Crafts
- Health Check Ups
- Senior Citizens Activities
- Legal Services
- Job Counseling and Referral
- Recreation
- Civic Meetings
The school building is no longer alien territory. It belongs to the people. And in city after city, schools are beginning to employ the poor as part of their staff -- not as janitors, but--
-- as homework aides, and tutors
-- as family helpers
-- as school guides
-- as library aides
-- as nursery mothers
-- as talent searchers
-- as home visitors
-- as teachers’ aides, case aides, health aides, neighborhood aides, homemaker aides.
These are not phony titles. They are new careers. These workers are not cheap labor. They should not be viewed -- or used that way. They have something special to offer-- something that has been sorely missing in the school, system. They don’t know educational theory, but they do know, what will or will not reach their friends, what will or will not appeal, what will or will not seem important, what will or will not seem patronizing.
They need a job. But the school system, the profession -- all of us need them. And it is time to admit it. In Detroit, there are 490 such non-professionals at work. In Michigan’s Migrant Opportunity Program, there are 206 such positions. And whatever the job is called -- I say to you that these poor people are educators -- educators for an entire society that needs to learn why we have failed one-fifth of our people -- and that needs even more to learn the meaning of those words attributed to St. Vincent de Paul -- “Before you set out to help the poor, you must first beg their pardon.”
There are some significant signs -- that professional isolation is on its way out. But you -- you especially, the leaders – must hasten this process. Even if it runs contrary to accepted notions of what is “proper” for educators, and graduate schools and universities. You may agree in theory. You may nod in assent, but will you act? Will you make the commitment? Will you take the plunge? Some have! Here are capsule press releases on a few •of the projects we have recently financed:
To Syracuse University, $314,329 to demonstrate that residents of Syracuse poverty areas can organize to improve conditions such as unemployment and poor housing. The grant will be used to train poverty victims to build effective democratic organizations, to establish an area-wide group of neighborhood, church, social, and other groups in the poverty area, and to compile new data on the value of programs planned with the active help of the poverty-stricken. To New York University, $314,031 to select 60 slum boys this summer to begin a five-year college program leading to teaching careers. These are boys who could not qualify for scholarships, or even admission under “normal’ procedures.
They will, of course, be free to choose teaching or any other career. But most important, throughout their college course, the boys will be urged not to reject their pasts but to consider themselves as agents for change in the slums.
To Berea College, Kentucky, $13,783 for a three-month research project to determine if a livable house with indoor plumbing can be built in rural Appalachia for $4,000. The lower house cost will be accomplished through the use of local materials, the introduction of building methods by which unskilled workers can follow exact patterns to produce acceptable quality, and by developing self-help and low-unit financing.
Is this the kind of project you would pitch in and help on – or do you react, by saying this is outside my bailiwick? I’m an educator -- not a crafts instructor!
To the Borough of Manhattan Community College, $50,000 for a training program to prepare low-income college students for careers in local anti-poverty programs. The project will provide job training, academic work, and on-the-job experience especially designed to encourage students from disadvantaged circumstances to enter the community action field. These are not projects for schools which want to boast only about the college entrance or graduate admission scores of their freshmen.
Or take the project which you and the University of Michigan are jointly undertaking through the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. A project to help the unincorporated community of Willow Village, which started as a federal housing project near the Willow Run Bomber Plant in World War II, to plan and conduct a community action program. A project, once again, to demonstrate that residents of an urban-fringe pocket of poverty can help organize and learn to manage their own self-help program. (Incidentally, about 30 percent of Willow Village’s 5,000 population receives some form of welfare aid. About half the population is Negro.) That demonstration could produce a pattern for the self-rebuilding of other poverty enclaves -- such as ribbons of slum housing strung along highways, communities near former military bases and industrial sites, and depressed pockets on the outskirts of metropolitan areas. Do you as educators see a role for yourself in this project? Or do you prefer to sit back, even to applaud -- but also to breathe a sigh of relief that you have spun off a separate institute to do “that kind of thing” so that you don’t have to be involved? Or the professional reputation of your school jeopardized?
This is, after all, a project to demonstrate that the poor can help to organize and learn to manage their own anti-poverty program. Do you -- deep down -- have the faith that they can do it? Or has your professionalism led you to lose faith in people -- and in Democracy itself? I don’t think it has. But if you really have this faith, it’s going to require that you abandon professional isolation. Isolation is easier and safer. Professional status gives you a kind of monopoly power in the education field. It renders you immune from comparison and competition and criticism. Surrendering that isolation will render you -- as a profession -- accountable to the people of your state for the kind of education you have helped to design and provide.
You are not the only ones faced with this choice. In Washington, every federal program is being subjected to this kind of scrutiny. Newspaper columnists and critics have pointed out for years that the Federal Government has been spending billions on poverty without trying to find out in any systematic way what kind of return it was getting for its dollar. We in the Office of Economic Opportunity have decided to face up to this -- to develop a cost effectiveness system as a tool for figuring out whether we are giving the American people their money’s worth -- and more important -- whether we are offering the best buy for their tax dollar.
The same principle applies to school systems too. No business would make the kind of investments this country has made, state-by-state, and locality-by-locality in education without trying systematically to evaluate its methods, its results -- and without exploring alternatives. Yet, the school system does this -- year in and year out. And it’s about time that all of us in the educational world begin thinking through how to incorporate as a basic part of your systems, a research and development unit -- a cost effectiveness system -- so that we can begin to make the most informed possible judgments on how to invest the funds entrusted to us by a lay public.
Up until now, your isolation, your professional status has protected you from scrutiny. Your professional judgment went, by and large, unquestioned. We are past that point now.
-- Particularly because of the large number of dropouts we see.
-- Particularly because of the new focus on poverty.
-- Particularly with the development of new programs like Job Corps and Operation Head start--
Which will provide a basis for comparison. I think this competition, this critical scrutiny, this comparison is healthy -- as healthy for education as it is for the economy. There are some who liken federal education programs -- both the old and the new -- to Medicare. They call it “Educare.” Well, I like that term Educare -- but I like to pronounce it in a different way. If my Latin serves me in good stead, I want to pronounce it Educare -- which translates “To lead out.”
That’s your job. And that’s the job of the War on Poverty. To lead people out of poverty into opportunity. We have the chance now to do this. All of us can break out of the isolation of past methods and past narrow professional categories. You can do it. The opportunity is here:
-- By participation in Community Action Programs
-- By development of new teaching techniques
-- By instituting research and development programs within your education system -- and that includes your graduate training system
-- By hiring poor people to work with children from deprived backgrounds
-- By using VISTA volunteers in your school systems
-- By combining education in the narrow sense with a variety of other services
-- By building community schools and making them part of the neighborhood.
But that will require change -- rapid change -- radical change. More is involved than just money. We are, in short--
-- with the enactment of the poverty program
-- with the passage of the Education Act—
We are on the verge of revolution.
And while this particular subversive would like to express his thanks for this award (--And I hope you have not begun to entertain second thoughts about it--), I would like to end with the exhortation of a rather well-known subversive on the eve of another revolution:
“If this be treason, make the most of it.
