Let me take a moment to venture back into the mystical world of my favorite fictional presidency.
Jed Bartlet was preparing to run for re-election against the Republican challenger, Rob Ritchie. They happened to be at the same theatre performance in New York and stepped outside for a little chat. This is from the end of their conversation:
BARTLET
Something horrible happened about an hour ago. CJ Cregg was getting threats so we put an agent on her. He’s a good guy. He was on my detail for a while, and he was in Rosslyn. He walked in the middle of an armed robbery, and was shot and killed after detaining one of the suspects.
RITCHIE
Oh. Crime, boy, I don’t know.
BARTLET
[sighs] We should have a great debate, Rob. We owe it to everyone. When I was running as a governor, I didn’t know anything. I made them start ‘Bartlet College’ in my dining room. Two hours every morning on foreign affairs and the military. You can do that.
RITCHIE
How many different ways you think you’re gonna find to call me dumb?
BARTLET
I wasn’t, Rob. But you’ve turned being un-engaged into a Zen-like thing, and you shouldn’t enjoy it so much is all, and if it appears at times as if I don’t like you, that’s the reason why.
RITCHIE
You’re what my friends call a superior sumbitch. You’re an academic elitist and a snob. You’re Hollywood, you’re weak, you’re liberal, and you can’t be trusted. And if it appears from time to time as if I don’t like you, well, those are just a few of the many reasons why.
BARTLET
They’re playing my song.
BARTLET stands and heads to the stairs, but he turns to RITCHIE before reaching them.
BARTLET
In the future, if you’re wondering, “Crime, boy, I don’t know” is when I decided to kick your ass.
Of all the ways Ritchie snarked him throughout the conversation, Bartlet takes that line the most personally. He couldn’t believe Ritchie could brush crime aside as… something that just happens. “Boy, I don’t know” is what you might say about the third straight day of rain, or the Bengals losing to the Bucs, or something else so meaningless in the grand scheme of everything that you can only rhetorize, “yeah, well, what can you do…”
I’m writing this entry having just watched the State of the Union. And I feel like I’ve just listened to Rob Ritchie all over again, though not about crime. It was the ten seconds Bush devoted to education that got me. I feel like I need to give my own address now: The State of Urban Education.
A few things have happened recently that illustrate this current state more prohibitively than others.
First, Tunk has dropped by several more times since our first meeting, in desperate need of math help. He whips out a worksheet full of complicated problems… It’s all that SINE, COSINE, formula of theorem angle of the algebraic logarithm… things. The instructions read, “complete the following problems.” You know, I actually think I was good at this about 7 years ago. But I had a great teacher, extensive notes from class, a textbook, and a graphing calculator. Tunk has none of these.
Luckily for us, Co-Workerette is considering med school and actually remembers math lessons beyond eighth grade. But even this is tricky for her. We’re both alternatively exasperated and appalled that Tunk is somehow supposed to figure out how to do this stuff without any formal instruction.
“What in the world do you do during class?”
Shrug.
“So the teacher doesn’t instruct you on how to do this stuff?”
“No, we just get these papers.”
So with no textbook, no notes, and an old graphing calculator someone found in the bottom of a filing cabinet Upstairs, we try to teach Tunk… whatever it is we’re looking at. Describing it as a “constant struggle” is like calling water a little bit wet. Here is a teenage boy forsaking upwards of three hours of his evening trying to learn what he should have in school. This isn’t normal. He’s probably the only one in his class actually trying to complete the material for learning purposes.
Somewhere along the line, he must have figured out that he needs to pass the SAT in order to get to college. And you can’t pass that without actually knowing something. And then the pressure is on us. If we can’t teach him, where else will he learn? What about the hundreds… thousands of others who have to learn the same thing, but can’t access resources like this after school help? They naively believe that by simply showing up for school, their pass for the future is secured. What is a school when it’s only a building with desks?
Which brings me to my next, much sadder example of the State of Urban Education.
Darth Vader is absolutely convinced he’s “going to Maryland to play football.”
Now, being a sports enthusiast myself, let me just say that this boy probably couldn’t run 40 yards to save his life. I’ve never seen him play football, but just looking at him… he seems more like a professional antagonizer who happens to carry above-average bulk. I don’t think they give scholarships for that.
But anyway, he’s convinced. And he wants to hear nothing of this “taking the SAT” thing.
I tried to relay to him that college sports aren’t easy on the mind or body, and how was he even sure that he’d get there. Pushing aside the fact that he’s probably nowhere near good enough to play, we launched into academics. I said it’s impossible to set foot on a field without first being eligible.
“What? Whatchu mean, eligible?”
“Something you wouldn’t have to worry about if you were a Kentucky basketball player,” I didn’t say.
“It means you have to go to class, study, and pass.”
He launched into one of his cookie-cutter teenage I know everything about everything spiels.
He won’t tell us what school he goes to, just that it’s “somewhere in Maryland.” I still don’t quite understand the whole DC which-school-you’re-allowed-to-go-to thing. I guess you can just pick wherever you want… if they let you in. But anyway, he says that he gets really good grades and he never has homework because they don’t give any.
I can believe the good grades part. He’s a smart kid, and if he didn’t earn a grade through academics, he certainly knows how to bully for one. I would wager a guess that he bullies every one of his teachers and gets whatever he wants.
He claims he only needs to be at school half days and at certain times. Co-Workerette and I asked him if a separate law about children and school was made for him. He wasn’t sure. Heh. So we asked about a few specific subjects. His answers are always the same.
“My grades are fine. I have a B or something in that class.”
“But you just said you don’t even have to show up for class.”
“Yeah, and I have a good grade, so why should I?”
“[Darth],” I said, “do you understand that you and other DC students are at a huge disadvantage when you are compared to the rest of the country?”
“What?? No we’re not.”
“Yes you are. When you take the same test that kids all across the country take, and they have had harder classes in high school than you, they’re going to know the material. And you won’t. It won’t matter that you got an A in whatever class because you’ll be doing so poorly compared to everyone else. The standards are lower here.”
“No they ain’t. And colleges look at your grades. Mine are good.”
I absolutely, 100% believe that he actually thinks that. I can tell now when he just disagrees for the sake of being antagonistic. This is not one of those times. He truly has no idea how completely screwed he is.
The public high schools around here are what you’d expect, and then some. If you walk in there during the school day, you won’t find many students in the classrooms. They’re in the hallways. Smoking pot. Rolling dice. Getting in fights. Teachers walk right by and ignore it all. They’re probably thrilled students actually made it inside the building.
One high school that a lot of our regulars go to is of “historic” nature. It was the first black high school in DC and was famous for its academics. Apparently after it “desegregated” (funny, 99% of its students are still black) those academics plummeted. However, there are reputations to uphold. As long as students are getting pretty good grades, the academics must be excellent. See how they learn? Shaniqwa got an B in math! Too bad the only criteria for grading was showing up. Maybe putting a name on the paper. Guessing. The other day Tyson’s homework was listing 10 countries that spoke Spanish. He said he’d just get a map of South America and pick 10. I reminded him that half those countries speak Portuguese. His response? “It don’t matter. They don’t care if it’s right, just that I turn something in.”
This is the story for many other schools across the area. So desperate to portray some kind of improvement, some sliver of success, that the measure of achievement lies in pointless, misleading statistics on a piece of paper rather than the quality of life and success of its students.
And then kids like Darth wonder what we mean by the “low standards.”
I’ll never forget the second week I was here. We were having some kind of staff meeting Upstairs, and got interrupted by the delivery of one girl’s SAT results. I didn’t know this girl yet, but apparently she was among “the best and the brightest” of the program. Received good grades at school, was on the college track, already labeled a success story.
Her score was a 450. COMBINED. That’s in the 1 percentile.
How do you tell a girl who has worked her tail off in school, been a positive presence throughout the program, and thinks she’s finally breaking the mold… that she did worse than 99% of the country? There’s no reason for it.
In his speech, President Bush devoted a whole two paragraphs to the nation’s most precious commodity. He called the No Child Left Behind Act, now five years running, a rousing success. He congratulated himself, claimed that America’s youth were all on the gravytrain to Collegeville, and urged the act’s renewal.
Meanwhile, two miles away, Tunk is still trying to figure out radius vector equations without the help of notes, and Darth has never heard of “eligibility.”
Education, boy, I don’t know.
