White Man's Burden

I’m reading over the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a man who loved learning more than anything. I wonder what he and the founders would think of a school where it was okay for kids to read at pre-primer levels at the ages of 17-18, fight, roam the halls and cuss at adults with no recourse. The founders would weep.

I’ve often wondered if I should be here – if I’m wanted or if I’m making any sort of impact. There’s so much apathy in this school and a feeling of complete defeat now that we’re being shut down. Before we were even shut down, though, the school flat out stunk. Nothing was organized, there were no governing rules or enforced expectations. Now that it’s getting stomped out – this community school that has stood for four decades – there is natural resentment, questioning and reflecting on what happened.

More conservatives need to step inside and see, or work in an urban school system. Then we could all speak more openly about how to fix a monumental problem in this country. The educational systems in our inner cities are equally offensive to any offense an outsider can give, so we conservatives shouldn’t be afraid to step up and make this issue our own. It is here in urban America where conservatives can and must highlight failed liberal policies. Much of the offense will come if white people, Republicans especially, try to step in and say to urban America – the way your children are being shoveled through school is not right – that more African Americans are in jail than white Americans is not right.

One co-worker, a 60-ish aged black woman, blames me for the school being closed. I am sure of it. She is a secretary/hall monitor/extended mother for the school and the kids here. She used to lumber down the halls screaming for wandering hall-walkers to “CLEAR IT UP!!!” and “GET OUT THEM HALLS!!” She took to ringing a cowbell up and down the halls to try and annoy kids to the point they could be herded into a classroom or at least to another spot. One time, a boy was sprinting down the halls and she took a swing at him, just barely missing. “I KNOW YOU FELT THE AIR!!! NEXT TIME I SEE YOU I AIN’T GONNA HAVE NO JOB!” she said. I doubled over in laughter over that one.

We used to have a great relationship and I respected how hard she tried to get kids in this crazy place to go to class, but it fell apart because she thinks I’m a reason the school is getting shut down.

Why does she think this?

One day I invited a reporter from the city’s major newspaper to come in and speak to my journalism students about crime reporting. He’s a great columnist and his work is well respected, so I brought him in to talk to the kids. Later that day, he wrote a blog entry about what he’d seen at the school after leaving my classroom. It turned out that he’d walked around the school and seen kids cussing out adults and roaming the halls in packs aimlessly while banging on classroom doors. He wrote about how no one in the school bothered to stop him and ask who he was.

The blog entry pissed off the central office, which already had it out for my principal for a variety of reasons. Within weeks, our principal was “replaced” with a “veteran.” The school fell apart in the transition. There were stabbings and people getting thrown through windows. It was ugly enough that I wrote the city’s superintendent and told him someone was going to die in the school and to not be surprised when this happened or even think of saying he wasn’t warned.

Within days, the heavy hitters of the school system were in our school trying to save it using extraordinary powers. Upon getting cussed out while patrolling the halls, the head of high schools in the city kicked a kid completely out of school. I laughed! If only we’d had this kind of authority the last couple years – there would be about 10 kids left in the whole building. One big shot came up here and got a little dose of what the school had to offer and little by little, movements were made to shut down the school.

I saw this place from day one as being completely out of control. It wasn’t right. Kids weren’t learning. They were trying to survive and get by and so were the teachers. It was a game of survival. I said something to a high enough authority and yes, it was determined, this isn’t right.

I know my old friend and colleague is upset with me and sees me as being an outsider (a white guy and new to the system) who came in and complained about this failed urban school and was part of shutting it down. Now she has to try to find another job in another school after so many years here. In some ways, I know she’s right: I am an outsider. A program, Teach For America, brought me here. Maybe it wasn’t my place to do anything – maybe I shouldn’t have been here at all. Who am I to say that this isn’t right? I’ve only been here a short time. I don’t know all the inner workings of the urban environment or the street culture which seems to run the schools. Who am I to say it’s so wrong to just survive?