Comments on Kozol and Suskind: Reflections on Teaching the City
Joan E. Aitken
Professor
Communication Arts
Park University
E-mail: joan.aitken@park.edu
As a teacher, I have worked with students in kindergarten through graduate school contexts. I recently taught in a six-week summer program at an urban alternative high school, more than forty years after Detroit burned during rioting. Now I read that the Detroit School District is poised for state takeover because it is $1 billion in debt. In 1967, while in college studying to become a teacher, I was a long way from my Detroit roots. Today, I feel even farther away.
I would like to be one of the faculty Kozol called idealists from the civil rights campaign generation who “try to keep faith with the principles that have inspired them” (218). Despite experiences teaching in urban contexts, I don’t feel like I belong in the city. Or maybe I feel like I belong there, and it’s my students and colleagues who think I don’t quite fit. Or maybe no one fits in.
In thinking about the forty-one years since Detroit become a war zone, I want to encourage more of my colleagues to read—or read again—Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation and Suskind’s Hope in the Unseen. Unfortunately, the struggles these authors describe are not new and are not outdated. Fortunately, though, my colleagues are still talking about both books.
When I moved to Kansas City 20 years ago, the city was struggling with desegregation. I recall a friend who said: “Who is going to volunteer to have their children participate in desegregation? Us!” My daughter recently told me that someone asked her: “So your parents sent you to a magnet school as part of a social experiment in desegregation?” We did, with glorious results that have profoundly affected my family. Unfortunately, the desegregation process fell apart in Kansas City. A disintegrating decade later, I think of Kozol’s words: “The longer this goes on, the further these two roads divide. . . the harder it will be to find a place of common ground on which the children of the many ethnic groups and social classes in our nation’s public schools will ever actually meet” (273).
Kozol explained his experiences with urban public schools in the United States in ways that are chillingly consistent with my brief but profound experiences working with Washington D.C. public schools. Here are a few of my own District of Columbia observations, which are consistent with Kozol’s New York observations:
Children spend much of their time standing in lines instead of learning (14-15).
Children are unsafe (43). One can find drug paraphernalia and condoms on the playground from last night’s adult activities there. When a kindergarten room was shot up in DC, the police had trouble distinguishing new bullet holes from old bullet holes. The buildings have asbestos and were in disrepair.
Funding urban schools is a low priority (45). Teachers didn’t always get paid when they were supposed to be paid. Because the federal government controls D.C. funding, it can withhold funds. D.C. has to use their budget to prioritize police escorts for the president and dignitaries over educating their children.
One quarter of the school year and vast resources are spent on testing and test preparation instead of authentic education (113). Kozol described the emotional toll of testing pressures on principals, teacher, and students (123). Particularly sad was how when schools have to close because of lack of success, the children go to a more successful school, which then sends that school into a downward spiral on performance testing too.
Principals range from weak to qualifying for sainthood. Some administrators are heroes (200).
Teachers lose confidence in themselves and what they know about children learning (305).
“We don’t have many people who believe that integration’s even possible or worth attempting anymore, not in the government at least.” Educators are worn out by the struggle (311-312).
While Kozol discussed many stories about urban education, Suskind’s book is an astounding story of a single student who graduated from Ballou Senior High in southeast D.C. and attended Brown University. Suskind’s book reminded me how I always felt lost trying to find schools in southeast Washington D.C. Unlike the other parts of the city, there are few street signs anywhere in southeast D.C. I wondered if that was because the government thought no one from outside the area would ever want to go into southeast D.C. or if the government didn’t want anyone from the area to find his or her way out.
The night I finished my work in D.C., I discovered a stop light in front of an elementary school. Before I came, a child had been killed there while crossing the street. A second child was hit and suffered severe traumatic brain injury after I arrived. My supervisor sent me on a campaign to install a signal light at the crossing, which was a more complicated task than I anticipated. I often wondered if the installation of that stop-light was the only thing I managed to accomplish during my months in D.C. Perhaps that stop-light is symbolic of it all. People running this nation zoom by those invisible, “cheap children” (Kozol 49). Instead, we need to stop and to see those children. Every child in this country deserves a good education.
Works Cited
Kozol, J. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown, 2005.
Suskind, R. (1999). Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. New York: Broadway, 1999.
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