When I started teaching in the mid-seventies, many of my friends said it was sad I had to teach in the inner city because better jobs in the suburbs were so scarce. The truth was, had I been given a choice (and I wasn't), I would have stayed in the inner city. I liked the poor Mexican school I taught in better than the rich one, and I prefer the other suburban district where I teach without all the fancy technology but with its diverse mix of students.
The realities of education involve money, social class, and, of course, politics. I experienced this fact in Minneapolis, in Mexico, and now in two different suburban school districts. Last week, when Harry and I visited our kids and grandkids in St. Louis, I learned about some education realities, St. Louis style.
In the lovely University City neighborhood where our grandkids are growing up, our son and daughter-in-law have learned that the majority of the white parents do not send their kids to the neighborhood school. I had little trouble guessing what the issues involved would be. The school district consists of two separate neighborhoods, one black, one white, which are adjacent. The school district boundaries were probably drawn up with the hope of creating integrated schools.
Harry and I walked over one afternoon to this neighborhood school, which was two blocks from the house of our son and daughter in-law. The school was a beautiful old brick building which had recently been renovated with a new lunch room, playground, tuck pointing, etc. etc. The high school was directly across the street and it too was physically in great condition. We wandered over to the playground and in the field nearby we watched as the girls' soccer team finished up their practice. There were approximately 25 girls in all: two girls were white and the rest were black. We learned from our daughter-in-law that the elementary school is about two thirds black, one third white, and that the free and reduced lunch percentage is approximately forty percent. After observing the soccer team one can easily deduce the demographics of the high school population.
If you can afford a Catholic or private school education in this St. Louis suburb, your child can attend an all-white school. The neighborhood Catholic school is a bargain at $4000, and white parents on the lower end of the upper-middle-class white neighborhood have this as an option. A nearby non-religious private school can run upwards of $30,000. (Parents living in Manhattan would find this a steal.) Or, if you can afford a house starting at the half-million dollar range, you can move to a nearby district and be assured the dominant racial group will be white. Sending your kids to a good school is the American dream, no matter what your race or religion. For white people, a good school means one where the children of color are no more than 10 to 15 percent of the school population. Any more than that and the school is undesirable to whites. Oh, I forgot to mention that in front of the grandkids' neighborhood school is a sign that says it won a National School Of Excellence Award, which I recall from my teaching days was not easy to obtain.
One of the current first-ring suburban school districts where I teach does not have a dominant racial or religious group. The mix of students is like nothing I have experienced in my 35-year-plus teaching career: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, Jewish -- the list goes on. The district does have one predominately white elementary school, a Spanish Immersion School which is right across the highway from our condo. Once these immersion students get to middle and high school, their fluency in Spanish is nurtured, but these students do not become an elite little school within a school; unlike the kind of school my daughter attended in Minneapolis, where the white kids, including my daughter, enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program and rarely had a class with a student of color. So much for integration.
The recent open enrollment law passed in Minnesota has encouraged minority students in Minneapolis to attend the other district, richer and less diverse, where I sub. This wealthy district has a stellar educational reputation and some black parents in the inner city now choose to send their kids across the city boundary to attend schools in this district. The population of black and other minority students from the inner city attending school in this district has increased over the years, and so has the population of immigrants who live in the limited number of apartments. I know first-hand the efforts this district has made to adjust to the demographic change which open enrollment has unleashed, because my sister teaches in the district and has been on the front lines fighting for equity. It is painful to watch the attempts on display to achieve educational equity in a district which knows how to educate white, upper-middle-class students but struggles to learn how to deal with students who are not white and not upper-middle class. Teachers in the district head off to workshop after workshop to confront educational inequities in the district. These weary educators return to their classrooms where the majority of students could be described as entitled and the issues of racism for the newcomers abound.
In a perfect world, maybe even in one not so perfect, going to a school that is representative of the culture as a whole could be a good thing. Growing up in Northeast Minneapolis back in the fifties and sixties meant I had no idea that the world was a lot more diverse and complex than I ever imagined. This naive, sheltered Minneapolis girI got her first teaching job in the inner city and it was eye-opening. My career began with a basically black and Native American student population. Then came the years of wave after wave of immigrants from Asia, Mexico, Central America and Africa that flooded the Minneapolis schools and gave us some great ethnic restaurants in the Twin Cities.
Over the last two decades, the first ring suburbs around Minneapolis have been forced to deal with the realities of changing demographics just as the city schools did in the seventies, eighties and nineties. As we advance into the 21st century, the new demographic reality, with whites as the minority, will change education and politics in a profound way. White flight from the city public schools worked pretty well for the population during the last century. Now, with people of color moving more and more into first ring suburbs and the cost of private school education out of sight for most white families, the failure of many Charter schools means it will become harder and harder to run from the reality of racially diverse schools, unless of course you have lots and lots of money.
My favorite district is ranked #2 in the state, right behind the district nicknamed the "Cake Eaters". I never thought this was a very flattering nickname, but many students in the district seem to take great pride in it. I think of Marie Antoinette and the fact that things didn't turn out so well for her in the end: although she had many years where she got to eat as much cake as she liked, she paid a high price for her arrogance and sense of entitlement (though she was on the cutting edge, like the district which perpetuates her reputation!). It would be nice if all students could be "cake eaters", even those who do not have a lot of money. Maybe that big piece of cake could be cut up into smaller pieces so everyone has some and gets a head start. And keeps it.
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