Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

Several years ago I heard Jonathan Kozol speak. It was around the time of the release of  Savage Inequalities.  I heard him again yesterday on Oprah. I cried. Both times.  

In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol suggests that we haven’t moved beyond Brown vs. the Board of Education. He decries the notion that “schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of academic and career goals.”  

I heard the many others on Oprah over the past two days. 

It’s not like we didn’t know.  It’s about rigor, relevance, relationships. (Many of us have used those new 3Rs in our talks over the past several years.) Small schools work. (Where there’s not enough room to fall through the cracks.”)  Authentic, project-based learning works. We must set high expectations for all students and for all teachers. Education is freedom. We need to demand more from ourselves and more from our leaders. It’s a crisis that will effect every one of us.  

Oprah and her guests, including Bill and Melinda Gates, point to a national crisis and to the need to “stand up.” If we don’t, our country will suffer. It is an issue that is both economic and moral and all of us need to be engaged in the problem and the solution. 

It’s not like we didn’t know.  We live in a 21st century apartheid, not unlike the 50s we thought we long left behind. We see it as we drive through all of our inner cities. Yesterday’s show illustrated what happened during an unusual student exchange.  This time we see it through the eyes of children and their innocence of the other is both stunning and moving. 

THEY didn’t know. Students from Harper High, a Chicago inner city public school, traded schools with students from Neuqua Valley High, another public school a mere 35 miles away in the affluent suburb of Naperville. Both groups of students were shocked by the inequities.

The environments were dramatically, shockingly different.  The curricula were different too:

After sitting in on a math class at the suburban school, a Harper student was particularly worried about what her Harper education was actually teaching her. “I was looking at the math problems that they’re doing [at Neuqua Valley], and I’m like, ‘What language is that?’” she says. “As soon as I get to college, I’m going to be lost.”

I hope that many get behind this rallying cry–that a positive, sustainable kind of activism errupts.  It can be done.  We need to tackle reform in many different ways. Focusing on test scores alone is not the way.  And we need to move beyond finger pointing.  Parents, teachers, administrators, board members, politicians, all of us need to work on planning for real improvement. 

We need to reflect on our practice and realize that those of us in lovely environments that do work, those of us whose students and children are learning and achieving are not off the hook.

It’s not like we don’t know. We can no longer close our eyes to an apartheid we all own.