But it is all in ruins. In middle school 10 percent of the students drop out while “51 percent drop out in high school.” (Kozol p.225) Discussion The conditions of the poor communities and their schools in Zozol’s book nearly 40 years after the Brown decision are shocking. Alexander, a 16-year-old student who was brought here by his parents from Jamaica just a year ago, says this: “You can understand things better when you go among the wealthy. Why don’t you call your mother?” The child says, “My mother doesn’t have a phone.” The principal sighs. Interviews with students, administrators, staff, and members of the community express the problems encountered in schools. Every student that I see during my visit to the school is white or Asian, though I later learn there are a number of Hispanic students and that 1 or 2 percent of students in the school are black. She tells me that Tri-Logic is her father’s firm. A plaque in the principal’s office tells a visitor that this is the oldest high school in the Bronx. “I’m not convinced,” he says, “that AP courses would be valued in the Bronx. The Times itself, at various points, has offered estimates that range from 25 percent to nearly twice that high—a range of numbers that suggests how inconsistent and perplexing school board estimates appear even to seasoned journalists. In the sentence “Jack walks to the store,” he is unable to identify the verb. To their friends they say, in private, “This is the best place to buy a home. The father’s earnestness, his faith in the importance of these details, and the child’s almost painful shyness stay in my mind later. They get used to what they have. The counseling office is the worst room I have seen. But what about the others? 24, unlike the poorer schools of District 10, can draw on educated parent volunteers who staff the room in shifts three days a week. At eleven o’clock, about 200 children in a top-floor room are watching Forman’s theater class performing The Creation by James Weldon Johnson. On the top floor of the school, a sixth grade of 30 children shares a room with 29 bilingual second graders. I feel guilty that I am not willing to risk my career in order to save the children of this community. Funding for schools in Illinois range “from $2,100 on a child in the poorest district to above $10,000 in the richest”. P.S. A student with a small trimmed beard and mustache stands to do a solo on the saxophone. “They know what suburban schools are like. . Only one of the children in this, group has ever been a student in a racially desegregated school. The reason, several students say straightforwardly, is “racial” or, as others say it, “out-and-out racism” on the part of adults. Why not take some money from the budget that we spend on armaments and use it for the children in these urban schools?”, A well-dressed student with a healthy tan, however, says that using federal taxes for the poor “would be like giving charity,” and “charitable things have never worked.… Charity will not instill the poor with self-respect.”, Max returns to something that he said before: “The environment is everything. If there were a multitude of schools almost as good as these in every city, so that applicants for high school could select from dozens of good options—so that even parents who did not have the sophistication or connections to assist their children in obtaining entrance to selective schools would not see their kids attending truly bad schools, since there would be none—then it would do little harm if certain of these schools were even better than the rest. Lack of space, she says, prevents the school from operating a pre-kindergarten program. We’ll pay the price someday—in violence, in economic costs. They, like their students, have peers to talk to and work with and to motivate them.” While recognizing the potential for inequity, Glazer nonetheless goes on, “I would argue that nowhere do we get so much for so little … than where we bring together the gifted and competent. Including those who drop out during junior high—numbers not included in the dropout figures offered by the New York City Board of Education—it may be that roughly half of New York City’s children do not finish school. “I think,” he says, “there’s a different subjective response on the part of doctors.…” And, in explanation of the fact that white patients in cardiac care are two to three times as likely as black patients to be given bypass surgery, he wonders whether white physicians may be “less inclined to invest in a black patient’s heart” than in the heart of a “white, middle-class executive” because the future economic value of the white man, who is far more likely to return to a productive job, is often so much higher. The systems and bureaucracies are different. A few, maybe. Two first grade classes share a single room without a window, divided only by a blackboard. We are in a powerful position.”. In effect, a circular phenomenon evolves: The richer districts—those in which the property lots and houses are more highly valued—have more revenue, derived from taxing land and homes, to fund their public schools. Quizlet flashcards, activities and games help you improve your grades. Statistics tell us, says the Times, that the South Bronx is “the poorest congressional district in the United States.” But statistics cannot tell us “what it means to a child to leave his often hellish home and go to a school—his hope for a transcendent future—that is literally falling apart.”, The head of school facilities for the Board of Education speaks of classrooms unrepaired years after having been destroyed by fire. A very shy light-skinned girl waits by the desk. Some kinds of logic are inside of you to start with. I don’t think the powers that be in New York City understand, or want to understand, that if they do not give these children a sufficient education to lead healthy and productive lives, we will be their victims later on. If there’s a war, we have to fight. Chunks of plaster also hang from underneath the balcony above my head. . The second position is that racial integration—for example, by the busing of black children from the city or a nonwhite suburb to this school—would meet with strong resistance, and the reason would not simply be the fear that certain standards might decline. The first things that one senses in the building are the sweetness, the real innocence, of many of the children, the patience and determination of the teachers, and the shameful disrepair of the surroundings. I return to see the kindergarten classes on the ground floor and feel stifled once again by lack of air and the low ceiling.