| |
AfterThoughts
A legacy deferred
By Lois Weiner
[The following article originally appeared in the February 27 Education
Week. It is reprinted with permission. Lois Weiner is a professor of education
at New Jersey City University in Jersey City, N.J.]
 When I taught at New
York City’s Martin Luther King High School almost 20 years ago, it
was already the “troubled” school described in news reports
last month of a shooting that occurred there, ironically, on Dr. King’s
birthday. The extensive media attention paid to the shooting of two King
students by another recalled the bitterness I felt each January in those
years as I listened to politicians’ bromides about Martin Luther
King’s legacy and the successes of the civil rights movement.
Though Martin Luther
King High School sits directly across from LaGuardia High School for Music
and Art, in the shadow of Lincoln Center, and although both schools draw
students from all over the city, LaGuardia picks its students in a highly
competitive process. For the most part, King draws two categories of students:
those whose test scores and skills keep them out of schools that can select
their students, and those without guardians or family members able to
navigate the high school admission procedures so that they can attend
a “good” school. Frequently, the two categories overlap.
As governmental and
media surveillance of schools’ test scores has increased, the competition
for students who have strong skills and respectable scores on the statewide
tests (those who “meet standards”) has increased. Few schools
want students who are academically weak, because they will need a degree
of support and attention that very few city schools are organizationally
and financially capable of providing. So most students who attend King
and other “neighborhood” high schools are there by default,
and they know it.
Almost every year that
I taught at King, teachers were subjected to a new plan devised by the
board of education to improve our students’ academic achievement.
Meanwhile, we endured a revolving door of principals, budget cuts that
always meant less help for our kids, and increased paperwork and regulation
stemming from new state and city requirements. Periodically, the school
was in the news for the sort of event the media adore: a shooting, a rape,
a teacher using sexually explicit poetry to which a religious student
objected. The then-current schools chancellor would issue a statement
deploring the event and giving new guidelines to prevent another occurrence;
the teachers’ union president would rush to the scene to determine
the facts. Shortly thereafter, a new plan would be formulated to improve
the school, one that would not be adequately funded or supported. The
school’s steady and inexorable decline would continue.
From my former colleagues
still teaching in the school, I know that the board of education’s
newest plan is its ultimate weapon: It will “redesign” the school
by cutting off new enrollments while new, small schools are put in its
place. Forgive me for being suspicious of what this redesign will bring,
but I left King to work in a “redesigned” neighborhood high
school that reverted back to its previous self within seven years. And
where will the students King currently serves, most of whom were unwanted
by selective public schools, go now?
There is no mystery
about what’s needed to make city schools that serve poor, minority
students—schools like Dr. King’s namesake in New York—become
models of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision. It’s just not popular
among politicians to state the truth. We need the resurrection and realization
of Dr. King’s ideals: economic and political justice and full democratic
rights for all members of society. Martin Luther King High School and
the city schools that serve poor, minority kids need the government on
all levels to commit resources for community development, so that schools
aren’t coping with social crises created by economic conditions beyond
their reach. Schools like King should be part of a democratically run
school system that’s well-funded, one that reflects the racial and
social diversity of the city, one committed to help each child develop
emotionally, morally, socially, and intellectually.
Without programs supported
by the federal and state governments to realize Dr. King’s dream,
we’ll continue to have city schools that contradict every one of
his ideals. The platitudes about racial justice we hear from politicians
on the holiday marking his birth ring false to kids and their teachers
in the racially segregated, underfunded schools that bear his name. And
there are many of them in the country. I know, because when I taught at
King, we were part of a network of these schools, and I noted that most
of them were segregated.
So you’ll have
to excuse me for not taking seriously the pledges and exhortations made
last month on the day set aside to remember
photo credit: Maryland State Archives
|
|
