Listen to the Teachers

Listen. A teacher is talking. Her name is Judy Ramsey. She teaches kindergarten at Carthay Center School, which is located on Olympic Boulevard, in the vast middle of Los Angeles. Go a few blocks in one direction and see the burned-out strip malls, monuments to the riots. Go the same distance the other way and you find glass-walled skyscrapers.

Carthay is vintage L.A. Unified. The students come in all colors and speak in many tongues. The schoolhouse itself was built in the 1920s. This was a sweet season for Southern California architecture, but time and neglect have done their work. There’s plywood in the window panes, and the computers conk out when the copy machine runs.

This is Ramsey’s 30th year. She folds her hands on her desk and talks, almost protectively, about her little students. “I think,” she says, “that these kids are wonderful. I think they are marvelous. They are honest, direct, curious, excited.

“And I think,” she adds, “that these children are our only hope.”

*

Three Carthay teachers are taking a quick morning break. They gather around a table in a bleak kitchenette and puff on cigarettes, furiously. They look almost beaten. There is strain in their voices and bags under their eyes. Veterans all, you ask how teaching duties have evolved over the years, and the words tumble out.

“We’re now asked” one says, “to do everything that the home doesn’t do, and the home is gone.”

“It wears on you,” says another. “I woke up at 3 this morning worrying about one of my students. I couldn’t go back to sleep. He’s got a big problem. I’m trying to get his parents in to talk about it. I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s all different now,” says the third. “Now we have got drug babies. We have got single-parent families and families where both parents have to work. We have got all these non-English speakers. A lot of them are fresh off the boat. We don’t even know if they are literate in their own language. I’m not just talking about Spanish-speakers. We have got Israeli. Armenian. Punjabi. How do you teach a Punjabi fourth-grade math?”

Carthay is a LEARN school, part of the district’s latest experiment in education reform. So far, the teachers seem to like what they have heard, but they are wary nonetheless. They want to see what comes after the pretty speeches. They can remember other reforms. Some worked. Many didn’t. Carthay in fact was once a model of one such effort, the so-called schools without walls. That one is gone now, but the teachers remain, the one classroom constant.

While the would-be reformers debate--vouchers, secession, you name it--the teachers develop their own methods. They draft students to translate. They pick through aged textbooks, skipping past debunked theories and dated semantics. They buy their own supplies. They scrounge. They survive.

“Every time I go to a store,” Ramsey says, “I ask for something free for my classroom. I say, ‘What do you have for my kindergarten class here? What can you donate?’ Most people are very nice. It’s guilt, I guess.”

*

Paula Tsou teaches first grade at Carthay. She quit a business career to become a public schoolteacher. She believed, as all of California once believed, that schools constitute any society’s most important enterprise. She tries hard now to soften her sense of betrayal, but listen closely and the anger, the sense of abandonment, seeps out.

“I am asked to do the impossible,” she says. “I am asked to prepare these kids for the 21st Century, to make them technically literate, socialize them, teach them values--all the things nobody has time for anymore. . . . I am not willing to not teach these kids, and I am not alone. There are thousands of teachers like me.”

The teachers know. They know they have been deserted, left behind to fight a rear-guard action while part of a city attempts to extract itself from the rest. They can understand the dynamics, can accept that parents will do whatever it takes to protect their own children, even if it means leaving behind whole schools of other children.

What they cannot understand is why debate over public education so often begins with a presumption of their failure. It’s not all gunplay and no schoolwork. The bell rings and classes come to order. The test scores aren’t soaring, but they are getting better. Miraculously perhaps, learning takes place everyday at Carthay--no matter how rickety the conditions, no matter how much we’ve loaded the workload with tasks better suited to parents, neighbors, preachers, police. Listen to the teachers. They have not failed Los Angeles. It is the other way around.