Seeing the Future in the Classroom : If the next generation is to succeed, today’s adults must renew and revitalize our urban public schools

Each year I look forward to spending a day visiting my daughter’s school, to get a snapshot of her life in our local middle school and thereby have a better sense of both her accomplishments and her frustrations. More recently, my motives shifted to include a broader dimension of concern: How well will these seventh-graders fare in the year 2001 if the California State University system begins to screen entry based on math and English writing skills?

My daughter warned me not to expect too much from her classes, that boredom was a common complaint among her peers. The monotonous ebb and flow of the classes, she said, changed only when there was an ingenuous substitute teacher. At best, the substitutes attempt to review old assignments while maintaining a semblance of class order; more often, the sub ends up as a baby sitter with a video. As I listened to my daughter’s caricatures of the substitutes, I realized that she and her friends were paying a price for not having a teacher who cared whether they learned something that day.

As I walked the halls following my daughter’s daily rotation, I saw the sea of faces that defines our urban public schools. Two-thirds of her classmates are Latino, African American or Asian. One in four is limited in English proficiency and one in four is poor. This environment explains why many professional parents opt out of urban public schools: to protect their children from the harsh reality of the growing divide in American society.

As I visited each class, I noticed an interesting pattern emerging. There were those instructors whose thematic core was to establish some semblance of order and discipline in the classroom void of any real content. Perhaps the best example of this was a physical education instructor who barked orders and used public humiliation to modify unruly student behavior. There were other classrooms where the issue of discipline was secondary and the content of the curriculum was present immediately after the bell rang. This was best illustrated by an algebra teacher who directly challenged his students to review a recent exam and redo those problems marked wrong. In time the moans and groans subsided, as the children slapped their foreheads in disbelief when they realized their own careless mistakes. I saw the glow emanate from their faces once they began to gain control of their own learning.

Yet even with the best teachers, I saw the insurmountable odds that our urban schools must face today. In my daughter’s English class, the students were assigned to read and prepare for a test. A young man was asked to read aloud a section from O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” As he stumbled over every other word, I couldn’t help but wonder if the struggle to sound out the words hampered his ability to understand them. After the class, I spoke with the teacher. There were exceptions in the class, she said, and the curriculum allowed for the expansion of a student’s individual potential, but how far could she go when many of her seventh-graders hovered at best at a fourth-grade reading level? This made me realize that the issue of remediation will not go away by the year 2001.

As parents, educators and business leaders, we have accepted with little protest that California is now 38th in the nation in per capita spending in public education and we are now ranked in last place both in reading scores and class size. We have not been serious about preparing our students for the next century.

As an educator, I want a seamless system where children naturally progress from one tier of education to another. As a parent, I want what is best for my child: an education that challenges her potential and rewards her creativity. And as a community member, I want the best public school system so that our youth may enter the career paths of their choice and so employers view them as part of a successful business future. As we leave the 20th century, one measure of its success should be the renewal of our public schools so that all our children may share in our loyalties and our dreams.