Makes Me Wanna Holler

The children of Mott Haven in the South Bronx are “small but mystical and interesting beings” despite the poverty and violence of their neighborhood. They are loving, whimsical, depressed, insightful or cranky, just like kids everywhere. They survive and regularly resurrect themselves.

Taller and older but no less mystical and interesting are the teenagers in the program for gifted students at Crenshaw High School in South-Central L.A. They move on to college despite bouncing from foster home to foster home or worrying how Mom will pay the electric bill, facing the scorn of other kids for being brainy or, at the very least, enrolling in an English class that sometimes lacks the basic texts.

These youngsters, somehow undaunted, have been well served in two splendid new books, Jonathan Kozol’s “Ordinary Resurrections” and Miles Corwin’s “And Still We Rise.” Kozol and Corwin spell out much that is wrong with the world in which these children grow up, but they also show us much that remains hopeful, mainly because the kids refuse to be beaten down and because caring adults do their best to protect them.

In the literature of American childhood, Kozol has long been a writer with passion and a deceptive elegance. Deceptive because this book, for example, seems a simple, straightforward narrative of mornings and afternoons with a group of elementary schoolchildren that Kozol got to know in Mott Haven. The area, as he describes it, has become “the nation’s epicenter for the plague of pediatric and maternal AIDS” in the last decade and is one of the country’s centers for the current asthma epidemic. Kozol delineates what is wrong with these children’s schools and neighborhoods--from inequalities in teachers’ salaries and abilities in the suburbs compared with the inner cities to the concentration of city garbage incinerators near the homes of the poor that contribute to the asthma. But he does much more.

Beyond the facts, Kozol never loses sight of what is truly at stake here, writing with lyricism about the lives around him, such as a dreamy-eyed 6-year-old who is having difficulty concentrating as she learns to read. “The teacher is gentle with her,” Kozol writes. “It’s still morning in New York and very early morning in this child’s life. Good teachers don’t approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They’re not drill masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don’t yet know what’s in the box. They don’t know if it’s breakable.” The child’s mind “is yawning still. Soon enough she’ll brush the cobwebs from her eyes and take a clear look at the world of vowel sounds and subtrahends and partial products, and some bigger things that lie ahead, like state exams, but not just now.”

Kozol’s almost poetic ability to capture these fleeting moments demonstrates why, as an author, he stands so far above sociological drones. He reminds us how fragile children can be at this age without writing a treatise that would make our eyes glaze over.

Corwin, a Los Angeles Times reporter, looks at the lives of older kids who have many of the same problems: dads in prison and moms on drugs, gangbangers shooting up the neighborhood, homelessness, an overtaxed and often rigid foster care system, no money to match the dreams of college. One of his principal arguments is that the playing field is not level even for the gifted students at mostly black Crenshaw High and others in similar circumstances around the state. Since the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, they no longer have the help of affirmative action programs for college admission within California. But they could use that help because they are still at a disadvantage compared with students in more affluent areas. Not only are their personal lives often chaotic, their schools are also overcrowded, their teachers overburdened or indifferent and their neighborhoods dangerous--all because they’re poor and they’re members of minorities. They have little leverage with politicians and the majority of voters to change these conditions.

Like Kozol, Corwin can stop you with a moment from his time at Crenshaw, whether it’s the day that Toya, for whom school had been the only sanctuary and for whom her teachers had such hope, shows up with her 10-day-old baby, or when a teacher, Toni Little, rails against a school system that makes her teach too many Advanced Placement English students with too little means to provide classroom materials.

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One of the most dramatic moments comes from Latisha, a Crenshaw senior, who tells Little how searing she found reading about Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.” “A lot of the messed-up things that happened in his family reminded me of the messed-up things in my own family,” Latisha tells Little. “The things that molded Stephen’s personality reminded me of the things that molded my personality. He said he felt like he didn’t belong in his family. It’s like, dang, I feel like that, too. It’s like he couldn’t move forward until he went back and dealt with things that happened in the past. That made me think back to things that happened to me when I lived in the projects. Things I don’t really want to remember,” such as being molested by her mother’s boyfriend and becoming an alcoholic at age 15 in an unsuccessful attempt to forget.

Latisha saw her own life through Joyce’s sentences, such as “his childhood was dead or lost” or “even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.” Later, in class, Latisha says that “like Stephen, I got big dreams. I’m like, dang, I want to be somebody. You know what I’m saying? That’s why I’m here right now, in this classroom.”

Both Kozol and Corwin have done what reporters dream of doing: Each spent a year or more getting to know a small group of students and their teachers. I was reminded of the year I was able to spend as a fly on the wall at a Head Start center run by the Training and Research Foundation near Watts Towers. I, too, remember the little moments, such as the time I photographed one usually troublesome child comforting another who was crying for no apparent reason.

Kozol writes about a similar moment that highlights the capacity for gentleness in so many children, whether they are underprivileged or not. Just because they’re poor, he reminds us, it’s unfair to assume they’re tough or bad. Ten-year-old Ariel, Kozol tells us, has a way of calming little Elio and giving him strength to go on. “Sometimes she says nothing at all but barely seems to graze his arm or shoulder with this little wand of friendliness she has, and then leans down to check that he’s okay. Some children have this gift, a healing presence that is tender without being coyly philanthropic. Her characteristic acts of kindness to another child are small gestures. They seem natural to her. They’re almost always just the right size for the person who receives them.”

And why do these children, small and tall, cry or rage at the system?

Gentleness, Kozol argues, is not enough to help these children through school or life: “Most of the children here, no matter how hard they work and how well they may do in elementary school, will have no chance, or almost none, to win admission to the city’s more selective high schools, which prepare their students for good universities and colleges. In a city in which four-fifths of all the public high school students are black or Hispanic, only 8% or 9% of students at Stuyvesant High, the city’s most selective school, are black or Hispanic; and the children of the St. Ann’s neighborhood have, statistically, the lowest chance of winning entrance to that school of all 1 million children in the city’s schools.” At the high school they are likely to attend, 2,000 children enroll but only about 90 reach their senior year. Only about 65 graduate, Kozol adds. “Some of these children seem to cry for no good reason,” he writes. “They don’t know much about the world at this point in their lives, but they know more than we think.”

The kids in South-Central L.A. know more and have lived through more by the time they reach Crenshaw. Even the gifted teenagers, about whom Corwin writes, confront mountainous hurdles. Olivia lives in a series of group homes where jealous girls steal her belongings or rub her clothes in oil spots on the street. She can’t concentrate on homework: The noise level is too high. Princess’ mother is often unemployed and can’t pay the rent or the electric bill; there are mice droppings in her bed. Toya has a baby. Sadi is taunted by the gangbangers with whom he used to run. Willie’s mother is on drugs.

Their teacher Little, whom Corwin describes as inspirational and giving literature a dramatic edge, lives on the edge herself. The year Corwin visits Crenshaw, Little is angry about being called a “white bitch” by some parents, feuding with her English department chairman and facing possible disciplinary action from the principal for some of her critical comments in class. Often distracted, she takes sick leave because of stress at a key time when her students should have been preparing for the Advanced Placement exam. The students cannot afford the kind of coaching that better-off kids receive for the SAT; even if they could, they have jobs and are too exhausted for much preparation. But they read the books and turn in the written work, often “essays and poems that are dazzling.”

State financial limitations imposed by Proposition 13 in 1978 contributed to a decline in California school rankings as counseling services, art and music programs, building maintenance and purchase of books, computers and laboratory equipment suffered. “Because Proposition 13 capped government revenue, each decision about spending in the state is a trade-off,” Corwin writes. “More money for the state prison system--with its $4 billion a year budget--ultimately means less money for education.” Parents in Laguna Beach or La Jolla raise millions in extra money for their schools. The same is true in Los Angeles--but you can guess where. “Of the twenty-six schools that raised $100 or more per student, twenty-two were located in the more affluent Westside and San Fernando Valley.”

But still they rise. Corwin profiled 14 students. Two years later, 11 of them were completing their sophomore year in college. They attended UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, USC, Morehouse, Clark, Pitzer, Cal State Long Beach and Colby. All are working, full- or part-time, and many volunteer for inner-city tutoring programs.

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Money alone, of course, will not fix what ails the schools and neighborhoods in which these children and teenagers live. But it would help. So would old-fashioned compassion. Enhancing Head Start, cleaning up the air in Mott Haven or easing the overcrowding and improving the programs for students in L.A. shouldn’t always be discussed in the cost-effective terms so often used when politicians address spending for poor people today.

If you’re not discussing how economically productive a young person will become or how much enrolling a child in Head Start could save the state in welfare or prison costs, you don’t get much attention. Managerial jargon weighs down urban school discussions today. I fume along with Kozol when he rues the impersonal, hyphenated terms that are used--”performance-referenced,” “outcome-oriented,” “competency-centered”--to refer to classroom activity and testing when educators and politicians should be talking about children growing up healthy, happy and able to learn. Readers of these two fine books should take it as their assignment to help policymakers see that watching a child come out of his shell or listening to Toya talk about how excited she is to be back in school matters as much--or more--as those cost-benefit ratios.