Disadvantaged Students Give Teachers a Lesson

“Don’t Blame Public Schools for All of Society’s Ills” (Aug. 25) took me back to my first teaching assignment years ago in a first-grade classroom in a Watts elementary school. I told one of the experienced teachers about my many students who were colorblind because they couldn’t recognize colors. “Oh no,” she said, “they just don’t know their colors, they’ve never learned them.” When we had our open house for parents, only five or six would attend out of a class of 30 students. Did the parents care about their kids? Of course they did, but they were just too worn out after many hard hours of work.

I knew then that there was something very wrong about the expectation that children from poor families could learn at the same rate as the privileged children in other parts of the city who had been exposed to books, museums, nursery school, trips and all that was available to them by the time they were 5 or 6 years old.

How unfair it is to expect that schools full of deprived children can possibly work at the same level as those in Bel-Air without some very special help. And how unfair to blame teachers and schools for the unequal backgrounds that children bring to school.

Barbara Frank Shafer

Los Angeles