Everyone Deserves a Great School Experience
The commencement speaker grew up thinking that passing a math test had little to do with study and plenty to do with which dream powder a giant blew into her bedroom at night.
That didn’t seem weird, since the orator was Ophelia Dahl, daughter of the children’s author Roald Dahl. It did, however, stand out like a house-sized peach amid the earlier speeches about education’s transformative power and the importance of teachers.
I’d been thinking about those subjects (education, not giants) all week as our family picked up one daughter at an East Coast college, drove our high school junior son to look at others, then looped back to Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, to watch our oldest daughter, Ashley, graduate.
Wellesley’s serene beauty always triggers contrasting memories of the scruffy realm of Los Angeles Unified, where my daughter spent the first 13 years of her educational life. (There she is, for example, on a junior high magnet trip I chaperoned in the San Gabriel Mountains, rampaging across a dirt basketball court, dodging potholes and a graffiti-marred picnic table to hurl a threadbare ball at a cockeyed hoop while sweaty boys and girls twice her size and from every possible background wave their arms and, now and then, send her sprawling in a cloud of dust.)
Now we strolled the verdant grounds, past sailboats drifting on Lake Waban and Gothic buildings right out of Harry Potter, and I found my thoughts gliding from the schmaltzy -- it goes so fast -- to the discomfiting: What can be done to make American education more equitable?
The commencement unfolded on an aromatic lawn shaded by a massive tent. While we waited for the processional, I eavesdropped upon a recent graduate who chattered about her exhausting first year of teaching. She said she hoped to put in another year in a private school before plunging into the far greater challenge of public education.
This elicited an elbow to the ribs from the second-grade public school teacher beside me -- my sister. Then came the next address, delivered by a student whose mother had died of cancer in January. She did, we learned, have a supporter in the audience -- her high school history teacher.
“Teachers,” the college president said, “are America’s true culture heroes.” Then she asked anyone in the audience who taught at any level to stand. A good fifth of us did, and the audience applauded.
Ashley had plenty of extraordinary teachers in L.A.’s public schools, women and men who pushed their students to excellence and often had to fight the potholed system itself to make sure the sons and daughters of parents they barely knew succeeded.
But good teachers are unevenly distributed in part because pushy parents like us wouldn’t tolerate bad teachers.
Wellesley, a woman’s college, is far more diverse and accommodating of students from all economic backgrounds than the 1950s stereotype of the school portrayed in the movie “Mona Lisa Smile.”
Still, landing there, or in any college, is a stretch for many LAUSD students. That no doubt includes students as smart and hardworking as my daughter but precluded by fate and other forces not just from pricy private schools that make college a slam-dunk, but the sort of boutique public elementary schools and magnets that are the last refuge of the middle class.
The rich can hardly be faulted for buying quality and exclusivity. The poor have little choice but to make the most of what’s left. Those of us in the middle find ourselves torn between alternatives. Our choices reverberate.
As it happens, Dahl wasn’t standing on the dais to speak of her father’s Oompa Loompas and dirty beasts. After graduating from Wellesley in 1994, she’d taken a few small steps that led to her role as executive director of an organization that provides healthcare from Latin America to Boston.
She was there to tell the tasseled young women that with imagination, they, too, could do something to fix a messed-up world. Quoting author Adam Hochschild, she advised them to “draw connections between the near and the far.”
I think Dahl was urging the young women to understand the universal qualities that join a seemingly perfect place like Wellesley with, say, the most wretched corners of Haiti. I found myself drawing connections between the fine Los Angeles schools I’ve visited and distant campuses right around the block.
Long before I started writing these columns, I spent a fair amount of time at my kids’ schools. There are dozens of experiences I could describe to make the point I’m getting to, but one in particular stands out.
Ashley was in junior high school when I chaperoned a magnet school class trip to Catalina Island’s Marine Institute. The camp at Toyon Bay threw together kids from all over L.A. Some, however, might as well have lived in Nebraska for the times they’d touched the Pacific.
Getting them into wetsuits was chaotic. Getting them to waddle backward into the night ocean -- masks fogging, fins slapping sand -- was Dahlesque.
Yet there we were, glow sticks affixed to snorkels, underwater lamps assigned to buddy pairs, stroking face-down through the black swells.
At the command of the camp’s counselors, we all turned off our lights, and sky and ocean fused into darkness. Another command set hands swirling underwater. Comet tails of phosphorescent plankton ignited inches from our masks. We rolled onto our backs. The Milky Way appeared.
That was learning. Giant dust learning.
I’m writing this just hours after my daughter’s graduation, so forgive me if I slip into what sounds like commencement-speak.
But please consider: The years will pass like a shooting star, and moments spent in classrooms or smelly school camp dorms are among the few I guarantee you won’t regret. Beyond that, I think there’s another payoff -- that near and far connection, perhaps. Because once you’ve talked to shivering adolescents about an underwater galaxy, you’ll not only understand why good teachers care so passionately, you’ll care whether those kids get the education they deserve.
To discuss this column or debate the question, “Are there advantages to public schools?” visit latimes.com/schoolme.
