“We conclude that in the field of public education the
doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities
are inherently unequal.”
(Chief Justice Earl Warren, 1891-1974: Brown vs. Board of Education 1954).
I was
reminded of how public education is still segregated throughout our nation
after watching a clip of a collegiate young man of color on Wheel of Fortune
and mispronouncing “Achilles”; I cringed for him but I also remember a time
when something similar happened to me in the 6th grade. I am a foreign born Black woman, coming to
this country when I was four years old.
My parents, who are also foreign born, settled in the Northeast
Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the Winchester Square area of Springfield. The first place we lived, a tenement, I was
fortunate to be able to walk to kindergarten at Eastern Avenue Elementary and when
we moved, the new neighborhood school, Homer Street Elementary. Our 3rd, 4th, and 5th
grade classes used to have Spelling Bees of which my older sister and I always
won. It was nice being able to walk to and from school, remembering just how
smart I was within that school within that class, never knowing any better. The shock and embarrassment of inequality did
not hit me until I hit the 6th grade. Bussing had started, so I had to attend
another school for 6th grade, Brunton Elementary, an elementary
school located in the predominately Caucasian community of Sixteen Acres. I remember our principal, Mrs. Rose Chase,
who introduced herself to those of us being bussed in and I remember the shock
to my system in this new school; it was different and better. While Eastern Avenue was clean, Brunton’s
clean was another sort of clean; there were no “old” smells as was at Eastern
Avenue. The classrooms were more modern
and the books were far more superior to what we had at Eastern Avenue and that,
my dear readers, is where the embarrassment comes in. I remember during a Social Studies class we
were reading about the Industrial Revolution in this country and abroad, with
everyone taking a turn at reading when the teacher called out their name; then
she called mine. Don’t get me wrong, I was
a bright student. Where my siblings and
peers would have to really study, all I had to do was read something once and I
remembered it. So, when I was called upon to read, I wasn’t nervous but then I ran
across two abbreviations that I had no idea how to pronounce or even what they
meant: Inc. and LTD. I remember
struggling to try to do my best to pronounce them with my Sixteen Acres
resident classmates giggling; I felt like the most stupid person. The teacher eventually helped me out after
she realized that I really did not know. When I got home, I showed my parents those
words, neither did they know. See, my
Cuban born dad dropped out of school during the elementary years to work to
help his family and my mom got a little further but never made it to high school. Now, consider that the North was supposed to
be better for any Blacks, domestic or foreign born, yet inequality was [and is]
such a very intricate part of the American society, unless one is raised in a
predominately Caucasian community, a public education is a joke. I remember in 2006 when Oprah was still on, she
had Bill and Melinda Gates as guests addressing public education in this
country. I remember they took cameras
and interviewed some Chicago high school students in a predominately Black
community school and their counterparts in a predominately White community
school. The differences in the
appearances of the school, the resources, the text books and even the caliber
of what students were learning was as different as night and day. Some of the
students from the Black school were chosen to spend a week in the other school,
I remember there was one young lady; very bright and intelligent and at the top
of her class with a perfect GPA and going to college. When the week was over, this young lady and
her peers expounded on the differences between their school and the other but
what stood out was her embarrassment that she was ill-prepared for
college. Why? The trigonometry she learned was not on par
to her peers in the suburban high school and even worse, she was never taught
calculus. I understood her feeling of
inferiority, her confusion and her pain.
Before I continue, I have to point out that in her school as well as the
elementary school I attended in my neighborhood, there were Caucasian students
also but due to them living in a predominately Black community, they suffered
the same educational fate as students of color.
If this
was happening during my time in public education, which was around the mid to
late 1960’s; one can only imagine how much worse it has become, especially since
the Reagan administration taking many of the resources from the public school
domain in an effort to close the federal Department of Education; a plan that
has been and continues to be the goals of conservatives via the conservative
think tank, the Cato Institute. I remember
when then Mayor of Washington, D.C. Adrian Fenty appointed Michele Rhee to be
the Chancellor of their public school system.
I also remember that during a tour to size up the problems of that
school system, she came across a warehouse full of new computers and updated
books for the students. The bottom line is that there are far more adults who
do not care about the quality of education minority students receive than those
adults who do care and trust me when I say that race, gender, and ethnicity is
moot in this argument. Has anyone
noticed that when reporters are interviewing African Americans from “certain” communities,
how dysfunctional their caliber of speech is? Or even the caliber of speech of
poor Whites in their own “certain” communities.
The monies that are supposed to be going into schools in these “certain”
communities are being diverted to communities that have no need for the
funds. When LBJ started his War on
Poverty, he ensured that federal monies would be going into the schools of economically
challenged communities and for a while it did, but no longer. Between the administrations Reagan and George
Herbert Walker Bush, the programs to fund these schools were gutted. George W. Bush realized what had been done
was wrong and why NCLB (No Child Left Behind) came about; he was trying to fix,
in his own way, what conservatives had done to further disable financially and
resource deficient struggling schools. NCLB also places more responsibility
upon educators which many of them hate yet considering that it was a profession
that they chose, I was a little taken aback by their attitudes. We look at the high dropout rates of minority
students especially males and the income disparity in our country; how can we
not demand better for these students?
Why isn’t more being done for many of these minority students? Because
many still hold to the idea that people of color are not as intelligent as the
current predominant race. But they fail
to realize that while illegal, running a drug ring takes intelligence; a stupid
or mentally inferior person could not handle the task.
In
closing, I am reminded of the 1983 John Landis movie, Trading Places, starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. For those of you unfamiliar with this film,
it more or less addresses some of the merits of this article. Dan Aykroyd plays Louis Winthorpe III who
came up privileged and is a commodities trader, Eddie Murphy plays Billy Ray
Valentine a homeless con artist and street peddler. Winthorpe works for two brothers who also
came up privileged, Randolph and Mortimer Duke, who reminds me of the Koch
brothers but that’s for another article and time. Anywho, the Dukes saw Billy Ray one day and came up
with a plan, actually a societal experiment to see what would happen if the wealthy White guy and poor Black guy
switched places. Well, the Duke brothers
pulled it off and while Billy Ray thrived in the commodities arena albeit some
cultural differences in approach. On the other hand, poor Louis, who was set up
to appear to be a peddler of drugs, went off the deep end. At the end, the two paired up against the
Duke brothers after Billy Ray overhears a conversation they have in the company’s
bathroom. The gist is that given the
opportunity, poor minority students can and will rise to the challenge and
succeed but maybe that is what so many are afraid of. It is perhaps that they realize as Horace
Mann (1796-1859) did. The father of
public schools, he started it specifically for children of the poor seeing the
same economic disparity then as now; realizing just how powerful and education
is, said:
“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin,
is the greatest equalizer of the conditions of men- -the balance-wheel of the
social machinery.”
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