| To my surprise, Mayor Booker and his entourage visited my very small school on Monday, and stopped by my classroom that had two students in it, briefly conversing with the three of us. He lives two blocks from the school and contrary to form, he was in the neighborhood during school hours. As I heard it, our gregarious head custodian cornered him and got him to take a tour of the school.
Who goes to Pathways Academy? Well, first, it's in Newark, so the kids are those growing up in the extraordinarily unsafe environment that is Newark today. Many Newark students who have involved parents go to schools that are not part of Newark Public Schools (NPS)—either private or charter schools. Of those who go to NPS high schools, many are siphoned away from the general population into magnet schools. Many of the magnet school teachers will tell you that there's no difference between the lack of ambition and poor mental health of their students and those in the general high schools, but again, the students who go to the magnet schools disproportionately have parents who are engaged with their children's education. |
| When students get in enough trouble that their principals arrange for them to be removed from the general population, they are assigned to one of NPS's Alternative Education programs. Most of the time, that means they attend evening classes in the same school they had been going to. But when their behavior is bad enough, they get sent to one of two stand-alone Alt Ed high schools. Those scheduled to go back to their regular schools after only half a year go to SOSA. Those sent where they're going for at least a year, and who then have to find a high school principal willing to take them back, go to Pathways.
That's where I teach math, as the sole math teacher. I see up to about 45 kids per day, usually more like 25, spread out into five periods. We have a mix of kids, including as many girls as boys, which surprises some people. Some students rarely show up. Some do show up because their probation officer has made it clear to them that that's what they have to do to avoid being locked up. And some show up most of the time and want to get back to their regular schools. Very few of them lack the innate intelligence to succeed academically, but most aren't succeeding, because they don't really believe any success is achievable, most have severe emotional problems, and their family support ranges from problematic to non-existent.
I help as many as I can, by "meeting them at their [academic] level," which means mixing a little of what the curriculum calls for with a lot of foundational material that they missed a long time ago, and have fallen further and further behind grade level since, because everything in the intervening years has depended on that foundation and it's less embarrassing in their world to sullenly not try than it is to ask for extra help.
Most of these students have been locked up at various times. Often for things you almost certainly want people prosecuted for, regardless of how you feel about the War On (Some) Drugs. They could reasonably be called criminals. Most of them are also good people in most ways. In the four years I've been teaching here, I've only had three students about whom I thought 'I hope the world sees to it that they don't have the chance to harm others.'
If I took the attitude that they are morally reprehensible, or even the attitude that their behavior in their current environment is so awful that I refuse to see the moral logic that they live by, I'd be a less effective teacher. I don't condone what they do. I spend a lot of energy trying to show them that there are other ways of approaching life and that those other ways will leave them happier. The primary difficulty is not convincing them that the other ways are better, but that they are possible.
I hope to post at Blue Jersey a fair amount for a while, and part of what I want to explore is how to be a principled activist in corrupt environments. I had planned to do that largely by looking at my (successful and unsuccessful) experiences in Middlesex County from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. But it now occurs to me that my students and the world those students live in are good analogues for most corrupt politicians and the world the politicians live in. Most corrupt politicians don't see themselves as venal; they are operating in what they believe is the only way things ever really are, behind the platitudes of honesty. Even many non-corrupt, non-politicians from corrupt areas believe the same thing. Our principal task as reformers is not to fight individual bad actors, though surely some of them must be prosecuted to make any progress. Our principal task is rather to awaken in people the notion that truly representative government is both possible and desirable. And we should judge politicians in large part by whether they inculcate true democracy as an important value, even if that means cutting some slack for those who have specific positions (like school vouchers) with which we probably disagree. To that end, here's an excerpt from the email I sent to the Mayor's Office after he visited us:I appreciate some fraction of the difficulty you face in creating a more open and accountable political culture in Newark. I was a part of the reform movement that briefly supplanted the machine in the Middlesex County Democratic Organization in 1993-94, as well as one that almost did so in 1979-80. And I've seen from a distance how reform-oriented mayors usually fail for one of two reasons. Some, like Sharon Pratt Dixon (Kelly) in Washington and John Lindsay in New York, too quickly antagonize too many of the entrenched power structures, and fail for lack of allies. Others, like Sharpe James and Ken Gibson, too thoroughly accept the nature of those structures and eventually become indistinguishable from them. I can't claim to be an expert on your administration, but from what I've seen, very few have managed to thread that needle as adroitly as you have so far. I hope my perception of you is right, and that you continue to successfully navigate such a difficult but necessary course. |
