The vignettes in Possible Lives (1995) give readers a feel for the diversity of cultures in the United States—especially what school is like for kids in different places. In your travels, did you find that schools across the country were encountering similar kinds of educational problems, or were the problems vastly different based on the region?
For somebody who's spent much of his life in Los Angeles, part of the joy of doing this book was to get out and get a sense of the country. I visited nine different regions. It was mind-expanding for me to get a texture of the incredible diversity of this place called the United States.
Each place, of course, has particular politics, particular challenges and opportunities. Take a place like Calexico, California, a border town of about 21,000 people, right across from Mexicali, with a significant population of migrant children. Because of the mobility of the families, schools face a particular challenge that you're not going to find, let's say, in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Montana.
But some issues did go across the board—for example, how you create a compelling and rich curriculum for the kids who are not automatically tracked into gifted classes. Folks in a Mississippi Delta town are struggling with that just as much as teachers in New York City are.
Tell us a story from your book that illustrates the compelling and rich curriculum you are speaking about.
One of the places I visited was a small defunct company town in Floyd County, Kentucky. Like so many company towns, Wheelwright thrived while coal was booming. Then, about 25 years ago, coal went bust. They had to sell off bits and pieces of the town, the artwork outside the town hall, even the street lights. Wheelwright has a bipolar population now, about 700 people, mostly children and old folks. Most young people have to move out to find work.
In a town that technology had left behind, two high school teachers started doing fascinating things with technology. They and others applied for some grant money and set up the Kentucky Telecommunications project through which kids could network with students in much larger cities—Louisville, Covington, Lexington, and Paducah. The two teachers, Bud Reynolds and Delores Woody, were both locals. They had a strong sense of how important it was that these Appalachian children come to a prideful understanding of who they are and who their forbears were.
For Mantrip, the magazine that they started, kids interviewed miners, ministers, and other people who had been in the region for generations. Their teachers wanted to enable their students to keep a foot in Wheelwright but also to extend the other into the larger world beyond. Kids wrote about the local economy, about coal, about what people were saying about how to revitalize the region. Kids in Lexington or Louisville wrote back about their own places. There was this wonderful, almost paradoxical, sense of grounding kids in local history and culture and providing the tools to move beyond local place.
The story illustrates a point I want to make about multiculturalism in this country. Some say we should have one common language, one common story, one set of beliefs, one set of practices, one curriculum. Those who fear diversity say there are going to be a thousand different groups all speaking their own language, talking only to each other, isolating themselves, ghettoizing themselves.
In fact, what I saw again and again in my travels was that successful schools were engaged in a complex negotiation of cultures. Teachers had an astute sense of how you both ground students where they are and provide them tools to enter more mainstream participation. A friend of mine said it's like giving kids both roots and wings. Nice phrasing.
All the schools you chose to visit were very poor or of modest means? Why was that?
I tried to be representative of discipline, region, and grade level, but I wanted to load the book with portraits of places that were poor, or at most, middle class. One reason I wrote the book was to show positive teaching, so I didn't want to stack the deck by looking only at affluent places. Second, my own heart responds more to places of poverty. In Lives on the Boundary, I tell my own story of being a working-class kid and struggling through school.
But the main reason I wrote Possible Lives was to enrich the conversation about public education. A friend of mine calls it granularity: engaging in the particular, trying to document case after case of positive teaching approaches. Over the past decade, public discussion about public schools has shifted from criticism to dismissal and despair. It has the effect of shutting down our vision of what is possible. I wanted to complicate the public conversation about public schools—not just to argue, "Ah, ladies and gentlemen, I have found 50 great public school classrooms. Therefore, the glass is half full." Rather, my intention was to ask: What do these classrooms represent to us? What possibilities do they give rise to? What can we learn from these exemplars?
What factors did you see in common among the best classes?
As varied as they were, these classrooms shared some characteristics. First, they were safe places—not just physically safe, but emotionally safe. They were places where you could take a chance. How can you grow intellectually if you're not in an environment where you're encouraged to take a risk? One middle-schooler in Chicago said about his school, "This is not a place that makes fun of you if you mess up." That's powerful.
Second, the schools were respectful places. But respect here means more than just civility, although civility is dear enough. The curriculum has to convey respect. It has to challenge and honor the people in the room and reflect high expectations across the board. Teachers must believe in the capacity of all the kids in that room to make a contribution. You know, you can set the high jump bar at seven feet and then stand back and say, "Okay, jump over it!" but you also have to provide mechanisms to achieve standards. You have to organize classrooms and schedules, individualize instruction, develop lessons, and group children so that they can achieve those standards, make it over the bar.
Another characteristic of those classrooms was that they were vibrant places. Some had all the desks in a row and the teachers standing in front; in others, there was pandemonium—kids all over doing things. As different as these classes were, all had a sense of something intellectually vibrant, socially vibrant there—a sense among students that something good was going on for them.
We've called this theme issue "The Changing Lives of Children." You've taught at all levels—elementary, high school, college, and adult literacy classes. In your travels, did you find that children today have changed since the days you taught?
Reading educational history over these past 10 years, I kept finding these quotations by the president of Brown in 1848 or by a Harvard professor in 1890 about the horrible state of the current generation. It seems to be a professional requirement of educators to bemoan the current crop of students in comparison to a generation or two previous. I have to tell you, I don't see, I don't feel, I don't sense differences in children today.
Some of the languages are new. Now I'm hearing Laotian, and I didn't hear that 20 years ago—but 20 years ago I heard some African languages that a teacher before me wasn't hearing because she was hearing Italian and eastern European languages. And the teachers four generations before that were hearing Gaelic. What has changed are some social conditions. Fire power has changed us. Kids in the central cities face threats from guns every day that I never faced or that students 25 years ago did not face.
Is another of those social conditions a certain negative peer pressure that goes on in a lot of schools, especially among adolescents?
That is a particular concern of some of the Latino and African-American teachers I talked to. Kids fear acting like a "braniac" or being a nerd. Yvonne Hutchinson, who teaches in South Central Los Angeles, tries to get her students to be critical of those accepted peer notions. She likes to tell them, "The nerds will inherit the earth."
Unfortunately, from the minute they open their eyes to the minute they go to sleep, young people are bombarded by images of what it means to be beautiful, successful, powerful. Some of those images come from youth culture, but they are fueled by mainstream media and culture. Those images are antithetical to reflectiveness, thoughtfulness, and to careful, slow, hard intellectual work. How can these kids develop positive ideas about education when so much around them contradicts those notions? Fold the increasing barrage of media imagery in with firepower, and you have two kinds of violence as far as I'm concerned.
I have never had a lot of truck with imported critiques of capitalism, but parents and teachers need to mount a critique of the notion that the market knows best. Where kids are concerned, it doesn't.
Racism is another kind of violence that seems to be growing in our country. What are some of the most effective ways that the schools you saw are dealing with racism?
It's a hard question because we don't have a lot of effective ways of dealing with racism in the society at large. But I did see some classrooms that could teach this society about how to build tolerance. Surely, one thing to do is to address the issue head on. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, has all kinds of materials for teaching tolerance. And I've seen many homegrown ways of getting students to think and talk about racial and ethnic conflict—writing assignments, reading materials, films, exercises kids can do. Another way is by enriching the curriculum and making it more historically accurate. As many black teachers I met put it, "For heaven's sake, don't have the only lesson on African Americans be about slavery."
Classrooms where there are predominantly children of a particular background must be rich in material that helps youngsters come to a proud understanding of who they are. Elena Castro's classroom in Calexico, a place I mentioned earlier, displayed a rich representation of achievements of people who looked like the kids in that room.
In talking about multiculturalism, though, you have to be careful. We have to have more representative curriculums, but the important thing is what you are doing with them. Stephanie Terry, a 1st grade teacher in Baltimore, for example, has an African-centered curriculum. When you walk into this room, you see a map of Africa, kinte cloth, and pictures of Frederick Douglass and astronaut Mae Jemison. If you look through the book rack, you'll find books about Africa and African Americans. You'll also find Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. It's a rich science-literature-social studies curriculum. It's not just the materials she uses but what she does with the materials—the cognitive, social, and ethical curriculum she fashions. All these pieces have to be there. So often we think in one-dimensional, single-shot, magic bullet ways: "Oh, we have a problem with minority achievement? Ah, we'll put pictures of minority folk in the classroom." That's not enough.
Do you think single-sex classes have any benefits?
It seems like a powerful idea to separate people for particular purposes at particular times in their education—girls-only math classes, boys-only elementary school classrooms for African Americans to help them gain a sense of themselves and their history. And yet it flies in the face of our struggle against segregation. We do have a history in this country of women's colleges; unfortunately, we also have a history of segregated schools. But the origins of these kinds of segregation are nefarious. Women's colleges emerged because of the historic exclusion of women from most of higher education. In our history, we're in a confusing transitional phase, and I don't see an easy way out. Girls-only math classes could have positive results for achievement, but we have to reconcile the separation with the struggle for equality and civil rights.
Sylvia Peters, an urban educator in Baltimore, has said that the African-American teacher is a vanishing breed. Only 5 percent of public schoolteachers are African American. She laments this situation because she thinks black students need more black role models.
I agree with her. It's one of the ironies that as progress has opened more doors of opportunity to young black women, fewer go into the teaching force, which was once one of the few avenues of conducting a professional life for African-American women. However, I certainly wouldn't want to say that the only effective teacher of a particular racial group has to be a person of that group, and I don't know any advocate of diversity in the teaching force who would say that either.
Yet you have to have a critical mass of teachers who are representative of the background from which students come or who have an understanding in their bones of them. In Baltimore, in Calexico, and with Navajo and Hopi kids, I saw teachers who came from African-American backgrounds or Latino backgrounds or Native American backgrounds doing wonderful work with young people. But I also saw Caucasians—Anglo teachers—doing wonderful work as well. They were people who had made it a point of educating themselves; of working themselves into the communities; of buying in the communities; of going to community functions; of living in the community, in some cases; of forming alliances with parents; of absorbing knowledge of local custom and culture.
The color of one's skin and where one lives do not automatically confer the capacity to reach particular groups of students. It's the combination of knowledge and experience—of subject matter, teaching, and culture in combination—that becomes a powerful chemistry.
We often hear two sides of a debate that are at odds with each other. One side says that the curriculum that all kids should take is a vigorous academic one. Another group advocates relevance first, arguing that an authentic curriculum is one based on kids' experiences. Did you find that classes you visited were successful in addressing both concerns?
What we have to do is lock people from both those schools of thought in the room and throw the key away until they decide they're going to talk to each other. Why is it in the history of American thought about education, we can't seem to think in complex ways? It's always this school or that school, this approach or that approach, with one side demonizing the other. What's ironic to me is that when you go into classrooms with rich, compelling curriculums, you see a powerful synthesis of many approaches.
Take the whole language/phonics debate. Elena Castro in Calexico champions herself as a whole language teacher. In that classroom, you see written language all over the place, kids who are being read to, kids' stories on the wall. But stick around and you'll see her teaching phonics and spelling when the instructional moment calls for it.
It does not help the discussion when people represent whole language classrooms as places where kids roll on the floor and stamp themselves with words. It does not help when the phonics classroom is pictured as a place where kids sit tied to their chairs going "aaah, baaah, daaah." That kind of narrow, bifurcated, pinched way we have of talking about the curriculum and educational issues disturbs me. I'd like to see a dialectic between different ways of thinking. It's the rich curriculum that holds promise for children today.
