Looking for My Path in 2009

[I wrote this editorial when I was in the Teach for America Program during the summer of 2008. I decided not to sign the contract with the Las Vegas Valley school system after completing my training in Watts. My path involves teaching talented and gifted and college bound students. I know that now.]

Education
July 28, 2008

Children in low-income neighborhoods deserve more adequate public school systems

A police helicopter was buzzing above the school grounds, drowning out the instructors’ voices inside of their classrooms at Markham Middle School in Watts, California on July 9.

Markham Middle School is a series of nondescript buildings near the Jordan Downs Housing Project. It’s a public housing project where residents experience the fallout from gang violence and a high crime rate on a level that profoundly affects the future opportunities available to the students who were sitting restlessly at their desks in front of me.

Los Angeles Times writer Sandy Banks described Jordan Downs in a 2006 article entitled “Injunction Has Community Feeling Handcuffed,” describing it as “a notorious public housing project in Watts considered by the Los Angeles Police Department to be so dangerous that officers are allowed to conduct ‘foot beat’ patrols from the safety of their cars and the department is installing outdoor surveillance cameras to monitor crime.”

I faced my students and wondered how their lives were different from mine.

I was a new 2008 Teach for America Corps member sent to Markham to teach summer school for the month of July. I was placed at Markham as part of the organization’s mission to close the educational achievement gap in the U.S.

When I sat down to join my small group of summer school students in our math and literacy class on the third day of school, I asked a student named Noe to tell me about his neighborhood.

Noe looked at me earnestly and said, “Miss, you don’t want to be in Watts at night or you’ll get raped and killed.”

I then asked Noe to advise me on things I should see or do while I was in Watts for the month of July.

“You should see the Watts Towers, Miss. It’s made out of garbage,” he said.

When I saw the Watts Towers for the first time, I wanted to appreciate this series of towers as optimistic expressions of art. In fact I visualized the towers as exuberant monumental pieces of urban art constructed from steel, concrete and found objects such as bed frames and bottles. Noe had told me, however, that the towers were made of garbage. Was I being overly optimistic?

Markham’s high school graduation rate is less than 50 percent, and the discipline problems I faced in my classroom were severe. I taught a group of extremely intelligent students who had created a classroom culture of misbehavior and bad choices that slowed down their learning process.

One of my students spent most of the hour using his hands to ball up his notebook paper and throw the balls across the room. Another student fidgeted restlessly and checked the cell phone in his pocket every few minutes, while another student completely turned around in his chair to chat with his neighbor.

This was not Iowa, the state where I had studied during my middle and high school years. Things were definitely different at Markham.

It was my job to create a space for learning. In the Teach for America literature that I read in order to prepare for my teaching experience, I re-learned what I already knew. An educational achievement gap exists in the U.S. To put it simply, where children grow up determines their life prospects.

According to the government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress 2005, a national assessment of students’ knowledge and skills, 9 year-olds living in low-income communities are three grade levels behind their high-income peers.

Of the 13 million children growing up in poverty, about half won’t graduate from high school. Those who do will perform on average at an eighth grade level according to the same report. Markham students were no exception.

After working with my students for only one week, I knew that the one thing I wanted most for Gilbert, Keynay and Jessica was for them to have an opportunity to learn and a chance to go to college, so that when they were 30 years old, they would be closer to realizing their dreams. And my kids had big dreams.

After reading their journal entries, I discovered that Gilbert wanted to own his own company and work with cars when he was 30. Keynay wanted to be married to a beautiful woman and have a good job, while Jessica wanted to get good grades in all of her classes and graduate from junior high and high school.

If, as the data suggests, only one in 10 students from low-income communities graduates from college, I still believe that a relentless pursuit of academic excellence in the classroom will result in my students at Markham beating the odds.