Samuel Freedman's Small Victories

...Especially in the first half of the book, Freedman stresses the poverty of the parents of Seward Park students, their poor health, the long hours they must work, which often keep them away from their children, and their sometimes tragic emotional problems...

...Freedman devotes extended chapters to the stories n••n 316 • DISSENT Boob of two students, one Chinese, the other Dominican...

...The texture of daily life in the classroom was missing...

...As Jessica's students gain the confidence to apply their intelligence to social problems and literary texts, as they overcome family problems and adolescent insecurities, as they write their college applications and pass their last high school accountability exams, the reader joins in the triumph of hope over despair, love over hatred...

...And by detailing how difficult it is to teach well in a system that provides so many obstacles and so few rewards, Freedman may make readers think twice before they start scapegoating teachers for America's social blight...

...The appearance of Tracy Kidder's Among Schoolchildren and especially Samuel Freedman's Small Victories changes the picture dramatically...

...If ignorant parents are the enemy, then, of course, they can't be enlisted as allies...

...SPRING • 1991 • 317 It is important to remember that many children in poor neighborhoods come from families that give them a lot of support and strength...

...All in all, this book is a triumph of the journalist's craft...

...The second theme of Freedman's drama is Siegel's growing determination to leave the teaching profession...

...parent-teacher meetings are scheduled infrequently and at hours inconvenient to working parents...

...Half a dozen years ago Americans rediscovered the failure of their public schools...

...Small Victories, the more interesting of these two bestsellers, takes the reader into Seward Park High School on New York's Lower East Side...

...See Wai Mui came to New York via Taishan, China, and Hong Kong...

...The daily grind of teaching 144) teenagers, grading 140 homework assignments, publishing the school newspaper, and writing dozens of college recommendations suffocates her, leaving no time for cooking, shopping, socializing, reading...

...Freedman's descriptions of Siegel's classrooms and his portraits of her students are so vivid and so moving that the book may make it easier for readers to think about what sorts of educational "reforms" might make a difference...

...Carlos Pimentel's story takes us to the Dominican Republic, where Carlos spends his childhood while his parents prepare to give him a better life...

...A series of governmental and foundation reports warned that the mediocrity of elementary and secondary school education endangered America's competitiveness in the global economy...

...once you plunge into the schools Kidder and Freedman describe, your take on America's educational problems must incorporate a sense of the cultural clashes and discontinuities played out in the public schools and a sense as well of the ways school bureaucracies and distrustful citizens handicap teachers...

...The book's protagonists are Jessica Siegel, a 1960s vintage graduate of the University of Chicago, and her journalism students, mostly immigrant youngsters from the barrios of Latin America and the rural villages of East Asia...

...They may not have spoken English very well—maybe not at all—but they passed onto their children not only folk wisdom but shrewdness...

...The forces of evil include indifferent school administrators, a teacher's union unconcerned with student learning, the corrosive poverty that lives amidst New York's affluence, and ignorant, corrupt, indifferent parents...

...There's no reason to explain to parents what the school is trying to teach or how it's trying to teach it...

...His family was the poorest in a village of poor peasants near the Pacific coast of China...

...See Wai worked twenty hours a week throughout junior high school and high school, and avoided the gangs that claimed so many children from immigrant families...

...Unwilling to lower her standards, to demand less from herself and her students, she ultimately decides to resign at the end of the year—but only after all her prize students have been admitted to appropriate colleges...

...Freedman's dramatic structure, which pits Siegel and the students against the rest of the world, presents most of the immigrant families and cultures in a distinctly negative light...

...In New York's Chinatown, there were only wearying days and nights in the noodle factories and garment sweat shops...

...Working-class parents who sense the school's prejudice against them fabricate excuses for their children's failure, encourage them to go out into the "real world" to get jobs, disparage the value of book learning...

...in its place were stereotyped images of classroom violence and mass ignorance...

...Carlos Pimentel is an example of a student whose parents made intense efforts to shelter him but who nonetheless succumbed for a time to the temptations of the drug culture...

...Today, in communities around the country, educators are experimenting with methods of drawing such parents into the school, enlisting them as allies in the educational process...

...Siegel and her fellow teachers seem like saviors...

...Doubtless some of Carlos's peers had similarly devoted parents but were unable to recover from their adolescent mistakes...

...In these pages, the world of New York's poor seems grim indeed, and it seems only natural that so many Seward Park students drop out, succumbing to the lure of the streets, the drug culture, teenage pregnancy, and the rest of the social pathology spawned by deprivation and discrimination...

...No one who reads these books can continue to think in the arid, abstract manner of the educational reformers of the last decade...

...Freedman's negative treatment of immigrant families in the first half of his book will not serve to validate such efforts...

...At Seward Park High School, he becomes a star basketball player, a prize-winning journalist, and a popular actor...

...Traditionally, schools have excluded parents from the educational process...

...Of course, not all children of parents who have been seriously damaged by their poverty will fail, and not all children of parents who have survived harsh social conditions will succeed...

...After his father emigrates to New York to build a nest for his family, Carlos's mother has to move him from village to city and back again in an effort to make ends meet...

...Freedman chronicles a year in Siegel's life at Seward Park High School as an epic struggle to gain college admission for her immigrant students...

...In Seward Park High School, he wakens intellectually and, with Jessica's help, gains admission into SUNY–New Paltz, despite his low grade-point average and his fragile grasp of the English language...

...This is dramatic stuff all right, but it's not realistic, and Freedman knows it...

...The parents who raised Siegel's students were poor, but unlike many immigrant parents who have been defeated by their poverty, those portrayed by Freedman in the second half of his book possessed tremendous strength, and they fiercely nurtured their children...

...Freedman takes us into the classroom, as Jessica teaches The Great Gatsby...

...On the side of virtue is Siegel, a brilliant, caring, perfectionist, and her students, tough and witty survivors...

...Both books take us into the classroom, into the lives of teachers and children, into the communities that students carry with them into the school...

...After the senior Pimentel undergoes a religious conversion that brings father and son into the orbit of a dynamic youth leader, Carlos begins to straighten up...

...Teenagers who prefer the excitement of the streets to the order of the classroom seize on these signals to justify their truancy...

...Parents are discouraged from visiting classrooms...

...Higher standards, central control of curricula, intensified accountability, longer school years, and more homework were accepted as solutions...

...Freedman takes us into the Seward World's staff meetings, where Siegel challenges her students to take on the social issues that shape their lives: military recruitment, gentrification, abortion, athletic scholarships...

...q 318 • DISSENT...

...Instead, Freedman's dramatic structure of good teacher versus bad parents will reinforce one of the most pernicious prejudices in American education—the idea that ignorant parents are the enemy and that the school's job is to bring the benighted children into the light...

...The school's treatment of the parent as an enemy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...This objection aside, Small Victories is an important and beautiful work...

...He takes us to rural China, to the valleys and barrios of the Dominican Republic, to the Lower East Side of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants...

...I need a life," she cries over and over...

...Contrast this to the early 1960s, when Jonathan Kozol, John Holt, Charles Silberman, and many other teachers and journalists vividly documented the shortcomings of urban schools and the difficulties encountered by reformers...

...He gains admission to SUNYBinghamton...

...When the family is finally reunited in New York's Manhattan Valley, Carlos feels lost and soon joins the drug subculture...

...But on second reading, Small Victories made me uncomfortable...

...Because the backgrounds of Seward Park students are portrayed so negatively, the ultimate success of each of Siegel's students, who are, after all, a small minority of the total high school population, appears miraculous...

...In the manner of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, Freedman interweaves the drama of Siegel and her students with social history...

...we hear her ask pointed questions that encourage the students to measure their own dreams for the future against the cynicism of Fitzgerald's characters...

...There was little debate either about the diagnosis of America's educational ills or about remedies: Low standards, watered-down curricula, and incompetent or hopeless teachers were blamed for our ills...

...The more parents feel excluded from a school, the less they reinforce the school's message, the more they undermine the teacher's method...

...These forays are beautifully written, and they meld school and society in a way no reader is likely to forget...

...Absent from public discourse about educational failure was any sense of what it was like to teach in or attend a public school...