THE RISK KEEPS RISING
Weiner, Lois
THE LAST WORD Lois Weiner The Risk Keeps Rising In 1983, when A Nation at Risk warned that America's schools were awash in a dangerous "tide of mediocrity," I was teaching in a New York City high...
...And with a caseload of hundreds of students, many of them like James, the teachers assigned to assist him couldn't possibly spend the time to track him down...
...I shared one telephone, for instance, with all nineteen English teachers and our supervisor, so that it was difficult to make an outgoing call and all but impossible to receive an incoming one...
...The class of1992 in New York City must pass more required courses—many of them designed by state authorities who are out of touch with the skills, lives, and concerns of inner-city students...
...What will we do with the dropouts who join James in the margins of society...
...We noted, however, that if we had won the war against truancy, we wouldn't have had enough desks and chairs to seat every student assigned to our classes...
...We paid for the chalk and paper we used...
...A clerk placed the card in the back of the binder, in a section that came to bulge as more and more of James's classmates followed him out into the street...
...Corporate executives and politicians complained that our schools lacked the high standards needed to compete in a high-tech age...
...THE LAST WORD Lois Weiner The Risk Keeps Rising In 1983, when A Nation at Risk warned that America's schools were awash in a dangerous "tide of mediocrity," I was teaching in a New York City high school no better or worse than the public schools most inner-city teen-agers attend...
...The inequality of educational opportunity has been worsened by the "reforms" that will push more poor and working-class students out of school...
...At faculty meetings, we were told that improving attendance was the system's first priority...
...That year, James was seventeen and a student in my ninth-grade home room-one of forty-two whose attendance I took...
...I learned of his departure from a pink computer slip stapled to his attendance card...
...It stayed in my bottom desk-drawer, along with thirty or so others, until the subsequent marking period, when I replaced the old batch with a new set...
...With the streets and window-washing ruled off limits, where can they go besides the jails...
...Since James, like his classmates, was absent all but one or two days a month, no counselor saw him during the year he was in my home room...
...But the school still lacks desks, books, counselors, telephones, chalk, and licensed math or science teachers to teach the new required courses...
...With no job-related skills, he had been able to find nothing but casual work, mostly through relatives...
...James is gone now from 42nd Street, removed by order of Mayor Ed Koch, who—sensitive to charges that the quality of city life has deteriorated—directed police to clear the streets of the window washers, mostly young black men like James whose unrequested attentions frightened drivers...
...James was absent the day report cards were distributed, so he never received his record...
...In these five years, much of the agenda of A Nation at Risk has been completed...
...for weeks at a time and failing all of his classes...
...James had graduated on schedule from junior high, but like most in this "freshman" home room, he began having attendance problems almost as soon as he entered high school, and he had passed only one course in three years...
...Unable to find other work, he had joined some friends in washing windows of cars stopped for red lights...
...James, like most of the others, left school when he turned eighteen...
...Drowning in neglect, we welcomed the attention of this report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education and the movement for "educational excellence" it sparked...
...States responded by enacting legislation to raise requirements that could be quantified, from students' stan-dardized-test scores to the number of courses needed for graduation...
...One day last year, he spotted me walking past 42nd Street...
...His only steady employment had been as an attendant in a city shelter for homeless men, but just as he and his girlfriend had a baby, he was laid off...
...And photocopies were easier to obtain in pre-glasnost Russia than in my school...
...In September, as James began the first half of the ninth grade for the seventh time, his course schedule was identical to the one for newly entering freshmen...
...Once each term, an appointment slip was placed in the attendance binder for James, but of course he was never present to receive it...
...The school never sent a report card home or notified James's mother that he was absent Lois Weiner, on leave from teaching English at the High School for the Humanities in New York City, is doing doctoral work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education...
...Working conditions in the school sabotaged the efforts of teachers who tried to inform parents about their children's problems...
...The school's only response to chronic truancy and subsequent course failure was to keep assigning students to the same courses they had already failed...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
