Reading Fiction

From Ann Patchett's compelling piece about the disappointments of a year with no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

I've posted lots of sentiments like this before, and this isn't necessarily the most original formulation of them—but I do agree with her (this is a big part of why I do what I do as an English teacher), and her essay as a whole is quite thoughtful and worth reading.

Risky Business

From a very interesting Louis Menand article about the value of college in America:

The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Menand goes on to point out that business is the number one major in American colleges, accounting for 22 percent of bachelor's degrees.

Epstein and Envelopes

I don't necessarily agree with everything Joseph Epstein writes in this piece about the recent dust-up in the human sexuality course at Northwestern, but I've always admired Epstein's writing. I particularly like this tart little sentence, in which Epstein refreshes a contemporary cliche:

A man with a penchant for smashing taboos, Professor Bailey enjoys pushing the envelope, but, like many another radical academic, prefers not to pay the postage.

Lift Ev'ry Voice

Born in 1871, James Weldon Johnson was a poet, a songwriter, an educator, a novelist, a diplomat, and an activist, the first African American to head the National Assocation for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1900, Johnson, then a school principal in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing” for a school commemoration in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Set to music by Johnson’s brother, the song would eventually come to be known as “the black national anthem.”

While doing a bit of research on "Lift Ev'ry Voice" for a project at school, I came across this rendition of the song, which accompanies a montage of images from African American history. It was originally presented at the African American Church Inaugural Ball. I found it pretty moving.

Black Odyssey

My essay comparing Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Odyssey is up at the Millions today, the first Friday of Black History Month.

I'd like to affectionately dedicate it to my students who mocked my obsessive Odyssey references as we studied Morrison's novel this past semester and I developed the ideas that I explore in the essay. Thanks for your patience, guys.

Meaning and Sound

More than two years after David Foster Wallace's death, his reputation continues to grow and the conversation about his work only increases in its intensity and pervasiveness. You see his name popping up all the time. For example, he gets mentioned briefly in this Ken Auletta article about the CEO of America On-Line, and in this Adam Haslett review-essay about Stanley Fish's new book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

Haslett argues that "Wallace’s anxious, perseverating sentences are arguably the most innovative in recent American literature":

Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels.

I particularly like Haslett's final point. It's one that I try desperately to make to my freshmen when I see them furtively reading their Sparknotes before a class on the Odyssey or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Huck Finn or Romeo and Juliet: if you're just trying to cram information from a pre-digested summary, you're missing the biggest reason for reading in the first place—to learn how to experience a book.

St. Louis Public Schools (2)

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post in which I tried to take stock of the challenges facing the St. Louis Public School system, as I understood them.

That blog post was influenced by some of my introductory experiences with SLPS as a parent, as well as by Daniel J. Monti’s book A Semblance of Justice, which takes a somewhat cynical view of the school desegregation efforts that have occurred in the St. Louis area.

I had found Monti’s book after reading Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’s celebrated account of school desegregation in Boston. I was looking for something that would explain and analyze St. Louis’s school desegregation with similar perceptiveness and rigor. But in comparison to Lukas’s gripping and incredibly informative narrative, Monti’s book felt abstruse and opaque—and it took for granted that its readers already understood the basic facts of the situation.

I was born in 1976 and grew up in Lindbergh school district, though I attended Catholic schools. Although the desegregation case was being negotiated and settled in my formative years, I had only a vague notion of its origins and a general understanding of its purpose and meaning.

Through an old article in the Riverfront Times I discovered another book on St. Louis school desegregation, Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools, by Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain. This book, published by Yale University Press in 1997, finally gave me what I was looking for: deep background on the roots of school desegregation in St. Louis; a clear description of the voluntary interdistrict transfer program; an analysis of its execution and consequences; a sense of how St. Louisans, black, white, urban, and suburban, felt about the program; and an understanding of the political realities involved with the program.

After reading this book, I took another look at my previous post about SLPS. I’m surprised and gratified to find that much of it still seems true. But Wells and Crain’s book has given me a much deeper context for understanding the issues I was struggling with.

Most significantly, I have a more nuanced response to Daniel J. Monti’s central thesis, as I understood it: that the desegregation program was mostly a symbolic gesture that purported to address deep-seated issues of inequality while in actuality not doing much to deliver justice.

On the one hand, I can see Monti’s point. I was startled to read, near the end of Stepping Over the Color Line, that in a representative year of the deseg program (1993), it consumed only 3 percent of the state’s total budget, compared to the separate 25 percent of the state budget that went to education. Though politicians may have used the program demagogically as a symbol of government waste and handouts to the undeserving black poor, in the end the amount of the budget devoted to the desgregation program was relatively small. And many black students, victims of Missouri’s long and ongoing pattern of unequal housing, educational, and employment opportunity, did not benefit at all from the program.

On the other hand, many of those who did participate in the program did benefit significantly. I’ve met several of them since I wrote my original post, actually. Wells and Crain, in addition to documenting convincingly that black city students benefit from attending suburban schools, also show the falseness of the alternative that opponents of the program often proposed: to use the deseg money to fix up the city schools instead. Politically, that was never an option. The deseg money was there because the courts forced the state to provide it.

Or, more accurately, the suburban and city school districts that agreed on the out-of-court settlement, in combination with the courts, forced the state of Missouri (which refused to participate in the settlement talks) to provide the money.

These St. Louis-area school districts agreed to the settlement not because they acknowledged that they had helped to create a racially unjust system and wanted to atone for their sins. Instead they agreed to the settlement because (1) they didn’t want to risk losing local control of their district, and (2) they realized that the settlement would mean lots of money for them. (And thus the settlement proved a fact of politics that I’ve come to understand: For the poor to get anything, the middle-class and wealthy have to get something too.)

In my original post, I explored the idea that the St. Louis Public Schools were the biggest losers in the desegregation settlement. My reasoning was that they had lost some of their best students and most committed parents, while also having to open up some of their most coveted spots to white county students. But, having read Wells and Crain, I now see that in fact SLPS saw significant gains from the settlement: for each student who left the district for one in the county, SLPS still received 50 percent of the funds they would normally have spent on that student. In addition, SLPS got additional funding for curriculum development, personnel, and capital improvements; and for the creation and maintenance of the magnet school program.

The biggest losers, I now realize, were the county districts—like Wellston, Jennings, Normandy, and others—that were “on the wrong side” of the lawsuit, according to one of the SLPS lawyers involved in the case. They were on the wrong side because they were already predominantly black and therefore received none of the money that flowed to the city and the rest of the county during the desegregation project. They were basically in the same plight as the all-black schools and neighborhoods in the city, yet they received no help from the state in the desegregation agreement.

SLPS, Wells and Crain helped me see, were both victims and perpetrators of segregation and attempts to remedy it. They created a separate and unequal system before Brown v. Board of Education and were slow and ineffective in dismantling it after that 1954 decision. At the same time, they were also in a bind because of the racial politics of the time, with rapid white flight (often spurred by racial fear) from the city and intense racially motivated demands from the white families who remained. They were stuck with the challenge of educating a largely racially segregated and impoverished population—stuck with this challenge by the suburban districts who thrived on the tax base that St. Louis County sucked out of the city. Yet the city schools often did a mediocre job, at best, of actually using their resources to help that population. This mediocrity is not surprising when one considers not only the daunting nature of the task, but also that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the school board included a powerful contingent of anti-desegregation members with ties to a local white supremacist group.

For that reason, in addition to the suburban districts that were largely African American, the black students left behind in neighborhood schools also got the rawest deal in the desegregation agreement. It’s understandable, from that perspective, that a group of black city dwellers would turn against the program. Their views were shared by Freeman Bosley, Jr., who found an anti-desegregation stance a useful political strategy for capturing both black and white votes and becoming the first African American mayor of the city.

As Wells and Crain acknowledge, there were political casualties of the desegregation agreement, and significant monetary benefits went to the very suburban districts who had helped to create the problem in the first place. (Though many suburbanites were ignorant of this basic fact.) Yet the book convinces me that the St. Louis city-county voluntary transfer program was something extraordinary. It was a real if small step in the direction of justice, one that gave black students a real chance, in fact, to achieve success in the way that conservatives always prescribe—to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

After all, don’t the images of black students standing on deserted corners by despair-filled housing projects waiting at 5:30 a.m. for buses to take them on the long ride to school call to mind other famous bootstrap examples of black Americans who endured discomfort and hardship in order to grasp the rare chance at an education?

Think of Frederick Douglass learning to read with the cast-off books of his master’s son. Or Booker T. Washington sleeping under a sidewalk while on a walking journey to a school that would be open to him. Or Ralph Ellison hopping a freight car in order to make his way to Tuskegee Institute because he couldn’t afford to get there any other way.

For the most part, however, white suburban St. Louisans didn’t see it that way. They just saw those students’ long journeys as a waste of money. Or they focused on the taxi cabs that took home the ones who had to stay late for some athletic contest or disciplinary consequence. Or they felt pity for the transfer student, a pity born of an aesthetic distaste for such a seemingly nonsensical arrangement—without understanding the much more disturbing nonsense of the historical and present color line in St. Louis.

With the desegregation plan set to end in 2014, what is next? Do all of the resources that went to provide at least a semblance of justice to black students simply melt back into the general budget for the state, or get returned to the taxpayers?

It’s clear that ignoring the educational problems caused by segregation does not work. In recent years, a number of the virtually all-black suburban districts passed over by the desegregation settlement have lost their accreditation, and the Supreme Court has ruled that parents in those districts have a right to send their kids to schools elsewhere. It’s the same issue that led to the desegregation settlement that will end in three years. The underlying racial, economic, and political realities have not really changed. It’s just that now the conflict is even more pronounced within St. Louis County.

Looking at a district like Wellston or Riverview Gardens, one realizes that, were it not for all the desegregation money pouring in from the state, SLPS would be in much, much worse shape than it is today. If middle-class whites (like my family) are to some degree moving in to the city, surely it has something to do with the fact that there’s still some hope left for the district. Would that be the case if not for the desegregation arrangement?

Reading Wells and Crain, however, I also come to understand more deeply how even well-meaning whites get caught inexorably in a system that perpetuates racial inequality. As the city scrambles for students, competing with private schools and charter schools and the ever-present alternative of exodus to the suburbs, and the racial balance requirements for the magnet schools fade, the best schools in the city system become whiter. This happens because white parents, who tend to have more connections, more time to make pestering phone calls, and more personal and cultural resources, will naturally do all they can to give their children the best chance at a worthwhile education.

From one perspective, there’s nothing wrong with that—just as there’s nothing wrong with a family moving to a suburban neighborhood that’s safer and has better schools. Yet, from another perspective, it’s exactly what perpetuates racial inequality, and exactly what led to the lawsuit that eventuated in the desegregation agreement.

Apart from straight-up racism, much of St. Louis whites’ distaste for the desegregation plan comes from the loss of local control (which feels to many like a basic American tenet) and a sense that the government is unfairly giving something to someone who hasn’t earned it. What this perspective misses, though, is how long the government unfairly took away something—opportunity in education, housing, and employment—from African Americans, how recently it stopped doing so, how long the legacy of that injustice will take to remedy, and what type of steps will need to be taken in order to do so.

For St. Louisans, these perspectives are a determinative part of “the cultural framework through which they view the world,” to use a phrase from Wells and Crain. In our segregated city, it’s all too easy for whites and blacks to develop quite different frameworks and thus to respond to the world in very different ways. The voluntary transfer program forced white St. Louisans to think about their frameworks. Some, Wells and Crain show, responded by becoming resistors, actively criticizing the program and hoping it would go away. Others became sympathizers, feeling a sense of charity toward the transfer students but no real strong enthusiasm for the notion of desegregation. A smaller group, mostly teachers, became visionaries, embracing the new perspectives offered by desegregation and changing their own behaviors in ways that ended up making life better for everyone involved, not only the transfer students.

As I finish reading Stepping Over the Color Line, I ask myself what my own response has been. On the one hand, I’ve largely been on the sidelines: educated in parochial, Catholic schools, I now teach in a prestigious and very predominantly white private Catholic school. In that school’s library, a reading room is named in honor of Daniel Schlafly, an alumnus who sent his own kids to Catholic schools but spent decades on the St. Louis school board, playing an important but ultimately ambiguous role.

There are many things I love about the school where I teach (of which I am also an alumnus), yet I also recognize how it is implicated in the racial injustice of the St. Louis area. I love the city magnet school my daughters attend, but I understand the privilege my white family has secured by obtaining coveted spots in this school while other city students are mired in failing, segregated schools.

What might “being a visionary” mean for me?

This past semester, for the first time, I taught an African American literature class. I learned a lot, not only from the large amount of reading I did to prepare for the course, but also from talking about race every day with a group of high school seniors that was 25 percent black (much higher than the overall percentage of black students in the school). For me, teaching that course is part of being a visionary, but it can’t be the end. After reading Stepping Over the Color Line, I realize that I need to do more. I need to get involved with the student group at my school that works to promote intercultural understanding. I need to get on the diversity committee at my daughters’ school, to help ensure that this great school doesn’t become a haven only for white students.

And I need to keep reading.

Assumptions for Organizers

According to Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters, during Bayard Rustin's orchestration of the 1963 March on Washington he kept saying, "If you want to organize anything, assume that everybody is absolutely stupid."

Pretty good advice for teaching, too.

As is Rustin's follow-up: "And assume yourself that you're stupid."

Jumping to Conclusions

I just read a couple great Comments from recent New Yorkers, both of which reminded me why I love this magazine so much.

This is the conclusion to Lawrence Wright's piece on Islam in America:

The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations. Until recently, America had been largely immune to the extremism that has placed some European nations in peril. America’s Muslim community is more ethnically diverse than that of any other major religion in the country. Its members hold more college and graduate degrees than the national average. They also have a higher employment rate and more jobs in the professional sector. (Compare that with England and France, where education and employment rates among Muslims fall below the national averages.) These factors have allowed American Muslims and non-Muslims to live together with a degree of harmony that any other Western nation would envy.

The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. The unfounded attacks on the backers of Park51 and others, along with such sideshows as a pastor calling for the burning of Korans, give substance to the Al Qaeda argument that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam, rather than against the terrorists’ misshapen effigy of that religion. Those stirring the pot in this debate are casting a spell that is far more dangerous than they may imagine.

And here's the conclusion of Nicholas Lemann's piece on the so-called crisis in American education:

The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah’s Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it.

We have a lot of recent experience with breaking apart large, old, unlovely systems in the confidence of gaining great benefits at low cost. We deregulated the banking system. We tried to remake Iraq. In education, we would do well to appreciate what our country has built, and to try to fix what is undeniably wrong without declaring the entire system to be broken. We have a moral obligation to be precise about what the problems in American education are—like subpar schools for poor and minority children—and to resist heroic ideas about what would solve them, if those ideas don’t demonstrably do that.

Back to School

by Robert Mankoff

A Problem Rooted in Scientific Complexity

From Atul Gawande's great commencement address at Stanford's School of Medicine:

The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

Cleveland High School

For some reason, I received in the mail yesterday the alumni magazine of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. My wife got her M.A. in history there, but the magazine was addressed to me.

In any case, it has an interesting piece about Dan Younger, an art professor at UMSL who has published a book of photographs of Cleveland High School, his alma mater.

"Cleveland looks great from the outside," Younger says. "It's just kind of this funny abandoned thing. You hate to think of it as a metaphor for the city, but it's just another formerly great thing that's been abandoned."

You can look at the entire book (and buy it, too, if you want) at this link.

The photos are a fascinating look inside a majestic piece of St. Louis educational architecture, located at S. Grand and Osceola, a building whose future, like that of so much of that architecture, is unclear.

Fluid Myths

This Daniel Mendelsohn piece eloquently confirms what I tell my students when we're discussing the Odyssey and they try to pin me down on this or that Greek myth:

Shaped as we are by printed literature, we tend to think about myths as texts as immutable as, say, “Anna Karenina.” In the same way we know that Anna Karenina is the woman whose passion leads her to the underside of a railway carriage, we think of Oedipus as a man who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, Jocasta, and then, after the ghastly revelation of what he has done, blinds himself and goes into exile. (Jocasta hangs herself.) If the name Helen of Troy comes up, we think of the adulterous Greek wife whose passion for a handsome house guest started a world war. But for the Greeks—whose culture was, even in classical times, still a largely oral one—myth was a great deal more fluid. Not twenty years after Sophocles put on his “Oedipus Tyrannus”—whose huge popularity from ancient times on has crystallized the self-blinding-exile-hanging version of the story—Euripides presented his tragedy “Phoenician Women,” in which Oedipus and Jocasta are still shuffling around the palace long after the revelation of incest and adultery. As for Helen of Troy, some people may be startled to learn that she might not have run away with Paris at all—and that, therefore, the decade-long Trojan War, like some other wars through the ages, was based on a fatal hoax. In his play “Helen,” Euripides dramatized a tale that had been in circulation since not long after Homer. Here the woman whom Paris takes home is just a phantom spun from clouds; the real Helen, virtuous and loyal, is spirited away to Egypt, where she weeps for her sullied reputation and mourns her husband, Menelaus, who eventually turns up and rescues her.

To us, brought up on the D’Aulaires’ “Book of Greek Myths,” all this may seem odd. It’s as if Tolstoy’s novel were only one of many possible “Anna Karenina”s, and there was a version in which the heroine acts on her final, panicked moment of hesitation, climbs back from underneath the train in the nick of time, and goes home to squabble with Karenin. But the Greeks had no “Book of Greek Myths”; they just kept tampering.

Of course, this is also a convenient way for me to dodge the fact that some of my students may know Greek mythology more thoroughly than I do.

Wade School

Wade School was built in 1929, named for Festus J. Wade, a prominent St. Louis banker. It was designed by famed architect Robert Milligan. In 1995, it was renamed the Meda P. Washington Education Center. It's on Vandeventer, in between Shaw and Kingshighway.

This building is in my neighborhood, and in an alternate universe—one in which it was still used as an elementary school, and in which every school in the district was a solid educational environment—it would be where my kids go to school. They could walk there in about ten minutes.

I'm not really complaining. The SLPS school that my daughter attends is only a five-minute drive from our house, and it's a great place.

But Meda P. Washington, nee Wade, does have a place in my heart. My grandma worked here as a school secretary decades ago. And I taught my wife to drive a stick shift in the parking lot.

It's a handsome building, part of St. Louis's rich heritage of educational architecture, yet also a reminder of the often sundered connection between our built environment and our lives in this city.

Trivia Quiz: O Brother Where Art Thou?

It's January again, time to show my freshmen O Brother, Where Art Thou?, our reward for having read The Odyssey over the course of the first semester. I guess I've seen the movie around thirty times now, and it still manages to delight me. My colleagues and I will spend the rest of the year quoting it to each other.

One thing about teaching a movie is that you begin to notice tiny details about it. Here's a fairly hard O Brother trivia contest that I wrote up last year while watching the film in class. (I'll post the answers in the comment section.)

1) Which artist from the film's soundtrack has a cameo in which she asks for a record of the Soggy Bottom Boys singing "Man of Constant Sorrow"?

2) Who performs the version of "I'll Fly Away" that's used in the film? (It's different than the one on the Grammy-winning soundtrack album.)

3) Whose translation of The Odyssey is quoted at the beginning of the film?

4) What moment in the film could be construed as a joke about Foley art?

5) Which character is speaking at a moment in the film when the sound doesn't match up with the image—when the dialogue does not fit with the character's mouth?

6) In what year is the movie taking place—and how do you know?

English

From Tad Friend's fascinating article (subscription required) about protests at Berkeley to statewide budget cuts in education, a perhaps surprising point, which I appreciate, as a former English major and graduate student in a family of engineers:

Another danger is that privatization can turn a university into a glorified trade school. Business programs and computer-science departments will attract wealthy supporters, but who will bankroll poetry? This concern is heightened because English—a high-enrollment, low-teaching-cost department—actually subsidizes disciplines such as nuclear physics and engineering, which require expensive equipment.

Cover Discoveries

The Book Bench does a weekly contest in which you have to identify four books based only on a small detail from their covers.

This week the theme was books that might show up in women's studies courses. One of the books was Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Look closely at the cover, though, in the contest solution.

It has been defaced. It reads: To the Shighthouse. Or, "to the shitehouse," as they would spell it in Ireland.

I wonder who pulled this little prank?

It reminds me of something that happened at the yearly Open House we have at the high school where I teach. For the English Department's table in the library, we set out all the books we teach, in order of class year. We then can use the books to talk prospective parents through our curriculum.

Sometimes we pull the display books from a shelf in our office where we keep books that we've found abandoned in the halls or classrooms over the years.

One year, I had been working Open House for about an hour or so. It was the middle of the afternoon, and many parents had been by the English Dept. table. As I talked yet another family through the books, beginning with the ones we teach to freshmen, I noticed that the copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that I was pointing to had been defaced. It read, boldly: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's PENIS.

Evidently we'd taken the book from the shelf of extra books, and the student who'd abandoned his copy of Huck had also added to its title, perhaps thinking wishfully about the contents of the novel.

One might expect such shenanigans at an all-boys school. But it's funny to see the same thing happen at one of the blogs of an august institution such as the New Yorker.

***UPDATE***

As of 3:50 today, they've replaced the shitehouse cover with a non-defaced one.

St. Louis Public Schools

Reading this article in the Post-Dispatch, struggling with where to send my own daughter to kindergarten next year, and talking with family members about St. Louis schools today has got me thinking about what’s happened to the St. Louis Public School system in the last 30-40 years.

Take these thoughts with a grain of salt, since in some instances I might not really know what I’m talking about.

After reading Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’s brilliant book about desegregation in the Boston public schools, I tried to find a comparable book about desegregation in St. Louis. What I came up with was Daniel J. Monti’s A Semblance of Justice, which I found fairly impenetrable and abstruse.

Monti’s main argument, however, as far as I could make out, was that school desegregation is a "ritualized rebellion," a public ceremony that purports to address deep-seated issues of injustice while actually doing very little to remediate or end them. In doing so, it allows tensions based on class and race to be vented without the disruptions that would probably accompany real social change.

The argument makes a certain amount of sense. But it occurs to me that the desegregation program has had very real negative consequences for St. Louis Public Schools. In a sense, St. Louis Public Schools have borne the brunt of the ritualized rebellion that was desegregation in St. Louis.

County districts, by and large, benefited financially from the plan, as they received significant taxpayer money for the students they accepted from the city.

Private schools benefited from the numbers of city students who decided to pay to attend them instead of going to desegregated city schools.

For city public schools, however, desegregation has been, largely, a lose-lose situation. Subjected to the highest degree of disruption, these schools also lost a good number of students, many from families (both black and white) who were probably pretty resourceful and committed to their children's education. And some of the precious spots in the city’s best schools had to be reserved for county students.

Desegregation combined with other patterns of white flight and suburban sprawl, which drained resources and residents from the city while simultaneously sticking the city with lots of responsibilities for taking care of the neediest people in our community. A plan designed to address inequality (if only ritualistically, as Monti asserts) ended up exacerbating it.

Then charter schools came around. They didn’t have to meet the same test score benchmarks or follow the same rules as the regular schools. So of course they further poached students from the city schools, despite the fact that they had little track record of better results. The idea seemed to be that anything was better than the existing system.

But the underlying social structures and patterns that had weakened the existing school system were not altered.

Now, to some degree, middle-class whites are beginning to move back into the city. At the same time, the district no longer is mandated by the court to maintain a racial balance in its magnet schools—and the magnet schools reserved for gifted and talented students are the ones most attractive to middle-class white parents.

So what happens now?

How will city schools respond? Will the goals of school desegregation be abandoned? Were they unrealistic to begin with—an attempt to use the school system to effect social change, a purpose for which it was ill-equipped? Can the city public schools bring middle-class white parents, with all of their resources and commitment, into the system? If so, what conflicts will arise? Who will benefit? Can this constituency be invited in so that the entire district benefits? Or will another segregated, unequal system arise?

If the city schools can't bring in middle-class whites and offer their children a decent education, then no doubt many of these families will move out to the county once their children attain school age.

It's certainly a conundrum. What am I missing? What do you think?

Parents as Teachers

I just finished teaching Romeo and Juliet to my freshmen. One student asked me, "So what was the moral of the story?"

I urged him not to think of literature as having a single moral or lesson, a simple take-home point like at the end of an Aesop fable. I suggested that one of the values of literature is that it presents us with characters and moments that seem lifelike, moments whose truth we recognize, and that might make us think about our own lives in new or sharper ways, ways which can change over time.

For instance, this time around, I've been thinking a lot about Friar Laurence, and how he fails as a mentor/surrogate parent to Romeo. He doesn't practice what he preaches, for one thing (he tells Romeo "Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast," yet he himself rushes and stumbles throughout the play). He acts against his own better judgment, it seems, because he can't summon up the nerve to tell his "young waverer" no, because he wants too much to be Romeo's friend.

I thought of Friar Laurence just now when I read in the New Yorker this Briefly Noted review of The Parents We Mean to Be, by Richard Weissbourd:

In this ardent and persuasive inquiry, Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist, warns that “happiness-besotted” parents do children a disservice by emphasizing personal fulfillment over empathy. (A high-school English teacher laments the difficulty of teaching “King Lear” to students who “can’t engage suffering in any way.”) Parents worry about their children’s confidence, but constant, preëmptive praise can turn kids into cynics; studies show that playground bullies (and, later in life, criminals) exhibit high self-esteem. Drawing on extensive field research, Weissbourd makes the case that parents, as models of behavior, must be vigilant about their own moral choices. If we’re afraid to risk our kids’ ire by criticizing them, how can we expect them to resist peer pressure? Of special concern are parents who try too hard to be their kids’ friends. Weissbourd explains, “Children have no incentive to become like us, because the message we’re giving is that they already are.”

Reading and Writing Fiction

At the NY Times, Charles McGrath reviews a couple new books from the era of the writing workshop.

Here's an interesting and, I would imagine, true statement:

Creative writing programs are themselves vocational training of a sort, [Mark McGurl] points out, and most of the people teaching in them are themselves holders of advanced degrees in creative writing. Probably a majority of American writers make a considerable part of their living not by writing, in fact, but by teaching others how to write and how to teach writing.

But McGrath's attempts to draw out worrisome trends from the rise of creative writing programs seem suspect to me: 

... few of even the most ardent teachers of creative writing believe it can really be taught. Probably the best that can be expected is that the programs identify and nurture talent that is already there. The downside, though no one seems terribly worried about it, is that with new programs springing up every year, a lot of costly nurturing of nontalent takes place as well.

And:

What this means is that we are conceivably approaching a state in which there are more writers in America than there are readers and, even more alarming perhaps, in which writing detaches itself from the marketplace and becomes, as it was back in the 17th century, a profession practiced only by teachers and by those who can afford to do it for nothing.

McGrath seems a little too caught up in the ideas of talent and the marketplace. I teach creative writing in two different (though similar) contexts: a summer program for seventh graders, and an elective course for high school seniors. Besides the obvious fact that these jobs keep me employed, I teach these courses and these students not in order to train producers of writing for the marketplace, but instead for two reasons:

1) It's fun—the courses give students a chance (and an excuse) to savor language, to play with words, and to create something beautiful, exciting, or funny with them.

2) For the reason that Mark Salzman arrived at while teaching creative writing to a group of juvenile delinquents, an experience he describes in an essay in The American Scholar, later part of a book called True Notebooks: 

Giving narrative coherence to experience is inherently meaningful work. It doesn’t make life possible the way food or shelter does, but it makes life worth living.