The late, great Marilyn mothered our five children. As they accumulated over the span of eight years, she retired from teaching in her public elementary school but never lost her esteem for the profession.
Three of our children collectively have invested more than 40 years in the classroom, more than half in the inner-city. Our son Steve – fresh from seven years of service as a public high school principal – has returned to California to follow his star as a teacher in an intermediate public school.
One day he may allow me to tell his all-minority history class of a private evening I had with Martin Luther King Jr. in which we discussed King’s never-ending hope for a society of respect for every human being. Specifically, he wanted to hear about the legal risk of his plan for boycotts.
But what are these brown and black students of Steve’s doing anyway, clustered in this school when, just up the slope of the East Bay, there are mostly white schools, in the same district? These schools appear within easy reach but lie across some magic line.
Of course, they are “Open to all. Welcome! Just move your residence.”
Which is, of course, exactly what Marylyn and I did 50 years ago, happy to enroll our crew in the soon-to-be integrated public schools of Berkeley. We found a nice house near John Muir Elementary School, Malcolm X Intermediate and St. Augustine’s first through eighth. We had choice and we used it.
The minorities that cluster in Steve’s school are, of course, “welcome” everywhere – if they have the dollars to buy or rent a residence in the attendance area they prefer. It happens that few of these families are so endowed; and, although several accessible private schools are attractive (and most spend less per pupil), the tuition would have to come from parents’ pockets – where it is not.
How did this “great democracy” of ours ever get itself into such a grossly un-democratic, wealth-determined, compulsory public slough? Vladamir Putin might understand and approve, but should we? How do we tolerate this civic shame?
Fear among 19th Century elites of the minds and habits of multiplying immigrants account for the inception, and I suspect, longevity of the problem, the solution to which, to this day, is structured into most of our state systems. Not surprisingly, this segregation of poor and minority families has, over time, pawned a bureaucracy that designs and controls the formal education required of would-be teachers and administrators of our public schools.
Thus, the inauguration of – and near monopoly – of the “ed schools,” trending ever in their message to the shallow and the deeply political. This probably was inevitable.
Legislators – their providers – found the “public” schools to be innocently (and even patriotically) admired by their middle-class constituents. And the masters of the teachers unions awakened to their unique power over the poor family. Gradually, they have managed the conscription of its child, thus creating the inner-city imperialism we behold today.
Again: If you are well-off, you treasure and scrupulously practice your role of parent, to the great advantage of child, family and civil society; if you are not, both of you – parent and child – take whatever the commanding officers decide.
This may be ideal; one sometimes gets lucky. But, instead, it just may make you and little Rosie mutually miserable. And whichever comes, you are out of it – helpless, useless.
So, just sit back for the next 12 years; but never, never forget your duty as a good and responsible citizen, just like the rest of us!
