After the Storm

In late August, during the second week of school, Z tapped me on the shoulder right after class and asked me if I’d talk to him outside. Z’s big for his age and probably a couple years older than his classmates in my sophomore English class. He’d been struggling to make it to class every day, holding a white hand towel soaked in menthol rub over his face and working a pack of tissue to keep his nose clean. The first day he arrived with his summer cold gear I thanked him for making the effort to be in school and reminded him to wash his hands a lot.

I’d seen Z in the halls the previous school year. He’s the sort of young man who didn’t always go to class. And his size and facial expression and body language might seem menacing to someone who sees him around school but doesn’t really know him. But I’ve been a student and teacher in the public schools in New Orleans for over 30 years, so even last year when I didn’t know him, I had no problem just hurrying Z along to where he was supposed to be or telling him to watch his language.

So when he asked to cut into our precious 30 minute lunch break for a conversation in the hall, I was glad to join him.

“Let me file these essays before I lose them, and then I’ll be right there.”

When I made it outside, he was leaning against the wall in the dimly lit hallway, clutching his rag and nodding at fellow band members as they rushed to the stairwell.

“Mr. Randels, I wanted to ask if you’d teach me how to read.”

******

Z’s request calls to mind four key issues about the educational circumstances and strategies under which Students at the Center has been working both before and after Katrina.

1) Our district high school had a population of approximately 20% special education students. This proportion was about the same for the twelve other neighborhood high schools in the New Orleans Public Schools. Before Katrina, our system also had six selective admissions public high schools. The only special education students at these schools were those who were academically gifted, talented in the arts, or had an exceptionality concerning their physical abilities.

2) We work in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Those of us who work in Students at the Center at Douglass (and other schools) have not spent our time complaining about these educational situations. Instead, we want the public and policy makers to understand the different types of schools we have in New Orleans. And more importantly we want to learn how to teach Z and his classmates as best we can. Only engaged in practice can we learn the solutions we need. In Z’s case, I believe his willingness to ask for assistance after less than two weeks of time in our class comes from the fact that we engaged him in oral processes. His thoughts and words had a space of respect in our classroom.

3) We understand students as a resource. I could not fulfill Z’s request to learn to read on a personal level. He needed daily one on one attention. We do, however, have veteran SAC students who have trained in our classes to be resources in literacy development to our students. Rodneka Shelbia, who would have been a senior at Douglass, has been part of SAC since her 9th grade year. She has trained in Reciprocal Teaching and other methods for helping to improve reading abilities. She and Z are also friends. Rodneka agreed to work with Z on his reading every day as part of her elective SAC course. Z was eager for this help. Then the storm came.

4) Young people such as Z are eager to learn, given the right conditions. We need to help create those conditions and find ways to assess and respect the whole student. Labeling schools such as Douglass as failures based primarily on their test scores is a disservice to the education of our students. Instead of one size fits all approaches, we need ways to measure what it means for me to teach Sophomore English in a class that includes about 20% of students who face educational challenges similar to Z’s. Instead of Z’s state test scores being the only way to measure his worth and success as a student, we also need ways to measure (and to compute into the formulas that allow states to hand over public schools to private entities) Z’s desire to read and the efforts that brought him to that point.

These questions are pressing as we return to a public school system in N. O. that will now be run by the state and by foundations and universities, designed by national experts and university presidents not by teachers and parents and students who have worked hard and with pockets of success to educate the young people not allowed admission into schools the state has labeled academically acceptable.

Posted by at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I keep thinking about Ed and Leatrice Roberts. Kalamu, Ashley, Maria, and I spent a couple of Saturdays there this summer. Maria, a rising senior at Douglass High School, sat between the two white-haired elders with dancing eyes and mischievous grins. They were on the couch, beneath the photograph of Dillard University’s college of education class of 1948. Maria’s head was bent over her notebook, except when she threw it back, braids and beads and all, laughing with Ed and Leatrice about crazy Ed dragging Leatrice on dates to union meetings or voter registration drives. Or when she looked straight at Leatrice, accepting and appreciating her elder’s stern, gentle question about how the boys were treating her.

The Roberts’ house is gone now, completely flooded out like the other homes in Pontchartrain Park by the breaches in the London Avenue Canal. And the story of their neighborhood hasn’t really been told in the national media. It’s easy to see the poverty and racism and downright evil unearthed by Katrina. What we don’t see is that the largest group of black, college-educated homeowners in New Orleans were teachers. What happens to this group when public schools are shut down?

I doubt that Ed and Leatrice carried out the old diplomas from the first graduating class of McDonogh 35, of which Mrs. Reed, Leatrice’s mother, was a member. I expect all the photographs and memorabilia from Amerzion Baptist Church, the lower 9th ward church down the street from my fiance’s house and where her family and Leatrice’s family have been members since the Reconstruction era, are gone now. Leatrice was head of the history committee and had enlisted our SAC digital media crew to help with the 135th anniversary celebration in October. And Keith Ferdinand’s drawings, the ones he did as a kid in the late 1950’s are probably gone. Most of them were lost in 1965, when Betsy flooded the Ferdinand home in the lower 9th ward. Ed and Leatrice, dry back in 1965 in their new Pontchartrain Park home, had some of the few surviving youth drawings of their godson.

But if I know Ed and Leatrice, their hearts are especially heavy about the threats to American Federation of Teachers Local 527 that the post-Katrina state of public education in New Orleans have laid bare.

I remember Maria putting down her pen, and smiling with pride and mischievous conspiracy when Ed talked about how his elementary school classroom became an adult literacy center. Ed and his union colleagues knew that developing literacy for their students needed to include parents. But they also knew that in the Jim Crow south, the education had to be political too. Parents needed to register to vote, and the classrooms were important spaces for developing democracy.

Maria practically cheered when Leatrice explained that she started teaching in 1949, the year that black teachers finally won equal pay. Maria had just finished a new writing on Veronica Hill (you can read it—and see a picture of Leatrice and Maria—at www.strom.clemson.edu/teams/literacy/sac), one of the teachers who helped launch the first white collar union in the south, AFT Local 527. This black union had as one of its main goals to pursue the struggle for equal pay for teachers in the Jim Crow South.

And Maria had been angry when she read the headlines in the local newspaper that the school district was considering dropping its contribution to the Health and Welfare Fund, a union and district partnership that the Roberts and fellow teachers had fought for—not just for the dental and vision benefits but for the professional development provided by the teacher center (now the Center for Professional Growth and Development)—the most stable avenue for improving teaching practices and sharing resources that black or white teachers in New Orleans have had for the last 30 or 40 years.

Maria concludes her essay on Leatrice, entitled “Sharing a Life, Passing a Torch,” with these paragraphs.

“`Just because you retire doesn’t mean you stop being an activist.’ That’s the reason she founded the retiree chapter. Ms. Leatrice and Mr. Edward struggled their whole lives to get teachers the benefits they deserved through the health and welfare fund. They succeeded, but now everything they worked for is on the brink of getting destroyed as the school system considers cutting the Health and Welfare Fund to balance its budget.

“`I’ve done all I can, but before I’m gone I want someone to pass the torch to,’ Ms. Leatrice said.

“That’s why I went to see her. I wanted to let her know that we students appreciate her and that there are a few of us who would gladly receive the torch and run with it.”

I am proud of Maria’s resolve and know that her words aren’t hollow. She’s already planning to move back to New Orleans in January, to carry the torch the Roberts have passed. She understands that this may mean getting a GED, since schools that honor the democratic institutions that Ed and Leatrice and other black teachers fought to establish will probably not be open. And I will be proud to be there with Maria and her classmates, working as hard as ever to give them the best education possible and one that preserves what storms and post-Katrina opportunists cannot wash away.

Posted by at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)