There Is a Lesson in “The
Children of Stanton Street”
By
Johnie H. Scott
(First printed in the WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, March 15, 2000)
There are very few films I have seen that carry the emotional and psychological wallop of I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Street. This Academy Award-winning documentary written, produced and directed by the husband-wife team of Alan and Susan Raymond is set in the Philadelphia ghetto. The subjects of the movie are those students, their parents, faculty, staff and the surrounding community as we watch how the tremendous pressures placed upon black schools and neighborhoods everyday by an environment given birth to by a racist society literally drains the will to succeed and do well from a person.
Predominantly black Stanton Street Elementary School has a total student population of just over 1,100. The surrounding neighborhood is comprised of buildings in desperate need of repair and these are next to drug houses that, the camera shows us, never lack for a steady flow of traffic. Alcoholics and drug addicts people the streets night and day, leaving their empty bottles and drug paraphernalia on the school grounds for the children to come across even as they pass by billboards and murals scrawled with “Crack Kills.”
If the Stanton Street kids are wise, like one young girl we see, they will give the used syringe to one of the school police who’ll promptly get rid of it before someone gets infected by the blood and/or residue that’s still in it.
Made over a one-year period of time, I Am a Promise takes us inside the hearts, minds, souls and dreams of these children of whom 97 percent, we are told at the film’s beginning by the Raymonds, come from families receiving public assistance. No amount of statistical data presented, though, hits quite as hard as learning that the school’s Free Breakfast Program is, for many of the students, their only hot meal of the day. Neither can the data match the impact of seeing a small, African American male child who could not be more than six years old sitting curbside early one morning, waiting for someone to come open the school gates. Chewing on a breakfast roll, the little boy tells Susan Raymond of this being a regular routine – the aunt he lives with is tired from the night before from whatever she might have been doing, leaving it to the boy to tend to himself every morning and the school to take over the parenting chores.
His is not an unusual case. Sad to say, neglect comes as no stranger to this child or to many of the others who attend Stanton Street. However, this is not a film review. Here, mention is made of I Am a Promise when thinking about the Academic Performance Index (API) Report released just one month ago (February, 2000). The results showed an overwhelming majority of black school children in Los Angeles – starting from kindergarten on through their senior year in high school – scoring in the nation’s bottom tenth percentile in reading comprehension, basic writing, and elementary mathematics.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times (Sunday, February 27, 2000), one white inner city school teacher begged that she and her colleagues not have to shoulder all of the blame for the school system’s abysmal betrayal of its mission. Careful not to point an accusing finger, this same educator issued a call for unity: a joining together of educators and parents to make common cause in the war to salvage the minds and futures of our youth.
Reflecting on the API Report and that embattled teacher’s plea, it is impossible not to be reminded of scenes from I Am a Promise. These are the scenes that show kindergartners being labeled “discouraged learners,” African American children herded into Special Education tracks (i.e., the “graveyard” of the public schools) seldom to be heard from again, teachers throwing hands up in despair while bemoaning testing results showing Stanton’s kids at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Except the present reality is that my discussion, this Word Up!, is no longer about I Am a Promise.
Whether we’re talking about the urban ghettoes of Philadelphia, Southcentral Los Angeles, Southside Chicago, Harlem, Bedford Stuyvestant, Baltimore, New Orleans, East Oakland or Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, that label keeps pooping up: discouraged learners. For anyone who truly thinks “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” this politically-correct nomenclature has to be very troubling.
Theresa Perry and Lisa Delpit are two African American female educators and scholars who have taken the battle one step farther by publishing one of the most important works to appear of late – The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African American Children (Beacon Press, 2000). In a book I consider “required reading” for those seriously concerned with taking action where the Miseducation of Black and other disadvantaged children is concerned, Perry and Delpit lay bare he all-too-familiar scenario:
“For six months, the 30-member African American task force (School Board members, community activists, and teachers) grappled with the under-achievement of African American students enrolled in the Oakland, California public schools. The average grade point average for all students in the district was 2.40; for white students, it was 2.70; for Asian American students, 2.40. The average grade point average for African American students was 1.80. While African American students made up 53 percent of the student population, they represented 80 percent of suspensions and 70 percent of students labeled as ‘special needs.’ (sic, there goes that “Special Education” rubric again – JS).”
Charcoal Alley
Number One
The “all-too familiar” scenario is one I bear personal witness to. As a 1964 graduate from David Starr Jordan Senior High located on East 103rd Street in the very heart of Watts (i.e., during the 1965 Watts Riots, referred to as “Charcoal Alley No. 1”), mine was a twelfth grade graduating class of 97 students with an average reading level of sixth grade and fourth grade skills in mathematics. This class entered Jordan High in the tenth grade with 250 students, with two-thirds disappearing over the next three years. Not all of those students transferred to other schools in the area, either. Jordan High School then, as now nearly 40 years later, possessed one of the highest dropout rates and absentee rates in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It scored, predictably, at the bottom on performance tests for the city’s high schools.
During the early 1960s – and bear in mind that a President had brought “Camelot” to the nation’s capitol while a man named King was organizing the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South – the defense commonly raised was to point towards the overachieving individuals (and they always exist, make no mistake!) who, somehow, someway, managed to rise above the odds against Black youth and “make it out” of the slums while the masses remained there, trapped in poverty. If anything has hanged from the early 1960s to these opening years of the New Millennium, it is the fact that Jordan High is just one of those “Bottom 10” high schools.
I say this based upon the results of the 1999 API tests which show John C. Fremont, Thomas Jefferson, Manual Arts, Compton, Compton Centennial, Compton Dominguez and Alain Locke High Schools – among others – joining Jordan in the “Bottom 10.” It is no longer possible to point towards a handful of academic “Ghetto Stars” while pushing the real issue of inferior schools under the rug like the dirt it is.
Staring the dragon in the face, two impulses rise up. One springs from having devoted nearly the last 20 years of my own life to the classroom in an effort to bring some small measure of relief to the lives of those young people present, particularly African Americans, so they might enter the world empowered with the courage, ability and skills needed to make their mark. The teacher within says it is wrong to place blame on my colleagues; that if any blame is to be found, then that accusing finger should rightly be pointed towads the parents who have not and seemingly will not get involved in their children’s education.
It says the blame should go to the parents for not reviewing their children’s homework, for not going to PTA meetings at their child’s school, for not going to Board of Education meetings where they could speak out about ill-equipped classrooms and unprepared teachers, for not voting “Yes” on propositions that might bring an influx of badly-needed dollars into the education pipeline.
The second, warring impulse is that of the father and parent of five children, a father who wants to shift the same blame, if not to teachers, then to an uncaring system rotten to its very core. A system that certainly become that way overnight, a system that has been failing children, and Black America, for decades (see Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro). A system of chews up and spits out committed educators like a Marva Collins, Joe Clark, Isaac McClelland, Claude Ware, George Lockett and Oliver Lattimore with the proof being that API “Report Card” listing of schools heavily populated by black, brown, poverty-stricken children. Clearly, the time has come for the sort of change that can only result from committed individuals forming organizations devoted to positive, systemic change.
There is no sorrier sight than that of parent and teacher at odds over which one is at fault. But on this watch, it is not enough to separate the two from fighting with one another – not while prisons are being built at five times the rate of universities, not while one of every three Black males is now a part of the criminal justice system with cities like Baltimore showing 80 percent of the Black men today between 20-29 being “under paper” (i.e., incarcerated, on probation, on parole, under court supervision).
On this watch, with this Word Up!, it is simply not enough while African American women represent the fastest-growing segment of the new prison inmates in our nation, and it is certainly not enough when one of the most hotly-contested ballot propositions centered on the sentencing of juveniles as adults passes while no one questions or murmurs a word about the ongoing criminal neglect happening in the little red schoolhouse.
(Note this has been edited and revised from the original which was published in the WAVE Newspapers with links providing in-depth, updated information embedded by the author for readers – JS)