Anyone who works in NYC schools can see that we - parents, friends, social workers, teachers, administrators and advocates - are not doing enough to prepare kids to learn by setting up an environment which coincides with the cultures that exist both inside
and outside the school.
Kids from families (rich and poor) who live day-to-day with hostile people inside their homes and outside, on the streets, learn to survive in many different ways. The current education system judges and discriminates against children for learning how to survive in the manner they have learned from their parents, or the people they interact with everyday.
There are not enough people or programs to re-direct negative behavior into positive outcomes.
The book "The Battle For Room 314 by Ed Boland seems to address the issue, and I commend him for putting this issue again in the public eye.
Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off
New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife
epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and
drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.
 |
| Ed Boland |
There’s nothing dry or academic
here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system
that seems broken beyond repair.
The
book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not
cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into
this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a
book deal.
What
Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.
Names
and identifying details have been changed, but the school Boland calls Union
Street is, according to clues and public records, the Henry Street School of
International Studies on the Lower East Side.
Boland
opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.
A
teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her
pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and
ignored.
“Chantay,
sit in your seat and get to work — now!” Boland says.
A
calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys
begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing
along. Another girl is immersed in a book called “Thug Life 2.”
Chantay
is the one that aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he
thinks, he can get control of the class.
“Chantay,”
he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”
The
classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up
at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her
upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook
it . . . She looked me right in the eye and
screamed, ‘SUCK MY F–KIN’ D–K, MISTER.’ ”
It was
Boland’s first week.
At the
time, Boland’s new school was considered a bold experiment — not a charter but
an “autonomous” one, given freedom in both management and curriculum. It was
endowed in part by the Gates Foundation, and the principal hired only teachers
who had once lived abroad.
Boland
had taught English in China. This was his favored school — advertised as the
last, best hope for kids who had fallen far behind — and he was thrilled to be
hired. He went home to his then-boyfriend (now husband) and celebrated over
takeout pad Thai and an expensive bottle of red wine.
“I was
ready to change lives as a teacher,” he writes.
How
wrong he was.
There
were 30 kids in his ninth-grade class, some as old as 17. One student, Jamal,
was living in a homeless shelter with his mother; most of the other students
lived in public housing. There was one white kid in the whole school.
“It was
as if Brown v. Board of Education or desegregation had never occurred,” Boland
writes.
He had
rounded up his students into a semicircle and checked for forbidden items:
phones, electronics, sunglasses, clothing in gang colors.
Then
someone kicked in the door.
And
there, Boland writes, “stood one Kameron Shields in pure renegade glory, a
one-man violation of every possible rule. Above the neck alone, he was
flaunting four violations: He wore sunglasses and a baseball cap over a red
bandanna over iPod headphones. A silver flip phone was clipped to his baggy
jeans. Everything he wore was cherry red — the hallmark color of the Bloods.
“He
turned his grinning face to the ceiling and howled, ‘WASS . . . UP . . . N—AS?’ ”
Boland
was outmatched. He was petrified. He ran out the clock and asked his fellow
teachers who this kid was.
“Oh,
yeah, he’s brutal,” one colleague said. Turned out Kameron had thrown a heavy
electric sharpener at a teacher’s head the year before, but the principal —
whom the teachers sarcastically called their “fearless leader” — refused to
expel any student for any reason.
Two
weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110
textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms.
There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, “I’m Not
Easy But We Can Negotiate.” Their self-care toggled in the extreme, from girls
who gave themselves pedicures in class to kids who went days without showering.
Kameron
was in a league of his own. “I was genuinely afraid of him from the minute I
set eyes on him,” Boland writes. After threatening to blow up the school,
Kameron was suspended for a few months, and not long after his return, a hammer
and a double switchblade fell out of his pockets.
The
principal gave up. Kameron was expelled.
“Oh,
they getting real tough around here now,” one student said. “Three hundred
strikes, you out.”
Here among the kids who
couldn’t name continents or oceans, who scrawled, “Mr. Boland is a f—-t” on
chalkboards, who listed porn among their hobbies, were a few who had a shot.
There
was Nee-cole, who wore thick glasses and pigtails. She was quiet, smart, much
more childlike than her peers, and Boland felt for her. He was also intrigued
by a tough girl named Yvette, who showed flashes of insight and intelligence
yet did all she could to hide it. “PLEASE DON’T TELL ANYONE I WROTE THIS,” she
scrawled on one report.
He
asked his fellow teachers about the enigma that was Yvette. “One day in class,
I intercepted a note,” said a colleague, Tasneen. “It said, ‘Yvette b—s old
guys for a dollar under the Manhattan Bridge.’ We punished the girl who wrote
it for spreading lies.”
Soon
after, the school heard from Child Protective Services. The prostitution rumor
was true. Yvette was removed from her home. “She’s not doing it anymore,”
Tasneen said, “but she’ll never outrun that story.”
The
bookish Nee-cole was also a target, but things were tolerable — until
parent-teacher night. Nee-cole’s mother showed up wheeling a suitcase down the
hall, listening to Donna Summer on a Discman. She wore off-brand jeans, rainbow
leg warmers, a ratty orange vest, dreads festooned with ribbons and shells, and
a face tattoo of pin curls where hair should be.
Boland
was flummoxed. He closed the classroom door.
She
introduced herself as Charlotte and explained Nee-cole’s history: Her daughter
had been enrolled in Harlem, but when her mother saw the school was on the
city’s list of underperformers, she pulled Nee-cole out and home-schooled her.
“But we
didn’t have a home, so I made do and taught her where I could, mostly on the
subway, for the year.”
She
went on to explain that she had to put Nee-cole in foster care. “I love my
child beyond words and am still very involved with her life,” Charlotte said.
“Her education is my priority.”
After
that meeting, Nee-cole’s life at school was never the same.
“Nee-cole’s
mother is a HOBO,” the other kids would say. “Did you get a look at her? Mama
look like a homeless clown.”
Boland
came to actively loathe most of the student body. He resented “their poverty,
their ignorance, their arrogance. Everything I was hoping, at first, to
change.”
His
colleagues gave him pep talks, reminded him to contextualize this behavior:
These kids had no parents, or abusive, neglectful ones. Most lived in extreme
poverty. School was all they had, and it was their only hope.
A lifelong liberal, Boland
began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. “We can’t just explain away
someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough upbringing,” he argued
back. “It doesn’t do them — or us — any good.”
Then
there was Jesús Alvarez, boyfriend of Chantay and, as Boland writes, “a perfect
s- -t.”
Jesús would stroll by Boland’s classroom and shout, “Bolan’, who you ballin’?
It ain’t no chick.”
Boland
called in the father, even though he was warned it would do no good. The three
sat down, and Boland was surprised.
“Jesús,
this is a good school,” the father said. He warned Jesús that it was either
school or the street, and Jesús wasn’t tough enough for the street. “You get
yourself right, get an education, and show this man some respect.”
It was
the one thing that had gone well so far. “I left that meeting brimming with
confidence,” Boland writes. “Involving parents was key.”
Next,
he turned his attention to Valentina, a transfer student who joined his class
in February. She wore tight jeans over what Boland calls “an epic derriere,”
and as she walked to her seat, the kids oinked and mooed.
“Step
down, all y’all n- - -as, or I’ll stab you in your neck,”
Valentina said. “Don’t get me tight, bitches.”
Boland
soon learned Valentina was what the Department of Education calls “a safety
transfer” — meaning she was such a threat to her fellow students that she was
pulled out of school.
Now
here she was, Boland’s newest charge. He was quickly impressed with her
observational skills — a bar he had set extremely low, now the victim of some
inner-city form of Stockholm syndrome.
Asked
to write about an ancient sculpture of two royals, Valentina wrote, “Well,
isn’t it obvious that they are a couple? His hand is on her t—y . . . The way they sit is regal.”
It was
the use of the word “regal” that blew Boland away. He pulled her aside after
class.
“You
can’t fool me,” he told her. “I can tell from just that one sheet of paper that
you have a very fine mind.”
For
that, he received an official complaint of sexual harassment, filed by one
Valentina. She claimed Boland said, “You are mighty fine, you turn me on, and I
can tell you like fooling around.”
The entire administration knew
Boland was gay, yet they still had to follow procedure. He was never to be
alone with Valentina again.
By the
time he invited a highly decorated Iraq War veteran to speak to class and
Valentina greeted him with, “Hey, mister, give me a dollar,” Boland thoroughly
despised her.
Nor
could he escape the kids outside of school. One winter day, Bolan was mounting
his bicycle, on his way home, when he saw a gang fight break out in a parking
lot. He saw Jesús in the crowd, and an older man egging the kids on. “That’s
it, Nelson, show that punk-ass bitch who’s boss. Whale his ass.”
It was
Jesús’ father.
Angry
and humiliated, Boland relayed this latest heartbreak to a veteran teacher. “As
crazy as sounds,” the teacher said, “that father may be trying to teach his
son how to survive in a hostile environment the only way he knows how.”
Boland
didn’t know what to believe anymore. At the end of the school year, he quit.
Boland
ends his book with familiar suggestions for reform: Invest more money, recruit
better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty. But there’s no public policy
for fixing a broken kid from a broken home, or turning fear into resilience, or
saving kids who can’t, or won’t, be saved.
Toward
the end of his tenure, Boland asks his sister Nora, a longtime teacher, for
help. What is he doing wrong? What could he be doing right? Why can’t he break
through to these kids, even the ones who seem to care? How can society absorb
such a massive human toll?
“I’ve
been teaching for a long time now,” Nora tells him. “And my only answer is that
there are no easy answers.”
