Viewing page 83 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

"Turn On" Teachers                          Sanchez

urban schools and the disadvantaged child. In the present moment of history every aspect of the latter has racial overtones. The books which I assign, such as Death at an Early Age, 36 Children, La Vida Down These Mean Streets, Compulsory Miseducation and the Community of Scholars, Beyond the Melting Pot, are part of the ocean of evidence about the treatment of minority children by the school system (historically speaking, all minorities). We don't have records adequate enough to compare the reading scores and drop out rates of today with those of the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants' children of thirty and forty years ago. But the low reading scores and high drop out rates which characterize far too many of the Negro and Puerto Rican students of today are objective facts that something is wrong with the education they are receiving. Broken home and low wages and large numbers of brothers and sisters are typical of immigrant families, too. Despite all the literature on the disadvantaged child, the difference between today's drop out and that of a generation ago is in the availability of jobs. Very few of yesterday's jobs required diplomas of any sort, while practically all of today's jobs, menial or otherwise, require a high school diploma. Black parents know these facts from personal experience and their fears for their children are the basis for the angry scenes we see on television. They feel that their survival demands independence from white controlled bureaucracies in general and the school bureaucracy, in particular, because these bureaucracies have not served them well in the past and the schools are not preparing them for the changed circumstances of the present and the future. They are demanding that their children be educated so that they, too, will be able to pass tests with good scores. And yet all their dissatisfaction with the past and their demands that their children have a better future are labelled "black racism" and "black militance," and we, who have made it successfully through the school system and through the world of tests and credentials, are warned that we must resist them or somehow everything we have will disappear. As the manager of my local post office told me in discussing the teachers' strike, "Those teachers are fighting for their very lives."
It is a bitter irony that America's racial problem should be especially volatile and especially visible, via television, in New York City where by a coincidence of history a large percentage of the school teachers and administration happen to be Jews (which is itself a fairly recent phenomenon). The "niggers" of Europe and the "niggers"