An Impoverished High School

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

I’m coming up on 10 years since I graduated high school and I thought it was time to reflect on the time I spent there for no other purpose than to remember events.

I went to a school which had a hodgepodge of different ethnicities. There was no majority, everyone was a minority. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Latinos, Vietnamese, Filipino, Afghani, Indian, etc. all filled the crossways. The main thing we all had in common was that we weren’t from affluent backgrounds. Most were the children of first-generation immigrants or were first generation themselves. A majority grew up in poverty. Most had no real aspirations because they didn’t know any better.

The Good: The Case for Diversity

My school was full of diversity, my friends were literally from everywhere. Cross country and track practices were full of jokes about who could run fastest from inmigración. We got along. The trajectories of our lives were going in different directions, but we could make jokes and have fun. We learned a lot about each other’s lives to the extent we could understand each other’s cultures. It gave us an opportunity to see things from different vantage points. This helped tremendously because there was no monoculture.

We learned how to live in a diverse world.

The Bad: Nowhere To Be, Nowhere To Go

There were fearful moments and not the “Oh my god they are canceling my AP class” kind. The first week of high school, I saw someone’s skull get broken during a fight. Most teachers saw their role as a babysitting and ensuring defense of other students and themselves instead of teaching. My freshman year someone burned down the snack shack as a “senior prank.” Most of the time, you put your head down and walked down the hall hoping no one had a bad day. The “smart kids,” which I was considered, we holed ourselves up in the Career Center because God knows that most students would never venture into that nook of the school.

Why was this the case? Why was there so much violence? I’ve been dabbling with this question for a long time. Socioeconomic reasons are reason number one.

A lot of my fellow schoolgoers didn’t have anywhere to be. Home had no one waiting. Their parents were either working whatever menial job they had and assumed the school would babysit their kids. Or when they were at school it just became a place to vent frustration. The students had no family life. I knew a few people whose dads were in jail. Yes, most of them were black.

Without anyone to report to, with no ties or creative outlets, the school became Lord of the Flies. There are cliques everywhere but the cliques that formed in my high school were a bit different. They grouped mostly around people with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. So you’d see a black dude, a Mexican dude, and a white dude hang out, they were all from a pretty similar socioeconomic background. A lot of the first-generation immigrations hung around other first-generation immigrations. Etc., etc. This grouping formation leads to low socioeconomic backgrounds grouping together to become gangs.

Further, many of the students were bused in from the town over. This had the negative repercussion in the destruction that they caused in the community the school was located in. After all this wasn’t their community, it was a place they were basically imported into. Why care about a place that seems to be doing better when the place you come from is a broken ghetto?

Broken School, Broken Minds

My school understood this to a degree. They had different academies so that students could learn a vocation if they decided that further school was not for them. There were teachers who cared—many of them got assaulted. Most teachers would leave to better pastures after a few years. After all why should being a teacher involve work safety issues?

Many of the old-time tenured teachers were apathetic. My Freshman English teacher showed us movies about Romeo and Juliet instead of actually reading the book. Actually, we saw three different renditions of Romeo and Juliet. That is when she actually showed up to class. Sometimes we just sat outside and chatted. In the back of my mind the aspiration of college slowly receding. (As an aside this was when I decided to finish 60 units of community college by the time I graduated. I succeeded in my goal.)

With Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy things became worst. The school always on the brink of losing accreditation became enamored with getting as many students to take the yearly standardized tests. Schools get money based on student turnout. We failed to reach that two years in a row and barely succeeded in the third.

Classes became teaching the test. Endless resources were put into something as stupid as the standardized way of taking notes. Fold the left third of the paper and put a question on the right side was the answer. Honestly, how do you ask 2x+2=4 in this format?

Most students failed the simplest of classes. Most students did not see the point of learning trigonometry when they never had any role models for people who actually used it in life. “How is trig going to help me flip burgers for a living or when I become an NBA legend?” Obviously most of the students didn’t care. How were students magically going to care about a test for a school that they didn’t care about?

So What’s The Solution?

This is where I wager my enlightened views on how to remove poverty, make the world a better place, etc., etc. K-12 should be an institution which leads to being a good citizen. But how do you teach good citizenship when there are no role models to emulate? I got lucky I had my uncles to look up to, my parents for working hard and creating a stable home. But many didn’t have this. I even assume most just came to school for the free lunch.

Some ideas I have include giving livable wages to parents so they can be at home. We need to educate parents who actually don’t actually know how to be parents. How are you going to prevent your 15-year-old from getting pregnant or staying out of jail when you yourself have gotten pregnant or went to jail at that age?

There should be a required year or two of service for everyone. We need to make volunteer service a required part of high school. When you help build your community it becomes much more difficult to want to dismantle it. We also need to educate our students not on the economic theories of supply and demand but on the economic practice of balancing a checkbook.

Further, there needs to be a way to fix homes that have been broken for generations? Otherwise, subalterns become subalterns. How are the students going to care when no one cared about them? It becomes a cycle, it is a cycle.

Conclusion

At work I sometimes overhear parents who are freaking out about sending their kids to private schools versus public schools. It is a weird dichotomy to have that experience. I know that the kids of these folks will be okay while a lot of kids who will be going to the school I went to or similar will likely continue the wheel of poverty.