Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 3

Maestro Harrell plays Randy, an intelligent and enterprising student at a Baltimore public school, on "The Wire".

Today's trivia question to prepare you for the “Clash of Civilizations”.
According to Marxist theory, what is the “haute bourgeoisie”?
Click here and Scoll down to "Interests" for the answer.
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I received this letter recently. (Irrelevant material indicated by […] has been deleted.)

"[…] I attended Knox high school a little over a decade ago. While I currently reside in Illinois, my family still lives in Starke Co., Indiana. I found your site quite interesting on many different levels. […] I also found interesting is the income of Mr. Condon for being principal of Knox Sr. High School. You see, I am currently enrolled in college in Illinois, but while attending Knox Sr. High, I was forced to drop out of school. Mr. Condon didn't make exceptions to rules with students that have a lack of parents in their lives. Although I attended school every day, I was also late because I worked a full time job at a factory 2nd shift, and my friends would pick me up 5 miles out of town in the country and bring me to school. Therefore, with me raising myself, working full time and attending high school full time, I was tardy often. Nearly everyday he would call me to his office and give me the lecture of being on time. I explained my situation to him, but he didn't care. I wasn't his problem, nor were the other record number of dropouts in his first two years in term. Now I will get to the point. Seeing his salary as high as it is, I find it unfortunate that the state wastes so much money on someone that doesn't take the time to care about his students, and maybe try to work with them on their situations rather than sit back, collect the salary as it rolls in, and discipline students to show an effort of work ethic, an expressing the lack of better judgment."

This letter is an interesting confirmation of the ideas set forth in my earlier blogs Caste and Class in the Classroom Part 1 and Fixing the High School. Our dropout rate is, at least in part, a symptom of the disconnect between students legitimate needs and the administration’s apparent indifference to those needs. The administrations attitude is that the students must conform to the schedule and rules of the school. My reader here may very well ask, “ Well what is wrong with that? Shouldn’t students learn to be on time, conform to the schedule, conform to the rules?” in this blog I want to examine this very question.

One of the sub plots in HBO’s Peabody Award winning series, The Wire, is the abysmal inner city Baltimore public schools. It is fascinating that the teachers and administrators are depicted as skillful, intelligent, caring, and hardworking. Likewise students are shown to have intelligence and drive. In spite of the great personal qualities of the staff and the students it is nevertheless a terrible mess. Knox is in a similar state albeit not so strikingly severe. I think that Mr. Condon is skillful, intelligent, caring, and hardworking. But I also believe that he did a disservice to our letter writer and a great many other similarly situated students. A great many of our students don’t have the luxury of conforming to middle class expectations.

What are some of these middle class expectations? We assume that a student is financially supported. We assume that a student will be able to conform to the school’s schedule. We assume that a student will be able to catch the bus. These assumptions are all correct when we are dealing with a middle class family. But what about the student that is self-supporting and works the second shift and consequently is tardy every day? Survival is more important than not being tardy.

I suggest that our school needs to rethink the middle class assumptions that underlie the present system. Our letter writer is in college today, not because of our school, but in spite of our school.

Doesn’t it seem terrible that it is possible to make such a statement?

Tootsie Duvall plays Edward J. Tilghman Middle School assistant principal Marcia Donnelly on "The Wire."