Two stories related to public schools caused my blood pressure to rise.
When John Edwards gave his “Two Americas” stump speech, he often noted that there were two public school systems, one for affluent areas and one for poor areas. A story in the New York Times provides an example of the latter:
February was Black History Month, and all students big and small at Edward Williams Elementary - which is 97 percent black - were assigned reports on a famous black American. Francis Powell, a sixth grader, wanted to do Langston Hughes, but when Francis visited the school library, there were no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems.Fahtemah Callands, another sixth grader, planned to do Whoopi Goldberg, but there was nothing in the school library about the actress. Nothing on Oprah Winfrey either. Nothing on Josephine Baker, Cicely Tyson, Leontyne Price, Ossie Davis. Nothing on Spike Lee. There was one book on Duke Ellington. Students went looking for Benjamin Banneker, the mathematician; Granville T. Woods, the inventor; Alex Haley, the author; but there was nothing. Nothing on Rosa Parks.
One book on Frederick Douglass, but it was checked out fast. Indeed, the best collection available was a coloring book series, "Negro Pioneers," published in 1967.
At a poor school, the library is often the last priority, and at Williams, it has been neglected for decades. Much of the collection is from the 1950's and 1960's, when this was a white school.
There is really no excuse for an elementary school not to have a decent library. By far the most important thing for elementary students to learn is that learning is fun. The easiest way to teach that is through interesting books. If kids learn that reading and learning are fun, and learn it early, the mastering of various subjects becomes much easier.
It is really hard to teach a child that reading is fun if there are no fun books to read.
The second story, from the Washington Post reports that a sixth grade class at a public school was shown large segments of an apparently bootlegged copy of “The Passion of the Christ.”
As a teacher showed sixth-graders at the District's Malcolm X Elementary School parts of the movie "The Passion of the Christ," 11-year-old Cutairra Ransom was growing upset by the violence unfolding in front of her."I saw Jesus getting beaten," Cutairra said yesterday. "Needles were going in his arms. It was scary the way they was beating him."
She added: "It made me feel really bad, terrible."
After about 15 minutes of watching the R-rated film about the final hours of Jesus's life, Cutairra said she walked out of the room.
She was one of the 16 to 20 students who were shown the movie Tuesday at the public school, which is in the Congress Park neighborhood of Southeast Washington. D.C. school officials, who said sixth-graders should not be shown R-rated movies at school, have placed the teacher, Ronald Anthony, on leave with pay pending an investigation.
I do know that it the movie earned an R rating for its graphic depiction of violence. What in the world is a public school teacher doing showing an R rated movie to a bunch of 12 year olds without consulting with their parents?
My oldest is a fourth grader. I can not imagine that in two years, I would permit him to see any movie containing a lot of graphic violence and I would be extremely unhappy if he was shown such a movie at school. I think that is a firing offense.
FWIW, my daughter's elementary school has many empty shelves and lacks a decent set of encyclopedias, but that's b/c it's only a few years old (and thanks to district regs, I can't just donate some books if I want to). It takes a few years to build up a decent collection, not that this is the case in the example you cite. There are literacy grants out there to buy books, especially for schools serving lower income families.
Posted by: emily at March 11, 2004 02:24 PM