Anyroads

Public School Indeed

My friend Ed posted this afternoon about his experiences with the public education system in Los Angeles, and it has really gotten my gears grinding. Not just because my own experiences echo his, but because he expressed nervousness at coming off as classist, which couldn’t be further from the truth. 

In fifth grade, my family moved from Budapest, Hungary to Los Angeles. I already spoke English, having spent first grade in the States, but that didn’t make me any less weird or foreign. Or rather, foreign-and-not-Persian-or-South-American, which left me without any community in my school — and no way were any of the other kids going to be friends with the weird foreign kid.

Our teacher quit halfway through the year. The first replacement spent history class turning off all the lights and regaling us with tales of his alien encounters. We learned how to make paper airplanes in math class, and as far as English class goes, all I learned was that he had eighteen facial reconstructive surgeries (which may not be true, though he looked like it could be). I still can’t diagram a sentence. It took two whole months before he quit due to pressure from the administration, mostly because one of my classmates’ parents worked at the school. Otherwise it would have gone unnoticed.

He was followed by a woman who gave us more work each night than Harvard law students get in a year. There was a three-day weekend during which all three days were spent trying to finish different assignments by my dad, my friend, his mom and myself, and we still couldn’t get it all done. My dad went in to school with me Tuesday morning and gave this teacher his very honest opinion. Cut to a few months later and my first day of middle school, as I am standing in the office trying to figure out why my name was not called on the honors class roster that I had been registered for. Turns out this woman had called the school and told them I can’t speak a word of English to save my life and should be in the ESL (English as a Second Language) program. Apparently the one upside to my outcast status had been all the lunchtimes I spent reading British children’s lit (and more Baby Sitters Club books than a team of ghostwriters could whip up), and so I used my fancy vocabulary to convince the administrators that I should be put back into honors classes immediately. Dad was never allowed to parent teacher conferences from then on.

I’ve had teachers grade me down for personal reasons (one, a well known anti-Semite who not only still teaches, but is department head and teaches AP Government now), teachers ditch class more than the students did, and teachers who just plain ignored us. The students I spent my years at public school with were not all mean, but the ones who were could be vicious. They were brutal both in words and in action, ignorant in their racism and homophobia, which was outspoken, often under teachers’ unflinching noses. By seventh grade a number of people were sexually active, and by ninth grade, it was standard for girls to give blowjobs - something that was demeaning enough in the context of random party hookups, but the general standard was that girls had to satisfy the guys, not necessarily vice versa. It was misogynistic, to say the least, let alone intimidating for girls who weren’t enthusiastic about giving BJ’s but had to endure getting hit on aggressively by guys who expected it. I went to one of the best and nicest public schools in LA, and we still had lockdowns and at least one shooting in my two years there.

When I transferred to a private school, the difference was stark. When a teacher tried to grade me down for personal reasons, the administrator I sought out for help personally looked over this teacher’s shoulder while she tallied up my grade. Despite being a math teacher, she apparently wasn’t very good at addition, since I had earned a B instead of the C- minus she “accidentally” gave me. The education held students to a higher standard, and teachers and administrators alike had our best interests in mind, even if it was only because they had a much higher rate of parental involvement to answer to. Of course, students at this school had their own issues as well, the worst of which being a girl getting date raped at a party for the entertainment of everyone watching. It’s not very comforting to think that even across social and economic divides, sex is still used as a tool and a weapon.

It seems undeniable that there are class differences between public and private schools anywhere, let alone here in Los Angeles. But pointing out those differences, like Ed did, especially based on personal experiences, is not classist. Just because a problem exists, it does not make the person bringing attention to it prejudiced. Los Angeles public schools are underfunded, overcrowded, staffed poorly and wholly under-resourced. They are institutions that train the youth they hold to function within an institution - the glass windows on each door through which administrators can observe classes are a prime example of that.

AP, honors, regular and remedial tracks separate students not only by intellect - something which LA public schools hardly encourage - but very often by class and race as well. Get one C in a regular track math class, and you’ll find yourself in remedial, and not even a B+ will bring you back up out of there, which you’ll be lucky to get with the nihilst antichrist teachers you’ll find yourself condemned to learning from. Falling down is easy, but moving up is near impossible. Ed was not classist for pointing out the system’s faults through his own experiences - the LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) is classist in its inherent structure and dysfunction.