Low Expectations

When my two older kids were entering the first and second grades, we lived in St. Louis and had to move from our home in the township of Hazelwood. Hazelwood is the sort of area where most of the families who reside there range from lower to upper middle class. I'm not from a large city, so I didn't worry too much when a neighbor of ours offered to rent us her house in St. Louis County, in an unincorporated part closer to the city. She gave us a lease/option and the house was small but adequate for our needs. We moved just before the beginning of the school year.

I was a naive young woman at the time and assumed that because this new-to-us district was in the same county and state as the Hazelwood one it would be similar. I was wrong.

I would like to think the ethnic population of the district has nothing to do with my sad discovery, but I'd probably be mistaken. I KNOW that income levels had EVERYTHING to do with what we encountered during the year my children attended that district. We had a pretty nice house but it was older, and surrounding us were mostly older people who didn't have much interest in the school. The children who attended with my children were mainly from a bevy of "section 8" housing complexes built at the edge of our neighborhood, a string of townhouses and apartments that swarmed with children before and after school.

For anyone who doesn't know what section 8 is, it's government-subsidized housing; low-income families get either a price break or free housing, depending on their situations. My two girls were in the minority here, surrounded by African American children. That simple fact didn't bother me, but what DID was the quality of education my children received from this school. Almost every day they returned home with tales of misbehavior that shocked me. Children standing on desks and screaming while teachers stood by and did little, and students who refused to cooperate were just left to their own devices with little or no intervention from staff members. Children who didn't complete tasks or do homework were given a shrug and pretty much ignored.

When I raised hesitant concerns to their teachers, my oldest daughter's second grade teacher, an older middle aged woman, told me I didn't understand. "These kids," she said, "aren't like yours. They don't know how to act and never will." Bothered by her comment and attitude doesn't begin to describe how I felt. I saw it right away, both in the lack of discipline and in the lax curriculum: NOTHING was expected of these children! It was a travesty, because guess what you get from children? What you expect. These little first and second graders were already learning a tough lesson: no one expects us to be anything special, or much of anything at all.

I was lucky with my children; I had the luxury of time with them. Their father worked and so did I but only part time, allowing me ample opportunities to expose them to diverse experiences which are known to expand a small child's thought processes. They went to preschools that were not expensive, but certainly not cheap. They went to kindergarten in the Hazelwood school district that took pride in their students' accomplishments. How many of their little classmates had these breaks?! And the real kicker: My second grader's teacher didn't make her do any work!

As a result of her "high IQ," she didn't expect her to turn in work like the rest. I received report cards with As on them, but when we visited the school I noticed she had no spelling page stickers like the other children. When I asked the teacher about it, she waved away my question and said my daughter knew all the words! Aargh, that's not the point!! She was allowing my child to go to the library and read while the other children worked--I almost had a coronary. I told the teacher to please stop doing that and she was miffed with me. And this was a teacher who'd been at this school for over twenty years. There truly are no words for the dismal state of this "educational facility." My daughter began a pattern of behavior from which she never recovered: a sense of entitlement because she was "smart" and a laziness about turning in work which haunted her entire academic career.

When summer came we moved again because I couldn't stomach the thought of my kids attending that school for another year. We moved back into the Hazelwood district, but what about the other children? They were left to eek what they could from a system designed for them to fail.

Our country, to this day, is in the throes of an educational crisis. How many valuable minds are lost due to, simply, low expectations? The color, creed, religion, or social class a child comes from should never, ever be a factor in the quality of his education. If he's an American child sent to an American school district, high standards and a solid curriculum should be expected and RECEIVED. If we don't start paying serious attention to the education of our future generations, we are going to be a mess as a nation, and I mean a much larger mess than we've ever seen.

So many of us complain about poverty and our need to support those who are unable to support themselves, but guess what? Without adequate schools to educate those currently entrenched in poverty, we will be inundated in the very near future. Don't fool yourselves--these kids want to matter and want to be seen as having potential. But years and years of being told they're not and they don't take their toll. We enhance the message when we send them to schools with peeling plaster and ancient books, or in some cases no books at all, and don't expect anything from them, not even a little. They become the hopeless masses because that's what they're taught to be.

If we would like to experience a bright future in our country, it has to begin with these kids. We have to stop saying "no" to added funding for schools, and we have to take an active interest in what's going on IN our schools and with the messages they recieve concerning who they are and what they're capable of being. This isn't about party lines or liberal philosophies or Presidential elections or even "saving money." It's about saving our kids. And yes, they are ALL "our" kids. They deserve better.