Anyone feeling overly optimistic about the future of America need only take a substitute teaching job in an inner city public school, and your optimism will very quickly blow away like pinching blood-red sand in a West Texas dust storm.

Two weeks ago I began filling in for a 6^th grade social studies teacher at a local middle school.  I had heard stories about this school from teachers in one of our tougher high schools.  It was accepted dogma that the kids who came out of this school were almost guaranteed to be the trouble makers in high school, the ones whose names populate the waiting list for the city’s alternative high school -- if prison did not take them first.

I’m not really cut out for middle school.  I know I’m much better with kids a little older.  Give me juniors or seniors in high school, or even sophomores.  Freshmen I can take, too, although they’re not my preference.  Until these past weeks I considered freshmen a greater challenge than middle schoolers.  I have had experience subbing in a middle school, and last year I spent five weeks working as an aid for a middle school teacher.  The thing about middle schoolers is that most of the kids are still small enough that I tower over them and can intimidate them if necessary.  Or so I thought.

I guess I should have disabused myself of that fantasy when the school’s principal warned me that this was, in fact, the worst school in town.  When the school’s principal tells you that, well, it’s serious stuff.  But still, a 6^th grader is still a little kid.  I’m six feet tall and weigh 180 pounds.  The toughest 120 pound five-footer is no match for me.

Well, that’s true as far as it goes.  Of course, I would not be allowed to physically force anyone to do anything.  I would have to use other powers of persuasion to keep these kids in line.  And if logic and pedagogic skills wouldn’t do the trick, I could at least be confident that my booming baritone voice would be an effective tool to bring order to the classroom.

How naïve I am.

Or was.

I am a 53 year old man.  I can’t tell you how many 12 year old kids, both boys and girls, called me “boy” in the past two weeks.  “Dequon, sit down,” I would say (very loudly to be heard over the din of his screaming classmates).

“You can’t tell me do nothin’, boy!” would be his respectful response. 

I wanted to tell these kids the socio-historical context from which the term “boy” derives as a derogative moniker.  That would be impossible, however, since no more than 5 or 6 in a class of 30 would be listening.

Please don’t assume this lack of respect was a racial thing, either.  This school is about 40% African-American, 40% Hispanic, and 20% Caucasian, with a handful of Asians.  The trouble makers are equally distributed among the same percentages as the school population as a whole.  Sadly, the trouble makers constitute the vast majority of the student body.  In a class of 30, I may have had seven or eight students who refrained from screaming, running around the classroom, throwing crayons, cursing, and threatening one another with bodily harm. 

My heart bleeds for the students at this school.  It bleeds for all of them, even the trouble makers.  I know why Dequon and the others like him have so little respect for me and every other adult they encounter.  I can only imagine what horrors they have witnessed during their short lives.  How can I expect to be respected when the children’s own parents (assuming they are even a factor in their lives) probably show little or no respect for them or anyone else.  Why shouldn’t children curse at me when their parents use the exact same language on them, and they on their parents?

Most of all, however, my heart bleeds for those children (and I have to remind myself that that’s what they are) who actually sit quietly at their desks and try to do their work and learn.  Will these kids come out of a school like this as some sort of Nietzschian übermensch, or will they be dragged down to a level far below their potential?  Will universities look at their transcripts, full of A’s and B’s, with skepticism, fully aware that the teachers purposefully “dumb down” the curriculum to prevent more than half the student body from flunking out?

And what of the special needs children who attend this school?  In a class of 30, I could expect at least five special needs students, and possibly as many as 10.  Is the concept of inclusion really benefiting anyone?  How can a middle school social studies teacher be expected to do his job and help students meet state educational standards when he or she literally has to read the text or test questions out loud to five of them?  How can a middle school teacher realistically assess students on an equal basis when five or ten of them cannot write a grammatically correct sentence in their barely legible handwriting?

One day, students were told to read a magazine article about blue whales.  The article mentioned that between 1920 and 1950, blue whales nearly went extinct due to over-hunting.  Students were to answer questions on a worksheet after reading the article.  Here is one of the questions:

“What happened to the blue whale population during the first half of the twentieth century?”

Here is what one student correctly answered, stating verbatim what was in the article:

“Blue whales were nearly hunted to extinction.”

Here is what another student answered in handwriting that was almost illegible:

“the nerLy hunt to EXtinc”

I know what this student was trying to say, and he obviously knows the correct answer.  However, is his answer worth the same grade as the first student’s?  If the teacher must grade him down for spelling and grammar, how will this student ever pass anything?  And if he does pass, what does his high school diploma mean if he still cannot write a sentence or spell a simple, single syllable word?

What I am talking about here is a student with an obvious learning disability.  But there are other special needs students who were in this class.  They are the ones whose inclusion is even more troublesome.  Why are there students with behavioral disabilities in a class that already confronts serious discipline problems simply due to the social environment from which the majority of its students come?  Do we really want students with little ability to control their emotions to sit in the same classroom as every other student, as if their behavior was a controllable non-issue?

Sadly, this is the direction that far too many of our public schools are following.  We talk about lofty ideas like “inclusion”, but maybe it’s just an excuse to cut costs.  Why pay for separate special education facilities when we can just herd these special needs children into the same classrooms as our economic underclass?  Who cares if these students drag down the performance of the school?  After all, it’s just an inner-city school, not one of the elite schools of the area.  We expect these schools to underperform, right?  What’s more, you won’t find the mayor’s kids, the local congressman’s kids, or the corporate executives’ kids in attendance there.  No one of influence will be affected by the underachievement of schools like this.

Soon, this school will be one of the ones the city will close.  Like so many other states, Illinois has failed to properly fund public education.  The state owes tens of millions to this city's school district, and chances are that's an amount that will never be paid.  When the budget ax hits, this will be a school that will be shut down.  What then?  The students will simply be bussed to another school, and they will bring all their problems with them.  Another school will be dragged down, and even more capable students will flee the city for greener pastures in the suburbs, or for the ever more popular private schools popping up everywhere.  The remaining public schools will continue sliding into academic irrelevance, and the dimantling of America's great legacy of public education will accelerate.  

It's sad.

I know I was just a substitute.  Students can be notoriously ill-behaved when a substitute teacher enters the classroom.   I also know this school is worse than most.  I was warned, but I couldn’t believe any school would be as bad as people predicted this one would be.  How wrong I was.

I am naïve no more.