“Easily the most passionate, and certain to be the most passionately debated, book about American education in several years … A classic American muckraker with an eloquent prose style, Kozol offers … an old- fashioned brand of moral outrage that will affect every reader whose heart has not yet turned to stone.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Moving … Shocking … Heartbreaking.” —Ruth Sidel, The Nation

“It is neither ironic nor paradoxical to call Savage Inequalities a wonderful book—for Kozol makes it clear that there are wonderful teachers and wonderful students in every American school, no matter what ugliness, violence, and horror surround the building.”

—Chicago Tribune

“The great virtue of Jonathan Kozol’s new book about inner-city schools is that it overcomes that ‘everybody knows’ problem by bringing an undulled capacity for shock and outrage to a tour of bad schools across the country. As soon as Kozol begins leading the way through a procession of overcrowded, underheated, textbookless, barely taught classrooms, the thought he surely intended to engender begins to take form: How can this be?”

—Washington Post Book World

“Poor children of all colors are increasingly looked upon as surplus baggage, mistakes that should never have happened. Indeed, an older view is returning that any attempts to educate the lower orders are doomed to fail. There can be more than one way to read the title of Jonathan Kozol’s depressing—and essential—book.”

—Andrew Hacker, New York Times Book Review

“Mr. Kozol exposes lemons in American educational facilities in the same way Ralph Nader attacked Detroit automobile makers.”

—Herbert Mitgang, New York Times

“This book digs so deeply into the tragedy of the American system of public education that it wrenches the reader’s psyche.… A must-read for every parent, every educator, and every relevant policymaker.”

—Alex Haley, author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“A powerful appeal to save children by redistributing the wealth. It will cause angry, but perhaps fruitful, debate.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Startling and compelling … Crucial to any serious debate on the current state of American education.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A superb, heart-wrenching portrait of the resolute injustice which decimates so many of America’s urban schools.”

—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross

Also by Jonathan Kozol

FIRE IN THE ASHES

LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER

THE SHAME OF THE NATION

ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS

AMAZING GRACE

RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN

ILLITERATE AMERICA

ON BEING A TEACHER

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

THE NIGHT IS DARK AND I AM FAR FROM HOME

FREE SCHOOLS

DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE

Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-7704-3666-7

Cover design by Darren Haggar Cover photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

v3.1

http://www.crownpublishing.com
For Cassie And for D.K. with love

CONTENTS

Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication

To the Reader Looking Backward: 1964–1991

1. Life on the Mississippi 2. Other People’s Children 3. The Savage Inequalities of Public Education in New York 4. Children of the City Invincible 5. The Equality of Innocence 6. The Dream Deferred, Again, in San Antonio

Appendix Notes Acknowledgments

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TO THE READER

A Clarification About Dates and Data in This Book

The events in this book take place for the most part between 1988 and 1990, although a few events somewhat precede this period. Most events, however, are narrated in the present tense. This is important to keep in mind because statistics, such as money spent in a particular school district, or a description of the staff or student body in a given school, apply to the year of which I’m speaking, which is indicated in the text or notes.

The names of students in this book have sometimes been disguised at their request or that of school officials. The names of all adults are real, although in a few cases adults are not named at all at their request. Documentation for statistics and matters of record in this book is provided in the notes beginning on this page.

Looking Backward: 1964–1991

It was a long time since I’d been with children in the public schools. I had begun to teach in 1964 in Boston in a segregated school so

crowded and so poor that it could not provide my fourth grade children with a classroom. We shared an auditorium with another fourth grade and the choir and a group that was rehearsing, starting in October, for a Christmas play that, somehow, never was produced. In the spring I was shifted to another fourth grade that had had a string of substitutes all year. The 35 children in the class hadn’t had a permanent teacher since they entered kindergarten. That year, I was their thirteenth teacher.

The results were seen in the first tests I gave. In April, most were reading at the second grade level. Their math ability was at the first grade level.

In an effort to resuscitate their interest, I began to read them poetry I liked. They were drawn especially to poems of Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. One of the most embittered children in the class began to cry when she first heard the words of Langston Hughes.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

She went home and memorized the lines. The next day, I was fired. There was, it turned out, a list of “fourth

grade poems” that teachers were obliged to follow but which, like most first-year teachers, I had never seen. According to school officials, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes were “too advanced” for children of this age. Hughes, moreover, was regarded as “inflammatory.”

I was soon recruited to teach in a suburban system west of Boston. The shock of going from one of the poorest schools to one of the wealthiest cannot be overstated. I now had 21 children in a cheerful building with a principal who welcomed innovation.

After teaching for several years, I became involved with other interests —the health and education of farm-workers in New Mexico and Arizona,

the problems of adult illiterates in several states, the lives of homeless families in New York. It wasn’t until 1988, when I returned to Massachusetts after a long stay in New York City, that I realized how far I’d been drawn away from my original concerns. I found that I missed being with schoolchildren, and I felt a longing to spend time in public schools again. So, in the fall of 1988, I set off on another journey.

During the next two years I visited schools and spoke with children in approximately 30 neighborhoods from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. Wherever possible, I also met with children in their homes. There was no special logic in the choice of cities that I visited. I went where I was welcomed or knew teachers or school principals or ministers of churches.

What startled me most—although it puzzles me that I was not prepared for this—was the remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere. Like most Americans, I knew that segregation was still common in the public schools, but I did not know how much it had intensified. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education 37 years ago, in which the court had found that segregated education was unconstitutional because it was “inherently unequal,” did not seem to have changed very much for children in the schools I saw, not, at least, outside of the Deep South. Most of the urban schools I visited were 95 to 99 percent nonwhite. In no school that I saw anywhere in the United States were nonwhite children in large numbers truly intermingled with white children.

Moreover, in most cities, influential people that I met showed little inclination to address this matter and were sometimes even puzzled when I brought it up. Many people seemed to view the segregation issue as “a past injustice” that had been sufficiently addressed. Others took it as an unresolved injustice that no longer held sufficient national attention to be worth contesting. In all cases, I was given the distinct impression that my inquiries about this matter were not welcome.

None of the national reports I saw made even passing references to inequality or segregation. Low reading scores, high dropout rates, poor motivation—symptomatic matters—seemed to dominate discussion. In three cities—Baltimore, Milwaukee and Detroit—separate schools or separate classes for black males had been proposed. Other cities— Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia among them—were considering the same approach. Black parents or black school officials sometimes seemed to favor this idea. Booker T. Washington was cited with increasing frequency, Du Bois never, and Martin Luther King only

with cautious selectivity. He was treated as an icon, but his vision of a nation in which black and white kids went to school together seemed to be effaced almost entirely. Dutiful references to “The Dream” were often seen in school brochures and on wall posters during February, when “Black History” was celebrated in the public schools, but the content of the dream was treated as a closed box that could not be opened without ruining the celebration.

For anyone who came of age during the years from 1954 to 1968, these revelations could not fail to be disheartening. What seems unmistakable, but, oddly enough, is rarely said in public settings nowadays, is that the nation, for all practice and intent, has turned its back upon the moral implications, if not yet the legal ramifications, of the Brown decision. The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.

To the extent that school reforms such as “restructuring” are advocated for the inner cities, few of these reforms have reached the schools that I have seen. In each of the larger cities there is usually one school or one subdistrict which is highly publicized as an example of “restructured” education; but the changes rarely reach beyond this one example. Even in those schools where some “restructuring” has taken place, the fact of racial segregation has been, and continues to be, largely uncontested. In many cities, what is termed “restructuring” struck me as very little more than moving around the same old furniture within the house of poverty. The perceived objective was a more “efficient” ghetto school or one with greater “input” from the ghetto parents or more “choices” for the ghetto children. The fact of ghetto education as a permanent American reality appeared to be accepted.

Liberal critics of the Reagan era sometimes note that social policy in the United States, to the extent that it concerns black children and poor children, has been turned back several decades. But this assertion, which is accurate as a description of some setbacks in the areas of housing, health and welfare, is not adequate to speak about the present-day reality in public education. In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.

These, then, are a few of the impressions that remained with me after revisiting the public schools from which I had been absent for a quarter-

century. My deepest impression, however, was less theoretical and more immediate. It was simply the impression that these urban schools were, by and large, extraordinarily unhappy places. With few exceptions, they reminded me of “garrisons” or “outposts” in a foreign nation. Housing projects, bleak and tall, surrounded by perimeter walls lined with barbed wire, often stood adjacent to the schools I visited. The schools were surrounded frequently by signs that indicated DRUG-FREE ZONE. Their doors were guarded. Police sometimes patrolled the halls. The windows of the schools were often covered with steel grates. Taxi drivers flatly refused to take me to some of these schools and would deposit me a dozen blocks away, in border areas beyond which they refused to go. I’d walk the last half-mile on my own. Once, in the Bronx, a woman stopped her car, told me I should not be walking there, insisted I get in, and drove me to the school. I was dismayed to walk or ride for blocks and blocks through neighborhoods where every face was black, where there were simply no white people anywhere.

In Boston, the press referred to areas like these as “death zones”—a specific reference to the rate of infant death in ghetto neighborhoods— but the feeling of the “death zone” often seemed to permeate the schools themselves. Looking around some of these inner-city schools, where filth and disrepair were worse than anything I’d seen in 1964, I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working. Children seemed to wrestle with these kinds of questions too. Some of their observations were, indeed, so trenchant that a teacher sometimes would step back and raise her eyebrows and then nod to me across the children’s heads, as if to say, “Well, there it is! They know what’s going on around them, don’t they?”

It occurred to me that we had not been listening much to children in these recent years of “summit conferences” on education, of severe reports and ominous prescriptions. The voices of children, frankly, had been missing from the whole discussion.

This seems especially unfortunate because the children often are more interesting and perceptive than the grownups are about the day-to-day realities of life in school. For this reason, I decided, early in my journey, to attempt to listen very carefully to children and, whenever possible, to let their voices and their judgments and their longings find a place within this book—and maybe, too, within the nation’s dialogue about their destinies. I hope that, in this effort, I have done them justice.

CHAPTER 1

Life on the Mississippi: East St. Louis, Illinois

“East of anywhere,” writes a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “often evokes the other side of the tracks. But, for a first-time visitor suddenly deposited on its eerily empty streets, East St. Louis might suggest another world.” The city, which is 98 percent black, has no obstetric services, no regular trash collection, and few jobs. Nearly a third of its families live on less than $7,500 a year; 75 percent of its population lives on welfare of some form. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development describes it as “the most distressed small city in America.”

Only three of the 13 buildings on Missouri Avenue, one of the city’s major thoroughfares, are occupied. A 13-story office building, tallest in the city, has been boarded up. Outside, on the sidewalk, a pile of garbage fills a ten-foot crater.

The city, which by night and day is clouded by the fumes that pour from vents and smokestacks at the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, has one of the highest rates of child asthma in America.

It is, according to a teacher at the University of Southern Illinois, “a repository for a nonwhite population that is now regarded as expendable.” The Post-Dispatch describes it as “America’s Soweto.”

Fiscal shortages have forced the layoff of 1,170 of the city’s 1,400 employees in the past 12 years. The city, which is often unable to buy heating fuel or toilet paper for the city hall, recently announced that it might have to cashier all but 10 percent of the remaining work force of 230. In 1989 the mayor announced that he might need to sell the city hall and all six fire stations to raise needed cash. Last year the plan had to be scrapped after the city lost its city hall in a court judgment to a creditor. East St. Louis is mortgaged into the next century but has the highest property-tax rate in the state.

Since October 1987, when the city’s garbage pickups ceased, the backyards of residents have been employed as dump sites. In the spring of 1988 a policeman tells a visitor that 40 plastic bags of trash are waiting for removal from the backyard of his mother’s house. Public health officials are concerned the garbage will attract a plague of flies and rodents in the summer. The policeman speaks of “rats as big as puppies” in his mother’s yard. They are known to the residents, he says, as “bull rats.” Many people have no cars or funds to cart the trash and simply burn it in their yards. The odor of smoke from burning garbage, says the Post-Dispatch, “has become one of the scents of spring” in East St. Louis.

Railroad tracks still used to transport hazardous chemicals run through the city. “Always present,” says the Post-Dispatch, “is the threat of chemical spills.… The wail of sirens warning residents to evacuate after a spill is common.” The most recent spill, the paper says, “was at the Monsanto Company plant.… Nearly 300 gallons of phosphorous trichloride spilled when a railroad tank was overfilled. About 450 residents were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital.… The frequency of the emergencies has caused Monsanto to have a ‘standing account’ at St. Mary’s.”

In March of 1989, a task force appointed by Governor James Thompson noted that the city was in debt by more than $40 million, and proposed emergency state loans to pay for garbage collection and to keep police and fire departments in continued operation. The governor, however, blamed the mayor and his administrators, almost all of whom were black, and refused to grant the loans unless the mayor resigned. Thompson’s response, said a Republican state legislator, “made my heart feel good.… It’s unfortunate, but the essence of the problem in East St. Louis is the people” who are running things.

Residents of Illinois do not need to breathe the garbage smoke and chemicals of East St. Louis. With the interstate highways, says a supervisor of the Illinois Power Company, “you can ride around the place and just keep going.…”

East St. Louis lies in the heart of the American Bottoms—the floodplain on the east side of the Mississippi River opposite St. Louis. To the east of the city lie the Illinois Bluffs, which surround the floodplain in a semicircle. Towns on the Bluffs are predominantly white and do not welcome visitors from East St. Louis.

“The two tiers—Bluffs and Bottoms—” writes James Nowlan, a

professor of public policy at Knox College, “have long represented … different worlds.” Their physical separation, he believes, “helps rationalize the psychological and cultural distance that those on the Bluffs have clearly tried to maintain.” People on the Bluffs, says Nowlan, “overwhelmingly want this separation to continue.”

Towns on the Bluffs, according to Nowlan, do not pay taxes to address flood problems in the Bottoms, “even though these problems are generated in large part by the water that drains from the Bluffs.” East St. Louis lacks the funds to cope with flooding problems on its own, or to reconstruct its sewer system, which, according to local experts, is “irreparable.” The problem is all the worse because the chemical plants in East St. Louis and adjacent towns have for decades been releasing toxins into the sewer system.

The pattern of concentrating black communities in easily flooded lowland areas is not unusual in the United States. Farther down the river, for example, in the Delta town of Tunica, Mississippi, people in the black community of Sugar Ditch live in shacks by open sewers that are commonly believed to be responsible for the high incidence of liver tumors and abscesses found in children there. Metaphors of caste like these are everywhere in the United States. Sadly, although dirt and water flow downhill, money and services do not.

The dangers of exposure to raw sewage, which backs up repeatedly into the homes of residents in East St. Louis, were first noticed, in the spring of 1989, at a public housing project, Villa Griffin. Raw sewage, says the Post-Dispatch, overflowed into a playground just behind the housing project, which is home to 187 children, “forming an oozing lake of … tainted water.” Two schoolgirls, we are told, “experienced hair loss since raw sewage flowed into their homes.”

While local physicians are not certain whether loss of hair is caused by the raw sewage, they have issued warnings that exposure to raw sewage can provoke a cholera or hepatitis outbreak. A St. Louis health official voices her dismay that children live with waste in their backyards. “The development of working sewage systems made cities livable a hundred years ago,” she notes. “Sewage systems separate us from the Third World.”

“It’s a terrible way to live,” says a mother at the Villa Griffin homes, as she bails raw sewage from her sink. Health officials warn again of cholera —and, this time, of typhoid also.

The sewage, which is flowing from collapsed pipes and dysfunctional pumping stations, has also flooded basements all over the city. The city’s

vacuum truck, which uses water and suction to unclog the city’s sewers, cannot be used because it needs $5,000 in repairs. Even when it works, it sometimes can’t be used because there isn’t money to hire drivers. A single engineer now does the work that 14 others did before they were laid off. By April the pool of overflow behind the Villa Griffin project has expanded into a lagoon of sewage. Two million gallons of raw sewage lie outside the children’s homes.

In May, another health emergency develops. Soil samples tested at residential sites in East St. Louis turn up disturbing quantities of arsenic, mercury and lead—as well as steroids dumped in previous years by stockyards in the area. Lead levels found in the soil around one family’s home, according to lead-poison experts, measure “an astronomical 10,000 parts per million.” Five of the children in the building have been poisoned. Although children rarely die of poisoning by lead, health experts note, its effects tend to be subtle and insidious. By the time the poisoning becomes apparent in a child’s sleep disorders, stomach pains and hyperactive behavior, says a health official, “it is too late to undo the permanent brain damage.” The poison, she says, “is chipping away at the learning potential of kids whose potential has already been chipped away by their environment.”

The budget of the city’s department of lead-poison control, however, has been slashed, and one person now does the work once done by six.

Lead poisoning in most cities comes from lead-based paint in housing, which has been illegal in most states for decades but which poisons children still because most cities, Boston and New York among them, rarely penalize offending landlords. In East St. Louis, however, there is a second source of lead. Health inspectors think it is another residue of manufacturing—including smelting—in the factories and mills whose plants surround the city. “Some of the factories are gone,” a parent organizer says, “but they have left their poison in the soil where our children play.” In one apartment complex where particularly high quantities of lead have been detected in the soil, 32 children with high levels in their blood have been identified.

“I anticipate finding the whole city contaminated,” says a health examiner.

The Daughters of Charity, whose works of mercy are well known in the Third World, operate a mission at the Villa Griffin homes. On an afternoon in early spring of 1990, Sister Julia Huiskamp meets me on King Boulevard and drives me to the Griffin homes.

As we ride past blocks and blocks of skeletal structures, some of which are still inhabited, she slows the car repeatedly at railroad crossings. A seemingly endless railroad train rolls past us to the right. On the left: a blackened lot where garbage has been burning. Next to the burning garbage is a row of 12 white cabins, charred by fire. Next: a lot that holds a heap of auto tires and a mountain of tin cans. More burnt houses. More trash fires. The train moves almost imperceptibly across the flatness of the land.

Fifty years old, and wearing a blue suit, white blouse, and blue head- cover, Sister Julia points to the nicest house in sight. The sign on the front reads MOTEL. “It’s a whorehouse,” Sister Julia says.

When she slows the car beside a group of teen-age boys, one of them steps out toward the car, then backs away as she is recognized.

The 99 units of the Villa Griffin homes—two-story structures, brick on the first floor, yellow wood above—form one border of a recessed park and playground that were filled with fecal matter last year when the sewage mains exploded. The sewage is gone now and the grass is very green and looks inviting. When nine-year-old Serena and her seven-year- old brother take me for a walk, however, I discover that our shoes sink into what is still a sewage marsh. An inch-deep residue of fouled water still remains.

Serena’s brother is a handsome, joyous little boy, but troublingly thin. Three other children join us as we walk along the marsh: Smokey, who is nine years old but cannot yet tell time; Mickey, who is seven; and a tiny child with a ponytail and big brown eyes who talks a constant stream of words that I can’t always understand.

“Hush, Little Sister,” says Serena. I ask for her name, but “Little Sister” is the only name the children seem to know.

“There go my cousins,” Smokey says, pointing to two teen-age girls above us on the hill.

The day is warm, although we’re only in the second week of March; several dogs and cats are playing by the edges of the marsh. “It’s a lot of squirrels here,” says Smokey. “There go one!”

“This here squirrel is a friend of mine,” says Little Sister. None of the children can tell me the approximate time that school

begins. One says five o’clock. One says six. Another says that school begins at noon.

When I ask what song they sing after the flag pledge, one says “Jingle Bells.”

Smokey cannot decide if he is in the second or third grade.

Seven-year-old Mickey sucks his thumb during the walk. The children regale me with a chilling story as we stand beside the

marsh. Smokey says his sister was raped and murdered and then dumped behind his school. Other children add more details: Smokey’s sister was 11 years old. She was beaten with a brick until she died. The murder was committed by a man who knew her mother.

The narrative begins when, without warning, Smokey says, “My sister has got killed.”

“She was my best friend,” Serena says. “They had beat her in the head and raped her,” Smokey says. “She was hollering out loud,” says Little Sister. I ask them when it happened. Smokey says, “Last year.” Serena then

corrects him and she says, “Last week.” “It scared me because I had to cry,” says Little Sister. “The police arrested one man but they didn’t catch the other,” Smokey

says. Serena says, “He was some kin to her.” But Smokey objects, “He weren’t no kin to me. He was my momma’s

friend.” “Her face was busted,” Little Sister says. Serena describes this sequence of events: “They told her go behind the

school. They’ll give her a quarter if she do. Then they knock her down and told her not to tell what they had did.”

I ask, “Why did they kill her?” “They was scared that she would tell,” Serena says. “One is in jail,” says Smokey. “They cain’t find the Other.” “Instead of raping little bitty children, they should find themselves a

wife,” says Little Sister. “I hope,” Serena says, “her spirit will come back and get that man.” “And kill that man,” says Little Sister. “Give her another chance to live,” Serena says. “My teacher came to

the funeral,” says Smokey. “When a little child dies, my momma say a star go straight to Heaven,”

says Serena. “My grandma was murdered,” Mickey says out of the blue. “Somebody

shot two bullets in her head.” I ask him, “Is she really dead?” “She dead all right,” says Mickey. “She was layin’ there, just dead.” “I love my friends,” Serena says. “I don’t care if they no kin to me. I

care for them. I hope his mother have another baby. Name her for my

friend that’s dead.” “I have a cat with three legs,” Smokey says. “Snakes hate rabbits,” Mickey says, again for no apparent reason. “Cats hate fishes,” Little Sister says. “It’s a lot of hate,” says Smokey. Later, at the mission, Sister Julia tells me this: “The Jefferson School,

which they attend, is a decrepit hulk. Next to it is a modern school, erected two years ago, which was to have replaced the one that they attend. But the construction was not done correctly. The roof is too heavy for the walls, and the entire structure has begun to sink. It can’t be occupied. Smokey’s sister was raped and murdered and dumped between the old school and the new one.”

As the children drift back to their homes for supper, Sister Julia stands outside with me and talks about the health concerns that trouble people in the neighborhood. In the setting sun, the voices of the children fill the evening air. Nourished by the sewage marsh, a field of wild daffodils is blooming. Standing here, you wouldn’t think that anything was wrong. The street is calm. The poison in the soil can’t be seen. The sewage is invisible and only makes the grass a little greener. Bikes thrown down by children lie outside their kitchen doors. It could be an ordinary twilight in a small suburban town.

Night comes on and Sister Julia goes inside to telephone a cab. In another hour, the St. Louis taxis will not come into the neighborhood.

In the night, the sky above the East St. Louis area is brownish yellow. Illuminated by the glare from the Monsanto installation, the smoke is vented from four massive columns rising about 400 feet above the plant. The garish light and tubular structures lend the sky a strange, nightmarish look.

Safir Ahmed, a young reporter who has covered East St. Louis for the Post-Dispatch for several years, drives with me through the rutted streets close to the plant and points out blocks of wooden houses without plumbing. Straggling black children walk along a road that has no sidewalks. “The soil is all contaminated here,” he says.

Almost directly over our heads the plant is puffing out a cloud of brownish smoke that rises above the girders of the plant within a glow of reddish-gold illumination.

Two auto bridges cross the Mississippi River to St. Louis. To the south is the Poplar Street Bridge. The bridge to the north is named for Martin Luther King. “It takes three minutes to cross the bridge,” says Ahmed.

“For white people in St. Louis, it could be a thousand miles long.” On the southern edge of East St. Louis, tiny shack-like houses stand

along a lightless street. Immediately behind these houses are the giant buildings of Monsanto, Big River Zinc, Cerro Copper, the American Bottoms Sewage Plant and Trade Waste Incineration—one of the largest hazardous-waste-incineration companies in the United States.

“The entire city lies downwind of this. When the plant gives off emissions that are viewed as toxic, an alarm goes off. People who have breathed the smoke are given a cash payment of $400 in exchange for a release from liability.…

“The decimation of the men within the population is quite nearly total. Four of five births in East St. Louis are to single mothers. Where do the men go? Some to prison. Some to the military. Many to an early death. Dozens of men are living in the streets or sleeping in small, isolated camps behind the burnt-out buildings. There are several of these camps out in the muddy stretch there to the left.

“The nicest buildings in the city are the Federal Court House and the City Hall—which also holds the jail—the National Guard headquarters, and some funeral establishments. There are a few nice houses and a couple of high-rise homes for senior citizens. One of the nicest buildings is the whorehouse. There’s also a branch of the University of Southern Illinois, but it no longer offers classes; it’s a social welfare complex now.

“The chemical plants do not pay taxes here. They have created small incorporated towns which are self-governed and exempt therefore from supervision by health agencies in East St. Louis. Aluminum Ore created a separate town called Alorton. Monsanto, Cerro Copper and Big River Zinc are all in Sauget. National Stock Yards has its own incorporated town as well. Basically there’s no one living in some of these so-called towns. Alorton is a sizable town. Sauget, on the other hand, isn’t much more than a legal fiction. It provides tax shelter and immunity from jurisdiction of authorities in East St. Louis.”

The town of Sauget claims a population of about 200 people. Its major industries, other than Monsanto and the other plants, are topless joints and an outlet for the lottery. Two of the largest strip clubs face each other on a side street that is perpendicular to the main highway. One is named Oz and that is for white people. The other strip club, which is known as Wiz, is for black people. The lottery office, which is frequented primarily by black people, is the largest in the state of Illinois.

“The lottery advertises mostly in black publications,” Ahmed says. “So people who have nothing to start with waste their money on a place that

sells them dreams. Lottery proceeds in Illinois allegedly go into education; in reality they go into state revenues and they add nothing to the education fund. So it is a total loss. Affluent people do not play the lottery. The state is in the business here of selling hopes to people who have none. The city itself is full of bars and liquor stores and lots of ads for cigarettes that feature pictures of black people. Assemble all the worst things in America—gambling, liquor, cigarettes and toxic fumes, sewage, waste disposal, prostitution—put it all together. Then you dump it on black people.”

East St. Louis begins at the Monsanto fence. Rain starts falling as we cross the railroad tracks, and then another set of tracks, and pass a series of dirt streets with houses that are mostly burnt-out shells, the lots between them piled with garbage bags and thousands of abandoned auto tires. The city is almost totally flat and lies below the Mississippi’s floodline, protected by a levee. In 1986 a floodgate broke and filled part of the city. Houses on Bond Avenue filled up with sewage to their second floors.

The waste water emitted from the sewage plant, according to a recent Greenpeace study, “varies in color from yellow-orange to green.” The toxic substances that it contains become embedded in the soil and the marshland in which children play. Dead Creek, for example, a creekbed that received discharges from the chemical and metal plants in previous years, is now a place where kids from East St. Louis ride their bikes. The creek, which smokes by day and glows on moonless nights, has gained some notoriety in recent years for instances of spontaneous combustion. The Illinois EPA believes that the combustion starts when children ride their bikes across the creek bed, “creating friction which begins the smoldering process.”

“Nobody in East St. Louis,” Ahmed says, “has ever had the clout to raise a protest. Why Americans permit this is so hard for somebody like me, who grew up in the real Third World, to understand..…

“I’m from India. In Calcutta this would be explicable, perhaps. I keep thinking to myself, ‘My God! This is the United States!’ ”

By midnight, hardly anyone is out on foot. In block after block, there is no sense of life. Only the bars and liquor stores are open—but the windows of the liquor stores are barred. There is a Woolworth’s store that has no windows. Silently in the persistent rain a dark shape looms before us and cuts off the street: a freight train loaded with chemicals or copper, moving slowly to the north. There is no right or wrong side of the tracks in East St. Louis. The tracks are everywhere. Behind us still:

the eerie specter of the lights and girders of Monsanto. In front of us, perhaps two miles away: the beautiful St. Louis Arch and, under it, the brightly lighted skyline of St. Louis.

“The ultimate terror for white people,” Ahmed says, “is to leave the highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis. People speak of getting lost in East St. Louis as a nightmare. The nightmare to me is that they never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the children here. They ought to get off that highway. The nightmare isn’t in their heads. It’s a real place. There are children living here.

“Jesse Jackson came to speak at East St. Louis High. There were three thousand people packed into the gym. He was nearly two hours late. When he came in, the feeling was electric. There was pin-drop silence while he spoke. An old man sat beside me, leaning forward on his cane. He never said a word but he was crying.

“You would think, with all the chemical and metals plants, that there would be unlimited employment. It doesn’t work that way. Most of these are specialized jobs. East St. Louis men don’t have the education. I go into the Monsanto plant and almost every face I see is white.

“The biggest employer in the town is public education. Next, perhaps, the Pfizer plant, which is situated just behind one of the high schools. After that, the biggest businesses may be the drug trade, funerals and bars and prostitution. The mayor’s family owns the largest funeral home in East St. Louis. The Catholic high school was shut down last year. There’s talk of turning it into a prison.”

There is a pornography theater in the center of the town but no theater showing movies suitable for children. East St. Louis is the largest city south of Springfield in the state of Illinois but was left off the Illinois map four years ago. The telephone directory that serves the region does not list phone numbers of the residents or businesses of East St. Louis, even though the city lies right at the center of the service area that the directory is supposed to cover. Two years ago, the one pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi River to St. Louis was closed off to East St. Louis residents.

“It’s a third bridge, smaller than the others,” Ahmed says, “very old— the only one that’s open to pedestrians. It puts you right into downtown St. Louis, quite close to the Arch. The closing of the bridge was ordered on the day before a street fair that takes place each summer during the July Fourth celebration. Three or four million people flood into the city. There are booths for food, and rides and music. For people in East St.

Louis, it’s an opportunity to bring their children to the city and relax. Mothers walk their kids across the bridge.…

“The police announced that they were shutting down the bridge. The reason they gave was that there had been some muggings in the past. They were concerned, they said, that teen-age blacks would mug the people at the fair, then run across the bridge and disappear into the streets of East St. Louis. Regardless of the reason, it was a decision that denied the folks in East St. Louis access to the fair.”

According to a story published later in Life magazine, black leaders in East St. Louis said “it looked suspiciously like a racist action.” The fact that it was pegged to Independence Day intensified the sense of injury. The president of the NAACP in East St. Louis said, “We seem to have been isolated.…”

The bridge was later opened by court order. “In recent years,” says Ahmed, “letters have been going out to people

who have homes in a half-mile zone next to Monsanto. The letters offer to buy your home, no questions asked, for cash: $4,000 flat for any house. The speculation is that Monsanto wants a buffer zone to fend off further suits for damages from chemical emissions. These offers are appealing to poor people who have nothing and who have no faith the courts would ever honor their concerns.…

“The land between the two main bridges and along the river is regarded as prime real estate by white developers. Given the fantastic view of the St. Louis skyline and the Gateway Arch, the land would be immensely valuable if its black residents could be removed. When people ask, ‘What should we do with East St. Louis?’ they don’t speak about the people. They are speaking of the land.”

Emerging from another rutted street of houses that do not appear to be inhabited, but from the interior of which some lights are seen, we pass the segregated topless joints again and stop the car along Monsanto Avenue to scrutinize Big River Zinc, Cerro Copper (“America’s Largest Recycler of Copper,” according to its sign) and the Monsanto plant. Then, making a U-turn, we head west onto the access road that climbs back to the bridge across the Mississippi.

“Every time I cross that bridge I feel that I am getting off a plane within a different country,” Ahmed says.

From the St. Louis side, one sees the dark breadth of the river, another wider strip of blackness where the dwellings of East St. Louis lie, and the glowing cluster of industrial illumination slightly to the south. Off to the east lie the Illinois Bluffs, far above the chemical pollutants.

East St. Louis—which the local press refers to as “an inner city without an outer city”—has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant death. Among the negative factors listed by the city’s health director are the sewage running in the streets, air that has been fouled by the local plants, the high lead levels noted in the soil, poverty, lack of education, crime, dilapidated housing, insufficient health care, unemployment. Hospital care is deficient too. There is no place to have a baby in East St. Louis. The maternity ward at the city’s Catholic hospital, a 100-year-old structure, was shut down some years ago. The only other hospital in town was forced by lack of funds to close in 1990. The closest obstetrics service open to the women here is seven miles away. The infant death rate is still rising.

As in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, dental problems also plague the children here. Although dental problems don’t command the instant fears associated with low birth weight, fetal death or cholera, they do have the consequence of wearing down the stamina of children and defeating their ambitions. Bleeding gums, impacted teeth and rotting teeth are routine matters for the children I have interviewed in the South Bronx. Children get used to feeling constant pain. They go to sleep with it. They go to school with it. Sometimes their teachers are alarmed and try to get them to a clinic. But it’s all so slow and heavily encumbered with red tape and waiting lists and missing, lost or canceled welfare cards, that dental care is often long delayed. Children live for months with pain that grown-ups would find unendurable. The gradual attrition of accepted pain erodes their energy and aspiration. I have seen children in New York with teeth that look like brownish, broken sticks. I have also seen teen-agers who were missing half their teeth. But, to me, most shocking is to see a child with an abscess that has been inflamed for weeks and that he has simply lived with and accepts as part of the routine of life. Many teachers in the urban schools have seen this. It is almost commonplace.

Compounding these problems is the poor nutrition of the children here —average daily food expenditure in East St. Louis is $2.40 for one child— and the under-immunization of young children. Of every 100 children recently surveyed in East St. Louis, 55 were incompletely immunized for polio, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough. In this context, health officials look with all the more uneasiness at those lagoons of sewage outside public housing.

On top of all else is the very high risk of death by homicide in East St.

Louis. In a recent year in which three cities in the state of roughly the same size as East St. Louis had an average of four homicides apiece, there were 54 homicides in East St. Louis. But it is the heat of summer that officials here particularly dread. The heat that breeds the insects bearing polio or hepatitis in raw sewage also heightens asthma and frustration and reduces patience. “The heat,” says a man in public housing, “can bring out the beast.…”

The fear of violence is very real in East St. Louis. The CEO of one of the large companies out on the edge of town has developed an “evacuation plan” for his employees. State troopers are routinely sent to East St. Louis to put down disturbances that the police cannot control. If the misery of this community explodes someday in a real riot (it has happened in the past), residents believe that state and federal law- enforcement agencies will have no hesitation in applying massive force to keep the violence contained.

As we have seen, it is believed by people here that white developers regard the land beside the river and adjacent sections of the city as particularly attractive sites for condominiums and luxury hotels. It is the fear of violence, people believe, and the proximity of the black population that have, up to now, prevented plans like these from taking shape. Some residents are convinced, therefore, that they will someday be displaced. “It’s happened in other cities,” says a social worker who has lived here for ten years, “East St. Louis is a good location, after all.”

This eventuality, however, is not viewed as very likely—or not for a long, long time. The soil would have to be de-leaded first. The mercury and arsenic would have to be dealt with. The chemical plants would have to be shut down or modified before the area could be regarded as attractive to developers. For now, the people of East St. Louis probably can rest assured that nobody much covets what is theirs.

“The history of East St. Louis,” says the Post-Dispatch, is “rife with greed and lust and bigotry.” At the turn of the century, the city was the second largest railroad center in the nation. It led the nation in sale of horses, mules and hogs, and in the manufacture of aluminum. Meat- packing, steel, and paint manufacture were important here as well. Virtually all these industries were owned, however, by outsiders.

Blacks were drawn to East St. Louis from the South by promises of jobs. When they arrived, the corporations used them as strikebreakers. In 1917 a mounting white resentment of strikebreaking blacks, combined with racial bigotry, ignited one of the most bloody riots in the nation’s

history. White mobs tore into black neighborhoods. Beatings and hangings took place in the streets. The mob, whose rage was indiscriminate, killed a 14-year-old boy and scalped his mother. Before it was over, 244 buildings were destroyed.

It may be said that the unregulated private market did not serve the city well. By the 1930s, industries that had enticed black people here with promises of jobs began to leave for areas where even cheaper labor could be found. Proximity to coal, which had attracted industry into the area, also ceased to be important as electric power came to be commercially available in other regions. The Aluminum Ore Company, which had brought 10,000 blacks to East St. Louis to destroy the unions, now shut down and moved to the Deep South. During the Depression, other factories—their operations obsolete—shut down as well.

The city underwent a renaissance of sorts in World War II, when deserted factory space was used for military manufacturing. Cheap black labor was again required. Prostitution also flourished as a market answer to the presence of so many military men at nearby bases. Organized crime set up headquarters in the city. For subsequent decades, East St. Louis was the place where young white men would go for sexual adventures.

Population peaked in 1945 at 80,000, one third being black. By 1971, with the population down to 50,000, less than one-third white, a black mayor was elected. A second black mayor, elected in 1979, remained in office until 1991.

The problems of the streets in urban areas, as teachers often note, frequently spill over into public schools. In the public schools of East St. Louis this is literally the case.

“Martin Luther King Junior High School,” notes the Post-Dispatch in a story published in the early spring of 1989, “was evacuated Friday afternoon after sewage flowed into the kitchen.… The kitchen was closed and students were sent home.” On Monday, the paper continues, “East St. Louis Senior High School was awash in sewage for the second time this year.” The school had to be shut because of “fumes and backed-up toilets.” Sewage flowed into the basement, through the floor, then up into the kitchen and the students’ bathrooms. The backup, we read, “occurred in the food preparation areas.”

School is resumed the following morning at the high school, but a few days later the overflow recurs. This time the entire system is affected, since the meals distributed to every student in the city are prepared in the

two schools that have been flooded. School is called off for all 16,500 students in the district. The sewage backup, caused by the failure of two pumping stations, forces officials at the high school to shut down the furnaces.

At Martin Luther King, the parking lot and gym are also flooded. “It’s a disaster,” says a legislator. “The streets are underwater; gaseous fumes are being emitted from the pipes under the schools,” she says, “making people ill.”

In the same week, the schools announce the layoff of 280 teachers, 166 cooks and cafeteria workers, 25 teacher aides, 16 custodians and 18 painters, electricians, engineers and plumbers. The president of the teachers’ union says the cuts, which will bring the size of kindergarten and primary classes up to 30 students, and the size of fourth to twelfth grade classes up to 35, will have “an unimaginable impact” on the students. “If you have a high school teacher with five classes each day and between 150 and 175 students …, it’s going to have a devastating effect.” The school system, it is also noted, has been using more than 70 “permanent substitute teachers,” who are paid only $10,000 yearly, as a way of saving money.

Governor Thompson, however, tells the press that he will not pour money into East St. Louis to solve long-term problems. East St. Louis residents, he says, must help themselves. “There is money in the community,” the governor insists. “It’s just not being spent for what it should be spent for.”

The governor, while acknowledging that East St. Louis faces economic problems, nonetheless refers dismissively to those who live in East St. Louis. “What in the community,” he asks, “is being done right?” He takes the opportunity of a visit to the area to announce a fiscal grant for sewer improvement to a relatively wealthy town nearby.

In East St. Louis, meanwhile, teachers are running out of chalk and paper, and their paychecks are arriving two weeks late. The city warns its teachers to expect a cut of half their pay until the fiscal crisis has been eased.

The threatened teacher layoffs are mandated by the Illinois Board of Education, which, because of the city’s fiscal crisis, has been given supervisory control of the school budget. Two weeks later the state superintendent partially relents. In a tone very different from that of the governor, he notes that East St. Louis does not have the means to solve its education problems on its own. “There is no natural way,” he says, that “East St. Louis can bring itself out of this situation.” Several cuts will

be required in any case—one quarter of the system’s teachers, 75 teacher aides, and several dozen others will be given notice—but, the state board notes, sports and music programs will not be affected.

East St. Louis, says the chairman of the state board, “is simply the worst possible place I can imagine to have a child brought up.… The community is in desperate circumstances.” Sports and music, he observes, are, for many children here, “the only avenues of success.” Sadly enough, no matter how it ratifies the stereotype, this is the truth; and there is a poignant aspect to the fact that, even with class size soaring and one quarter of the system’s teachers being given their dismissal, the state board of education demonstrates its genuine but skewed compassion by attempting to leave sports and music untouched by the overall austerity.

Even sports facilities, however, are degrading by comparison with those found and expected at most high schools in America. The football field at East St. Louis High is missing almost everything—including goalposts. There are a couple of metal pipes—no crossbar, just the pipes. Bob Shannon, the football coach, who has to use his personal funds to purchase footballs and has had to cut and rake the football field himself, has dreams of having goalposts someday. He’d also like to let his students have new uniforms. The ones they wear are nine years old and held together somehow by a patchwork of repairs. Keeping them clean is a problem, too. The school cannot afford a washing machine. The uniforms are carted to a corner laundromat with fifteen dollars’ worth of quarters.

Other football teams that come to play, according to the coach, are shocked to see the field and locker rooms. They want to play without a halftime break and get away. The coach reports that he’s been missing paychecks, but he’s trying nonetheless to raise some money to help out a member of the team whose mother has just died of cancer.

“The days of the tight money have arrived,” he says. “It don’t look like Moses will be coming to this school.”

He tells me he has been in East St. Louis 19 years and has been the football coach for 14 years. “I was born,” he says, “in Natchez, Mississippi. I stood on the courthouse steps of Natchez with Charles Evers. I was a teen-age boy when Michael Schwerner and the other boys were murdered. I’ve been in the struggle all along. In Mississippi, it was the fight for legal rights. This time, it’s a struggle for survival.

“In certain ways,” he says, “it’s harder now because in those days it was a clear enemy you had to face, a man in a hood and not a statistician. No one could persuade you that you were to blame. Now the choices seem like they are left to you and, if you make the wrong choice, you are

made to understand you are to blame.… “Night-time in this city, hot and smoky in the summer, there are

dealers standin’ out on every street. Of the kids I see here, maybe 55 percent will graduate from school. Of that number, maybe one in four will go to college. How many will stay? That is a bigger question.

“The basic essentials are simply missing here. When we go to wealthier schools I look at the faces of my boys. They don’t say a lot. They have their faces to the windows, lookin’ out. I can’t tell what they are thinking. I am hopin’ they are saying, ‘This is something I will give my kids someday.’ ”

Tall and trim, his black hair graying slightly, he is 45 years old. “No, my wife and I don’t live here. We live in a town called Ferguson,

Missouri. I was born in poverty and raised in poverty. I feel that I owe it to myself to live where they pick up the garbage.”

In the visitors’ locker room, he shows me lockers with no locks. The weight room stinks of sweat and water-rot. “See, this ceiling is in danger of collapsing. See, this room don’t have no heat in winter. But we got to come here anyway. We wear our coats while working out. I tell the boys, ‘We got to get it done. Our fans don’t know that we do not have heat.’ ”

He tells me he arrives at school at 7:45 A.M. and leaves at 6:00 P.M.— except in football season, when he leaves at 8:00 P.M. “This is my life. It isn’t all I dreamed of and I tell myself sometimes that I might have accomplished more. But growing up in poverty rules out some avenues. You do the best you can.”

In the wing of the school that holds vocational classes, a damp, unpleasant odor fills the halls. The school has a machine shop, which cannot be used for lack of staff, and a woodworking shop. The only shop that’s occupied this morning is the auto-body class. A man with long blond hair and wearing a white sweat suit swings a paddle to get children in their chairs. “What we need the most is new equipment,” he reports. “I have equipment for alignment, for example, but we don’t have money to install it. We also need a better form of egress. We bring the cars in through two other classes.” Computerized equipment used in most repair shops, he reports, is far beyond the high school’s budget. It looks like a very old gas station in an isolated rural town.

Stopping in the doorway of a room with seven stoves and three refrigerators, I am told by a white teacher that this is a class called “Introductory Home Ec.” The 15 children in the room, however, are not occupied with work. They are scattered at some antiquated tables, chatting with each other. The teacher explains that students do no work

on Friday, which, she says, is “clean-up day.” I ask her whether she regards this class as preparation for employment. “Not this class,” she says. “The ones who move on to Advanced Home Ec. are given job instruction.” When I ask her what jobs they are trained for, she says: “Fast food places—Burger King, McDonald’s.”

The science labs at East St. Louis High are 30 to 50 years outdated. John McMillan, a soft-spoken man, teaches physics at the school. He shows me his lab. The six lab stations in the room have empty holes where pipes were once attached. “It would be great if we had water,” says McMillan.

Wiping his hand over his throat, he tells me that he cannot wear a tie or jacket in the lab. “I want you to notice the temperature,” he says. “The heating system’s never worked correctly. Days when it’s zero outside it will be 100 Fahrenheit within this room. I will be here 25 years starting September—in the same room, teaching physics. I have no storage space. Those balance scales are trash. There are a few small windows you can open. We are on the side that gets the sun.”

Stepping outside the lab, he tells me that he lives in East St. Louis, one block from the school. Balding and damp-looking in his open collar, he is a bachelor 58 years old.

The biology lab, which I visit next, has no laboratory tables. Students work at regular desks. “I need dissecting kits,” the teacher says. “The few we have are incomplete.” Chemical supplies, she tells me, in a city poisoned by two chemical plants, are scarce. “I need more microscopes,” she adds.

The chemistry lab is the only one that’s properly equipped. There are eight lab tables with gas jets and water. But the chemistry teacher says he rarely brings his students to the lab. “I have 30 children in a class and cannot supervise them safely. Chemical lab work is unsafe with more than 20 children to a teacher. If I had some lab assistants, we could make use of the lab. As it is, we have to study mainly from a text.”

Even texts are scarce, however. “We were short of books for four months last semester. When we got replacement copies, they were different from the texts that we already had. So that presented a new problem.…

“Despite these failings, I have had two students graduate from MIT.” “In how many years?” I ask. He tells me, “Twenty-three.” Leaving the chemistry labs, I pass a double-sized classroom in which

roughly 60 kids are sitting fairly still but doing nothing. “This is

supervised study hall,” a teacher tells me in the corridor. But when we step inside, he finds there is no teacher. “The teacher must be out today,” he says.

Irl Solomon’s history classes, which I visit next, have been described by journalists who cover East St. Louis as the highlight of the school. Solomon, a man of 54 whose reddish hair is turning white, has taught in urban schools for almost 30 years. A graduate of Brandeis University in 1961, he entered law school but was drawn away by a concern with civil rights. “After one semester, I decided that the law was not for me. I said, ‘Go and find the toughest place there is to teach. See if you like it.’ I’m still here.…

“This is not by any means the worst school in the city,” he reports, as we are sitting in his classroom on the first floor of the school. “But our problems are severe. I don’t even know where to begin. I have no materials with the exception of a single textbook given to each child. If I bring in anything else—books or tapes or magazines—I pay for it myself. The high school has no VCRs. They are such a crucial tool. So many good things run on public television. I can’t make use of anything I see unless I can unhook my VCR and bring it into school. The AV equipment in the building is so old that we are pressured not to use it.”

Teachers like Mr. Solomon, working in low-income districts such as East St. Louis, often tell me that they feel cut off from educational developments in modern public schools. “Well, it’s amazing,” Solomon says. “I have done without so much so long that, if I were assigned to a suburban school, I’m not sure I’d recognize what they are doing. We are utterly cut off.”

Of 33 children who begin the history classes in the standard track, he says, more than a quarter have dropped out by spring semester. “Maybe 24 are left by June. Mind you, this is in the junior year. We’re speaking of the children who survived. Ninth and tenth grades are the more horrendous years for leaving school.

“I have four girls right now in my senior home room who are pregnant or have just had babies. When I ask them why this happens, I am told, ‘Well, there’s no reason not to have a baby. There’s not much for me in public school.’ The truth is, that’s a pretty honest answer. A diploma from a ghetto high school doesn’t count for much in the United States today. So, if this is really the last education that a person’s going to get, she’s probably perceptive in that statement. Ah, there’s so much bitterness— unfairness—there, you know. Most of these pregnant girls are not the ones who have much self-esteem.…

“Very little education in the school would be considered academic in the suburbs. Maybe 10 to 15 percent of students are in truly academic programs. Of the 55 percent who graduate, 20 percent may go to four- year colleges: something like 10 percent of any entering class. Another 10 to 20 percent may get some other kind of higher education. An equal number join the military.…

“I get $38,000 after nearly 30 years of teaching. If I went across the river to one of the suburbs of St. Louis, I’d be earning $47,000, maybe more. If I taught in the Chicago suburbs, at a wealthy high school like New Trier, for example, I’d be getting close to $60,000. Money’s not an issue for me, since I wouldn’t want to leave; but, for new, incoming teachers, this much differential is a great deterrent. When you consider that many teachers are afraid to come here in the first place, or, if they are not afraid, are nonetheless offended by the setting or intimidated by the challenge of the job, there should be a premium and not a punishment for teaching here.

“Sometimes I get worried that I’m starting to burn out. Still, I hate to miss a day. The department frequently can’t find a substitute to come here, and my kids don’t like me to be absent.”

Solomon’s advanced class, which soon comes into the room, includes some lively students with strong views.

“I don’t go to physics class, because my lab has no equipment,” says one student. “The typewriters in my typing class don’t work. The women’s toilets …” She makes a sour face. “I’ll be honest,” she says. “I just don’t use the toilets. If I do, I come back into class and I feel dirty.”

“I wanted to study Latin,” says another student. “But we don’t have Latin in this school.”

“We lost our only Latin teacher,” Solomon says. A girl in a white jersey with the message DO THE RIGHT THING on the front

raises her hand. “You visit other schools,” she says. “Do you think the children in this school are getting what we’d get in a nice section of St. Louis?”

I note that we are in a different state and city. “Are we citizens of East St. Louis or America?” she asks. A tall girl named Samantha interrupts. “I have a comment that I want

to make.” She then relates the following incident: “Fairview Heights is a mainly white community. A friend of mine and I went up there once to buy some books. We walked into the store. Everybody lookin’ at us, you know, and somebody says, ‘What do you want?’ And lookin’ at each other like, ‘What are these black girls doin’ here in Fairview Heights?’ I just

said, ‘I want to buy a book!’ It’s like they’re scared we’re goin’ to rob them. Take away a privilege that’s theirs by rights. Well, that goes for school as well.

“My mother wanted me to go to school there and she tried to have me transferred. It didn’t work. The reason, she was told, is that we’re in a different ‘jurisdiction.’ If you don’t live up there in the hills, or further back, you can’t attend their schools. That, at least, is what they told my mother.”

“Is that a matter of race?” I ask. “Or money?” “Well,” she says, choosing her words with care, “the two things, race

and money, go so close together—what’s the difference? I live here, they live there, and they don’t want me in their school.”

A boy named Luther speaks about the chemical pollution. “It’s like this,” he says. “On one side of us you have two chemical corporations. One is Pfizer—that’s out there. They make paint and pigments. The other is Monsanto. On the other side are companies incinerating toxic waste. So the trash is comin’ at us this direction. The chemicals is comin’ from the other. We right in the middle.”

Despite these feelings, many of the children voice a curiously resilient faith in racial integration. “If the government would put a huge amount of money into East St. Louis, so that this could be a modern, well- equipped and top-rate school,” I ask, “with everything that you could ever want for education, would you say that racial segregation was no longer of importance?”

Without exception, the children answer, “No.” “Going to a school with all the races,” Luther says, “is more important

than a modern school.” “They still believe in that dream,” their teacher says. “They have no

reason to do so. That is what I find so wonderful and … ah, so moving.… These kids are the only reason I get up each day.”

I ask the students, “What would happen if the government decided that the students in a nearby town like Fairview Heights and the students here in East St. Louis had to go to school together next September?”

Samantha: “The buses going to Fairview Heights would all be full. The buses coming to East St. Louis would be empty.”

“What if East St. Louis had the very best computer classes in the state— and if there were no computer classes in the school of Fairview Heights?”

“The buses coming here,” she says, “would still be empty.” When I ask her why, she answers in these quiet words: “I don’t know

why.”

Sam Morgan, principal of East St. Louis High, was born and raised in East St. Louis. He tells me he didn’t go to East St. Louis High, however. “This was the white high school in those days,” he says.

His office was ruined in a recent fire, so he meets me in a tiny room with space for three chairs and a desk. Impeccably dressed in a monogrammed shirt with gold links in his cuffs, a purple tie and matching purple handkerchief in his suit pocket, he is tall, distinguished- looking and concerned that I will write a critical report on East St. Louis High. When I ask, however, what he’d do if he were granted adequate funds, he comes up with a severe assessment of the status quo.

“First, we’re losing thousands of dollars in our heating bills because of faulty windows and because the heating system cannot be controlled. So I’d renovate the building and install a whole new heating system and replace the windows. We’ve had fire damage but I see that as a low priority. I need computers—that’s a low priority as well. I’d settle for a renovation of the typing rooms and new typewriters. The highest priorities are to subdivide the school and add a modern wing, then bring the science laboratories up to date. Enlarge the library. Buy more books. The books I’ve got, a lot of them are secondhand. I got them from the Catholic high school when it closed. Most of all, we need a building renovation. This is what I’d do to start with, if I had an extra $20 million.”

After he’s enumerated all the changes he would like to make, he laughs and looks down at his hands. “This, of course, is pie in the sky. You asked me what I need so I have told you. If I’m dreaming, why not dream the big dreams for our children?”

His concerns are down-to-earth. He’s not pretentious and does not appropriate the cloudy jargon that some educators use to fill a vacuum of specifics—no talk of “restructuring,” of “teacher competency” or any of the other buzzwords of the decade. His focus is on the bare necessities: typewriters, windows, books, a renovated building.

While we are speaking in his temporary office, a telephone call from the police informs him that his house has just been robbed—or that the theft alarm, at least, has just gone off. He interrupts the interview to try to reach his wife. His poise and his serene self-discipline do not desert him. I gain the impression this has happened before. He’s a likable man and he smiles a lot, but there is tremendous tension in his body and his fingers grip the edges of his desk as if he’s trying very hard to hold his world together.

Before I leave the school, I take a final stroll along the halls. In a

number of classrooms, groups of children seem to be involved in doing nothing. Sometimes there’s a teacher present, doing something at his desk. Sometimes there’s no adult in the room. I pass the cooking class again, in which there is no cooking and no teaching taking place. The “supervised” study hall is still unsupervised.

In one of the unattended classrooms on the second floor, seven students stand around a piano. When I stick my head into the room, they smile and invite me to come in. They are rehearsing for a concert: two young women, five young men. Another young man is seated at the piano. One of the students, a heavyset young woman, steps out just before the others. When she sings, her pure soprano voice transforms the room. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” she begins. The pianist gazes up at her with an attentive look of admiration.

The loveliness and the aesthetic isolation of the singer in the squalor of the school and city bring to my mind the words of Dr. Lillian Parks, the superintendent of the East St. Louis schools. “Gifted children,” says Dr. Parks, “are everywhere in East St. Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty and turmoil and the damage done by knowing they are written off by their society. Many of these children have no sense of something they belong to. They have no feeling of belonging to America. Gangs provide the boys, perhaps, with something to belong to.…

“There is a terrible beauty in some of these girls—terrible, I mean, because it is ephemeral, foredoomed. The language that our children speak may not be standard English but there still is wisdom here. Our children have become wise by necessity.”

Clark Junior High School is regarded as the top school in the city. I visit, in part, at the request of school officials, who would like me to see education in the city at its very best. Even here, however, there is a disturbing sense that one has entered a backwater of America.

“We spend the entire eighth grade year preparing for the state exams,” a teacher tells me in a top-ranked English class. The teacher seems devoted to the children, but three students sitting near me sleep through the entire period. The teacher rouses one of them, a girl in the seat next to me, but the student promptly lays her head back on her crossed arms and is soon asleep again. Four of the 14 ceiling lights are broken. The corridor outside the room is filled with voices. Outside the window, where I see no schoolyard, is an empty lot.

In a mathematics class of 30 children packed into a space that might be

adequate for 15 kids, there is one white student. The first white student I have seen in East St. Louis, she is polishing her nails with bright red polish. A tiny black girl next to her is writing with a one-inch pencil stub.

In a seventh grade social studies class, the only book that bears some relevance to black concerns—its title is The American Negro—bears a publication date of 1967. The teacher invites me to ask the class some questions. Uncertain where to start, I ask the students what they’ve learned about the civil rights campaigns of recent decades.

A 14-year-old girl with short black curly hair says this: “Every year in February we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We read it every year. ‘I have a dream.…’ It does begin to seem—what is the word?” She hesitates and then she finds the word: “perfunctory.”

I ask her what she means. “We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King,” she says. “The

school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black. It’s like a terrible joke on history.”

It startles me to hear her words, but I am startled even more to think how seldom any press reporter has observed the irony of naming segregated schools for Martin Luther King. Children reach the heart of these hypocrisies much quicker than the grown-ups and the experts do.

“I would like to comment on that,” says another 14-year-old student, named Shalika. “I have had to deal with this all of my life. I started school in Fairview Heights. My mother pushes me and she had wanted me to get a chance at better education. Only one other student in my class was black. I was in the fifth grade, and at that age you don’t understand the ugliness in people’s hearts. They wouldn’t play with me. I couldn’t understand it. During recess I would stand there by myself beside the fence. Then one day I got a note: ‘Go back to Africa.’

“To tell the truth, it left a sadness in my heart. Now you hear them sayin’ on TV, ‘What’s the matter with these colored people? Don’t they care about their children’s education?’ But my mother did the best for me she knew. It was not my mother’s fault that I was not accepted by those people.”

“It does not take long,” says Christopher, a light-skinned boy with a faint mustache and a somewhat heated and perspiring look, “for little kids to learn they are not wanted.”

Shalika is small and looks quite young for junior high. In each ear she wears a small enameled pin of Mickey Mouse. “To some degree I do believe,” she says, “that this is caused by press reports. You see a lot about the crimes committed here in East St. Louis when you turn on the

TV. Do they show the crimes committed by the government that puts black people here? Why are all the dirty businesses like chemicals and waste disposal here? This is a big country. Couldn’t they find another place to put their poison?”

“Shalika,” the teacher tells me afterward, “will go to college.” “Why is it this way?” asks Shalika in a softer voice again. But she

doesn’t ask the question as if she is waiting for an answer. “Is it ‘separate but equal,’ then?” I ask. “Have we gone back a hundred

years?” “It is separate. That’s for sure,” the teacher says. She is a short and

stocky middle-aged black woman. “Would you want to tell the children it is equal? ”

Christopher approaches me at the end of class. The room is too hot. His skin looks warm and his black hair is damp. “Write this down. You asked a question about Martin Luther King. I’m going to say something. All that stuff about ‘the dream’ means nothing to the kids I know in East St. Louis. So far as they’re concerned, he died in vain. He was famous and he lived and gave his speeches and he died and now he’s gone. But we’re still here. Don’t tell students in this school about ‘the dream.’ Go and look into a toilet here if you would like to know what life is like for students in this city.”

Before I leave, I do as Christopher asked and enter a boy’s bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilets stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll.

“This,” says Sister Julia, “is the best school that we have in East St. Louis.”

In East St. Louis, as in every city that I visit, I am forced to ask myself if what I’ve seen may be atypical. One would like to think that this might be the case in East St. Louis, but it would not be the truth.

At Landsdowne Junior High School, the St. Louis Sun reports, “there are scores of window frames without glass, like sockets without eyes.” Hallways in many schools are dark, with light bulbs missing or burnt out. One walks into a school, a member of the city’s board of education notes, “and you can smell the urinals a hundred feet away.…”

A teacher at an elementary school in East St. Louis has only one full- color workbook for her class. She photocopies workbook pages for her

children, but the copies can’t be made in color and the lessons call for color recognition by the children.

A history teacher at the Martin Luther King School has 110 students in four classes—but only 26 books. Some of the books are missing the first hundred pages.

Each year, Solomon observes of East St. Louis High, “there’s one more toilet that doesn’t flush, one more drinking fountain that doesn’t work, one more classroom without texts.… Certain classrooms are so cold in winter that the students have to wear their coats to class, while children in other classrooms swelter in a suffocating heat that cannot be turned down.”

Critics in the press routinely note that education spending in the district is a trifle more than in surrounding districts. They also note that public schools in East St. Louis represent the largest source of paid employment in the city, and this point is often used to argue that the schools are overstaffed. The implication of both statements is that East St. Louis spends excessively on education. One could as easily conclude, however, that the conditions of existence here call for even larger school expenditures to draw and to retain more gifted staff and to offer all those extra services so desperately needed in a poor community. What such critics also fail to note, as Solomon and principal Sam Morgan have observed, is that the crumbling infrastructure uses up a great deal more of the per-pupil budget than would be the case in districts with updated buildings that cost less to operate. Critics also willfully ignore the health conditions and the psychological disarray of children growing up in burnt- out housing, playing on contaminated land, and walking past acres of smoldering garbage on their way to school. They also ignore the vast expense entailed in trying to make up for the debilitated skills of many parents who were prior victims of these segregated schools or those of Mississippi, in which many of the older residents of East St. Louis led their early lives. In view of the extraordinary miseries of life for children in the district, East St. Louis should be spending far more than is spent in wealthy suburbs. As things stand, the city spends approximately half as much each year on every pupil as the state’s top-spending districts.

It is also forgotten that dramatic cuts in personnel within the East St. Louis schools—for example, of 250 teachers and 250 nonprofessional employees, as demanded recently by state officials—would propel 500 families with perhaps 2,000 children and dependents to the welfare lists and deny the city the stability afforded by a good chunk of its rapidly diminished lower middle class. Nothing, in short, that the East St. Louis

school board does within the context of its penury can benefit one interest in the city without damaging another.

It is accurate to note that certain of the choices and priorities established by the East St. Louis school board do at times strike an observer as misguided, and state politicians are not hesitant to emphasize this point. The mayor of the city for many years, a controversial young man named Carl Officer, was frequently attacked by the same critics for what sometimes was alleged to be his lack of probity and of far-sighted planning. There may have been some real truth to these charges. But the diligence of critics in observing the supposed irregularities of his behavior stands in stunning contrast to their virtual refusal to address the governing realities of destitution and near-total segregation and the willingness of private industry to flee a population it once courted and enticed to East St. Louis but now finds expendable.

In very few cases, in discussing the immiseration of this city, do Illinois officials openly address the central fact, the basic evil, of its racial isolation. With more efficient local governance, East St. Louis might become a better-managed ghetto, a less ravaged racial settlement, but the soil would remain contaminated and the schools would still resemble relics of the South post-Reconstruction. They might be a trifle cleaner and they might perhaps provide their children with a dozen more computers or typewriters, better stoves for cooking classes, or a better shop for training future gas-station mechanics; but the children would still be poisoned in their bodies and disfigured in their spirits.

Now and then the possibility is raised by somebody in East St. Louis that the state may someday try to end the isolation of the city as an all- black entity. This is something, however, that no one with power in the state has ever contemplated. Certainly, no one in government proposes busing 16,000 children from this city to the nearby schools of Bellevue, Fairview Heights or Collinsville; and no one intends to force these towns to open up their neighborhoods to racially desegregated and low-income housing. So there is, in fact, no exit for these children. East St. Louis will likely be left just as it is for a good many years to come: a scar of sorts, an ugly metaphor of filth and overspill and chemical effusions, a place for blacks to live and die within, a place for other people to avoid when they are heading for St. Louis.

CHAPTER 2

Other People’s Children: North Lawndale and the South Side of Chicago

Almost anyone who visits in the schools of East St. Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended us in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long—and with so little public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of history? Is it unusual? Is it an American anomaly? Even if the destitution and the racial segregation and the toxic dangers of the air and soil cannot be immediately addressed, why is it that we can’t at least pour vast amounts of money, ingenuity and talent into public education for these children?

Admittedly, the soil cannot be de-leaded overnight, and the ruined spirits of the men who camp out in the mud and shacks close to the wire fencing of Monsanto can’t be instantly restored to life, nor can the many illnesses these children suffer suddenly be cured, nor can their asthma be immediately relieved. Why not, at least, give children in this city something so spectacular, so wonderful and special in their public schools that hundreds of them, maybe thousands, might be able somehow to soar up above the hopelessness, the clouds of smoke and sense of degradation all around them?

Every child, every mother, in this city is, to a degree, in the position of a supplicant for someone else’s help. The city turns repeatedly to outside agencies—the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the federal and Illinois EPA, the U.S. Congress, the Illinois State Board of Education, religious charities, health organizations, medical schools and educational foundations—soliciting help in much the way that African and Latin American nations beg for grants from agencies like AID. And yet we

stop to tell ourselves: These are Americans. Why do we reduce them to this beggary—and why, particularly, in public education? Why not spend on children here at least what we would be investing in their education if they lived within a wealthy district like Winnetka, Illinois, or Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or Manhasset, Rye, or Great Neck in New York? Wouldn’t this be natural behavior in an affluent society that seems to value fairness in so many other areas of life? Is fairness less important to Americans today than in some earlier times? Is it viewed as slightly tiresome and incompatible with hard-nosed values? What do Americans believe about equality?

“Drive west on the Eisenhower Expressway,” writes the Chicago Tribune, “out past the hospital complex, and look south.” Before your eyes are block after block of old, abandoned, gaping factories. “The overwhelming sensation is emptiness.… What’s left is, literally, nothing.”

This emptiness—“an industrial slum without the industry,” a local resident calls it—is North Lawndale. The neighborhood, according to the Tribune, “has one bank, one supermarket, 48 state lottery agents … and 99 licensed bars and liquor stores.” With only a single supermarket, food is of poor quality and overpriced. Martin Luther King, who lived in this neighborhood in 1966, said there was a 10-to-20-percent “color tax” on produce, an estimate that still holds true today. With only a single bank, there are few loans available for home repair; private housing therefore has deteriorated quickly.

According to the 1980 census, 58 percent of men and women 17 and older in North Lawndale had no jobs. The 1990 census is expected to show no improvement. Between 1960 and 1970, as the last white families left the neighborhood, North Lawndale lost three quarters of its businesses, one quarter of its jobs. In the next ten years, 80 percent of the remaining jobs in manufacturing were lost.

“People carry a lot of crosses here,” says Reverend Jim Wolff, who directs a mission church not far from one of the deserted factories. “God’s beautiful people live here in the midst of hell.”

As the factories have moved out, he says, the street gangs have moved in. Driving with me past a sprawling redbrick complex that was once the world headquarters of Sears, Roebuck, he speaks of the increasing economic isolation of the neighborhood: “Sears is gone. International Harvester is gone, Sunbeam is gone. Western Electric has moved out. The Vice Lords, the Disciples and the Latin Kings have, in a sense, replaced them.

“With the arrival of the gangs there is, of course, more violence and death. I buried a young man 21 years old a week ago. Most of the people that I bury are between the ages of 18 and 30.”

He stops the car next to a weed-choked lot close to the corner of Sixteenth and Hamlin. “Dr. King,” he says, “lived on this corner.” There is no memorial. The city, I later learn, flattened the building after Dr. King moved out. A broken truck now occupies the place where Dr. King resided. From an open side door of the truck, a very old man is selling pizza slices. Next door is a store called Jumbo Liquors. A menacing group of teen-age boys is standing on the corner of the lot where Dr. King lived with his family. “Kids like these will kill each other over nothing—for a warm-up jacket,” says the pastor.

“There are good people in this neighborhood,” he says, “determined and persistent and strong-minded people who have character and virtues you do not see everywhere. You say to yourself, ‘There’s something here that’s being purified by pain.’ All the veneers, all the façades, are burnt away and you see something genuine and beautiful that isn’t often found among the affluent. I see it in children—in the youngest children sometimes. Beautiful sweet natures. It’s as if they are refined by their adversity. But you cannot sentimentalize. The odds they face are hellish and, for many, many people that I know, life here is simply unendurable.

“Dr. King once said that he had met his match here in Chicago. He said that he faced more bigotry and hatred here than anywhere he’d been in the Deep South. Now he’s gone. The weeds have overgrown his memory. I sometimes wonder if the kids who spend their lives out on that corner would be shocked, or even interested, to know that he had lived there once. If you told them, I suspect you’d get a shrug at most.…”

On a clear October day in 1990, the voices of children in the first-floor hallway of the Mary McLeod Bethune School in North Lawndale are as bright and optimistic as the voices of small children anywhere. The school, whose students are among the poorest in the city, serves one of the neighborhoods in which the infant death rate is particularly high. Nearly 1,000 infants die within these very poor Chicago neighborhoods each year. An additional 3,000 infants are delivered with brain damage or with other forms of neurological impairment But, entering a kindergarten classroom on this autumn morning, one would have no sense that anything was wrong. Kindergarten classes almost anywhere are cheerful places, and whatever damage may already have been done to children here is not initially apparent to a visitor.

When the children lie down on the floor to have their naps, I sit and

watch their movements and their breathing. A few of them fall asleep at once, but others are restless and three little boys keep poking one another when the teacher looks away. Many tiny coughs and whispers interrupt the silence for a while.

The teacher is not particularly gentle. She snaps at the ones who squirm around—“Relax!” and “Sleep!”—and forces down their arms and knees.

A little boy lying with his head close to my feet looks up, with his eyes wide open, at the ceiling. Another, lying on his stomach, squints at me with one eye while the other remains closed. Two little girls, one in blue jeans, one in purple tights, are sound asleep.

The room is sparse: a large and clean but rather cheerless space. There are very few of those manipulable objects and bright-colored shelves and boxes that adorn suburban kindergarten classrooms. The only decorations on the walls are posters supplied by companies that market school materials: “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” “Zoo Animals,” “Community Helpers.” Nothing the children or teacher made themselves.

As the minutes pass, most of the children seem to sleep, some of them with their arms flung out above their heads, others with their hands beneath their cheeks, though four or five are wide awake and stare with boredom at the ceiling.

On the door is a classroom chart (“Watch us grow!” it says) that measures every child’s size and weight. Nakisha, according to the chart, is 38 inches tall and weighs 40 pounds. Lashonda, is 42 inches and weighs 45. Seneca is only 36 inches tall. He weighs only 38.

After 30 minutes pass, the teacher tells the children to sit up. Five of the boys who were most restless suddenly are sound asleep. The others sit up. The teacher tells them, “Folded hands!” They fold their hands. “Wiggle your toes!” They wiggle their toes. “Touch your nose!” They touch their noses.

The teacher questions them about a trip they made the week before. “Where did we go?” The children answer, “Farm!” “What did we see?” The children answer, “Sheep!” “What did we feed them?” A child yells out, “Soup!” The teacher reproves him: “You weren’t there! What is the right answer?” The other children answer, “Corn! ”

In a somewhat mechanical way, the teacher lifts a picture book of Mother Goose and flips the pages as the children sit before her on the rug.

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.… Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone.… Jack and Jill went up the hill.… This little piggy went to market.…”

The children recite the verses with her as she turns the pages of the book. She’s not very warm or animated as she does it, but the children are obedient and seem to like the fun of showing that they know the words. The book looks worn and old, as if the teacher’s used it many, many years, and it shows no signs of adaptation to the race of the black children in the school. Mary is white. Old Mother Hubbard is white. Jack is white. Jill is white. Little Jack Horner is white. Mother Goose is white. Only Mother Hubbard’s dog is black.

“Baa, baa, black sheep,” the teacher reads, “have you any wool?” The children answer: “Yessir, yessir, three bags full. One for my master.…” The master is white. The sheep are black.

Four little boys are still asleep on the green rug an hour later when I leave the room. I stand at the door and look at the children, most of whom are sitting at a table now to have their milk. Nine years from now, most of these children will go on to Manley High School, an enormous, ugly building just a block away that has a graduation rate of only 38 percent. Twelve years from now, by junior year of high school, if the neighborhood statistics hold true for these children, 14 of these 23 boys and girls will have dropped out of school. Fourteen years from now, four of these kids, at most, will go to college. Eighteen years from now, one of those four may graduate from college, but three of the 12 boys in this kindergarten will already have spent time in prison.

If one stands here in this kindergarten room and does not know these things, the moment seems auspicious. But if one knows the future that awaits them, it is terrible to see their eyes look up at you with friendliness and trust—to see this and to know what is in store for them.

In a fifth grade classroom on the third floor of the school, the American flag is coated with chalk and bunched around a pole above a blackboard with no writing on it. There are a couple of pictures of leaves against the windowpanes but nothing like the richness and the novelty and fullness of expression of the children’s creativity that one would see in better schools where principals insist that teachers fill their rooms with art and writing by the children. The teacher is an elderly white woman with a solid bun of sensible gray hair and a depleted grayish mood about her. Among the 30 children in the room, the teacher says that several, all of whom are black, are classified “learning disabled.”

The children are doing a handwriting lesson when I enter. On a board at the back of the room the teacher has written a line of letters in the

standard cursive script. The children sit at their desks and fill entire pages with these letters. It is the kind of lesson that is generally done in second grade in a suburban school. The teacher seems bored by the lesson, and the children seem to feel this and compound her boredom with their own. Next she does a social studies lesson on the Bering Strait and spends some time in getting the class to give a definition of a “strait.” About half of the children pay attention. The others don’t talk or interrupt or fidget. They are well enough behaved but seem sedated by the teacher’s voice.

Another fifth grade teacher stops me in the corridor to ask me what I’m doing in the building. He’s 50 years old, he tells me, and grew up here in North Lawndale when it was a middle-class white neighborhood but now lives in the suburbs. “I have a low fifth grade,” he says without enthusiasm, then—although he scarcely knows me—launches into an attack upon the principal, the neighborhood and the school.

“It’s all a game,” he says. “Keep them in class for seven years and give them a diploma if they make it to eighth grade. They can’t read, but give them the diploma. The parents don’t know what’s going on. They’re satisfied.”

When I ask him if the lack of money and resources is a problem in the school, he looks amused by this. “Money would be helpful but it’s not the major factor,” he replies. “The parents are the problem.”

The principal, Warren Franczyk, later tells me this: “Teachers are being dumped from high school jobs because of low enrollment. But if they’ve got tenure they cannot be fired so we get them here. I’ve got two of them as subs right now and one as a permanent teacher. He’s not used to children of this age and can’t control them. But I have no choice.”

The city runs a parallel system of selective schools—some of which are known as “magnet” schools—and these schools, the principal tells me, do not have the staffing problems that he faces. “They can select their teachers and their pupils, So it represents a drain on us. They attract the more sophisticated families, and it leaves us with less motivated children.”

Chicago, he tells me, does not have a junior high school system. Students begin Bethune in kindergarten and remain here through eighth grade. Eighth grade graduation, here as elsewhere in Chicago, is regarded as a time for celebration, much as twelfth grade graduation would be celebrated in the suburbs. So there are parties, ball gowns and tuxedos, everything that other kids would have at high school graduation. “For more than half our children,” says the principal, “this is the last thing they will have to celebrate.”

Even in the most unhappy schools there are certain classes that stand out like little islands of excitement, energy and hope. One of these classes is a combination fifth and sixth grade at Bethune, taught by a woman, maybe 40 years of age, named Corla Hawkins.

The classroom is full of lively voices when I enter. The children are at work, surrounded by a clutter of big dictionaries, picture books and gadgets, science games and plants and colorful milk cartons, which the teacher purchased out of her own salary. An oversized Van Gogh collection, open to a print of a sunflower, is balanced on a table-ledge next to a fish tank and a turtle tank. Next to the table is a rocking chair. Handwritten signs are on all sides: “Getting to know you,” “Keeping you safe,” and, over a wall that holds some artwork by the children, “Mrs. Hawkins’s Academy of Fine Arts.” Near the windows, the oversized leaves of several wild-looking plants partially cover rows of novels, math books, and a new World Book Encyclopedia. In the opposite corner is a “Science Learning Board” that holds small packets which contain bulb sockets, bulbs and wires, lenses, magnets, balance scales and pliers. In front of the learning board is a microscope. Several rugs are thrown around the floor. On another table are a dozen soda bottles sealed with glue and lying sideways, filled with colored water.

The room looks like a cheerful circus tent. In the center of it all, within the rocking chair, and cradling a newborn in her arms, is Mrs. Hawkins.

The 30 children in the class are seated in groups of six at five of what she calls “departments.” Each department is composed of six desks pushed together to create a table. One of the groups is doing math, another something that they call “math strategy.” A third is doing reading. Of the other two groups, one is doing something they describe as “mathematics art”—painting composites of geometric shapes—and the other is studying “careers,” which on this morning is a writing exercise about successful business leaders who began their lives in poverty. Near the science learning board a young-looking woman is preparing a new lesson that involves a lot of gadgets she has taken from a closet.

“This woman,” Mrs. Hawkins tells me, “is a parent. She wanted to help me. So I told her, ‘If you don’t have somebody to keep your baby, bring the baby here. I’ll be the mother. I can do it.’ ”

As we talk, a boy who wears big glasses brings his book to her and asks her what the word salvation means. She shows him how to sound it out, then tells him, “Use your dictionary if you don’t know what it means.” When a boy at the reading table argues with the boy beside him, she yells out, “You ought to be ashamed. You woke my baby.”

After 15 minutes she calls out that it is time to change their tables. The children get up and move to new departments. As each group gets up to move to the next table, one child stays behind to introduce the next group to the lesson.

“This is the point of it,” she says. “I’m teaching them three things. Number one: self-motivation. Number two: self-esteem. Number three: you help your sister and your brother. I tell them they’re responsible for one another. I give no grades in the first marking period because I do not want them to be too competitive. Second marking period, you get your grade on what you’ve taught your neighbors at your table. Third marking period, I team them two-and-two. You get the same grade as your partner. Fourth marking period, I tell them, ‘Every fish swims on its own.’ But I wait a while for that. The most important thing for me is that they teach each other.…

“All this stuff”—she gestures at the clutter in the room—“I bought myself because it never works to order things through the school system. I bought the VCR. I bought the rocking chair at a flea market. I got these books here for ten cents apiece at a flea market. I bought that encyclopedia”—she points at the row of World Books—“so that they can do their research right here in this room.”

I ask her if the class reads well enough to handle these materials. “Most of them can read some of these books. What they cannot read, another child can read to them,” she says.

“I tell the parents, ‘Any time your child says, “I don’t have no homework,” call me up. Call me at home.’ Because I give them homework every night and weekends too. Holidays I give them extra. Every child in this classroom has my phone.”

Cradling the infant in her lap, she says, “I got to buy a playpen.” The bottles of colored water, she explains, are called “wave bottles.”

The children make them out of plastic soda bottles which they clean and fill with water and food coloring and seal with glue. She takes one in her hand and rolls it slowly to and fro. “It shows them how waves form,” she says. “I let them keep them at their desks. Some of them hold them in their hands while they’re at work. It seems to calm them: seeing the water cloud up like a storm and then grow clear.…

“I take them outside every day during my teacher-break. On Saturdays we go to places like the art museum. Tuesdays, after school, I coach the drill team. Friday afternoons I tutor parents for their GED [high school equivalency exam]. If you’re here this afternoon, I do the gospel choir.”

When I ask about her own upbringing, she replies, “I went to school

here in Chicago. My mother believed I was a ‘gifted’ child, but the system did not challenge me and I was bored at school. Fortunately one of my mother’s neighbors was a teacher and she used to talk to me and help me after school. If it were not for her I doubt that I’d have thought that I could go to college. I promised myself I would return that favor.”

At the end of class I go downstairs to see the principal, and then return to a second-floor room to see the gospel choir in rehearsal. When I arrive, they’ve already begun. Thirty-five children, ten of whom are boys, are standing in rows before a piano player. Next to the piano, Mrs. Hawkins stands and leads them through the words. The children range in age from sixth and seventh graders to three second graders and three tiny children, one of whom is Mrs. Hawkins’s daughter, who are kindergarten pupils in the school.

They sing a number of gospel songs with Mrs. Hawkins pointing to each group—soprano, alto, bass—when it is their turn to join in. When they sing, “I love you, Lord,” their voices lack the energy she wants. She interrupts and shouts at them, “Do you love Him? Do you?” They sing louder. The children look as if they’re riveted to her directions.

“This next song,” she says, “I dreamed about this. This song is my favorite.”

The piano begins. The children start to clap their hands. When she gives the signal they begin to sing:

Clap your hands! Stamp your feet! Get on up Out of your seats! Help me Lift ’em up, Lord! Help me Lift ’em up!

When a child she calls “Reverend Joe” does not come in at the right note, Mrs. Hawkins stops and says to him: “I thought you told me you were saved! ”

The children smile. The boy called “Reverend Joe” stands up a little straighter. Then the piano starts again. The sound of children clapping and then stamping with the music fills the room. Mrs. Hawkins waves her arms. Then, as the children start, she also starts to sing.

Help me lift ’em up, Lord! Help me lift ’em up!

There are wonderful teachers such as Corla Hawkins almost everywhere in urban schools, and sometimes a number of such teachers in a single school. It is tempting to focus on these teachers and, by doing this, to paint a hopeful portrait of the good things that go on under adverse conditions. There is, indeed, a growing body of such writing; and these books are sometimes very popular, because they are consoling.

The rationale behind much of this writing is that pedagogic problems in our cities are not chiefly matters of injustice, inequality or segregation, but of insufficient information about teaching strategies: If we could simply learn “what works” in Corla Hawkins’s room, we’d then be in a position to repeat this all over Chicago and in every other system.

But what is unique in Mrs. Hawkins’s classroom is not what she does but who she is. Warmth and humor and contagious energy cannot be replicated and cannot be written into any standardized curriculum. If they could, it would have happened long ago; for wonderful teachers have been heroized in books and movies for at least three decades. And the problems of Chicago are, in any case, not those of insufficient information. If Mrs. Hawkins’s fellow fifth grade teachers simply needed information, they could get it easily by walking 20 steps across the hall and visiting her room. The problems are systemic: The number of teachers over 60 years of age in the Chicago system is twice that of the teachers under 30. The salary scale, too low to keep exciting, youthful teachers in the system, leads the city to rely on low-paid subs, who represent more than a quarter of Chicago’s teaching force. “We have teachers,” Mrs. Hawkins says, “who only bother to come in three days a week. One of these teachers comes in usually around nine-thirty. You ask her how she can expect the kids to care about their education if the teacher doesn’t even come until nine-thirty. She answers you, ‘It makes no difference. Kids like these aren’t going anywhere.’ The school board thinks it’s saving money on the subs. I tell them, ‘Pay now or pay later.’ ”

But even substitute teachers in Chicago are quite frequently in short supply. On an average morning in Chicago, 5,700 children in 190 classrooms come to school to find they have no teacher. The number of children who have no teachers on a given morning in Chicago’s public schools is nearly twice the student population of New Trier High School in nearby Winnetka.

“We have been in this class a whole semester,” says a 15-year-old at Du

Sable High, one of Chicago’s poorest secondary schools, “and they still can’t find us a teacher.”

A student in auto mechanics at Du Sable says he’d been in class for 16 weeks before he learned to change a tire. His first teacher quit at the beginning of the year. Another teacher slept through most of the semester. He would come in, the student says, and tell the students, “You can talk. Just keep it down.” Soon he would be asleep.

“Let’s be real,” the student says. “Most of us ain’t going to college.… We could have used a class like this.”

The shortage of teachers finds its parallel in a shortage of supplies. A chemistry teacher at the school reports that he does not have beakers, water, bunsen burners. He uses a popcorn popper as a substitute for a bunsen burner, and he cuts down plastic soda bottles to make laboratory dishes.

Many of these schools make little effort to instruct their failing students. “If a kid comes in not reading,” says an English teacher at Chicago’s South Shore High, “he goes out not reading.”

Another teacher at the school, where only 170 of 800 freshmen graduate with their class, indicates that the dropout rate makes teaching easier. “We lose all the dregs by the second year,” he says.

“We’re a general high school,” says the head of counseling at Chicago’s Calumet High School. “We have second and third grade readers.… We hope to do better, but we won’t die if we don’t.”

At Bowen High School, on the South Side of Chicago, students have two or three “study halls” a day, in part to save the cost of teachers. “Not much studying goes on in study hall,” a supervising teacher says. “I let the students play cards.… I figure they might get some math skills out of it.”

At the Lathrop Elementary School, a short walk from the corner lot where Dr. King resided in North Lawndale, there are no hoops on the basketball court and no swings in the playground. For 21 years, according to the Chicago Tribune, the school has been without a library. Library books, which have been piled and abandoned in the lunch room of the school, have “sprouted mold,” the paper says. Some years ago the school received the standard reading textbooks out of sequence: The second workbook in the reading program came to the school before the first. The principal, uncertain what to do with the wrong workbook, was told by school officials it was “all right to work backwards.…”

This degree of equanimity in failure, critics note, has led most affluent parents in Chicago to avoid the public system altogether. The school

board president in 1989, although a teacher and administrator in the system for three decades, did not send his children to the public schools. Nor does Mayor Richard Daley, Jr., nor did any of the previous four mayors who had school-age children.

“Nobody in his right mind,” says one of the city’s aldermen “would send [his] kids to public school.”

Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as “sinkhole” when opposing funding for Chicago’s children. “We can’t keep throwing money,” said Governor Thompson in 1988, “into a black hole.”

The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago’s children. “But race,” says the Tribune, “never is far from the surface.…”

As spring comes to Chicago, the scarcity of substitutes grows more acute. On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children—the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston —are assigned to classes with no teacher.

In this respect, the city’s dropout rate of nearly 50 percent is regarded by some people as a blessing. If over 200,000 of Chicago’s total student population of 440,000 did not disappear during their secondary years, it is not clear who would teach them.

In 1989, Chicago spent some $5,500 for each student in its secondary schools. This may be compared to an investment of some $8,500 to $9,000 in each high school student in the highest-spending suburbs to the north. Stated in the simplest terms, this means that any high school class of 30 children in Chicago received approximately $90,000 less each year than would have been spent on them if they were pupils of a school such as New Trier High.

The difference in spending between very wealthy suburbs and poor cities is not always as extreme as this in Illinois. When relative student needs, however, have been factored into the discussion, the disparities in funding are enormous. Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality. The need is greater in Chicago, and its children, if they are to have approximately equal opportunities, need more than the children who attend New Trier. Seen in this light, the $90,000 annual difference is quite startling.

Lack of money is not the only problem in Chicago, but the gulf in

funding we have seen is so remarkable and seems so blatantly unfair that it strikes many thoughtful citizens at first as inexplicable. How can it be that inequalities as great as these exist in neighboring school districts?

The answer is found, at least in part, in the arcane machinery by which we finance public education. Most public schools in the United States depend for their initial funding on a tax on local property. There are also state and federal funding sources, and we will discuss them later, but the property tax is the decisive force in shaping inequality. The property tax depends, of course, upon the taxable value of one’s home and that of local industries. A typical wealthy suburb in which homes are often worth more than $400,000 draws upon a larger tax base in proportion to its student population than a city occupied by thousands of poor people. Typically, in the United States, very poor communities place high priority on education, and they often tax themselves at higher rates than do the very affluent communities. But, even if they tax themselves at several times the rate of an extremely wealthy district, they are likely to end up with far less money for each child in their schools.

Because the property tax is counted as a tax deduction by the federal government, home-owners in a wealthy suburb get back a substantial portion of the money that they spend to fund their children’s schools— effectively, a federal subsidy for an unequal education. Home-owners in poor districts get this subsidy as well, but, because their total tax is less, the subsidy is less. The mortgage interest that homeowners pay is also treated as a tax deduction—in effect, a second federal subsidy. These subsidies, as I have termed them, are considerably larger than most people understand. In 1984, for instance, property-tax deductions granted by the federal government were $9 billion. An additional $23 billion in mortgage-interest deductions were provided to homeowners: a total of some $32 billion. Federal grants to local schools, in contrast, totaled only $7 billion, and only part of this was earmarked for low-income districts. Federal policy, in this respect, increases the existing gulf between the richest and the poorest schools.

All of these disparities are also heightened, in the case of larger cities like Chicago, by the disproportionate number of entirely tax-free institutions—colleges and hospitals and art museums, for instance—that are sited in such cities. In some cities, according to Jonathan Wilson, former chairman of the Council of Urban Boards of Education, 30 percent or more of the potential tax base is exempt from taxes, compared to as little as 3 percent in the adjacent suburbs. Suburbanites, of course, enjoy the use of these nonprofit, tax-free institutions; and, in the case of private

colleges and universities, they are far more likely to enjoy their use than are the residents of inner cities.

Cities like Chicago face the added problem that an overly large portion of their limited tax revenues must be diverted to meet nonschool costs that wealthy suburbs do not face, or only on a far more modest scale. Police expenditures are higher in crime-ridden cities than in most suburban towns. Fire department costs are also higher where dilapidated housing, often with substandard wiring, and arson-for-profit are familiar problems. Public health expenditures are also higher where poor people cannot pay for private hospitals. All of these expenditures compete with those for public schools. So the districts that face the toughest challenges are also likely to be those that have the fewest funds to meet their children’s needs.

Many people, even those who view themselves as liberals on other issues, tend to grow indignant, even rather agitated, if invited to look closely at these inequalities. “Life isn’t fair,” one parent in Winnetka answered flatly when I pressed the matter. “Wealthy children also go to summer camp. All summer. Poor kids maybe not at all. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, for two weeks. Wealthy children have the chance to go to Europe and they have the access to good libraries, encyclopedias, computers, better doctors, nicer homes. Some of my neighbors send their kids to schools like Exeter and Groton. Is government supposed to equalize these things as well?”

But government, of course, does not assign us to our homes, our summer camps, our doctors—or to Exeter. It does assign us to our public schools. Indeed, it forces us to go to them. Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school —and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.

In Illinois, as elsewhere in America, local funds for education raised from property taxes are supplemented by state contributions and by federal funds, although the federal contribution is extremely small, constituting only 6 percent of total school expenditures. State contributions represent approximately half of local school expenditures in the United States; although intended to make up for local wealth disparities, they have seldom been sufficient to achieve this goal. Total yearly spending—local funds combined with state assistance and the small amount that comes from Washington—ranges today in Illinois from

$2,100 on a child in the poorest district to above $10,000 in the richest. The system, writes John Coons, a professor of law at Berkeley University, “bears the appearance of calculated unfairness.”

There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If they learn how much less they are getting than rich children, we are told, this knowledge may induce them to regard themselves as “victims,” and such “victim- thinking,” it is argued, may then undermine their capability to profit from whatever opportunities may actually exist. But this is a matter of psychology—or strategy—and not reality. The matter, in any case, is academic since most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts. They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. It is a waste of time to worry whether we should tell them something they could tell to us. About injustice, most poor children in America cannot be fooled.

Children, of course, don’t understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

“These kids are aware of their failures,” says a fourth grade teacher in Chicago. “Some of them act like the game’s already over.”

By fifth or sixth grade, many children demonstrate their loss of faith by staying out of school. The director of a social service agency in Chicago’s Humboldt Park estimates that 10 percent of the 12- and 13-year-old children that he sees are out of school for all but one or two days every two weeks. The route from truancy to full-fledged dropout status is direct and swift. Reverend Charles Kyle, a professor at Loyola University, believes that 10 percent of students in Chicago drop out prior to their high school years, usually after seventh or eighth grade—an estimate that I have also heard from several teachers. This would put the city’s actual dropout rate, the Chicago Tribune estimates, at “close to 60 percent.”

Even without consideration of these early dropouts or of the de facto dropouts who show up at school a couple of times a month but still are listed as enrolled—excluding all of this and simply going by official school board numbers—the attrition rates in certain of the poorest neighborhoods are quite remarkable. For children who begin their school

career at Andersen Elementary School, for instance, the high school dropout rate is 76 percent. For those who begin at the McKinley School, it is 81 percent. For those who start at Woodson Elementary School, the high school dropout rate is 86 percent. These schools—which Fred Hess of the Chicago Panel on School Policy and Finance, a respected watchdog group, calls “dumping grounds” for kids with special problems—are among the city’s worst; but, even for children who begin their schooling at Bethune and then go on to nearby Manley High, the dropout rate, as we have seen, is 62 percent.

Not all of the kids who get to senior year and finish it and graduate, however, will have reading skills at high school level. Citywide, 27 percent of high school graduates read at the eighth grade level or below; and a large proportion of these students read at less than sixth grade level. Adding these children to the many dropouts who have never learned to read beyond the grade-school level, we may estimate that nearly half the kindergarten children in Chicago’s public schools will exit school as marginal illiterates.

Reading levels are the lowest in the poorest schools. In a survey of the 18 high schools with the highest rates of poverty within their student populations, Designs for Change, a research center in Chicago, notes that only 3.5 percent of students graduate and also read up to the national norm. Some 6,700 children enter ninth grade in these 18 schools each year. Only 300 of these students, says Don Moore, director of Designs for Change, “both graduate and read at or above the national average.” Those very few who graduate and go to college rarely read well enough to handle college-level courses. At the city’s community colleges, which receive most of their students from Chicago’s public schools, the non- completion rate is 97 percent. Of 35,000 students working toward degrees in the community colleges that serve Chicago, only 1,000 annually complete the program and receive degrees.

Looking at these failure rates again—and particularly at the reading scores of high school graduates—it is difficult to know what argument a counselor can make to tell a failing student that she ought to stay in school, except perhaps to note that a credential will, statistically, improve her likelihood of finding work. In strictly pedagogic terms, the odds of failure for a student who starts out at Woodson Elementary School, and then continues at a nonselective high school, are approximately ten to one. The odds of learning math and reading on the street are probably as good or even better. The odds of finding a few moments of delight, or maybe even happiness, outside these dreary schools are better still. For

many, many students at Chicago’s nonselective high schools, it is hard to know if a decision to drop out of school, no matter how much we discourage it, is not, in fact, a logical decision.

The one great exception in Chicago is the situation that exists for children who can win admission to the magnet or selective schools: The Chicago Tribune has called the magnet system, in effect, “a private school system … operated in the public schools.” Very poor children, excluded from this system, says the Tribune, are “even more isolated” as a consequence of the removal of the more successful students from their midst.

The magnet system is, not surprisingly, highly attractive to the more sophisticated parents, disproportionately white and middle class, who have the ingenuity and, now and then, political connections to obtain admission for their children. It is also viewed by some of its defenders as an ideal way to hold white people in the public schools by offering them “choices” that resemble what they’d find in private education. “Those the system chooses to save,” says the Tribune, “are the brightest youngsters, selected by race, income and achievement” for “magnet schools where teachers are hand-picked” and which “operate much like private institutions.”

Children who have had the benefits of preschool and one of the better elementary schools are at a great advantage in achieving entrance to selective high schools; but an even more important factor seems to be the social class and education level of their parents. This is the case because the system rests on the initiative of parents. The poorest parents, often the products of inferior education, lack the information access and the skills of navigation in an often hostile and intimidating situation to channel their children to the better schools, obtain the applications, and (perhaps a little more important) help them to get ready for the necessary tests and then persuade their elementary schools to recommend them. So, even in poor black neighborhoods, it tends to be children of the less poor and the better educated who are likely to break through the obstacles and win admission.

The system has the surface aspects of a meritocracy, but merit in this case is predetermined by conditions that are closely tied to class and race. While some defend it as, in theory, “the survival of the fittest,” it is more accurate to call it the survival of the children of the fittest—or of the most favored. Similar systems exist in every major city. They are defended stoutly by those who succeed in getting into the selective schools.

The parallel system extends to elementary schools as well. A recent conflict around one such school illustrates the way the system pits the middle class against the poor. A mostly middle-income condominium development was built close to a public housing project known as Hilliard Homes. The new development, called Dearborn Park, attracted a number of young professionals, many of whom were fairly affluent white people, who asked the school board to erect a new school for their children. This request was honored and the South Loop Elementary School was soon constructed. At this point a bitter struggle ensued. The question: Who would get to go to the new school?

The parents from Dearborn Park insist that, if the school is attended by the children from the projects—these are the children who have lived there all along—the standards of the school will fall. The school, moreover, has a special “fine arts” magnet program; middle-class children, drawn to the school from other sections of Chicago, are admitted. So the effort to keep out the kids who live right in the neighborhood points up the class and racial factors. The city, it is noted, had refused to build a new school for the project children when they were the only children in the neighborhood. Now that a new school has been built, they find themselves excluded.

The Dearborn parents have the political power to obtain agreement from the Board of Education to enter their children beginning in kindergarten but to keep the Hilliard children out until third grade—by which time, of course, the larger numbers of these poorer children will be at a disadvantage and will find it hard to keep up with the children who were there since kindergarten. In the interim, according to the New York Times, the younger children from the project are obliged to go to class within “a temporary branch school” in “a small, prefabricated metal building surrounded on three sides by junkyards.”

The Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance tells the press that it “is only fair” to let the kids from Hilliard Homes share in the resources “that the middle-class kids enjoy.” The panel also notes that poorer children do not tend to bring the top kids down. “It is more likely that the high-achieving kids will bring the others up.” But the truth is that few middle-class parents in Chicago, or in any other city, honestly believe this. They see the poorer children as a tide of mediocrity that threatens to engulf them. They are prepared to see those children get their schooling in a metal prefab in a junkyard rather than admit them to the beautiful new school erected for their own kids.

The conflict around South Loop Elementary in Chicago helps to

illustrate some of the reasons for the reservations that black leaders sometimes voice about the prospect of a fully implemented plan for “schools of choice”—a notion strongly favored by the White House and, particularly, by Mr. Bush: If the children of the Hilliard project are successfully excluded from the magnet school across the street, how much harder will it be to get those children into magnet schools in other sections of the city? And will those children “choose” to go to “schools of choice” if it is made clear they are not wanted? This is an example of the ways that people may be taught to modify and to restrict their choices. The parents, of course, conditioned already by a lifetime of such lessons, may not even need to have their dreams further restricted. The energy to break out of their isolation may have atrophied already.

School boards think that, if they offer the same printed information to all parents, they have made choice equally accessible. That is not true, of course, because the printed information won’t be read, or certainly will not be scrutinized aggressively, by parents who can’t read or who read very poorly. But, even if a city could contrive a way to get the basic facts disseminated widely, can it disseminate audacity as well? Can it disseminate the limitless horizons of the middle class to those who have been trained to keep their eyes close to ground?

People can only choose among the things they’ve heard of. That is one problem that a “choice” plan must confront. But it is no less true that they can only choose the things they think they have a right to and the things they have some reason to believe they will receive. People who have forever been turned down by neighborhoods where they have looked for housing and by hospitals where they have looked for care when they were ill are not likely to have hopeful expectations when it comes to public schools.

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a “choice” plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn? Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair.

There are conscientious people who believe that certain types of “choice” within the public schools can help to stimulate variety and foster deeper feelings of empowerment in parents. There are also certain models—in East Harlem in New York, for instance—which suggest that

this is sometimes possible; but these models are the ones that also place a high priority on not excluding children of the less successful and less knowledgeable parents and, in the East Harlem situation, they are also models that grew out of social activism, and their faculty and principals continue to address the overarching inequalities that render their experiment almost unique. Without these countervailing forces—and they are not often present—“choice” plans of the kind the White House has proposed threaten to compound the present fact of racial segregation with the added injury of caste discrimination, further isolating those who, like the kids at Hilliard Homes, have been forever, as it seems, consigned to places nobody would choose if he had any choice at all.

In a system where the better teachers and the more successful students are attracted to the magnet and selective schools, neighborhood schools must settle for the rest. “I take anything that walks in,” says the principal of Goudy Elementary School.

Far from the worst school in Chicago, Goudy’s building is nonetheless depressing. According to Bonita Brodt, a writer for the Chicago Tribune who spent several months at Goudy during 1988, teachers use materials in class long since thrown out in most suburban schools. Slow readers in an eighth grade history class are taught from 15-year-old textbooks in which Richard Nixon is still president. There are no science labs, no art or music teachers. There is no playground. There are no swings. There is no jungle gym. Soap, paper towels and toilet paper are in short supply. There are two working bathrooms for some 700 children.

These children “cry out for something more…. They do not get it,” says Ms. Brodt, whose Tribune article I have relied upon for this description of a school in trouble.

“Keisha, look at me,” an adult shouts at a slow reader in a sixth grade class. “Look me in the eye.” Keisha has been fighting with her classmate. Over what? As it turns out, over a crayon. The child is terrified and starts to cry. Tears spill out of her eyes and drop onto the pages of her math book. In January the school begins to ration crayons, pencils, writing paper.

Keisha’s teacher is a permanent sub who, according to the Tribune, doesn’t want to teach this class but has no choice. “It was my turn,” the teacher says. “I have a room of 39 overage, unmotivated sixth and seventh graders.… I am not prepared for this. I have absolutely no idea of what to do.”

“All right, we must read,” another teacher at Goudy announces to a

third grade class. She stands in the middle of the room, her glasses askew, holding a teacher’s manual that tells her what to do. The room is in chaos. A child is passing out red construction paper to her friends. Another is busy at the pencil sharpener.

The teacher looks around and blinks and eyes the child at the pencil sharpener. The child at the pencil sharpener says, “I got to sharpen my pencil.”

“Your pencil is sharp,” the teacher says. The child makes a face and breaks her pencil point to spite the teacher. Three years ago, the Tribune explains, this teacher received “official

warning” at another elementary school. Transferred here, but finding herself unable to control the class, she was removed in March. Instead of firing her, however, the principal returned her to the children for their morning reading class. It is a class of “academically deficient children.” But the teacher does not know how to teach reading.

On the third floor, in a barren-looking room, a teacher observed by the Tribune’s reporter gives a sharp tongue-lashing to his 33 sixth graders. “If you’re stupid, sit there like a dummy,” he says to a boy who cannot estimate a quotient.

To punish the children for their poor behavior, he makes them climb and then descend three flights of stairs for half an hour.

“I’m the SOB of the third floor,” he says. The bleakness of the children’s lives is underlined by one of Goudy’s

third grade teachers: “I passed out dictionaries once.… One of my students started ripping out the pages when he found a word. I said, ‘What are you doing? You leave the pages there for the next person.’ And he told me, ‘That’s their problem. This is my word.’ ”

Children who go to school in towns like Glencoe and Winnetka do not need to steal words from a dictionary. Most of them learn to read by second or third grade. By the time they get to sixth or seventh grade, many are reading at the level of the seniors in the best Chicago high schools. By the time they enter ninth grade at New Trier High, they are in a world of academic possibilities that far exceed the hopes and dreams of most schoolchildren in Chicago.

“Our goal is for students to be successful,” says the New Trier principal. With 93 percent of seniors going on to four-year colleges—many to schools like Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Brown and Yale—this goal is largely realized.

New Trier’s physical setting might well make the students of Du Sable

High School envious. The Washington Post describes a neighborhood of “circular driveways, chirping birds and white-columned homes.” It is, says a student, “a maple land of beauty and civility.” While Du Sable is sited on one crowded city block, New Trier students have the use of 27 acres. While Du Sable’s science students have to settle for makeshift equipment, New Trier’s students have superior labs and up-to-date technology. One wing of the school, a physical education center that includes three separate gyms, also contains a fencing room, a wrestling room and studios for dance instruction. In all, the school has seven gyms as well as an Olympic pool.

The youngsters, according to a profile of the school in Town and Country magazine, “make good use of the huge, well-equipped building, which is immaculately maintained by a custodial staff of 48.”

It is impossible to read this without thinking of a school like Goudy, where there are no science labs, no music or art classes and no playground—and where the two bathrooms, lacking toilet paper, fill the building with their stench.

“This is a school with a lot of choices,” says one student at New Trier; and this hardly seems an overstatement if one studies the curriculum. Courses in music, art and drama are so varied and abundant that students can virtually major in these subjects in addition to their academic programs. The modern and classical language department offers Latin (four years) and six other foreign languages. Elective courses include the literature of Nobel winners, aeronautics, criminal justice, and computer languages. In a senior literature class, students are reading Nietzsche, Darwin, Plato, Freud and Goethe. The school also operates a television station with a broadcast license from the FCC, which broadcasts on four channels to three counties.

Average class size is 24 children; classes for slower learners hold 15. This may be compared to Goudy—where a remedial class holds 39 children and a “gifted” class has 36.

Every freshman at New Trier is assigned a faculty adviser who remains assigned to him or her through graduation. Each of the faculty advisers— they are given a reduced class schedule to allow them time for this— gives counseling to about two dozen children. At Du Sable, where the lack of staff prohibits such reduction in class schedules, each of the guidance counselors advises

420 children. The ambience among the students at New Trier, of whom only 1.3

percent are black, says Town and Country, is “wholesome and refreshing,

a sort of throwback to the Fifties.” It is, we are told, “a preppy kind of place.” In a cheerful photo of the faculty and students, one cannot discern a single nonwhite face.

New Trier’s “temperate climate” is “aided by the homogeneity of its students,” Town and Country notes. “.… Almost all are of European extraction and harbor similar values.”

“Eighty to 90 percent of the kids here,” says a counselor, “are good, healthy, red-blooded Americans.”

The wealth of New Trier’s geographical district provides $340,000 worth of taxable property for each child; Chicago’s property wealth affords only one-fifth this much. Nonetheless, Town and Country gives New Trier’s parents credit for a “willingness to pay enough … in taxes” to make this one of the state’s best-funded schools. New Trier, according to the magazine, is “a striking example of what is possible when citizens want to achieve the best for their children.” Families move here “seeking the best,” and their children “make good use” of what they’re given. Both statements may be true, but giving people lavish praise for spending what they have strikes one as disingenuous. “A supportive attitude on the part of families in the district translates into a willingness to pay …,” the writer says. By this logic, one would be obliged to say that “unsupportive attitudes” on the part of Keisha’s mother and the parents of Du Sable’s children translate into fiscal selfishness, when, in fact, the economic options open to the parents in these districts are not even faintly comparable. Town and Country flatters the privileged for having privilege but terms it aspiration.

“Competition is the lifeblood of New Trier,” Town and Country writes. But there is one kind of competition that these children will not need to face. They will not compete against the children who attended Goudy and Du Sable. They will compete against each other and against the graduates of other schools attended by rich children. They will not compete against the poor.

It is part of our faith, as Americans, that there is potential in all children. Even among the 700 children who must settle for rationed paper and pencils at Goudy Elementary School, there are surely several dozen, maybe several hundred, who, if given the chance, would thrive and overcome most of the obstacles of poverty if they attended schools like those of Glencoe and Winnetka. We know that very few of them will have that opportunity. Few, as a result, will graduate from high school; fewer still will go to college; scarcely any will attend good colleges. There will be more space for children of New Trier as a consequence.

The denial of opportunity to Keisha and the superfluity of opportunity for children at New Trier High School are not unconnected. The parents of New Trier’s feeder districts vote consistently against redistribution of school funding. By a nine-to-one ratio, according to a recent survey, suburban residents resist all efforts to provide more money for Chicago’s schools.

Efforts at reform of the Chicago schools have been begun with a new wave of optimism every ten or 15 years. The newest wave, a highly publicized restructuring of governing arrangements that increases the participation of the parents in their children’s schools, was launched in 1989. There are those who are convinced that this will someday have a payoff for the children in the poorest schools. Others regard it as a purely mechanistic alteration that cannot address the basic problems of a segregated system isolated by surrounding suburbs which, no matter what the governing arrangements in Chicago, will retain the edge provided by far higher spending and incomparable advantages in physical facilities and teacher salaries. It is, in any case, too soon to draw conclusions. A visitor in 1991, certainly, will see few comprehensive changes for the better.

Certain schools are obviously improved. Goudy, for example, is more cheerful and much better managed than it was three years ago. There is a new principal who seems to be far more demanding of his teachers than his predecessor was, and there are a number of new teachers, and there have been major structural improvements.

Goudy, however, has received so much adverse publicity that it was expected, and predictable, that it would get some extra funds to ward off any further condemnation. School boards, threatened by disturbing reportage, frequently make rapid changes in the schools that are spotlighted by the press. Limited resources guarantee, however, that such changes have to be selective. Extra funds for Goudy’s children mean a little less for children somewhere else.

Conditions at Du Sable High School, which I visited in 1990, seem in certain ways to be improved. Improvement, however, is a relative term. Du Sable is better than it was three or four years ago. It is still a school that would be shunned—or, probably, shut down—if it were serving a white middle-class community. The building, a three-story Tudor structure, is in fairly good repair and, in this respect, contrasts with its immediate surroundings, which are almost indescribably despairing. The school, whose student population is 100 percent black, has no campus and

no schoolyard, but there is at least a full-sized playing field and track. Overcrowding is not a problem at the school. Much to the reverse, it is uncomfortably empty. Built in 1935 and holding some 4,500 students in past years, its student population is now less than 1,600. Of these students, according to data provided by the school, 646 are “chronic truants.”

The graduation rate is 25 percent. Of those who get to senior year, only 17 percent are in a college-preparation program. Twenty percent are in the general curriculum, while a stunning 63 percent are in vocational classes, which most often rule out college education.

A vivid sense of loss is felt by standing in the cafeteria in early spring when students file in to choose their courses for the following year. “These are the ninth graders,” says a supervising teacher; but, of the official freshman class of some 600 children, only 350 fill the room. An hour later the eleventh graders come to choose their classes: I count at most 170 students.

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