Prisoner of Second Grade

The reason the book took so long was that the task turned out to be harder than I’d expected. And I was the biggest stumbling block. Ranting on and on at the system, I became like one of those cranky old bores who just can’t get over the fact that the world won’t change to accommodate them. In truth, I’d brought much of what happened on myself. Accepting this, I adopted a more creative approach by taking up a crusade for bringing the arts back into the classroom. When this strategy swung me like a pendulum into something resembling an aging hippie, I tried centering myself through every meditation technique known to the New Age. In the process, I felt called to bear witness to the injustices many children suffer in the name of education. However, a number of superb and heartbreaking books had already chronicled this tragedy. And it was no longer news that yet another dedicated teacher had been driven from the system. Growing sullen and solitary, I fought off the despair of failure through an obsessive pursuit of the martial arts. When not striking out at punching bags, wooden blocks, sparring partners, and the air, I sat at my computer, typing and retyping the same old lines, changing this phrase or that, searching for the magic word that would open the door out of my lost life. But magic words exist only in fairy tales, and I fell into a grave depression.

The only thing the book really had going for it throughout those years was the insight provided by friends and relatives who were never shy about telling me when I sounded too whiny, vague, angry, defensive, or wrapped up in the poetry of self-justification. But the blessings came from those who could still smell the flowers. What I settled on in the end is a series of vignettes, each one a kind of open meditation, an invitation to the reader to reflect with me on the ways in which we in America are educated. To be more specific, I’ve written the book to show how policy affected me at different stages of my life. I did this by turning over the narration of the story to the poet who as a teenager got sent to the back of the school bus along with all of the arts and humanities. It was, after all, when the poet finally stood up to claim her birthright and encourage her students to do the same that the teacher was dismissed. I also found that looking at the education system through the eyes of the exile also revealed some significant and as yet unexplored reasons for the problems in our schools.

Of course, I realize the kind of anecdotal evidence presented here lacks clout in our world of experts and expensive studies. But herein lies my point. When policy is based on bureaucratic benchmarks laid down by legislative decree and mission statements funded with buckets of money, those implementing the policy become so attached to outcomes that they fail to notice what’s happening to the children. And when education is not about the individual, it’s no longer education but training. Everyone becomes the same; justice lapses into policy; and without fully realizing the consequences, we’re all caught up in a vicious cycle that has nothing—and everything—to do with education.

I know that in the final analysis I’m responsible for all the choices I made. It’s a free country, and I had every privilege of a white, upper-middle-class childhood. However, after pondering the ways policy affected my life, I not only agree with the adage that “all politics is local” but would also hasten to add that everything policymakers do is personal. My story is important, not because of what happened to me, but because the lessons I learned too late reveal what’s been missing from the last fifty years of education reform in America. I also believe my story suggests that by rethinking the problems in our schools, we may find that the solutions are not as difficult or costly as the education establishment would have us believe. « less