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JDA: At your school, did the students in the college prep track look different from the students in the non-college prep track? PN: Yes, mostly white kids at the top. Mostly non-white kids at the bottom. JDA: Did student background or language ever play a role in the tracking process? PN: Yeah, except that in my school almost everybody was working class. We didn’t have middle-class, or affluent kids in my school, so race was probably more the significant factor. There were some differences, but the differences in terms of class were fairly narrow. JDA: How do you explain that? PN: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with private preparation. The kids who start out with more support at home do better and get more support in school. And then on top of that you have issues of tracking, lower expectations for kids in the lower tracks, and no focus on providing opportunity to kids to get to the more challenging courses. JDA: How many of the students you started off with went to college? PN: 10% JDA: And how did students prepare for college? PN: Most of the kids who went to college from my school went to community college. The best students went to the state university and they attended college prep courses. JDA: Was there college counseling available? PN: Very minimal. JDA: And was this available to everyone or only certain students? PN: Starting mostly in 11th-12th grade you started getting college advising. JDA: For everybody, all tracks? PN: That’s a good question. I don’t know cause I don’t know what’s happened to the other kids. My guess is that it wasn’t. My own counselor was discouraging me from applying to Ivy League schools. JDA: If you had to venture a guess, what did the students who did not go to college end up doing? PN: The biggest employers in my community were Entenmann’s Bakery and Pilgrims State Mental Hospital, the largest mental hospital in the world. For most people, those were the jobs that they wanted because they were fairly good paying jobs. The problem was that they were dead end jobs, so even though people started out at a descent hourly rate, most people I know who worked there, still do. And those were the lucky ones. JDA: And the ones that weren’t so lucky? PN: You either got factory jobs or no jobs at all. JDA: And would you say that these were the paths of those who lucked out? Were those working class opportunities similar to the racial patterns that you saw? PN: Except that there were white kids, too, who also I think went nowhere. JDA: Was it clear to you that there was a racialized pattern about who was going to college and who was ending up in these other jobs? PN: Yes. JDA: What do you know about your school today? Are all students placed on a pathway to college? PN: No. I think it’s pretty much the same. It’s more diverse now. There are a lot more Latinos there than when I was there. JDA: And do you get the sense that students are able to gain access to a college going curriculum if they want it? PN: My sense is that it would take a lot of advocacy on the part of the parents to get them in, especially if they are not recommended by a teacher. JDA: Why do you think, given the distance between when the Brown decision was made and where we are today, that this reproduction of inequalities is still happening at that school? PN: One reason is that the school is just following certain patterns that have been pushed for a long time. It serves a working class population and so the expectation always is that we were preparing these kids for work and not for college. I would say that, to a certain degree, the expectations of the parents are similar. Most of the parents have not expected their kids to go to college because they themselves are workers and that’s what they expect for their kids. So that’s a factor in this, too. I mean the school I went to was huge, it had about 5000 students. It was warehousing the kids. That was their mission. We had security gates, guards, all these things…and that was 25 years ago when I was a high school student. JDA: And who do you think is responsible for the perpetuation of these patterns? PN: Well, a lot if it is due to the political economy of the country and the fact that schools reflect the existing inequalities, rather than working to undo them. So I would say a lot of the problems lie outside of schools, but schools are also complicit. JDA: How would you change the situation? PN: I think you have to start by changing the teachers, or at least the mindset of the people who teach there, so that they are troubled by the perpetuation and reproduction of the patterns and be able to ask themselves how and in what ways they contribute to these patterns. So I think that you have to start there. Because once you change attitudes and beliefs, than you can start to change behavior and practice. JDA: What is your sense of the kind of future the students there are being prepared for? PN: That's a good question. What are they being prepared for? Because I think its even less clear now what kind of work is available. JDA: What do you think, given the decrease in availability of those jobs, are their future plans? PN: I don’t know because I haven’t spent enough time there to really probe those kinds of questions. But I do know that the military is a big draw in that school. JDA: Are they on campus recruiting a lot? PN: Yeah, and it’s the kind of place where kids of all colors, a lot of them, choose the military as an option. JDA: What do you think your school needs to provide all students with the opportunity to move on to college? PN: I think the main thing is that they have to provide them with the ability to think well, give them strong academic skills so they they have options and the ability to make informed choices about their futures. But I think that at a school like the one I went to there are a lot of obstacles in the way to doing that. JDA: Do you think that all the students at that school would be able to take the classes they need if they were offered? PN: No. I think you can't start in high school to address this because kids often have such weak preparation before high school, so if you put them into rigorous courses, you set them up for failure. You really have to address the early grades . Not that there is nothing that you can do in high school, but the strategies are different. Just de-tracking and putting kids into very challenging courses is not a solution unless you also have some place where you can develop their skills. JDA: What actions would you recommend to students or parents interested in providing college-going opportunities? PN: I would say that we’ve got to start earlier. We need to start talking in middle school about college, the future and what it takes to get there. We have to demystify the whole process and experience for them. We have to expand their horizons. There are some kids who have never been to a college. So we need to take them places so that they can see what its like to be a college student from their background. Let them visit the campuses so they can talk to students about their experiences. JDA: The Brown decision held out the broad promise of a society no longer shaped by the racism of Jim Crow segregation. What difference can equitable schooling make in today’s struggle against that kind of racism. PN: The Brown decision was always about, ultimately, creating more equitable schools. The problem was that we used integration as the vehicle to get there and we lost sight of the fact that an integrated school, even if you can get one, does not necessarily mean that its going to be an equitable school. And the issues are not identical. The need is for much greater clarity about what equity is and what it looks like when you’ve implemented an agenda. It needs to be much clearer. Because in schools that have been practicing inequality for so long inequality has become second nature. ^tcla |
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TCLA would like to hear your thoughts on this issue's Black & Brown on Brown! 