Breathe In Breathe Out

I've been breathing in more than breathing out lately. The writing part of my brain seems to have decided to curl up in a corner and take a long nap. But I have just finished a semester of tutoring middle school children in reading as a volunteer with the amazing Reading Partners program that has just expanded to Baltimore, and it has been one of the most moving and rewarding experiences of my life.

62% of our students are reading below grade level.

They are smart, their parents are engaged, they have wonderful teachers and administrators, but they are behind.

That's not so surprising when you consider that 25% of them are homeless. Many of them are dealing with some other instability in their family life. Substance abuse and crime are quotidian experiences for a lot of them. Just getting breakfast and eight hours of sleep is an exception rather than the rule at times. Parents may have to keep their kids at home if they want to make it to work since most of the available work is so far away they have to leave well before anyone is at the school to let the kids in.

And yet. These kids jumped in the deep end with so much energy and determination. They are mostly referred to the program by their teachers who are truly incredible. My favorite (shut up, I can have a favorite in here. Don't tell on me) Big D improved three whole levels in as many months. Their achievements humble me.

I don't remember learning how to read. It was a world that I couldn't stand not having access to so I broke down the door. My mother tells of me at a very young age trying to hide the fact that I could read once I entered kindergarten because I was so embarrassed by all the attention it invited. I would turn a book upside down whenever an adult entered the room.

Part of me was really worried that I wouldn't be able to help these wonderful kids as I have virtually no understanding of what they are going through. But the Reading Partners curriculum is so well designed that even an idiot like me can just follow the lesson plan and make a difference. It didn't matter that I had zero training in education, all I had to do was follow the directions and lo and behold, success!

Nationally, my kids aren't all that unusual. They live in a relatively wealthy state that was just singled out for the fourth year in a row for educational excellence, but they live in one of those pockets that exist everywhere. A little satellite of crappy schools, crappy housing, and almost no amenities. The closest grocery store is further than I could deal with and there are no corner stores to run to for milk or eggs. Transportation to the parts of the city that anyone might want to go to for culture or a job is iffy at best, and the population was purposefully shuttered away to one of the most isolated areas in Baltimore by planners who caved to prejudice at a time when African Americans were just beginning to make some headway in this country. The children of the Great Migration were thriving in the Northern cities their parents had fled to seeking things like the right to vote, or to graduate from high school, or just to see a paycheck instead of owing a sharecropper landlord money for seeds from the spring.

They face logistics I doubt I could navigate. And they are so isolated and cut off from the rest of the city, they must feel decidedly unwanted. Which, to be perfectly honest, they are. The police patrol their streets like an occupying force, never on foot, always in SUVs or helicopters like some sort of alien invasion. And some assholes think they should be banned from any area a tourist might visit. Assuming they could get there in the first place.

They have almost no contact with children from other backgrounds.

This is the thing that I find most depressing. Studies have shown that children who are educated in a mixed environment preform better. The kids with the greatest hurdles to overcome do better, and the kids that one would expect to do well do well without losing any ground academically and are better able to excel in social settings which expose them to people from different backgrounds, a.k.a. real life. The benefits of diversity in schools is one of those things that impacts outcome more than spending, classroom size, or almost any other measurable factor. It is simply the easiest and cheapest way to raise the outcome for all students at the expense of none that any community can exploit. But our schools are becoming, if anything, more segregated and our children less familiar with each other than they have been for generations.

I can't fix any of that. I can vote, I can write letters, but at the end of the day, the only real difference I can make right here right now, is to get in the trenches and sit down with a kid, one on one, and try to help him or her climb over that wall.