In general, the ebb and flow of the children’s lives is left to them to control. Like Katie Brindle and Harold McAllister, Wendy and Willie Driver spend time hanging out with their cousins and neighborhood friends, watching television, playing games, helping with household chores, and accompanying the adults on errands. As in these other families, there are clear and decisive boundaries between adults and children. When the adults want to talk, for example, they simply tell Wendy and Willie to go out of the room; the children, without protest, get up and go. Lastly, there are significant gender differences in what the two children are allowed to do. Ms. Driver restricts her daughter’s freedom:
Willie can go out. He goes to friends’ houses, and he goes to places by himself. Whereas she is outside that door—and if I call her, she has to be [able to] hear me. If not, forget it. I won’t even let her walk to the store, a block and a half away. I will not let her walk a block and a half by herself.6
Similarly, only Wendy is required to participate in organized activities.7Compared to children in the other working-class and poor families we observed, she is unusually busy. Each week, she has a dance lesson, a Catholic class in religious instruction (CCD), and school choir practice. Unlike her middle-class counterparts, however, Wendy does not take part in these activities in order to cultivate her talents, develop her social skills, or enlarge her circle of friends. When asked what she thinks Wendy is getting from her involvement in dance class, Ms. Driver says simply:
Grace. And I guess just remembering her dances. She has no one else to depend on but herself to memorize them, and she memorizes them.
Similarly, when asked about the CCD instruction, Wendy’s mother does not, as Alex Williams’s mother would, emphasize the intellectual stimulation the classes provide. She sends Wendy to CCD because she wants to make sure that her daughter is able to be a godmother and “has a religion.” She elaborates this point, saying:
This way she’ll have all her sacraments. Even though I can’t afford a Catholic school, at least she’s getting her religion. She’s getting it this way.
Compared to the detailed answers and the animated tone we heard as middle-class parents like the Tallingers and Williamses discussed what they saw as the benefits of organized activities, Ms. Driver’s response is brief. She is more animated, though, as she reveals her hope that getting Wendy involved in extracurricular activities will keep her daughter “off the streets.” When Ms. Driver was a girl she wanted to “spend [time] with my friends and hang around on the corner with everybody else,” but her parents were “strict”:
My parents didn’t believe in that . . . My brothers could, but I couldn’t . . . So I had no choice. Either I stayed in or I did activities. So I chose the activities to keep myself busy and occupied, and it gave me a social life.
Although as a child Ms. Driver had thought the classes her parents made her take were “a waste of time,” Wendy is more positive. She likes her dance lessons (“I like to dance. It’s fun . . . You get to learn all this new stuff”), enjoys choir, and dismisses CCD as “boring.” She does not complain to her mother or Mr. Fallon about any of her activities, however. Her extracurricular commitments are not especially important to her; they do not dominate her life or the lives of her family members. The adults typically do not bring up Wendy’s classes at all; she mentions them periodically, but she does not dwell on them. Instead, her activities take a “backseat” to other topics of conversation (usually past and future family events).
DIRECTIVES: USING LANGUAGE AS A PRACTICAL TOOL
Similar to the adults in the McAllister family, both Ms. Driver and Mr. Fallon are quite directive, even authoritarian, in their child-rearing techniques. They tell the children what to do. Unlike children in middle-class families, Wendy and Willie rarely, if ever, argue with adults.
Wendy asks her mother, “Can I put the sticker on? Please?” Ms. Driver says, “We aren’t going to do that.” Wendy is silent.
Debbie, sitting in the kitchen with Mack, tells Willie, “Go in the living room.” Willie goes in without comment or protest. He watches TV.
Mr. Fallon, particularly when he is tired or exasperated, is likely to yell his directives. In some instances, Willie might “push it,” but usually, after a single protest, he falls silent:8
Willie asks if he could hold Valerie, who was in her chair. Debbie says, “No.” Willie says (in a whiny voice), “Why not? When am I going to be able to hold her?” Debbie retorts, “When you have your own baby.” Willie is silent.
Willie also sometimes needles the adults, but his approach is very different from that of Alexander Williams, for example. Willie is not trying to reason with his mother or Mr. Fallon or show them why they are wrong. Instead, he modifies his request to give it a slightly different form:
Willie wants to go out. Mack says, “No.” The phone rings and Willie rushes to answer it. Just before Willie answers it, Mack repeats, “You can’t go out.” Willie says “Hello?” and then “Just a sec,” and puts his hand over the receiver. He says, “Mack?” and Mack’s temper starts to rise. He demands loudly, “What did I say? What did I say?” Willie says, “Wait.” Mack responds in a lower tone of voice, questioning, “What?” Willie asks, “Can he come over and stay on the porch?” Mack seems to explode with anger, “What did I say? I said NO VISITORS! You can’t go out.”
Overall, Ms. Driver and Mr. Fallon use language as a tool, a practical necessity rather than an intrinsically interesting dimension of life. Neither adult is likely to urge the children to expound on a topic. In contrast to middle-class parents like Mr. and Ms. Williams, who frequently made a conscious effort to encourage Alexander’s language development, the adults in Wendy and Willie’s lives do not follow up when the children happen to mention some new piece of information. When, for example, Wendy asks her family members (one by one) if they know what a mortal sin is, her mother says, “Tell us what it is. You’re the one who went to CCD.” Wendy provides the answer, and both her mother and Mr. Fallon look at her as she speaks, but neither acknowledges her answer. They wait her out and then return to watching television.
INTERVENTIONS IN INSTITUTIONS
Wendy’s mother does not nurture her daughter’s language development like Alexander Williams’s mother does her son’s. She does not attempt to draw Wendy out or follow up on new information, such as the meaning of mortal sin. But, just like Ms. Williams, Ms. Driver cares very much about her child, and, just like Ms. Handlon, she wants to help her daughter succeed. Ms. Driver keeps a close and careful eye on Wendy’s schooling. Unlike Melanie’s mother, she is not forgetful with paperwork. She immediately signs and returns each form Wendy brings home from school and reminds her to turn the papers in to her teacher.
Debbie reminds Wendy, “Don’t forget to take those papers to school tomorrow.” To me, she explains, “They’re testing her again. So I had to sign papers to give my permission.” When I ask when the testing will happen, she says, “I don’t know when, but they’ll call us in there to go over the results and they’ll give us a written report of the results.”
Wendy is “being tested” as part of an ongoing effort to determine why she has difficulties with spelling, reading, and related language-based activities. Her mother welcomes these official efforts, but she did not request them. Unlike the middle-class mothers we observed, who asked teachers for detailed information about every aspect of their children’s classroom performance and relentlessly pursued information and assessments outside of school as well, Ms. Driver seems content with only a vague notion of her daughter’s learning disabilities. This attitude contrasts starkly with that of Stacey Marshall’s mother, for example. In discussing Stacey’s classroom experiences with field-workers, Ms. Marshall routinely described her daughter’s academic strengths and weaknesses in detail. Ms. Driver never mentions that Wendy is doing grade-level work in math but is reading at a level a full three years below her grade. Her description is vague:
She’s having problems
. . . They had a special teacher come in and see if they could find out what the problem is. She has a reading problem, but they haven’t put their finger on it yet, so she’s been through all kinds of special teachers and testing and everything. She goes to Special Ed, I think it’s two classes a day . . . I’m not one hundred percent sure—for her reading. It’s very difficult for her to read what’s on paper. But then—she can remember things. But not everything. It’s like she has a puzzle up there. And we’ve tried, well, they’ve tried a lot of things. They just haven’t put their finger on it yet.
Wendy’s teachers uniformly praise her mother as “supportive” and describe her as “very loving,” but they are disappointed in Ms. Driver’s failure to take a more active, interventionist role in Wendy’s education, especially given the formidable nature of her daughter’s learning problems. From Ms. Driver’s perspective, however, being actively supportive means doing whatever the teachers tell her to do.
Whatever they would suggest, I would do. They suggested she go to the eye doctor, so I did that. And they checked her and said there was nothing wrong there.
Similarly, she monitors Wendy’s homework and supports her efforts to read.
We listen to her read. We help her with her homework. So she has more attention here in a smaller household than it was when I lived with my parents. So, we’re trying to help her out more, which I think is helping. And with the two [special education] classes a day at the school, instead of one like last year, she’s learning a lot from that. So, we’re just hoping it takes time and that she’ll just snap out of it.
But Ms. Driver clearly does not have an independent understanding of the nature or degree of Wendy’s limitations, perhaps because she is unfamiliar with the kind of terms the educators use to describe her daughter’s needs (e.g., a limited “sight vocabulary,” underdeveloped “language arts skills”). Perhaps, too, her confidence in the school staff makes it easier for her to leave “the details” to them: “Ms. Morton, she’s great. She’s worked with us for different testing and stuff.” Ms. Driver depends on the school staff’s expertise to assess the situation and then share the information with her.
I think they just want to keep it in the school till now. And when they get to a point where they can’t figure out what it is, and then I guess they’ll send me somewhere else . . .
Wendy’s mother is not alarmed, because “the school” has told her not to worry about Wendy’s grades:
Her report card—as long as it’s not spelling and reading—spelling and reading are like F’s. And they keep telling me not to worry, because she’s in the Special Ed class. But besides that, she does good. I have no behavior problems with her at all.
Ms. Driver wants the best possible outcome for her daughter and she does not know how to achieve that goal without relying heavily on Wendy’s teachers.
I wouldn’t even know where to start going. On the radio there was something for children having problems reading and this and that, call. And I suggested it to a couple different people, and they were like, wait a second, it’s only to get you there and you’ll end up paying an arm and a leg. So I said to my mom, “No, I’m going to wait until the first report card and go up and talk to them up there.”
Ms. Driver might have placed somewhat less faith in Wendy’s teachers’ expertise had she known more about the bureaucratic rules educators in Lower Richmond School’s large urban district must contend with as they try to identify and resolve children’s learning difficulties. One teacher, speaking informally, notes that “[the district administrators] don’t want people written up.” To assign a student to a special education class full time, teachers are required to file two separate plans of intervention (each requiring a meeting with the principal, counselor, and mother), which each must be tried for 60 days before testing is permitted. The entire school year is only 180 days; thus, a minimum of two-thirds of the year would elapse before the end of the referral stage. As a practical reality, testing and placement in an appropriate classroom could not occur within the same school year, even in the extremely unlikely event that the process were to be initiated on the first day of school. The paperwork for Wendy was begun in the spring of third grade, but her “case” fell through the cracks; the referral had to be reinitiated in fourth grade. The only special help Wendy receives as a fourth-grader is access to the reading resource teacher. Had she attended an elementary school in a smaller suburban district like the one Garrett Tallinger went to, or a private school like the one Alexander Williams was enrolled in, where the educational resources were much more extensive and better funded and the bureaucratic machinery less imposing, Wendy might have received more effective attention, sooner.
Lower Richmond educators, however, tend not to stress these kinds of institutional differences as important factors in Wendy’s persistent reading problems. Instead, they often emphasize the critical role of parents. During the parent-teacher conference, Mr. Tier, Wendy’s fourth-grade teacher, expresses his outrage that she has made it to fourth grade without knowing how to read. He urges Ms. Driver to be more demanding with him and other school personnel, telling Ms. Driver in a parent-teacher conference: “If our roles were reversed—I’d be beating me on the head.”
Here, Mr. Tier suggests that Ms. Driver should take a concerted cultivation approach to her daughter’s education. She should aggressively monitor, criticize, and even badger educators rather than simply following the professionals’ advice. He shifts much of the responsibility for Wendy’s current predicament away from these expert decision makers and on to her mother, implying that had Ms. Driver taken this approach from the start, Wendy’s reading deficiency would never have been “allowed” to persist.
When Ms. Driver asks Mr. Tier to specify what she should do to help Wendy, he stresses the role of parents as leaders in developing their children’s language skills.
I would just try to get Wendy to get an interest in reading. Go to the library, find out the types of things she’s interested in, read to her, just get her—find out her interests and try to capitalize on them. And just see how far you could get. Because I think Wendy could learn how to read.
The school’s reading resource teacher, Mr. Johnson, echoes the view that, given the proper encouragement outside of school, Wendy “could learn how to read.” He adds tutoring to the list of parent-sponsored interventions.
The first thing I would do is seek some outside help. And the outside help would be—I might put her in something like a tutorial program. There is something at the Salvation Army. They have the same thing at the YMCA . . . [I’d] try to read a story and see if they can pick out any of the words, to try to develop a sight vocabulary.
Despite their agreement that Wendy could learn to read, and that parental input would be essential in her developing this skill, Mr. Tier and Mr. Johnson do not agree on the underlying cause of Wendy’s problems nor on what the most effective institutional response might be. Mr. Johnson is struck by the fact that Wendy performs at grade level in math. He believes she has a reading “phobia,” possibly compounded by other learning difficulties. In his view, it is emotional issues (a “social emotional overlay”) that are the problem. Mr. Johnson’s plan for intervention for fifth grade is to repeat the basic steps involved in reading readiness (a process normally initiated in kindergarten and continued in first grade) to “try to improve her sight vocabulary and some of her language arts skills.”
Mr. Tier and Ms. Green (Wendy’s third-grade teacher) see Wendy’s reading problems differently. Rather than diagnosing Wendy as suffering from a “phobia,” they think she may have neurological problems. In contrast to Mr. Johnson, Mr. Tier feels Wendy should be placed in special education classes full time. Mr. Tier also believes that she should repeat fourth grade. Each of Wendy’s classroom teachers, beginning in second grade, identified her as a student with learning problems and each feels that he or she tried to get additional help for her. But, as Mr. Tier puts it, somehow Wendy “slipped
through the cracks”:
Wendy, I think, slipped through the cracks . . . I firmly believe that if Wendy was a little Black girl that she would already have been in a special education type of situation. A kid in fourth grade who can’t read a first-grade reader, something is dreadfully wrong here . . . And Wendy is so cute and so sweet. She has a smile for everybody, and I think somehow or other, I think they did her a terrible disservice by just letting her go forward.
Ms. Driver is somewhat aware that the school may not have fully met its responsibilities in Wendy’s case. For instance, after the parent-teacher conference in the spring, she realizes that the teachers disagree over whether Wendy should repeat fourth grade.
I went to talk to Mr. Johnson after I saw [Mr. Tier]. He said she’s doing fine and she doesn’t need to stay back. He said the same thing—that she can’t stay back ‘cause she’s in Special Ed. He said that she’s only failing [in] reading and spelling but she’s doing fine in math and social studies, so he can’t fail her. But the other teacher (she does not use Mr. Tier’s name) said she has to stay back. They said the opposite things.
When asked for her own “gut feeling” about whether Wendy should be promoted to fifth grade, Ms. Driver says, “I think she should stay back.” Nevertheless, she seems prepared to accept whatever “the school” decides is best for Wendy. Unlike Ms. Marshall, she does not place numerous calls to educators, follow up to find out what happened at the most recent meeting, or express her opinion about what should happen next. Faced with contradictory information, Wendy’s mother seems both bewildered and intimidated by the possibility that any intervention on her part might end up introducing more errors and delays in the process of getting the best education for Wendy.9
Unequal Childhoods Page 28
