Even kids who are able to nurture dreams and work hard to realize these dreams are likely to be crippled.
When teachers at Frank W. Ballou Senior High School in Washington, D.C., talk about the crab bucket syndrome, they are describing a terrible fact of life at their inner-city school. That is, the way kids who have surrendered to the culture of gangs and drugs react to a kid who is trying to escape it: They do their best to pull him back into the bucket.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article (May 26, 1994), reporter Ron Suskind talks about Cedric Jennings, a 16-year-old student who is trying to escape from the bucket. He's knocking himself out to make it to college -- MIT is his dream. But as big a job as this would be for a 16-year-old anywhere, it looks nearly impossible for someone attending Ballou.
According to Suskind, students at Ballou are more likely to be schooled in the violence of the streets than in math or history. This year, one student was shot by another during lunch period, a second was hacked with an ax and a body turned up near the school parking lot. The dropout rate at Ballou is astronomical -- 20 percent of the sophomores who registered last September were gone by Thanksgiving. But staying on doesn't mean kids are devoted students. Only a tiny percent get average grades ofB or better, and Suskind quotes a teacher who says that conducting a class is a lot like "crowd control."
What does all this mean for the few students like Cedric who are eager to learn? While teachers are occupied with 17-year-olds who read at a fifth-grade level or with kids shouting obscenities, those interested in learning are left to take care of themselves. As one teacher says, they "have to put themselves on something like an independent study course to really learn -- which is an awful lot to ask of a teenager." But what Cedric is put through by the other kids makes school a million times more difficult. Lots of adults remember how they were sometimes taunted at school for being a "brain" or a "grind." At Ballou, the abuse never stops.
Suskind describes a school assembly at which outstanding students were supposed to receive awards. Fearing that these kids wouldn't come and subject themselves to sneers and catcalls, school officials kept the awards a secret. "It sends a terrible message," says the assistant principal, "that doing well here means you better not show your face." However, the message is accurate: One unfortunate honoree had to be ordered to come to the stage as other kids shouted "Nerd!" at him. But bad as it is, this kind of public humiliation is not the worst. Cedric has been threatened with a gun and is regularly beaten up.
The kids who sneer and threaten and brutalize explain their behavior by calling students like Cedric traitors. They say that academic achievement is a "white thing" and kids who work hard in school are showing disrespect for black people -- as if the only way to be authentically black is to be a gang member or a dope pusher. But underlying this reaction, of course, is despair. As one teacher puts it, these kids "think they're supposed to drown."
Cedric has been relatively lucky. His mother has supported and encouraged him since he was a tiny child. But even kids who are able to nurture dreams and work hard to realize them are likely to be crippled. A recent Ballou graduate who has gone on to college finds that, for all her hard work and success in high school, she is poorly prepared to do college work -- and she wonders if she can possibly make it. Suskind's description of life at Ballou raises a number of painful questions. Are we going to lose a whole generation of inner-city youngsters? What can we do, right now, to reverse what looks like an irreversible process? I don't know the answers to these big questions, but one thing is clear. Every inner-city school, no matter how blighted and hopeless, has a core of Cedrics. It's immoral to leave them in a situation where their efforts to learn -- to do what society wants them to do -- will harm them. And for every Cedric, there are other youngsters who would like to learn and achieve but who don't dare take on the mob. To say, as some people do, that leaving the gang members and bullies in with the achieving kids will somehow improve them is like saying that putting a group of Harvard or Princeton students into Sing Sing would improve the hardened criminals. That's ridiculous. We need to help violent kids, but letting them rule the schools isn't helping them, and it's destroying the kids who want to save themselves. That's not decent, wise or practical.