By David McGrath David
McGrath teaches English at College of DuPage Published August 10, 2003
The current financial crises facing
school districts throughout the country, due to the underfunded
federal Leave No Child Behind Act, and its consequential
rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scramble by states and property-taxing
districts, will have a deleterious effect on an entire generation of
students if not soon resolved.
I was a teacher in the Chicago
Public Schools in 1979 when a combination of factors from
administrative ineptitude and election politics, to charges of
institutional racism, precipitated a similar crisis and a negative
balance in the bank accounts of the Chicago Board of
Education.
To
the general public, it was yet another in a long line of front-page
debacles for the city schools. And although this time it included
payless paydays for teachers still on the job, little sympathy was
elicited for a 25,000 member workforce generally reviled for the
strikes it staged approximately every other September.
There
was no money for textbooks. No money for paper for handouts, tests
or worksheets. No mimeograph fluid. No money for repair and
replacement of audio-visual equipment. Money was running out for
heat, for phones, for roofing repairs, for buses.
With no
books for my 140 pupils, I filled out dozens of forms for free
sample subscriptions to magazines. I read to my high school English
students for the first two weeks, until I received the first trial
batches of Scholastic Magazine. We would use the teen-targeted
education digests for lessons in literature, composition, spelling
and vocabulary; and then I'd collect and save them all for another
group, since the trial subscriptions were good through October,
after which I had to make sure I canceled them all.
For a few
days, we were able to use the blank backs of used paper on which to
mimeograph drills, worksheets and tests for our students. When these
used sheets were exhausted, and the mimeograph fluid cans emptied,
some teachers withdrew from their savings to shop at office supply
stores for a few reams of paper, a gallon of duplicating fluid, and
a couple of boxes of colored chalk, all of which they kept under
lock and key. Others of us went back to dictating our lessons
orally--the writing exercises or vocabulary drills, in my case--for
the students to copy into their own tablets and loose-leaf folders.
And after school we would fill the blackboard with grammar rules,
examples, and verb forms (what students in other school districts
with real budgets found in glossy texts), always with pleading
side-notes to the janitors not to erase our "chalk books"
overnight.
In late fall and still without texts, teachers
started assigning library books, taxing an already meager and
ravaged collection up on the third floor; and more often than not,
the assigned books were not available, or, more likely,
inaccessible, since the library was bulging with whole classes
rerouted there because of lack of heat in classrooms on the lower
floors.
Sadly, declining attendance helped alleviate the
crisis, as students despairing of conditions that even included
out-of-order washrooms, simply stayed home.
Attempting to
improve on the bland, Spartan curriculum necessitated by zero
funding, I rented for my classroom a television and one of the early
Beta videocassettes from a furniture rental store, with plans for
some film-as-literature enrichment. But after arriving at the school
and assessing the blighted conditions among hundreds of urban
teenagers, the TV delivery men changed their minds and returned the
equipment to the store.
So I bought a cassette player for $29
at Olson Electronics, instead, and taped the WBBM weekly mystery
theater segment off of the radio. I played it in the classroom and
wrung from it lessons in listening skills, vocabulary and drama. It
was hardly a substitute for the reading, writing and language arts I
was supposed to be teaching in order to raise dismal student scores
in national achievement tests; but it was all we had
left.
Thankfully, the board was finally able to borrow some
money. Teachers drove through the snow over Christmas vacation to
word-of-mouth locations to get their first paychecks in more than a
month. A political arrangement was made, the labor contract
reinstated, and a long-range deficit spending plan mapped out. And
though history might record the crisis as having ended in December,
the lasting nature of irretrievable negative effects on Chicago's
children would forever be undetermined.
The following year,
and the year after that, I still signed up for free trial
subscriptions of Scholastic Magazine series, never confident again
in the state's will to educate its children. And though I no longer
teach in Chicago, there may still be hundreds of class sets of Scope
and Literary Cavalcade, bundled up in hemp twine in those old oak
cabinets, yellowed testimony to a failed public education system and
to upside-down societal priorities.
