An Unequal Education

He asked me later, in a voice of sweet compassion, "Are you going to die?"

He asked me the same thing once about my father, too. My father, though, was in his 90s, so the child's worry in this instance seemed more understandable. His astonishment about my own age baffled me. Why would the age of "nearly 61" strike any child in America as old enough to bring to mind the imminence of death?

One reason, as a teacher later pointed out to me, is that so many men in this South Bronx community do not live much past 55. Homicide and illness--heart disease, untreated cancer, asthma, diabetes, AIDS, and other ills--have taken a high toll on people in the middle years of life within this neighborhood. Of those who do live well past 60, a significant majority are women. For these and other reasons, older men are far less visible in children's daily lives in this community than elsewhere in our nation, and children's speculations about ages and their estimates or life expectancy are frequently distorted as a consequence.

Why is this little story about Elio of relevance to librarians?

It is directly relevant, I think, because young children in impoverished sections of our cities need wide-open windows to the world of infinite variety beyond the walls that our society has built around their lives, and there are not too many windows quite so wide as those provided by spectacular resources in a well-endowed school library. Yet this, ironically--a fairly normal feature in the schools that serve most children in this wealthiest of nations--is not often found these days in public schools that serve the destitute and hypersegregated sections of our urban areas, and nowhere is this deprivation more extreme than in our nation's largest city.

Nearly 30 years ago, as student populations in the New York City public schools began to turn from ethnic white to black and brown, the city started to dismantle its school libraries. A fiscal crisis in the middle 1970s provided what appeared to be a neutral rationale for cutting back the funds that paid for books and for the skilled librarians who, up until that time, had introduced them to young children. Libraries in many elementary schools were soon reduced to little more than poorly stocked collections of torn, tired-looking, or outdated books. As student populations grew and school construction was postponed by scarcity of funds, libraries themselves were soon co-opted to be used as classroom space. Librarians were fired or, more diplomatically, "retired"--and, as they retired, not replaced. Books were frequently consigned to spaces scarcely larger than coat closets.

Families in some wealthier white neighborhoods raised private funds to stock their children's public schools with books and hire certified librarians. Parents in the poorest neighborhoods, of course, did not have funds to do this. Thus it was that children who already were most likely to find good supplies of books at home found even more at school, while those who had the least to stimulate their reading appetites at home would henceforth find much less to stir their love of learning in their public schools.

Few forms of theft are quite so damaging to inner-city children as the theft of stimulation, cognitive excitement, and aesthetic provocation by municipal denial of those literary treasures known to white and middle-class Americans for generations. It is, moreover, the one form of theft that is too often irreversible. Children are children only once. If these opportunities for early stimulation have been stolen from them, they can never be returned.

Libraries, admittedly, are not the only places in which children of poor people have a chance to broaden their horizons and expand the reference points of their vocabulary and imagination. Books, however--and not simply books as inert objects shoved into a barren room or closet in a darkened corner of an overcrowded school, but books in artful presentation, books displayed and offered as theatrical enticements, books, in short, in beautiful school libraries developed with the artfulness of skilled librarians--remain the clearest window to a world of noncommercial satisfactions and enticements that most children in poor neighborhoods will ever know. To shut those windows is to close down one more opening to democratic amplitude and one more opportunity for fully realized cultural existence.

A few of the principals in elementary schools in the South Bronx have managed to create a modest library with charitable funds or by creative uses of available resources. Some churches also do their best to pull together book collections for the children in the area. These efforts, though, depend on philanthropic whim and fiscal sleight-of-hand in use of tiny budgets that don't usually provide for salaried librarians.

Most of the kids I know in the South Bronx are avid readers. Each time I visit, I bring books they've asked me for, or books donated by my publisher, or books I've picked up on my own. I know the tastes of many of the children now; then too, like many people of my age, I have my favorite books and try to push the children, when I can, beyond contemporary preferences too often linked to vulgarly commercial programs on TV. I am a cultural elitist, maybe, in this sense. I prefer The Secret Garden and The Little Prince to Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club. I do my best to sell the kids on titles that I love.

"Did you bring books with you today?" the children ask each time they see me at their school or after school. Whatever I bring, the children always take it gratefully.

I often think how high some of these eager kids could fly if gifts like these were not the whimsical donations of a random visitor but the entitlements of culture. Elio's teacher loves him dearly and she uses her own salary to buy him books. Countless teachers do this for their students in poor neighborhoods. If it were not for the vicious and persistent inequalities of education in such bastions of apparently eternalized apartheid as New York, these acts of cultural transmission would take place each day as matters of routine, and not as acts of charity.

School inequity remains a fact of life throughout our nation, and the schools of New York State remain among the nation's most unequal. The city spends only about half as much to educate a little boy Elio's age in public schools of the South Bronx as nearby suburbs such as Great Neck and Manhasset spend each year on children of the same age. If Elio attended school in either of these wealthy suburbs, he would have a teacher who is being paid approximately $20,000 more than what the teachers in his South Bronx neighborhood receive. He would have far fewer classmates in his room, so that his teacher could provide him with a great deal more of her solicitous attention. He would also go to school within a splendidly appointed building with a marvelous school library, and he would find within that library a trained librarian who has the skill to seize upon his youthful appetite for knowledge and direct him to the titles that will not just satisfy his hunger but provoke him to want even more.

Denial of these normal aspects of a democratic culture to the children of the poor cannot be justified as "prudent stewardship" of public funds or as an unintended consequence of accidental or archaic systems of financial allocation. It is a conscious act of social demarcation: a shameful way of building barriers around a child's mind, of starving intellect, of amputating dreams.

A suit demanding fiscal equity for urban schools is in the courts of New York State today. The suit, brought by a coalition of poor New York City districts and respected advocates for children such as Aspira and Educators for Social Responsibility, has been joined by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus of New York. Among the battery of witnesses who have appeared in court are Harold Levy, Interim Chancellor of New York City's schools, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and the distinguished scholar Linda Darling-Hammond. Similar suits are under way, in court, or still in preparation, in more than a dozen sections of the nation. School librarians should be involved in these court actions, as participants, as strategists, as witnesses. They are the bearers of the book, as those of us who grew up in a more old-fashioned age still like to say. Who better than they to testify to what it means when all the gifts that they can bring will never be received?

A seven-year-old like Elio cannot stand up in court and testify to what this social order steals from him. It is for those who love the written word, who treasure books and all the glories, all the mysteries, and all the joys they can unveil, to testify on his behalf. Elio won't be a child for much longer. If school librarians, both individually and through the leaders they select, won't stand and speak for him in this regard, it's hard to know who will.