News Smackdown! Ghetto vs. Gay, XXX-tra Special! One Night Only!

Photo credit here.

The attention-grabbing article in this week's NYT Mag was the one on openly gay middle schoolers, but I found it less than groundbreaking. Middle schoolers are frenziedly constructing their own identities: what else is new? Though I did enjoy the quote from 12-year-old Kera, a self-identified bisexual, who declared that "most middle school guys are total, complete morons." Succinctly put.

The more interesting article was actually Maggie Jones's piece on the D.C.-area SEED School, a charter which boards low-income minority children five nights of the week in an effort to protect them from the vagaries of their own neighborhoods.

I share with the charter's critics the reservation that "SEED and other charter schools skim the cream of inner-city youth, attracting the families who are motivated to fill out th paperwork to apply to the school. Meanwhile, some of the most high-risk kids, whose parents are barely functional and place more value on their child's being home every day to baby-sit or do housework than they do on education, are left behind."

I'm also disturbed by the school's ability to boot difficult students (SEED boasts a 97% college-acceptance rate, unheard of in the inner city, but Jones reports that the school loses 20% of its class every year) and by the reported per-student annual public funds expenditure of $35,000 -money directed to the lottery-winning SEED students presumbly at the expense of their contemporaries who remain in the failing public schools.

Yet, I'm impressed with SEED, and with the article, for finally calling attention to that silent but ornery elephant in the room of urban educational debate: the enormous cultural dislocation required of every low-income child who "makes it." We don't ask white middle-class children to abandon their communities' norms and mores when they enter college or the job market, but this is exactly what a poor black child must do to succeed in the mainstream.

We talk about lengthening the school day, about improving teacher performance and curriculum mapping. But I very seldom hear anyone discussing the nearly unthinkable difficulty of turning your back on everything you know. SEED staff and students, at least, speak openly about the difficulty of moving between universes, of cultivating the ability to operate biculturally: "I don't mix my worlds," 17-year-old Reneka explains. "You feel bad when you are different from people in your own neighborhood," senior Triston says.

Jones, a perceptive chronicler, describes Triston's older brother Parry playing basketball on those two days of the week he is not ensconced at SEED:

"He still plays there most weekends, though he gas grown weary of the neighborhood boys' talk about SEED as 'D Block.' He no longer tries to set them straight and avoids telling them about his plans for college. Instead, at the end of each game, Parry heads in one direction, the boys in another...among the lessons SEED instilled in Triston and Parry was that to move ahead, they had to keep moving beyond home."

Is it right to ask these children to leave behind their communities? Is it right to ask them not to?