The pull of pop culture

OPINION:

We talk, we all talk, a lot about education. School choice, class size, testing and accountability, teacher pay and per-pupil spending all rank high on the school-reform agenda because those very aspects seemingly affect what matters most inside the classroom. Perhaps we should turn the spotlight on another area of the schoolhouse — the hallway.

A Maryland English teacher by the name of Lynn H. Fox has written a provocative opinion piece in a weekly newspaper called The Gazette (published by The Washington Post Co.). He poignantly lays out a constant conflict that teachers and students alike confront each school day. It’s called the “hallway culture vs. the classroom culture.”

“If you were to spend five minutes in my school’s hallways at class change or at the end of the day, you would despair for our country’s future. Students screaming obscenities at each other, male students bullying and degrading, in the most graphic and unmistakable ways, female students (and the females usually laughing hysterically at each insult), fights between residents of one neighborhood vs. another, and enough anger to blow up a city block or, for that matter, a city.”

Haven’t seen that story on the 6 o’clock news, have we?

Mr. Fox introduces us to this untold story through one of his students, David, (a pseudonym, of course), who stands one day in the threshold uncertain of whether he wants to enter the classroom culture or the hallway culture — “50 Cent or Shakespeare, the pull of the popular or the push of schooling.” David chooses the former.

Lament the lamentable because there are Davids in schoolhouses all across America making such choices, the wrong choices, and there are Lynn Foxes who are not only trying to rock the noggins of the Davids in their midst with knowledge but also get teenage knuckleheads to understand that one wrong turn could lead them down a road to nowhere.

The hallway culture is not unlike the “street culture.” It’s that our refusal to confront the obvious has allowed both “cultures” to claim the lives of so many youths.

It’s good to know that David is at least in the schoolhouse, and that we have an opportunity every time he turns up to get him inside the classroom. (Remember, as long as a child is enrolled in a school, that school gets local, state and federal dollars on his behalf.) But it’s incumbent upon us to ask what happens when even the hallway culture becomes as boring as the Iliad, which could teach teens a thing or two about channeling anger. Or what happens when that hallway becomes too small a pond?

Our dropout and graduation rates speak as much about the future of America as do crime and juvenile statistics, and critically important to those facts is that the warning signs were around long before CDs replaced eight-track tapes. Indeed, the seminal 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report is as startling as the images burnished by Mr. Fox.

• Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate.

• About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds can be considered functionally illiterate.

• Functional illiteracy among minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.

• Average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched.

• Many 17-year-olds do not possess the “higher order” intellectual skills we should expect of them.

• Nearly 40 percent of 17-year-olds cannot draw inferences from written material.

• Only one-fifth of 17-year-olds can write a persuasive essay.

• Only one-third of 17-year-olds can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.

Again, that report came out in 1983. The seeds for David were sown a long time ago. Look what we hath wrought.

The state-to-state variable in calculating dropout and graduation rates leaves many in disagreement about whether rates or higher or lower since the nation-at-risk study. Suffice it say, however, that the federal government’s calculations paint a dire portrait. Data released last year show the D.C. graduation rate at 59 percent, which effectively means that students in the capital of the free world have a 50-50 shot at graduating from high school.

It’s not hard to figure out that while David lives in Prince George’s County, Md., the wealthiest black county in America, his chances of rejecting the hallway culture for the classroom culture are growing slimmer as he grows older, and if David drops out and never learns the difference between a black comedy and a black comic, then we haven’t learned anything either. As Mr. Fox writes, David’s “decision is a fundamental battle that rages inside almost every public high school in the country. But surprisingly, after all the words used to describe our broken schools, very few educational researchers or critics talk about the choice facing David” — contemporary culture vs. unpopular class.

Our future — America’s future — depends on making sure there are fewer and fewer Davids as the calendar rolls along. We are our brother’s keeper.