From The Country Club To The Ghetto
Sarah Jeffery
When I was a child, I do not think I really
understood that there was a difference between myself and the kids from
school. That difference was money. Although my parents both come from
middle class backgrounds, the neighborhood we live in is filled with
families of a high socioeconomic status. I grew up in a wealthy
neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, yet from ages five to eighteen, I
went to public school with people of (primarily) lower social and
economic classes. St. Paul public schools are comparable to many
inner-city schools, including inner-city Chicago, which William Julius
Wilson discusses in When Work Disappears. I will be comparing my
neighborhood with the neighborhood my high school is located in to show
the two different worlds I grew up in. I do not feel connected to
my neighborhood because my childhood and teenage years were spent in
contact with people at public school from different social and economic
classes. Although I do not mean to assume that most people at my high
school come from the neighborhood around it, I believe it is much more
representative of inner-city public school students than my home’s
census tract.
My neighborhood’s census tract is four miles long
with a population of 2,097 people, while my high school’s census tract
is 1.6 miles long with a population of 3,330 people (Census, 2000).
Both of these areas are urban, yet there is a clear difference in
density of population. The main reason for this difference is space;
yards and houses are bigger in my neighborhood, in contrast to the
smaller, closely spaced houses near the high school. There is a
parallel between the density of this inner-city neighborhood and the
density of children in classrooms at inner-city schools. Wilson states
that overcrowding and inadequate teachers are a problem in inner-city
Chicago public schools (Wilson, 1996: 8). Jonathon Kozol also addresses
the issue of overcrowding in his essay “Savage Inequalities.” He
describes public school classrooms in East St. Louis, a particularly
destitute city, as having thirty to thirty five students in one class.
He quotes the president of the teachers’ union saying that increased
class size will have “an unimaginable impact [on the students]. . . .
If you have a high school teacher with five classes each day and
between 150 and 175 students . . . , it’s going to have a devastating
effect” (quoted in Kozol, 2001: 327). I had classes in high school
where there were not enough desks for each student. It is extremely
hard for a teacher to keep order in a class that large, resulting in
wasted time calling the class to order, taking attendance, handing back
homework, handing out assignments, and the like. There is little
one-on-one interaction between teachers and students because there
simply is not time to see every student. Although the president did not
fully explain what the “devastating effect” would actually be, my own
experience implies that cutting teachers and increasing class size is
more of an educational loss than the financial loss the city would
suffer by paying more teachers.
Many kids in my neighborhood have had entirely
different experiences than mine at school. In my census tract, 61
percent of children in kindergarten through twelfth grade attend
private schools, in severe contrast to 8 percent in my high school
tract (Census, 2000). My sisters and I did not play or interact much
with the private school kids, two families of which lived only two or
three houses down the street, because we felt we did not have much in
common with them. Part of this was certainly my own shyness at meeting
new people, but part of it was also a feeling of exclusion from
conversations they had involving school. At ten or twelve years old, I
was not familiar with many private schools in the area, and neither
were they with public schools. I did not feel inferior because I went
to a public school; it has in fact become a sense of pride that I
“survived” public school. Rather, I did not feel connected with my
neighborhood as a community because I did not have strong ties to the
people there.
One topic Wilson discusses about inner-city
joblessness in Chicago is social organization within a neighborhood. He
writes, “Neighborhoods in which adults are able to interact in terms of
obligations, expectations, and relationships are in a better position
to supervise and control the activities and behavior of children”
(Wilson, 1996: 20). He applies social organization to keeping
inner-city Chicago children safe from drug dealers and crime, but it
applies to my situation as well. I have never truly been part of my
neighborhood’s social organization because I have not lived there as an
adult. In children, however, one can often find a reflection of the
adults influencing them. If my parents had been good friends with the
other families, surely they would have encouraged us to play with the
other children. However, my parents have always been closer to families
from the public schools. We have also been involved in church, but the
one we attend is three miles away and not part of our neighborhood. My
sisters and I are not troublemakers, so one might wonder how we stayed
on the straight moral path despite a disconnected social organization
within our own neighborhood, which Wilson argues leads to
disintegration of the community.
Although my parents did not converse as much with
adults in our neighborhood, they still had contact with other adults
who had the same values. Even though they lived in different
neighborhoods, there appears to be a strong social organization across
neighborhoods. Residents of Wilson’s inner-city Chicago could benefit
from interactions with safer, more affluent neighborhoods. However,
they may have more difficulty with these interactions because not only
do they have problems getting jobs where they can meet people from
different social/economic classes, they cannot physically get out of
their neighborhood due to redlining (Class notes, March 2, 2005).
Although the children at my school grew up in entirely different
neighborhoods, our experiences at school together allowed us to forget
social and economic class differences. Perhaps the disconnection
between neighborhood and school comes from economic class versus social
class; my parents lived in the same area as wealthy people, but, coming
from middle class backgrounds themselves, they connected, as did my
sisters and I, more with the public school families.
References
Census, 2000. Online at: http://factfinder.census.gov
Kozol, Jonathon. 2001. “Savage Inequalities.” Pages 325-331 in Patricia
A. Adler and Peter Adler, editors, Sociological
Odyssey: Contemporary Readings in Sociology. Belmont,
California: Wadsworth/Thomon Learning.
Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When
Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York, New
York: Vintage Books.
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