I took American History I and II concurrently in Night School in an ill-understood attempt to graduate high school on time. A lot of factors landed me in night school, most obviously my habit of skipping school for other activities. I believe I failed American History I for failing to take the final exam.
My high school did not offer APUSH; I might have been assigned to an APUSH class based on my designation as “gifted.” I was among the small group of students who got SAT prep as an assigned class. I took interesting English electives like “The Devil in Literature” vs being assigned to standard 11th grade English lit. My “devil” class could have been a Women’s Studies class at college- space filled with girls who thought too much and wore little or no makeup. My SAT prep class was filled with other people who had mastered taking standardized tests. Questions first, then the passages. My 10th grade World History class was more heterogenous; a white, male basketball player routinely copied my answers during tests, often tapping my elbow that was obscuring his view of my paper. Our World History teacher was an older man, small with piercing eyes and a face full of scruffy beard. His sartorial style was sensible shoes, dried not ironed dress shirt and slacks. He tried to contextualize the World History we were formed to learn within present-day (early 1980s) geopolitical dynamics. The Cold War, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Revolution.
In contrast, the teacher I had for American History I – roughly 1492-1865, taught the class like the content was settled points of fact, and discreet from our day-to-day lived experiences. It was a pageant of Manifest Destiny without much reflection on the vanquished, enslaved, or marginalized. The teacher, a more clean-cut guy -taller, khakis, polos and ironed plaid shirts hurried through the material. There was little to no discussion.
I recall asking why the textbook had so little information – a mere 2.5 pages dedicated to Black history generally and slavery specifically during the antebellum period (it was pretty mum on the origins of the peculiar institution, the 3/5th compromise compartmentalized like Athena being born from Zeus’ head). I was one of maybe 3-5 Black students in a class of 25 or so. There were some Asian-American students too, approximately 2-3. The teacher more or less said the book focused on what it was important for us to know and quickly went back to some mundane point about Andrew Jackson or James Polk. I was offended and probably embarrassed. I remember the unsaid point – that the history of people who looked like me was unimportant for me but especially my white classmates to know.
I went to a high school that was 90%+ White, predominately Italian-American, situated in the neighborhood that would later be the site of the beating death (lynching) of Yusef Hawkins in 1989. My assignment to this school was part of an attempt by the NYC Board of Education to desegregate neighborhood schools. As I recall, no White students were awarded lottery placements at schools in predominately Black schools. I think the lottery only flowed one way.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess that my landing at my high school didn’t come about because I wanted to go to a really great high school in Flatbush but my home address would have landed me at a “problematic” high school in my mother’s neighborhood. My father’s address was zoned to an even more “problematic” high school. My parents, although divorced couldn’t see me attending either school, one being my mother’s alma mater, and the other a school that relatives a generation or two older than me had attended. I did audition into one of the performing arts high school and applied to the aviation vocational high school. I won a seat in both! But my wayward ways made my folks leery of allowing me to travel to Manhattan or Queens daily. I had no high school set towards the end of 9th grade. So, my mother and grandmother hatched a plan to get me into the school of my dreams.
A trip to NYC Bd of Ed Brooklyn headquarters ended with me and my mother learning that the even side of my grandparent’s street was zoned to Midwood High; the odd side was zoned to a lottery-system designed to send Black students to some of the least diverse high schools in the borough. Midwood was among the choices. The helpful clerk theorized no one gets their first choice, so we chose my high school as #1, a similar school as #2 and Midwood as #3 and so on. Winner, winner, chicken dinner – I got my first choice. My commute was long – two trains or the world’s longest bus ride depending on which parent I was residing with. To access a safe, well-resourced high school required an hour ride each way.
The weight of Whiteness had already been felt in my earlier educational days. My parents declined to bus me to a more robust gifted program due to the discrimination my father had faced in the neighborhood where the school was. Then there was the austerity spending of the 1970s; school budgets were slashed, w/ art and music instruction cut in K-5 schools. I would have paid money for them to cut PE, dodgeball was the go-to sadistic choice all too often. I had one Black teacher during grades K-5. The overall tone of my K-5 experience both at home and at school was “behave yourself.” We lived in a nice residential neighborhood near some streets that were almost exclusively 100% white. Our street wasn’t. I remember asking my mother where those children went to school – they didn’t go to my school or the local Catholic school (the preferred choice of our increasingly West Indian neighbors). My mother shrugged, mentioning private schools on the other side of Prospect Park before reminding me to mind my own business. I have fond recollections of Miss Aronson and Miss Harrison, my kindergarten and first grade teachers. I’m relatively neutral about the other teachers that followed. Mrs. Second Grade liked to pop you with a ruler if you misbehaved, and thanks to austerity cuts, the assistant principal who handled discipline was also my fourth grade teacher. I lost recess for two weeks for melting crayons on the radiator pipe. My report cards were pretty consistent, high grades for academics and low grades for unsatisfactory behavior.
In junior high and high school my behavior went largely unnoticed or unremarked upon. I wasn’t a fighter or quarrelsome teen; other girls who looked like me dutifully filled those rolls. And in high school, there were endless blonde and brunette girls to write up for smoking in the bathroom. The vast majority of our Black super-minority went unseen for the most part in high school. Except when some jerk got in his feelings from time to time. Then there would be rumors that we – the Black kids- would be chased to the subway. We traveled as a pack on those afternoons. Since most of my Black classmates hailed from Bed-Stuy, particularly the Marcy projects, that meant taking the F to Jay Street, transferring for the C to catch the shuttle to Prospect Park station if going to my mother’s. Or quickly boarding a bus along the run if going to my dad’s.
My second junior high was entirely devoid of white people – not a teacher or administrator or student. Set in the Brownsville neighborhood, site of a parental uprising demanding community control in the late 1960s and powered through the inducements of White Flight, including the riots of the 1960s and low-cost GI Bill mortgages backed by restrictive covenants – we weren’t welcome in Levittown, my father’s childhood neighborhood, a place where he had had white neighbors, was entirely Black by the late 1970s. I received an exemplarily education at JHS 275, groomed by teachers to be a credit to my race. I also saw schoolmates that were not identified as gifted receive lesser educations, sometimes left to their own distractions, often managed to keep disruptions to the bare minimum. NYC Public used a simple numbering system for classes both in elementary and junior high/intermediate schools. You instantly knew the presumed intelligence level of a class by the number or letter code after the grade level (i.e. 7-1, 7-2, etc.).
It wouldn’t be junior high without interpersonal conflict. I had a dedicated band of tormentors until I beat one of the girls up. She kinda made me do it. We used to see each other on the commute to Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge- she went to a different school for something health-career related. I was polite but unfriendly. Now I remember how that commute from the center to the margin shrank all us bussed in from Black Brooklyn. And perhaps that was and is the work of school integration. To assimilate and homogenize us into one distinct dominant culture. To teach us our proper role and place in our society. Cable Television, and the Internet have made this increasingly difficult. “Patriotic Education” requirements from federal and state governments are a tacit acknowledgement of this difficulty. These Tik-Tok kids have old guys pressed.
Overall, Night School was a positive experience. We were students expected to not amount to much – teen mothers, kids expelled earlier in their academic careers, the not-so-bright, and rule breakers like me. Our classes met at Erasmus High, Barbra Streisand’s and Henry Winkler’s alma mater two nights a week for a semester, each class 90 minutes long. Not much home work, but frequent tests. I passed each class with an 100% – the equivalent of an A. And came to know the joys of a KFC two-piece-and-a-biscuit followed by one of their strawberry shortcake parfait desserts. Most importantly, the teachers did a good job of linking the past to the present and stressing why it was important for us to know the story of America. We were encouraged to see ourselves as rising citizens with value. We were valued at Night School. Our Miseducation disrupted.
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