Why Life in High School Is More Absurd Than Ever

New York City high schools have been crazy for the 22 years of my employment as a school social worker. But recently, the convergence of No Child Left Behind, the continuing economic meltdown and “managerial fetishism” have plunged them to new depths of absurdity, despair and destruction of human potential. (Being open-mined and un-doctrinaire, I picked up the term “managerial fetishism” from an op ed by John Podhoretz in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which is happily provided free at school to enrich everyone’s intellectual development.)

My own post for the past nine years is a small high school in the Bronx —the borough which, except for a few counties on the Texas/Mexico border, is the poorest large county in the U.S. The school is art-themed, so stipulate that for us, the admissions process doesn’t select the book-ish, academically inclined kid but rather the spacey one who likes to doodle or graffiti, and our proportion of teens with special needs is high, around 25%. Over the years, guided by dedicated teachers, our students have produced some excellent art, a few graduates develop real passion and skill and annually go on to art colleges with full scholarships. However, we also have to cover the standard New York state curriculum and as the emphasis on test scores has ratcheted up, student engagement has plummeted.


Over-Testing and Disengagement

For many working class and poor students of color in NYC, disengagement begins with the third grade citywide tests. Children learn that these arbitrary exercises are something they will be judged on and that success on them is, in fact, the whole point of school. Most conclude after a couple of rounds that this is not a game they can win.

So by the time they get to high school, it’s already a recovery mission to interest and motivate them. Many students tell me, “I don’t do homework” and/or “I don’t study.” With study, they’ve concluded that they don’t remember the material anyway when the test comes, so why bother? With homework, they don’t see the return on it, they’re sick of school by 2:30 and don’t want to go home and think about school.

Besides, once puberty hits, their own world of interpersonal drama is so intense that nothing can compete with it—except possibly something that would lead to a job, an income and a future. Parents are often at work, if they have jobs, and overwhelmed and depressed if they don’t. A fair number have failed at school themselves, so don’t enforce homework completion.


Despair About Earning a Living

If the U.S. economy is improving, it sure hasn’t reached the Bronx yet. The effects of this are predictable but nonetheless tragic—and mainstream discourse never seems to draw a link to how young people perform (or don’t) in schools. Students tell me about relatives who had stable jobs, lost them from 2008 onward, and haven’t found another job since. One student reported of his mother, “She hasn’t found a job since she finished college.” More people are losing houses that the family once owned, or apartments that they rent, doubling up, becoming homeless. It’s been well documented that increases in parental income and financial stability positively affect student academic performance, so I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that decline in parental income and stability might have the opposite effect.

Just in the past couple of months, more students are reporting deaths of friends, usually 16- and 17-year-old young men, in gang violence, as paths to prosperity, achievement and social acceptance are extinguished. These are small and very locally based crews, not the nationally known ones, with shocking levels of violence—like taking a young man’s body out of the casket, in church, and shooting it up again.

A few years ago, when I’d ask students what kind of jobs they saw themselves doing as adults, I’d often hear stuff like veterinarian, forensic pathologist (obviously CSI, NCIS, Bones etc. are big), lawyer, architect--jobs that were not perhaps the most realistic possibilities for teens with low grades and reading levels. But at least they represented aspirations, and an opening for discussion, and one could get other jobs in those fields. Now I hear a sullen “I don’t know,” “ I never thought about it.” Making it more concrete, asking “Is there anybody you know, like in your family or friends, who have a job that you could see yourself doing,” I get “No.” Colleagues in other schools report similar conversations. In freshmen advisories, when teachers raise questions of college or careers, students now often say: “What’s the point of even getting a diploma? There’s no jobs out there.”


Terrorized Teachers

If students are not doing school work (because they don’t see school success leading to jobs), their teachers are working like maniacs-- because teachers have jobs and don’t want to lose them. Beyond their daily extra hours of planning lessons and grading papers, teachers are constantly bombarded with data (usually scores on various tests) that they are supposed to be reading on all of the 32 students they have in most classes. This is supposed to enable them to “differentiate instruction” for kids with various learning disabilities, and widely divergent reading levels etc.

This all intensified a few years as principals agreed to be judged on statistical indicators such as number of courses passed and four-year graduation rates, and transmitted that performance pressure to teachers. The managerial fetishism comes in with rising numbers of principals and even heads of school systems who have no prior experience working in public schools, based on the notion that a good manager can manage anything. A bunch of retired NYC teachers summed up the absurdity of that when they showed up at Hearst Publications to apply for the job vacated by Bloomberg’s chancellor appointee, Cathie Black (now, happily, resigned).

Note that I haven’t mentioned superintendents, the previous leaders of school districts in NYC. One reform under Chancellor Joel Klein was to separate the functions of supporting school development (i.e. professional development for staff at all levels) from monitoring/accountability, which are now based primarily on performance measures. So the presence of superintendents is not very evident and it’s not clear to most staff what they do. Principals complain that there’s no one organizing gatherings of principals to share best practices, and therefore principals are more isolated than ever. I heard of one principal saying to his secretary, upon hearing that his superintendent was on the line, “Take her name and number and tell her I’ll get back to her.”


Demoralized and Passive Students

Incidents of principals pressing teachers to raise Regents scores, or teachers giving test answers to students, have been documented. But what’s not well known is the perverse effect that the pressure on teachers and administrators has on students. Sensing that the staff are doing the worrying about whether they pass, students seem less motivated than ever. This is understandable on a human level, since there are few positive consequences (like job prospects) attached to doing well in school and, for students who are already used to school failure, no real negative ones. I was told by a 9th grader who received special education serves and had failed several classes: “I failed three classes but then I had credit recovery after school and the success academy at the end of the semester. I never thought high school would be so easy.”

This culture of declining student effort is also fed by the increased presence of 18- and 19-year old super-seniors who have actually given up on school, but often can’t admit this to themselves. In a better job market, they would have dropped out of school and gotten some kind of job. Now, they come to school but don’t go to most classes, get their free meals and Metrocard, hang out in hallways and bathrooms, and generally model bad behavior. They spend the day socializing with their friends. It sure beats hunting for non-existent jobs every day, or sitting around home getting yelled at by parents to go out and get a job.


What Is to Be Done?

It’s hard to talk about solutions for all this stuff, because they go way beyond the school system. I don’t believe that most public school officials and reformers have consciously elitist intentions. But structurally, in a hierarchical society, school failure serves to justify or legitimize why some people are jobless, or relegated to wage levels that nobody can actually live on. The almost universally acknowledged growth of inequality in income, wealth and life chances is a problem that pervades US society and permeates schools. Only in Lake Woebegone can all the children be above average.

So meaningful school reform, for the average urban student of color with whom I work, has to be tied to creating more jobs at a living wage. It’s unrealistic to expect 14-year-olds who have long turned off to school to become motivated to acquire knowledge for its own sake. School work has to have some connection to a future job and income. Creating those living wage jobs will require self-organization and mobilizing on the part of students, parents, communities--all of us.

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A Tale of Two City Kids (Part II)

This is the second of two articles about two young, African-American men---both abandoned by birth parents, both labeled “learning disabled"—who attended a supportive small high school in New York City. [Read Part I here.] As a school social worker, I counseled both of them. I first looked at JB, who graduated and, after two years, seems to be doing okay. Now, I’ll look at Solo, who didn’t graduate and seems like he’s lost, with his possibilities narrowing to the streets.

SOLO’S STORY

Solo, now almost 19, dropped out in senior year. Last I heard, he’d been kicked out of his adoptive parents’ house and was living in a different borough with his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend and her mother.

Solo came to us from a self-contained Special Education class in elementary school (a small class of 12 to 15 students with Individualized Educational Programs who stay together all day). This indicates that his learning disability was more significant than JB’s. He seemed a little lost and overwhelmed, shy and socially awkward coming into high school (and we didn’t have a self-contained class at that point).

During the first week of school, a cute, aggressive African-American freshman girl named Keisha took Solo under her wing and soon served as his confidante, protector and advocate. She led him to reveal to me in one of our early counseling sessions that he had been getting some pretty severe corporal punishment from his adoptive parents, whom he called Grandma and Grandpa. Best I recall, he had recently punched a wall and hurt his hand slightly, out of anger from the punishment he had received.

Solo had been with Grandma and Grandpa since he was four or five years old, didn’t know the whereabouts of his birth parents and had no contact with them. Grandpa worked for a school custodian and Grandma took care of Solo and two foster children in the house she and her husband owned. They were in their sixties, their biological kids long grown, devout Christians with a “spare the rod, spoil the child” philosophy, deep ties to relatives in the South and an old-fashioned, country shrewdness. It was one of those borderline situations where I considered calling child protective services (ACS) for excessive corporal punishment and gave Solo a stress ball so he could take out his frustrations on it rather than hurt himself or get himself into more trouble. (I think that frequently, the reason for his adoptive parents’ anger was that he played rough, broke things, didn’t want to stop playing etc.) Solo told me he thought the worst had passed and he’d be okay. At our next session, he further stated that he didn’t want ACS called because “I don’t wanna get taken away from them. They’re mostly good to me, they give me the games and clothes that I ask for.”

The school soon created a self-contained class for Solo, Keisha and three other kids. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a disaster because, in such situations, the students often feel stigmatized and have no positive peer models. So they feed, provoke and copycat each other’s dysfunctions and diss each other all day: “Ape Face,” “Stupid” etc. Also unsurprisingly, when the school abolished the self-contained class, these students resisted re-integration. They were used to being mocked by each other but they really feared being put on the spot by more demanding teachers and looking stupid in front of “normal” students.

Solo: Weaknesses and Strengths

Unlike JB, Solo had little interest in intellectual pursuits or books beyond whatever soft- core porn he could get his hands on, though he could read at a decent 5th grade level. In math, his skills were poor beyond basic whole number computations, and he didn’t know the times tables by heart. He was strong, fast and well-coordinated, good at helping Grandpa with home repairs and yard work.

Solo sought out nurturing relationships with adults, and he could be reflective and insightful in one-on-one conversations. But if he saw a curvy girl walk by, some drama brewing among acquaintances or a new game on somebody’s Play Station, any other thought was out the window. (I learned that he had previously taken some medication for ADHD but like many teens, now was refusing to take it.) He could critique himself later on—with prompting--- but he couldn’t stop himself from responding to the strongest, basest stimulus. This was a set up for trouble as he grew older, developed into a well-built and more socially adept young man, and had opportunities for actual sex.

Socially, Solo was prone to engage in crude, eight year-old boy-style teasing, laughing at the cruelest put down’s and even at someone’s obvious pain or discomfort. Yet he could also be incredibly kind and protective when he perceived others as vulnerable, and himself in a more powerful position. For example, in one of our first encounters, he was trying to help a new Latino student (from the school upstairs), who didn’t speak any English, to find the right office and get his class schedule.

Solo had obviously been scolded a lot as a child, and when he was confronted about something wrong that he had done, or simply out-talked by someone with good verbal skills, he usually laughed out of embarrassment. If it was an adult authority figure, he was likely to then become tongue-tied, say nothing and do anything to exit the situation as soon as possible. If it was a male peer, he was prone to get physical when he felt put down.

Solo: Smart to Teachers vs. Smart to Kids

Solo entered his junior year making intermittent academic efforts, cutting and hiding from classes he found difficult or boring, and avidly following every drama and comedy in the hallways. He refused my suggestions to ask teachers for help, which they would gladly have given, when he didn’t understand. He couldn’t articulate a reason for this refusal, just shook his head. My sense is that he feared looking stupid or slow. Sometimes we agreed that I would talk to a teacher on his behalf and then the teacher would approach him, but he didn’t really persist in tutoring or classroom work with the push-in Special Ed teacher.

As educators, we often ask ourselves about students like Solo: Is he just unable to do the work? Are we using the wrong teaching methodologies? Or is he really lazy? I realized that Solo wasn’t unwilling to make an effort to learn things, but because he wasn’t the most facile learner and hadn’t developed good work habits, he had to prioritize. And his priority was learning about stuff that matters to kids, not teachers. He and his friend, Curtis, from the former self-contained class, took to following like puppy dogs a more moderately learning disabled student named Robert, a basically decent but un-scholarly kid, rumored to be a minor gang leader. Why? Because “Robert tells us about stuff.” Similarly, Solo explained to me that he had to roam the hallways all the time to know what was going on with everybody, so that he wouldn’t be considered dumb by his peers.

Solo: Struggling with Judgment and Impulse Control

That year saw two incidents where Solo’s poor judgment and impulse control almost caused disasters. The first incident, never completely clear to me, involved his foster-sister. She had taken his new Game Boy and wouldn’t give it back. So to shock her and get back at her, Solo snuck upstairs to her room and dropped his pants. The foster-sister then claimed that Solo touched her sexually, Grandma called the police (perhaps doubting the girl’s story but knowing that the girl might tell the foster care agency and Grandma would be in trouble if she hadn’t acted), and Solo was arrested. He told me that the police promised to release him if he “admitted” it, and guaranteed worse punishment if he didn’t. Typically prioritizing getting away from an unpleasant situation and adult criticism, Solo “admitted” it.

This sounded like a disaster—a possible adult criminal conviction for sexual assault—and I did basically believe his version of the story, feeling that childish antics like dropping his pants were in character, but sexually touching his foster-sister wasn’t. So I got on the horn to the lawyer to try and vouch for his character, and checked in with his Grandmother who had never talked to the lawyer, was very stressed out, and said that neither of the kids’ stories fully made sense. Eventually, the foster-sister recanted her story, the charges were dropped and Solo was saved.

A few days before Christmas, Solo walked into my office as classes started and said “I’m about to do something really stupid and I need you to try and talk me out of it.” The previous evening, he and a few friends had gone Christmas shopping and a few guys approached them, demanding his friend Jovan’s expensive jacket. A fracas ensued and the guys eventually ran off, but not before one of them spat on Solo. Solo restrained himself from retaliating for one reason: he knew that his friend Curtis, who is prone to seizures and had suffered serious head injuries, would have stood up for him and might have been seriously hurt or killed in any fight.

Solo had been seething with rage all night and was now determined to find these guys and have his revenge, no matter the consequences. “I’m not takin’ that—I don’t care what happens.” Throughout first period, I offered reason upon reason to restrain himself. Finally I pointed out that if he hit or killed them and then wound up in jail, it was like letting them win because it would really mess up his life. He said somberly “That’s true. So I’m gonna give you these.” Solo then opened his parka and pulled out two long knives (from Grandma’s kitchen, he explained). They didn’t look like very sharp or strong knives but I didn’t think it was particularly useful to point that out. I quickly stuffed them in a file cabinet I could lock and said I was going to call his grandmother, let her know what happened, and return the knives to her the next time she came to the school. Solo accepted this.

Solo: A Downhill Slide

The next year Solo’s attendance was more and more erratic. In the spring, realizing that he was screwing up, Solo asked to re-consider the suggestion that he attend an off-site vocational program for half the day, and stay with us for the other half of the day until we could give him an IEP diploma. This is the lowest level of diploma, basically a certificate of attendance in school for twelve school years from first grade, not good for college. We had a meeting with Grandma and an Assistant Principal, and Solo signed a contract promising he would attend regularly and complete assigned work.

Solo began the building maintenance program, which rotates students through the basic skills required to be a building superintendent: electrical, carpentry, janitorial etc. He soon got stymied by the measuring required for carpentry. I asked him to bring me some assignments and saw that he couldn’t add and subtract fractions. I spoke to the Special Ed coordinator at our school, who agreed to work with Solo during after-school tutoring. But Solo seldom showed up for that. Then, when the teacher at the vocational school noticed this and apparently created a smaller class for Solo and other IEP students who were having similar problems, Solo was insulted. Feeling he was being shunted off into a special class, he attended the vocational program less and less frequently.

For all his withdrawal and intolerance for school, Solo was eager to work and become more self-reliant, and to this end, I helped him apply for a Summer Youth job, which he was offered. At first I couldn’t understand why Grandma didn’t want him to take the job but was insisting that he go with her to visit relatives in the South for the summer. I finally realized, and she confirmed, that while she was away and her husband at work, Solo might invite friends over the house. Given his poor judgment, they might not be the kind of people you’d want in your house. So he resentfully went down South for the summer.

The next October, Solo turned 18. His attendance got even worse, and he was increasingly at odds with the grandparents for staying out late. He realized that legally, no one could tell him what to do anymore. He’d check in after a long period of absence, and several times, I did convince the principal, who could have dropped him for non-attendance, to let him come back and keep open the option of an IEP diploma (which is given at the principal’s discretion and involves no credit or exam requirements). I knew, as did several sympathetic teachers, that he wasn’t going to actually do much work—and I told him that. We just wanted him to come often enough to grab the diploma and have a better chance of getting jobs.

Solo: Sex and New Complications

After one long absence, Solo reported a whole new level of complication in his life. His grandparents had thrown him out, he was staying with his new girlfriend, and she was pregnant.

Solo had accepted a dare from a friend to meet a girl on line and convince her, within a week, to have sex with him. So he seduced Lisette, but then, being a basically decent person, he felt really bad about it, and told her, and started an actual relationship with her. It turned out she was really only 14, (she’d pretended to be older), had been truant from school for a couple of years and was the subject of an open ACS case. Her mother liked Solo and was letting him stay at the house but she didn’t yet know about the pregnancy, and Solo and Lisette were concerned about her reaction. Several times, I asked him if he really thought it was good for his life and his future to be staying with someone who hadn’t been getting her 14-year-old daughter to school. He acknowledged a problem here and several times almost moved back with the grandparents. But he’d stay out too late and they’d get angry, then he’d go back to Lisette. She'd beg him not to leave and he felt responsible to her and his unborn child. And then we didn’t see him anymore.

Solo: What Went Wrong?

Solo wasn’t the slowest kid or the angriest kid or the most distractible kid (though he was pretty distractible) in our school. We had graduated kids with bigger deficits. His biggest weaknesses were judgment and impulse control. I don’t know how to help a kid develop judgment and impulse control at age 15 or 17 when there’s not a previous groundwork for it. I tried all the obvious little techniques. “Before you do something, think of how it will affect you tomorrow, next month and in 5 years;” I talked through the possible consequences; I showed him gestures to shift his thinking and snap himself out of it, etc. But nothing carried over from my office to the heat of the moment, though Solo was capable of solid, if a bit overly concrete, reasoning .

My sense and what I know of the literature and research says that helping a child to improve judgment and impulse control has to begin at much earlier age. And the intuitive working class approach practiced by his adoptive parents--using corporal punishment to reach a child who’s so concrete and so in the moment-- is pretty much the opposite of what’s needed. It doesn’t help a child to develop internal controls, or show him how to slow down and not be just pulled in by the most intense stimulus. It doesn’t model the behavior you want him to follow. It also left Solo with huge resentments of people telling him what to do and never listening to him.

Solo had been prescribed Ritalin when he was younger and then begun refusing medication as a teen, so I don’t know if a drug would have helped him to slow down and focus until hopefully, maturation might have alleviated his distractibility and impulsivity. Maybe if he had grown up in the 1940s when guys could drop out and get a factory job at 16, with decent pay and little stigma, he could have channeled his physical strength and gained the dignity and self-reliance that he craved. I only know that the genuine love of his adoptive parents and the caring of several competent pedagogues in a generally supportive school have not been enough to get him graduated and prepared for a decent job. I hope that somehow, something works out for him.

Infrastructures Needed to Support Young People

Looking at the life chances of Solo and JB in the context of a deepening economic crisis, I believe we face a struggle to re-build two types of infrastructure that kids like them need. For Solo, a program that trains youth of color to construct, repair and environmentally retro-fit buildings and transportation grids—advocated by Van Jones in The Green Collar Economy and potentially fundable by President Obama’s recently-passed stimulus package-- could help. It could provide the job, the income and the organic discipline of cooperative labor that he needs to channel his energy and aspirations for self-determination. And JB’s story shows how essential it is to preserve the social service agencies, the public school system, and the subsidized training programs for human services jobs, which have sustained him.

Of course, the causes and solutions of their problems go much deeper. We need to address what drove their parents to illegal drugs and neglect, and to find other ways besides legal drugs and beatings to help kids control their attention and impulses. Exposing kids to more green space and less asphalt and video screen would probably help. But maintaining and expanding the two infrastructures would be a start.

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A Tale of Two City Kids (Part I)

Two young, African-American men---both neglected by birth parents, both labeled “learning disabled’--attend a supportive small high school in New York City. JB graduates and, after two years, seems to be doing okay. Solo doesn’t graduate, and, at the time when he should have, seems like he’s lost, with his possibilities narrowing to the streets.

Why? Did we, as teachers and counselors, do something right in one case and wrong in the other? And in the face of bigger factors, things beyond our control, how much difference can our efforts really make?

As a high school social worker, I think about these questions a lot. On the one hand, I don’t really believe that the majority of human beings will be secure and fulfilled without deep social upheaval that overthrows structural oppressions (white domination, the rule of big corporations, patriarchy etc). On the other hand, I think it’s important if I/we/schools/social welfare institutions can help some young human beings at society’s bottom to grow up and “make it,” even in this messed up capitalist system. My definition of “make it” is a modest one. I just mean holding some kind of job that channels and recognizes some of their skills or talents and is therefore subjectively bearable if not thrilling (instead of dying on the streets in their twenties or rotting in jail), and sustaining some rewarding human relationships. “Making it” usually requires, but is definitely not guaranteed by, a high school diploma or GED.

So here’s my attempts to understand the stories of JB and Solo (not real names of course), two kids who I counseled for four years (due to their IEP requirements) and like very much.

Following federal and state law, schools must write up and carry out an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) for each student who is determined by a psychologist’s evaluation to have a disability (often a learning, emotional or sensory difficulty, broadly speaking). The IEP might mandate that the student receive a certain number of hours of instruction in a smaller class, get extra time on tests, or receive services like speech therapy or counseling. That’s how they get to me, and often see me at least once a week for their four years of high school. I also counsel kids who don’t have IEPs but are emotionally upset about something, though that contact tends to be less regular.

JB's Story

JB was my first mandated counseling student at this new high school. At 14, he was a sociable, attractive kid who demanded a lot of attention in a peer group or a classroom. He liked to talk with peers, move around a lot, and argue with or challenge adults, but not in a hostile or mean way. Unlike many teenage guys, he didn’t resist mandated counseling and said he had become used to getting counseling from his foster care agency over the years. Nor was he embarrassed about other kids finding out that he got counseling.

While JB was not into recounting a coherent story about the past (more like details and fragments when he felt like it), I pieced together a picture from our conversations and his file. He was the second oldest of five kids of drug-abusing parents. All were removed from a filthy, chaotic home when he was about 6 or 7, and then placed in foster homes or staffed houses, sometimes all together or in pairs or trios, sometimes singly. He seemed to be the least damaged of the children, and worried a lot about a sister who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was often hospitalized, and a younger brother who was acting out aggressively. There was no contact with the birth parents, and he never wanted to talk about them much.

Throughout the four years of high school, there was a fair amount of drama about JB’s living situation. He knew how to work the system and had manipulated to get himself and two siblings out of a staffed house (I’m forgetting the exact technical term) and placed as foster children with one of the staff whom he liked. However, once in her home, they clashed and he moved to two homes after that. This pattern of growing close to an adult figure and then becoming very angry when that figure doesn’t live up to unrealistically high expectations is an idealization/devaluation syndrome common to kids whose early caretakers didn’t provide consistent nurturing. (Not to mention that the adult’s behavior also changes, and must change to some extent, when you’re the one in charge of a kid 24-7, versus being the worker they like to confide in.) JB would say, “She’s on me all the time” and complained that he was being blamed for everything that went wrong in the home.

JB: Best Not Too Close or Too Far

But JB did much better with relationships that were structurally more distant and secondary and not so potentially engulfing. He got to our school because the psychologist at his elementary school was very concerned about him finding a supportive high school, and accompanied him to the high school fairs. They were still in touch occasionally.

JB was labeled as “learning disabled,” a cover-all term in IEPs which always needs to be broken down and concretized, and balanced by an assessment of strengths. On the weakness side, what the teachers and I noticed was that he was somewhat disorganized, had trouble sitting still and finishing work, and would say, especially of math problems, “I really can do it—I know how to do it--I just get bored.” Many will recognize this pattern as typical of young people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which is often not mentioned in New York City IEPs because it’s not included as a handicapping condition in New York State regulations.

When we raised it with him, JB resisted the idea that this new label might apply to him—especially since, if his foster care agency were to explore it, it might end up with him taking medication. But when I framed it as not a stigma or barrier but a way of understanding some weaknesses for which he could work to compensate, and then loaned him a memoir by an academically successfully teen with ADHD, he did acknowledge the resemblance and look at some of the tips for success. (I think he kept the book too, kinda forgetting to bring it back--which always happens with my best books.) This was a crucial acknowledgement, since without it he would probably fall into blaming teachers when he didn’t do well, or complaining that they were picking on him or didn’t like him. And a key part of my job was helping him to build and preserve the alliances with teachers that he needed to graduate—rather than withdrawing, devaluing, antagonizing etc.

JB’s Intelligence and Ability to Bond

JB had several key strengths. One was a keen interpersonal intelligence that allowed him to understand where people where coming from, got him a lot of (mostly female) friends and girlfriends, and made him an excellent peer mediator. Not to say that he didn’t have his own fairly intense conflicts with peers, but he usually kept them to a verbal level, and we spent a lot of counseling time processing his feelings about these relationships. His desire to understand himself and other people, and his openness to new insights, made JB a stimulating counseling client and student. Several teachers enjoyed conversing with and took him under their wing. JB also was what I like to call a “natural intellectual”—a working class kid who grasped, seized on and dug abstract concepts. This got him through Social Studies when the name/date/place details were not always engraved in his memory.

JB reinforced my sense that, when a kid who’s been through a lot is able to bond with me and benefit from counseling, it’s not primarily because I’m a brilliant social worker, but because the young person has developed this capacity to form relationships as a key survival mechanism. JB had an openness, curiosity, humor and spirit that over the years, drew many adults in his agency and his schools to want to help him. This quality is recognized as a key aspect of resilience, and I think it’s a large part of why he was able to graduate. It also didn’t hurt that he only had to take the RCTs (New York State’s minimum competency exams required in the major subjects) rather than the more difficult Regents exams, which were just being phased in.

JB Graduates and Flounders

JB graduated without a very clear plan for college and it was hard for me to track him. I try to balance between the therapeutic ethos/protocol of ‘terminating” and encouraging the client to move on, and the pedagogical ethos/protocol of wanting to know the progress of a young person, and welcome them back for a visit and check in. JB came back to visit the school once (his girlfriend, two years younger, was still a student) and told me something vague about looking for a job and applying for college. I was not too surprised that he was floundering a little because, unfortunately, few graduates from my school are really ready to succeed in college with its demands of independent reading and writing—despite our best efforts.

There were two hopeful signs, however. First, JB was still living with a foster parent, maybe the fourth one since I’d known him, with whom he got along better. Many kids in foster care hate the system so much that they bolt when they reach 18, refusing the considerable college or vocational tuition aid and other benefits available until age 22 to those who maintain a relationship with an agency. And secondly, he had maintained the relationship with his girlfriend Ramona, a pretty and kindhearted girl who was not into too many head games, from what I could tell.

A couple of times, I asked Ramona how JB was doing, and she would say, “He’s okay…” From her tone and vagueness, I sensed that things might not be going so well. But it wasn’t appropriate to pry or make her feel pressed or awkward —because now my obljgation was to be available to her, a current student, if she needed me. (I see both regular and special education students).

JB Re-Appears

This past June, Ramona graduated, and there at graduation was JB, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year. He grabbed me in a big hug and said how happy he was to see me. I said the same and that I had been wondering how he was doing and asking after him. “You asked about me?” he said, with a quick aside to Ramona, who was preoccupied with congratulations. “You didn’t tell me she asked about me!” He told me to me that he had been “really messed up” for a while but now had a job working with retarded adults and was taking classes for certification as a nursing assistant—through his foster care agency. “The science isn’t really hard,” he said, ”just sometimes the words are hard.”

JB said he felt good and could imagine himself studying for other licenses or degrees. I said I thought it was great that he could turn all the struggles he’d been through into compassion for other people who had big problems and needs. “I deal with really low-functioning people, I mean I have to change their diapers and stuff like that. Maybe I should be ashamed of what I do but I don’t really feel ashamed,” he said. I could only reply that he should be proud because he was actually helping people, even though our sick society doesn’t value that work enough.

JB’s putting himself on a good path after so many struggles, and I must admit, his happiness in seeing me and his expression of appreciation for my work with him—made my day.

JB: Saved by Fragments of the Welfare System

One key lesson I draw from this last part of the story is the importance of JB’s foster care agency, and the other shattered fragments of a welfare system that still remain in this country. For a kid who had neglectful and inattentive parents over the first six years of life, it’s not easy to establish an ongoing bond with a parent figure in later childhood or adolescence, no matter how supportive and caring that person is. But the consistent presence of the agency and the availability of programs that could take him from age six through career training has been a crucial constant in his life. He’s now at the point where he can name, and is determined to take advantage of, every benefit it offers.

Yes, his primary agency worker was usually an under-paid or un-paid social work intern who left after a year, and their supervisors stayed bit longer but also came and went. But these more “loosely coupled” relationships with a succession of good-enough advocates/confidants provided the right combination of consistency with a bit of distance, where no dyad became too intense or threatening for him. Similarly, his relationships with the elementary school psychologist and me, though longer-lasting (JB once said to me, ”The agency has a new worker every year but you’re always here for me”), were productive and tolerable for JB because they were limited in scope.

Somehow, the messed up special ed/school system, and the messed up social welfare system, combined with his own resilience, have sorta worked for JB. I think, cross fingers.

[Part II, Solo's story and some conclusions, coming shortly.]

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Teen Breakthrough, Part 2: "Resistance Bisexuality"

[This post addresses another positive development on the gender front among teens, not as recent as the erosion of male homophobia I reported on earlier this week, but among girls.]

About 3 years ago, I noticed that girls in the NYC high school where I work were starting to call themselves "bisexual." Lots of them. Wearing rainbow logos on all kind of clothing articles. And it was becoming almost impossible for a guy to upset a girl, or pressure her into sex by calling her a "lesbian," because the term was losing its stigma. (It's still possible for guys to pressure a girl into sex, but one maneuver has been eliminated).

For teenagers, identifying as "bisexual" has often been a step toward acknowledging that they're lesbian or gay, a milestone on the road to coming out. I knew this from the literature and had heard it anecdotally from friends whose teen kids went to more elite schools. But until that point I had seldom heard the term used as a self-identifier by the predominantly Black and Latino working class kids whom I counsel.

The new self-identification, which has also been observed by my friends in other cities who are either teachers or parents of teens, has many sources as well as multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings for the girls who use it. Some of my colleagues see it as a simply a ploy by girls who are basically heterosexual to attract more boys or have more leverage in a relationship ("I don't need you, I can have romance and sex with girls") or to titillate boys with the thought of two girls doing it (and the paradisiacal possibility of joining in). These colleagues say that this new trend, which I've seen affect maybe up to 25% of the girls in a school, doesn't represent any erosion of or challenge to male supremacy.

I think that this view is a bit one-sided. Kids often try out several identities through the teen years; they'll come back in September with a whole new look, self-label ("emo," "ghetto," etc.) and group of friends. So the fact that some girls may later go straight doesn't mean that their bisexual self-classification was simply phony or a ploy. What I pick up is that they're often turned off to men by seeing how women are put down and abused by men, and they're grappling with how to live and have some agency in what is still a "man's world." That's why I like to call this very mixed and contradictory phenomenon not a conscious political act or rebellion, but a kind of "resistance bisexuality."

One girl, for example, said to me in discussing her bisexuality, "I guess I don't like the way I see men treat women, " She had a stepfather who had tried to cop a feel once or twice when he was drunk (and since that hadn't occurred recently, she didn't want to give her mother heartache by telling her about it). She'd seen her mother hit by an earlier boyfriend. She felt more connection and empathy with her female friends, and that led her to explore physical closeness with them. I heard similar statements from other girls who had experienced domestic violence or sexual abuse.

One encouraging by-product of the bisexual self-identification is that it cuts against the widespread "I don't have no females for friends" attitude, which I used to hear all the time from girls: "They act nice, but then they talk about you behind your back and stab you in the back and steal your man." While I'd be the last to minimize how mean girls can still be to each other, the bisexual girls do seem to value their female friendships more highly and are often very conscious about giving each other support.

On the down side, as someone who does conflict resolution, I have to note that this phenomenon creates endless new possibilities for drama. Two female friends find they're attracted to each other but then often they're also attracted to the same boys. So part of the girls' relationship is comparing numbers of suitors and getting jealous if the other girl is getting more male attention, and confusing or toying with a lot of guys--who then get angry and into beefs with each other...

Still, I would hold that the option of claiming bisexuality represents an advance in the deep, ongoing cultural revolution (or, using Gramsci's formulation, "war of position") against male supremacy.

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Teen Breakthrough, Part 1: "I'm Not Racist Against Gays"

In my workaday world in the NYC public school system, this year's big news was the growing acceptance of and sympathy for gay guys. And because male homosexuality has been, in my experience, so deeply stigmatized among youth, I think this is a tremendous breakthrough. I still don't hear many guys in high school saying flat out, "I am gay," but there's definitely less attempt to deny or repudiate or hide attributes that might brand a young man as gay.

Little things like young men casually mentioning, "My uncle is gay," or an African-American senior who is into fashion design, tends toward the flaming in his manner and shows no romantic interest in girls being elected a class officer. Or a young man saying to a female classmate who called him "fa--ot" in an argument: "Well, I don't appreciate that because you must not think too much of gay people, and my brother is gay. " In the past, the likely response would have been to hurl back an insult, and the main concern would have been to assert his own straightness in front of the peer audience. But now, he takes the offensive and critiques heterosexism!

Another example that impressed me occurred in the context of a school art project for which students chose the theme of taboos. There was a fair amount of art about gay/lesbian relationships, but one of the most intriguing paintings showed what looked like a man in his twenties and a man in his sixties embracing, The young Latino artist, who as far as I know is straight, definitely wanted to provoke reactions and sought out feedback. It really blew me away that he was challenging two stigmas by portraying, in a compassionate way, both gay male sexuality, and the need of older people to express their sexuality (which is often is often a big yuck factor for teens!).

At the same time, teens, like all of us, have contradictory consciousness and they still come up with some disturbing anti-gay practices. One glaring example is the custom of saying "That's gay" when they think something is stupid or silly. I often will challenge this by asking, "How would you like it if when I thought something was stupid, I said 'That's so Dominican' or 'That's so Black'?" Many students will reply, "It's just a saying," "It doesn't mean anything" and vehemently assure me that they get along with gay classmates or friends or relatives, etc.

One young man listened thoughtfully and replied, "No, Miss, I'm not racist against gay people." I really dig this phrasing, because it reflects the reality of racism as the primary form of oppression and put-down that he is experiences and sees in the world. And I'm encouraged that many teens are becoming less racist against gay people.

[Next up, Part 2: Resistance Bisexuality]

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Why Kids Enlist--Still!

Counter-recruitment continues to be an important part of the over-all struggle against the occupation of Iraq. If this kind of organizing is to be effective, we who are doing it need to understand why kids enlist. In my experience, rhetoric about the “poverty draft” is far too simplistic. So I’d like to share some of the complex and contradictory dynamics that I’ve observed a social worker in a New York City high school--dynamics that lead kids to enlist even though each and every one of them knows there’s a deadly war on.

One big issue is that kids see they need discipline and structure. They know they haven’t internalized a lot of good work habits and they need external controls and incentives. And they’re right about that.

Due to the white domination that pervades the school system--unequal distribution of educational resources, the Eurocentrism of curricula, etc.—working class youth of color often reject, consciously or unconsciously, much of authority exerted over them as racist and hypocritical. Therefore many kids wind up not internalizing some skills and work/study habits that they actually could put to their own ends. By 18 or 19, many of these youth want to make up for this lack of development and they see the military as a way to do this.

A very self-aware and smart young African-American man told me, “I don’t think I’m ready for college. I think I need to go into the Army for a couple of years until I get it together.” This young man had figured out that he was smart enough to get into college but lacked some planning, system-negotiating and time-management skills and might have difficulty passing college courses. He sensed that unlike George Bush, a Black kid from the Bronx wouldn’t be given second chance at college if he screwed up. And he thought the military would drill good work habits into him and help him grow up.

Another aspect of the military’s appeal is controlled violence. Most of my students have experienced a good deal of violence in their communities, and sometimes in their homes. The idea of being paid to be on the trigger-pulling end of the gun with social sanction is a powerful lure. The US military knows this very well—hence the ads with the jeeps and “running a two-million dollar machine.”

The promise of skills training and employment options is another pull. One practice session for the PSAT’s can be all it takes to send an under-prepared young person looking for a way to avoid the whole college admissions process. Here it is helpful to point out that before the military gives you access to any really interesting job training, they make you take a test and you have to score high.

I don’t know if anyone has systematcally studied the enlistment rate of youth who’ve been through the foster care system, but I’ve observed a particular appeal here. For kids who’ve never felt they belong anywhere and are used to bureaucratized collective environments, the military not only levels the playing field—because nobody belongs there any more than you—but it actually gives them up a leg up, because they’re use to coping with regimented environments.

One young man who’d been in group homes and foster homes since the age of 6 spoke longingly of the military as something you could really feel you belong to. After we talked over all the reasons why it appealed to him, and I acknowledged the legitimacy of the needs he was expressing (to belong, challenge himself, serve some cause bigger than himself), he finally concluded that the military could be a good thing if you didn’t have to go to war.

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