As I begin writing this, I am looking over the backs of my students’ heads. They, too, are bent over their own work of writing essays on world literature. What I am doing, in writing with them, is what teacher/writers call “modeling” — that is, we teach that there is pleasure and satisfaction to be found in this kind of communication by doing it ourselves, by showing we want for ourselves what we want for them. What I want for them, my widely and wildly varied group of tenth-graders, is that they would do well on the new state mandated writing test that will be fielded next March. More importantly, what I want for them is that they might learn to communicate well with a broader spectrum of people than just their families, their peers within these walls, and their communities. What I want for them is to increase their options in what they do with their lives. What I want is to increase the size of their world. What they want, I think, is to finish yet another essay for Ms. Young so they can get on with the more pleasant teen-age tasks of socializing, fitting in, and figuring out what it is adults want from them.

I know my demands on them make them weary, and their weariness sometimes affects me. Last year, about midway through the school year, I was again driving to my work, tired again, again listening to the radio, again fueled by my belief in what I do, by a strict work ethic taught me by my parents and by at least two cups of coffee. I was listening to a young man list the groups of people in America whom he considered to be political activists. Near the top of his list, he said, were public school teachers. I was both surprised and pleased. I had never before considered my profession in this way, but I immediately saw the truth in his statement. The novelty and energy of it was contagious, and I felt far less tired than I had before I saw myself in this light.

As a public school teacher, it is my job to teach all students — the washed and unwashed, the masses and the elite, the common and the uncommon. I like it. Perhaps I like it because, as an English teacher, I teach these students, no matter what their background, what good writing is, what reading powerful books can do, and how the combination of the two can change their lives. Perhaps another reason I like it has more to do with the part of me that likes being a political activist, the part of me that cares who has power, who doesn’t, and why. In teaching students that powerful writing changes lives, I hope also to help them find their own voice, a voice loud enough and compelling enough that others will listen. I would like to do this for them for the simple reason that it was once done for me.

I cannot pretend lack of bias. I grew up in Swain County, and I attended and graduated from its schools. While I was a misfit who relished my role as a “fringe-dweller,” I learned a great deal in Swain’s schools that has served me well in my life outside of the county, and has served me well since I returned to teach three and a half years ago. I have brought back with me what I learned outside — what I learned at WCU, where I earned my bachelor’s degree; what I learned at Columbia, where I earned my master’s degree; and what I learned at Warren Wilson, where I earned my masters of fine arts. I have brought back with me what I learned from teaching mentally retarded adults in Colorado; from teaching Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and South American immigrants seeking American citizenship in North Carolina’s community colleges; and from teaching a mix of scholarship and wealthy students receiving a private education in north Georgia’s Rabun Gap boarding school. I have brought back with me exposure to other ways of living, thinking, and being, as well as exposure to other cultures and communities. With all of that, however, I have also retained an enormous respect for the accomplishments of a small rural community in the Appalachian Mountains that creates for its students an atmosphere of hope and measurable success. Because I have taught in so many places and with such economically and racially diverse groups, I have direct experience with the fact that collective effort and common goals, as well as a certain amount of selflessness, are absolute necessities if one wants to benefit all students.

It is this knowledge that creates in me such a deep aversion to the inherent divisiveness and, yes, selfishness of the proposed “Mountain Discovery Charter School” in Swain County. I am acquainted with some of the proponents of the charter school, and I know them to be good people who see their intentions as equally good. I have much in common with them philosophically, politically, and even in educational ideology. But I am not an elitist. Even if a charter school wants to accept all students who are interested, they cannot do so, because the size of their student population is limited, and because the continuation of their charter is determined by the success of their school, and that includes test results. In order to survive, they must take students with academic strengths, and students whose parents have the flexibility, energy, and economic resources to be involved in school events during typical working hours, since, by definition, charter schools require direct parental involvement. This is a thing much to be desired by all schools, but most never experience it, particularly in a county as poor as Swain, because most of its parents do not have such time and resources. They are too busy trying to earn a living.

Charter schools must, then, have a certain amount of exclusivity, no matter how much they profess the opposite. And while it is true that many charter schools are a fine and necessary addition to the communities in which they are created, this is not always the case. If a school system has enormous flaws that cannot be addressed, then that school system may need a charter school.

Such is the case with the kinds of schools Jonathan Kozol writes about in Savage Inequalities, his book on the poor, neglected, and, therefore, failing schools in many places in America. Swain County is not such a school system. If the proponents of Mountain Discovery Charter School are unaware their projected procurement of 70 percent of its students from Swain County’s school system and more than half a million dollars of Swain County school’s funding will have a detrimental effect on the schools already in place, they are blind. Even if they take 101 students who currently attend our schools, and thus relieve the system of the amount spent on those students, it will still require from our budget the same amount of money as it did before to light, heat and cool buildings, to maintain those buildings, and to run busses, as it did before the proposed removal of 101 students and $600,000. (According to Swain’s superintendent, that amount of money would mean cuts in funding for student activities, numbers of teachers and aides, professional development, supplies and materials, and equipment. Every area would be affected). If those in favor of the charter school are aware of this fact but willing to go ahead with their quest for a charter, they are elitist at best. At worst, they are cruel. A group of educated, dedicated, and compassionate individuals surely would not choose this route if they know the truth. I would rather believe those in favor of the charter school have simply not considered all the ramifications of their desired charter on a county as poor as Swain, a county which nonetheless succeeds far beyond all expectations in educating its students.

It goes without saying Swain’s students are rural. Eighty-six percent of the 336,627 acres in Swain County is publicly owned, and of that total acreage, 313,179 acres are forestland — that’s 93 percent.
That leaves a very small, very rural tax base to be used by the local government in supporting its schools. Most of Swain’s money, therefore, comes from state and federal sources. In 1999, about 40 percent of the workforce earned less than $8 per hour. The unemployment rate in 2000 in Swain County was 12.5 percent — and that’s before the recession that we’re just now beginning to experience. Our students mostly come from families that have little chance to become educated outside of what the Swain public schools offer. In the 1990 census, 28.9 percent of Swain’s adult population were high school graduates, and 6.7 percent held an associate’s degree, while 6.6 percent held a baccalaureate degree. These numbers may have changed somewhat in 11 years. I hope the change has been for the better.

In spite of all of these statistics, Swain students do remarkably well. Based on the available results from the last few years of testing, Swain County schools consistently score in the top 10 to 25 percent of all of North Carolina’s public schools. This number includes North Carolina charter schools, which, as I said before, require more parental involvement, and which also have a much higher number of parents who hold college degrees, with many of them also having greater economic resources.

Why does all of this economic and educational material matter? It matters because all research indicates strongly that income and social class are greater predictors of student academic success than any other factors  race, religion or sex. In this month’s NEA Today (the magazine of the National Education Association), one article quotes research that says “the degree to which poor children are surrounded by other poor children ... has as strong an effect on their achievement as their own poverty.” And yet, the achievements of its students would indicate this is not the case for Swain County. In 1999, Swain County was ranked at 97th in the state (out of 100) based on per capita personal income. In terms of state monies received for nutrition per school system, Swain ranks 14th out of 117. In terms of federal monies received for nutrition per school system, Swain ranks fourth. And in terms of the amount of money afforded our school system by its local government, Swain is 117th out of 117. This is also the case in other areas in which we receive money from the state and federal government, except in the case of federal expenditures on our behalf. If one excludes nutrition expenditures, we are second in the state instead of fourth. Money matters. In a county with a per capita median personal income that is almost $10,000 less than the state average, the money put into our school system, and the wise management of that money, is what has allowed Swain to beat the odds of poverty and ignorance which have had such devastating consequences in school systems comparable in size, poverty, educational background, and ethnic makeup.

Last month’s Harper’s magazine featured a number of articles on American education. Among them was a funny, pithy article by Garret Kizer entitled “Why We Hate Teachers: Notes on a Notable American Tradition.” In it, Kizer reminds readers that “Public schools embody our democratic principles and contradictions better than any other institution we know.” He goes on to say that “the present initiatives to diminish radically the scope of public education in America ... [such as] the utopian school, the cyber-school, the voucher-subsidized school, the school of ‘school choice,’ all reduce to a fantasy of social and political transcendence — an attempt to sidestep the contradictions of democracy, the cruel jokes of genetics, the crueler jokes of class, and the darker side of diversity.” In the same issue, there is a forum on charter schools, one which reveals the thought and excellence which has gone into the most successful of these schools, and with educators, writers, and thinkers of the highest order participating in a conversation with Harper’s editor. One of these, Theodore Sizer, chairman emeritus of “The Coalition of Essential Schools,” and author of six books on education, says this: “We can’t design the perfect charter school. My experience with people starting new schools is that unless they can somehow connect in a constructive way with this larger group of influences — mostly families, yes, but other influences as well — the results will follow social class lines.”

In Swain County, however, if one determines social class by income, then there is less diversity in terms of social class than there is in terms of ethnicity. The population of Swain County is 29 percent Native American, and this is reflected in the school population. But because Swain County’s educators are hyper-aware both of its poverty and the negative expectations that go with it, they have made certain that their children, though poor, have the same chance at a good life as children in more affluent parts of the country. They have poured time and effort into making sure that necessary funds are available for creating an environment conducive to student achievement. In per pupil expenditures, Swain comes in 23rd overall out of 117 school systems in the state. And the amount of money spent has, thus far, succeeded in increasing students’ options concerning the life that is available to them.
It boils down to this. A friend of mine, with whom I was discussing the issue of charter schools, commented this is the question we have to answer: Do we want what is best only for our own children, or do we want what is best for all children? If parents want what is best for all students, they must recognize and acknowledge that school choice in Swain County, in the guise of a charter school, is a bad idea, and one which will divide a community formerly united in its support of its school system.

My own tiny community, my students, finished writing their essays long before I finished this one. Because of their economic class, their young age, their culture, and, in many cases, their race and even their accent, the classroom may be one of the few places in which my students’ voices will be listened to, and their writing will be read, with attention given to each paragraph, each word, each detail. But as an English teacher, I will read all of their words, noting strengths and weaknesses as I go. As a human, I will be seeing, as I read, the individuals who wrote the words on the page. As a political activist, my new favorite way of describing what I do, I want them, all of them, to have a fair shake at success. They don’t deserve any less than what they are now being given in terms of available resources. They don’t deserve any less than all the world has to offer. They don’t deserve to have that world diminished by a charter school that can offer its services to only a few, and at the expense of many.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a teacher who lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)

 

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