The Scarred Child Behind the Mask

Comparison of Public Education in Urban Schools versus Suburban Schools

This investigation has examined some of the many dimensions of urban and suburban public school systems, specifically those students who have behavioral and mental health issues, but not limited to those who have special education needs with various types of disability. This study explores reasons why the inner-city schools are doing so poorly compared to the affluent suburban schools. It compares urban and suburban schools, their test scores, and the reason why their different-zone schools cannot produce high scores during testing. It also elaborates on why children are not given the proper and adequate support and resources within their specific school. It further discusses the importance of good parenting and good leadership in the community. The study includes the challenges that inner-city students and teachers face daily. However, the important thing to note is that all say the Pledge of Allegiance, so why not give them proper and fair education? They are our future leaders.

Being a foreigner in this country for over thirty-six years, having been to college, graduated, and finally became a substitute teacher for the Baltimore, Maryland, public school (1994–2003), a pastor’s wife, a church counselor, and now a behavioral specialist consultant, the behavior of the children in the classroom has been a culture shock. The poor expectation has amazed me over the years, and the unbelievable inadequacy of supplies and resources and support, along with the attitude in the urban school, has made me wonder and thank God for not being able to attend high school in United States. Notwithstanding part of these years, one-third of my teaching was spent in the suburban public school in Baltimore, Maryland. I have had the opportunity to experience both urban and suburban school districts as well as two states (Maryland and Pennsylvanian public school system). I have experienced elementary, middle, and high school in both states and the same settings.

Moreover, parents in the inner city of adolescent children are often at a loss as to how to respond to the type of injustices millions of children, adolescents, and adults across the United States and throughout the world experience, as well as to long-term disabilities that significantly affect the lives of people. As the face of education changes with new laws and amendments,¹ urban schools continue to face injustices from day to day, unlike the suburban school district, specifically where the whites resides. According to an article written by Amy Golba, comparisons of urban and suburban schools along with their students show the latter not being treated fairly² because of inequality in terms of resources, teachers’ incentives, resources for parents, providers, and salaries. Another article, News Lab Strategies’ School Funding states: When comparing things like per pupil spending, make sure that you are comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges. Compare two schools in the same districts. But the fact of the matter is that the primary concern is not only the neglect and injustice in education toward the urban school districts as compared to the suburban schools, but also that all children are held equally accountable in national test results.

School Assessments

In every state, all school districts are required to give national assessments to their students. For example, in Maryland, students are required to take the Maryland State Assessment (MSA). In Pennsylvania, it is the PSSA (Pennsylvania State Standard Assessment).

Under Florida’s accountability system, schools are assigned letter grades based on student achievement data from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), but the grades aren’t based on current achievement alone. Improvements in student achievement, especially among the lowest-performing students, are also taken into account.

As the figure above shows, in the three years before the initiative was implemented (2002–2004), the percentage of zone schools that received a D or an F actually increased. But since entering the zone in January 2005, the percentage receiving a D or F has dropped dramatically, from nearly 90 percent to just 22 percent. By 2006, nearly 60 percent of zone schools received a C while a little over 20 percent earned an A or B.³

These types of assessments are to be given across the board, whether you are attending an inner-city school or a suburban school; whether you are from a low-income home, a middle-class home, or a higher-bracket home; whether it is a school that was rated as number one in violent schools in the district and whether the school is known to be violent. Whether you are from a school district where there are no calculators in the school building, where there are no science labs, where there are no books in the so-called library to read, and where a teacher has been a provisional teacher for over fifteen years and yet cannot pass the praxis, the scarred child is required to take the assessment and meet the state’s standard like the rest of the rich school district.

To be more specific, one of my clients, a young girl in her teens, Brittney, was removed from her zone school in York, Pennsylvania, because of her behavior; she was put in an alternative school. It was part of my job to follow her to administer the proper and adequate treatment. After being at the alternative school for over six months, my client was asked to take the PSSA assessment at her zone school, where she was previously put out because of behavioral problems.

However, during the six months, there was no evidence of any type of instruction that was helpful in order to take a state-standard assessment such as the PSSA. There were always less than ten students in the class, but the environment was very disruptive: there was no adequate instruction, there was no learning going on, and everyone seemed to be doing their own thing. The teacher sat behind the desk and gave a packet of work with no more than five pages. Ninety percent of the students did not do the work or did not understand the work or did not care to do the work. There was no guided instruction or practice work. The books in the class were ten to fifteen years old; the books were below grade level. There were no counselors. Neither was there learning support (special education teacher in the building). Of the students in this classroom or in the building as a whole, 99 percent exhibited behavioral problems; they were all on different grade levels in the class.

In addition, none of the teachers was certified. But what amazed me about this school district was when the student (my client) was asked to come back to the school where she was previously put out because of fighting or a behavioral problem; to have asked for her to come to the school and to take the PSSA was amazing. It was amazing because since she had been to the alternative school, she had not learned anything academically; she was not ready for a standard test. She did not have any type of support. The alternative setting to where she attended alternative school, she had not learned anything academically. She was not ready for a standard test. She did not have any type of support. The alternative setting where she attended did not have a lab or library or a computer lab. Moreover, this client of mine was diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) and bipolar disorder. She was not ready for the PSSA assessment. She is one of the scarred children behind the mask.

According to the article written by Derek Neal called School Effects on Minority Students,

The American Federation of Teachers has long been a leader in promoting high standards of learning and teaching and is working actively to close the achievement gap. When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became law in 2002, the AFT hoped that the resources earmarked for NCLB would be provided and that the law would be implemented in a way that would strengthen public education while raising the academic achievement of all students.

Unfortunately, flaws in the law are undercutting its original promise. Guidance for states has been unclear, untimely and unhelpful, and the U.S. Department of Education’s attempts to make the law more flexible have brought about only minimal improvements without addressing NCLB’s larger flaws. Underlying all these issues is the pervasive problem of funding, which is far less than what was promised and far less than what is needed. The stakes are too high for our children to wait until the upcoming reauthorization before we begin talking about how to make positive improvements to NCLB.

Many obvious distress signals seen in today’s American urban schools include the increasingly overloaded and underfunded schools, confusion over actual goals and purposes, and a tendency toward a separation into two unequal class divisions within the public schools. Underlying these signals are the growing population of indifferent students, the emergence of students from single-parent families, poorer and more culturally impoverished students, fewer teachers to cope with these students, and the increasing apathy of the more affluent public members (Frady 1985, 11). Our nation has sadly become a society where many people are concerned only for themselves, with little concern for those who are less fortunate.

For example, in the alternative schools, there are many pastors, ministers that could volunteer their services to help teach the children basic instructions of life from the Bible. Notwithstanding, some pastors, ministers, and some churches as a whole do not help the needy children within their reach but prefer to go across the country and other parts of the world, including Africa, to become missionaries.

What is at stake is the future of a heterogeneous America, a place where there is equal opportunity for everyone, not just for those who can afford to pay for a good education and the chance to have a more prosperous life. America is a country of multiple cultures and of people who come here from other countries and learn to deal with those different cultures. Those who do not want their children to be handicapped by the learning problems of others who have suffered generations of oppression, ignorance, and neglect simply abandon the city schools that these students were being integrated into and flee to richer suburban schools. Over 52 percent of Americans live in the suburban areas surrounding the large metropolises (Elam 1993, 196).

Today, blacks, Hispanic, and poorer children dominate twenty-three of the nation’s twenty-five largest urban school systems (Frady 1985, 13). This has raised a permanent fissure in our public schools and has separated them into two separate and unequal classes—one, suburban, privileged, and mostly white, and the other inner-city, poorer, and mostly nonwhite. Because we have not one monolithic national system of schools but thousands of separate independent ones, providing an equal education and opportunities for our children is a concern we can personally affect and decide. The education of all of our children needs to be addressed as one of our nation’s top priorities.

School Effects on Minority Students

Minority students are often placed into an at-risk group in society in America’s public schools. As an at-risk group, minority students may have more trouble learning the school’s curriculum, and they may be behind in the material compared to their peers. According to the North Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Center for the Prevention of School Violence, high school dropouts are three and a half times more likely to be arrested than high school graduates. The dropout rate for students in low-income families are nearly four times greater than the rate of the suburban high-income families. The reason why minority students are failing in America’s schools is because minority students’ schools in an urban setting and the population in most urban school systems is comprised overwhelmingly of minority students that are below poverty level. The majority of the schools in the urban districts are struggling schools.

Even though the NCLB was replaced by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 10, 2015 which was implemented in the 2017-2018 school year, but the core principle still remains the same. The obtaining and retaining teachers based on students’ performance, teacher’s evaluation, special need students’ yearly assessment continues to be controversial even though there are some charter schools’ initiatives in some states to bring some relief to parents. Notwithstanding labeling a parent according to his or her zip code continue to be a challenge for some parents. In 2015, President Obama signed the ESSA bill with the hope that it will bring relief to the states and parents even though there are eligibility criteria a school and parent must meet to be qualify. With the revision and replacement of the NCLB, I still see it as some form of a problem at the same token it brought some relief to parents.

With this bill, we reaffirm that fundamentally American ideal—that every child, regardless of race, income, background, the ZIP Code where they live, deserves the chance to make of their lives what they will, President Barack Obama said after signing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into law.

According to article on whyy.org published by Ayi Wolfman-Arent on December 13, 2018, Pennsylvania released a list of 289 struggling schools that supposed to develop improvement plans under the directives of state advisors sharing some portion of $40 million. Unlike previous years, the state focused less on schools with low overall test scores, and included schools where certain subgroups of students failed to meet academic benchmarks. Those subgroups include economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, special education students, and federally established race and ethnic populations, according to the state.

The new designations change the calculus for how the state defines struggling schools, drawing scrutiny to some schools that would have previously flown under the radar. Each identified school will work with a team of state officials to create improvement plans, though there’s no plan to radically intervene at schools that fail to improve. These schools and many more schools such as Illinois, New York, Michigan and other states have adopted these innovations.

In addition, most urban areas are also higher in poverty. Students that come from low-income families are below grade level in reading and math and have no support to bring their reading and math comprehension skills up to speed. As a result, high rate of absenteeism and little parental involvement become permanent. For example, the city of Detroit is highly segregated, comprised of an extremely high percentage of Americans. It also is extremely impoverished. The city does not bring in enough tax revenue to support schools’ necessities. As a result, the schools are more run-down than in surrounding suburban schools in Grosse Pointe and West Bloomfield.

Teachers in urban school districts are typically less experienced and are the least qualified (Biddle and Berliner 2004, cited in Slavin 2006). These educators hold low expectations for these students (Becker and Luthar 2002, cited in Slavin 2006; Persell 1997, Slavin 2006) and may have conscious or unconscious stereotypes against Hispanic and American students. A teacher may hold a misconception of black students as lazy. And if the student believes the teacher thinks they cannot score well on a test or paper, they may think there is no point in putting any effort into the work. After this repeatedly happens, they may lose faith in the educational system and totally give up on trying. Low expectation and stereotyping can have detrimental effects on the young student, perhaps forever altering their educational path. Most of the time, schools just need to