Fire in the Ashes : Twenty-five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Kozol Jonathan

Author:Kozol, Jonathan [Kozol, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780770435950
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2012-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

— II —

Pineapple’s years at P.S. 65 were nearly at an end. During the spring, the pastor of St. Ann’s began to probe the possibilities of winning her admission to a private day school in New York to avoid the middle schools that had proven so destructive to the adolescents in that neighborhood.

Martha talked with me at length before she did this. She was somewhat torn in making the decision. Both of us were strong supporters of the public schools—not of demoralizing places such as P.S. 65 and the local middle schools but, on a larger level, of the whole idea of public education as something that was elemental to American democracy. Still, when a child, as in Pineapple’s case, had been shortchanged so badly in her first six years of school, Martha was not willing (nor was I) to let her be denied the opportunities that lay beyond the options the city had prescribed.

In reaching out to build support for programs at St. Ann’s, Martha had developed close affiliations with a number of the affluent and more progressive churches in New York, some of which ran private schools, attended for the most part by children of the privileged. One of these schools, which was situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and which had some dedication to the value of diversity in class and racial terms, was willing to admit Pineapple and provide her with a scholarship, even with the recognition that it would be hard for her to catch up with her peers.

“It will be a struggle,” the principal advised me when, at Martha’s urging, I got in contact with the school before Pineapple and her parents came to a decision. “But we like this little girl and we’d like to make this work if the child is willing.” I shared this with Pineapple and her mom and dad and, because of what they knew by now about the local middle schools, they told me they were eager to move forward. Martha, as I recall, helped them to fill out the application.

Pineapple’s acceptance at the school was conditioned on her willingness to repeat a grade because she was far below the academic level of the sixth-grade students at the school—and, as it turned out, below most of the fifth-grade students also. The run of transient teachers at P.S. 65 had done its greatest damage to her literacy skills, a degree of damage that she could not easily reverse even in a school that had the means to offer her the individual attention that had been impossible at P.S. 65.

In this respect, Pineapple’s situation was entirely different from the one that Leonardo had confronted when he went to boarding school. For Leonardo, as we’ve seen, the transition had been easy. For Pineapple, everything from this point on would be an uphill climb.

As early as the winter of her first year at the school, her principal and teachers, in the letters and reports that they were sending on to

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