Today is cold, rainy, and dark. Maybe it is one of the few sixty-five days of the year that Colorado claims (with embarrassment) isn’t sunny. The pumpkins lined up at the front door don’t seem to mind. Neither do I, since there is a hot apple pie resting on the top of my stove.
I love autumn like every good Midwester girl does–for the change of pace, pumpkin spice lattes (JUST KIDDING! I draw the line at pumpkin spice), the cool after the scalding heat of the summer we think might never end. But it does. It always ends. Then we blink-adjust our eyes, surveying the leaves falling and crisp in the air. What a reminder! We are never in control of the movement of time. The laws that rule nature, the seasons that divide years into neat compartments–they are reliable, something a human can depend on. Fall is a relief, even if the days are dark.
There are other things we can depend on, and I’m faced with the blunt reality every day as I walk the kids to school, the one labeled Title I.
Title I schools exist to “improve the academic achievement of the disadvantaged.” Title I waves the red flag at poverty. This is where you belong. Poverty, that trashy, no-good stain on our American soil. Poverty, that curse that our society can’t seem to shake off. Even Jesus promised, “You will always have the poor among you…”
Poverty. You can count on it.
It’s interesting, learning about Title I. I don’t immediately associate my kids with the words describing Title I school kids,
“low-achieving children in our Nation’s highest-poverty schools, limited English proficient children, migratory children, children with disabilities, Indian children, neglected or delinquent children, and young children in need of reading assistance…” (US Department of Education)
Since we moved here midsummer, I had no choice but to enroll them in the neighborhood school. I had walked out the back door on homeschool, of course. We were jumping back in on faith, banking on the big Guy to catch us if the water was too deep. I didn’t know the demographics of the population around me. I knew that if we’d moved earlier, perhaps mid-spring, we could have opted into a non-Title I school, but I had been confused about that, too. Why would anyone opt out of a neighborhood school and into a different school that was further away? I was a country girl, out of the city and out of touch. It suited me to plead ignorance to the system.
It turns out discrimination and privilege toe a very thin line.
Several weeks ago I went to a district meeting for parents of GT kids, the goal being to inform families of the opportunities to enroll in GT “center” schools. Center schools are the answer for clustering these advanced learners within a large district. On a school night there were four sessions going on at the same time in different areas of the district area. Schools are spread out over some 750 square miles, so the folks in charge tried to situate the meetings accordingly. It was a twenty minute drive from my house to the venue. When I walked in, I was surprised. Nearly every parent was white and well-dressed.
Why was I surprised? If I look at the county’s demographics, 91% are white. Of course they would make a good show. But in my Title I school, it’s virtually the opposite. Only about 10% are white.
The wheels started turning in my head. Our neighborhood school has a label, and it screams poverty! What Title I parents were able to read an informational email in English regarding an upcoming GT meeting? How could a low-income, one-car (or no car) family ever hope to attend a GT meeting twenty minutes away? What if they happen to work on Thursday evenings at six?
How could an underprivileged child qualify for GT services if the testing is only in English? Should they qualify, who can take their GT qualified kids to a center school in a different neighborhood, being that there is no school bus to take them there?
This had the markings of unfair all over it.
Without a doubt most folks don’t want their their communities to be marked by low achievement and poverty. No one wants their life to tell a story of rags unless it ends with to riches. The rags can stay in someone else’s laundry, not mine. We want to start out and end up well off. And this, I assume, is why many people opt their kids out of one “bad” school and open enroll into a “good” one. We can iron it into some smooth reasoning, ”Oh, it’s just a better fit for my kid,” but deep down there it is planted in our hearts, this idea that we deserve better than the next person. The low achievers. Disabled. Neglected. Delinquent.
Title I will take care of those kids, I’ll take care of mine.
And this is where I am wondering where the Christians are, the ones who claim to believe in an upside down Kingdom, the first being last and the last being first. The Savior who, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing…and became obedient to death, even death on a cross,”–would he have opted into a better school?
I cannot turn my eyes and unsee it, and it is hypocrisy at its peak when I pretend it isn’t my problem.
In his book, The God Who Is There (1968), Francis Schaeffer says this:
The Christian is to resist the spirit of the world. But when we say this we must understand that the world-spirit does not always take the same form. So the Christian must resist the spirit of the world in the form it takes in his own generation. If he does not do this he is not resisting the spirit of the world at all. This is especially so for our generation, as the forces at work against us are of such a total nature. It is our generation of Christians more than any other who need to heed these words which are attributed to Martin Luther:
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady in all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” (pg.18)
This is the battle in my Christian American soul, because it is so easy for the rich man–me!–to snake my way out of something that I could pass off as “not my problem”. We want our liberty, man, but give us our freedom from those needy people! I’ve got my own kids, my own problems.
If the spirit of the world in our generation is “me first, everything else second,” it is easy to pretend we are all on a level playing field. Your kids happen to go to a good school while mine go to a bad one. Some kids grow up literate, some don’t.
Schaeffer goes on to say:
…When the Apostle warned us to ‘keep ourselves–unspotted from the world’, he was not talking of some abstraction. If the Christian is to apply this injunction to himself he must understand what confronts him antagonistically in his own moment of history. Otherwise he simply becomes a useless museum piece and not a living warrior for Jesus Christ.
The orthodox Christian has paid a very heavy price, both in the defense and communication of the Gospel, for his failure to think and act as an educated man at grips with the uniformity of our modern culture. (The God Who Is There, pg. 19)
We are so blinded by our privilege. It causes us to forget the one huge equalizer among us–that Jesus died for sinful men. That not one of us is above poverty level when it comes to needing a Savior.
What are we thinking when we look at people and label them Title I?
What makes us think we are doing right by opting out?
