1996, Black matters matter, school matters, what to do, what to do? Praising and complaining.

Where's Papa?

5/15/96: Blacks and whites together in Oak Park . . . Blacks should be less sensitive and whites less self-congratulatory, Robert Bates told 70 or so Oak Parkers gathered May 9 to discuss race relations. He said we should reject race as a "focal point." I like that.

He had opened in stark fashion with a story of being called a "black bastard" on the L some 10 years ago by a white woman. He was new to Oak Park and took exception to the allegation but did not take her up on it. Later he ran, boisterously, for elementary school board and lost. He apparently favors being in there pitching instead of bitching. I like that too.

Next to me in a ten-person discussion group, one of five in the Irving School gym, sat old friend Mena, waving an article that said the same thing: skip race as a category. No future in it, said Mena.

Elementary schools there too . . .

Oak Park's elementary school District 97 was overrepresented at the gathering, the first of the much debated, publicly funded Vision 2000 discussions. Three of seven D97 board members were there. One reported for his group, telling us that we Oak Parkers can now, finally, talk about blacks doing poorly in school.

Here's something else we can talk about: his district has been so busy not offending anyone that it has done poorly by black students. So-called cultural sensitivity has been a higher priority than black academic achievement. Now the district is making a lot of noise about it with the help of its beloved Wednesday Journal, whose puffery has been grist for this mill.

I will take this and other of its board members seriously when they put academics in first place, bar nothing. Kids' self-esteem -- the district's first priority -- will take care of itself once kids get somewhere in readin', 'ritin', 'n 'rithmetic. Bitching about the high school, where D97 chickens come home to roost, will get them nowhere. Pitching in on academics will.

So too the Wednesday Journal. . .

Was overrepresented, that is. Two editors, one of them performing admirably at a flip chart, and a senior writer were seen and positively identified. Oak Leaves was there too, to judge by its coverage, but had no one at a flip chart that I recognized.

Overrepresented?

Yes. One would have been enough from each. Wives, children, and significant others deserve more attention in general. For me it was a third straight night out, which is too much. True, it's a social outing of sorts, full of familiar faces you see at other such gatherings, night after night.

Academic support at Oak Park & River Forest High . . .

A few days later, I sat with teachers, deans, and citizens at large, being myself one of the latter, a dedicated amateur at all this, to help devise an academic support program. Not surprisingly, the professionals made the more solid contributions.

Not to canonize them. They are as mixed a bag as the rest of us. But our group of five, including two black mothers, proclaimed staff one of the school's strong points -- "committed faculty and deans . . . great teachers, able to make cultural transfer [sic]," one said. "Something is happening. We don't celebrate it enough. . . . The school's 'people resources' are superior, The system is the problem," said another.

Besides the system reference, there was complaint that the school does "not address thinking skills" or teach kids "how to show persistence in the face of difficulty." Nor do teachers point out "transfer value," or practicality, of what's taught. Nor do they "teach skills underlying motivation." Not only that, there's a "lack of baseline data."

Oh.

Comment: That blaming a system is a catchall, and vague at that. One of the professionals suggested polling students about teaching, as colleges do. That's an interesting possibility, though fraught with huge logistic problems, this being a 2,800-student school.

In later discussion I tossed out the idea that we live in an age of triage, when diminishing resources limit us — shot down immediately by a teacher! But it should provide a reality check for us, if only as counterpoint to the too frequent whining about why this or that isn't done.