Hark! Social Commentary!

Hello you beautiful people.

As some of you know, I'm doing an internship right now with an obituary writer at the Denver Post for my creative writing class. Weird, right? It's actually pretty interesting, from a writing perspective. She always tells me, I don't know how I could ever write fiction. The people and situations I find in the world are stranger and more interesting than any I could invent myself. In some ways, that's true for me too (though I do write fiction sometimes). For instance, the other day I was waiting in the line at the post office and listening to an old woman complain to her daughter that she can't find anywhere to buy sympathy cards in bulk. "So many people I know are dying these days, and I don't want pay $1.99 a pop plus postage." Or what about the fact that I go to a doctor named Sorena Kierkegaard? (what's even weirder about that is that soren kierkegaard's middle name was Aabye. Soren a Kierkegaard. WACK)

Anyway, those stories were entirely irrelevant to where I'm going with this post. Point is, I'm doing this internship. And I just started working on editorial writing. The first editorial I wrote, though it was summarily rejected by the woman i'm interning with (not so much rejected as she told me I need to rewrite it better and on a different but related subject if i want even a chance to get it published), is quite TASPy. Plus, since it isn't going to published, if I don't post it here it'll languish forever in the corner of my desktop, sad and alone.

That said, I now present my (kind of bad and kind of melodramatic but also on a subject of great personal interest to me and i think of general interest to the peoples of our TASP) editorial about race and education in here in my lovely city. Call it my MLK day reflection.

Cool? Cool.


This Monday, more than 1200 Denverites gathered in City Park, undeterred by the sub-freezing temperatures, for the city’s 22nd annual Martin Luther King marade (march and parade). Many present were children, eager to share in the experience on their day off from school. They toted signs and waved to passerby, bouncing down Colfax to avoid the cold. Ardently and repeatedly, they spoke of King’s work for peace, equality, and justice.

However, to me the most impacting comment was one that touched on something closer to home. Said six year-old Matthew Pente proudly of King, “He made it so that black kids and white kids could be together.” I cannot help but be struck by Matthew’s simple statement, not because he is growing up in a generation of realized civil rights, but precisely because, forty years after King’s death, what he said is no more than a fantasy for most of Denver’s children.

Today, the vast majority of kids growing up in the metro area attend schools where theirs is the predominant race. In fact, 50% of blacks and close to three quarters of Latinos enroll in schools that are less than 10% white, and their white peers, the few (less than 7%) who choose to remain in the Denver Public Schools that is, cluster in a small number of affluent schools and well-funded magnet programs. More than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education proclaimed that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” public education in the city of Denver continues to exist in two separate and distinctly unequal realms.

Rarely do we allow ourselves to talk about public education in such overtly racial language. But to do so is necessary if we are to understand why segregation and inequality in Denver schools has persisted as it has, and how eventually this system will fail our students, all of them. Half will drop out before they graduate. Many more will lack the basic skills to continue their education. But most of all, these children will grow up in the polar antithesis of King’s dream, a system of racial and socioeconomic isolation so reinforced it will seem to them vastly permanent.

I know it does not have to be this way because I know it didn’t used to be. In 1973, Denver was actually the first major metropolitan area outside of the south to desegregate by order of the Supreme Court. Until the mid-80s, it enjoyed a remarkable level of integration. However, by the time I was born, in 1989, the “flight” of wealthy, white students to suburban and private schools, accompanied by an influx of Hispanic migrants, had torn gaping holes in funding, opportunity, and that old promise of integration. By the time the court’s ruling was lifted in 1995, four out of every five DPS students were minorities, and of the few remaining white students, nearly one fourth- myself included- attended schools that were at least 60% white. Separation had surfaced once again.

And with it came the twin demon of low expectations. All but three DPS high schools are now labeled as “low” achievers by the state. Most boast overcrowding, underfunding, and constant turnover of teachers and administrators. Education writer Jonathan Kozol calls this rampant breakdown of urban schools the “savage” inequality of American education. I like his term, because it exposes the disparity in our public schools in a way that is necessarily vicious. No, he says, this kind of isolation and poverty is not just unfair or even prejudiced. It is something much more. It is brutish, destructive, backward.

It is Philips Elementary in northeast Denver, an overwhelmingly black school with only one part time art teacher. And it is Richel Middle School, 92% Hispanic, which sends more than 100 students per year to city court for school infractions. It is North High School, where less than 40% of the entering freshman class this year will graduate. It is all these schools and so many more. It is the history of every child our education system has ever failed.

It is time we demand accountability for this inequity, not only from the city and school district, but from ourselves as well. Because it is us, the parents, the taxpayers, and most of all the students like me, who will bear the responsibility for seeing this through. And it is us most of all who deserve to watch it realized- clean, safe schools with high standards and humane discipline policies. All of these things are vastly important, of course. However, none of us, no Denver students, benefit from the continuing misconception that the only policy changes that matter are the ones that boost our CSAP scores, not when we know there is more. We know that we- black, Hispanic, Asian, white- do not benefit from learning in isolation from one another. We know too that we deserve better, that we should be the benefactors of that great dream King spoke about so many years ago. “Education is fundamental to all that we do,” our new governor told the state legislature yesterday. We know this, and we hope Mr. Ritter will not let it become just another campaign promise. Our future depends on it.


That's my story. Make of it what you will :-)