Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [127]
I think they just want to keep it in the school till now. And when they get to a point where they can’t figure out what it is, and then I guess they’ll send me somewhere else . . .
Wendy’s mother is not alarmed, because “the school” has told her not to worry about Wendy’s grades:
Her report card—as long as it’s not spelling and reading—spelling and reading are like F’s. And they keep telling me not to worry, because she’s in the Special Ed class. But besides that, she does good. I have no behavior problems with her at all.
Ms. Driver wants the best possible outcome for her daughter and she does not know how to achieve that goal without relying heavily on Wendy’s teachers.
I wouldn’t even know where to start going. On the radio there was something for children having problems reading and this and that, call. And I suggested it to a couple different people, and they were like, wait a second, it’s only to get you there and you’ll end up paying an arm and a leg. So I said to my mom, “No, I’m going to wait until the first report card and go up and talk to them up there.”
Ms. Driver might have placed somewhat less faith in Wendy’s teachers’ expertise had she known more about the bureaucratic rules educators in Lower Richmond School’s large urban district must contend with as they try to identify and resolve children’s learning difficulties. One teacher, speaking informally, notes that “[the district administrators] don’t want people written up.” To assign a student to a special education class full time, teachers are required to file two separate plans of intervention (each requiring a meeting with the principal, counselor, and mother), which each must be tried for 60 days before testing is permitted. The entire school year is only 180 days; thus, a minimum of two-thirds of the year would elapse before the end of the referral stage. As a practical reality, testing and placement in an appropriate classroom could not occur within the same school year, even in the extremely unlikely event that the process were to be initiated on the first day of school. The paperwork for Wendy was begun in the spring of third grade, but her “case” fell through the cracks; the referral had to be reinitiated in fourth grade. The only special help Wendy receives as a fourth-grader is access to the reading resource teacher. Had she attended an elementary school in a smaller suburban district like the one Garrett Tallinger went to, or a private school like the one Alexander Williams was enrolled in, where the educational resources were much more extensive and better funded and the bureaucratic machinery less imposing, Wendy might have received more effective attention, sooner.
Lower Richmond educators, however, tend not to stress these kinds of institutional differences as important factors in Wendy’s persistent reading problems. Instead, they often emphasize the critical role of parents. During the parent-teacher conference, Mr. Tier, Wendy’s fourth-grade teacher, expresses his outrage that she has made it to fourth grade without knowing how to read. He urges Ms. Driver to be more demanding with him and other school personnel, telling Ms. Driver in a parent-teacher conference: “If our roles were reversed—I’d be beating me on the head.”
Here, Mr. Tier suggests that Ms. Driver should take a concerted cultivation approach to her daughter’s education. She should aggressively monitor, criticize, and even badger educators rather than simply following the professionals’ advice. He shifts much of the responsibility for Wendy’s current predicament away from these expert decision makers and on to her mother, implying that had Ms. Driver taken this approach from the start, Wendy’s reading deficiency would never have been “allowed” to persist.
When Ms. Driver asks Mr. Tier to specify what she should