By Jim Trelease © 2004

othing demonstrates the unevenness of the "playing field" in American schools better than the successive days in 2004 when I presented lectures to students in two high schools: one suburban and one urban.

   The contents of the two programs were intended to be identical: the importance of reading in one's daily life and future, and the importance of reading to children when they arrive in your life. Each school site had been given identical instructions as to what physical arrangements and equipment were needed: overhead projector with bright bulb (and backup bulb or projector, just in case), screen (large enough to be seen by the audience), and a microphone.

Suburban School

   On Tuesday morning I made a 50-minute presentation to 350 well-behaved high school juniors in the suburban district. They were seated in a handsome school auditorium, complete with a 24-foot screen, bright overhead projector, and a state-of-the-art sound system. A student had been asked to introduce me to the group and he'd been carefully prepared with a brief resume about me. The audience was 99 percent white.

Urban School

   The following morning I made a similar presentation to 65 well-behaved high school students in an urban school's cafeteria. All of these teens, 99 percent of them African-American, had been hand-picked for the presentation because they were either already parents or soon to be parents. They were seated at cafeteria tables in hard-back chairs, facing a makeshift "screen" that consisted of eight pieces of white paper taped to a cinderblock wall. Adjacent to the "screen" was a large shadeless window that largely prevented students from clearly seeing most of what was on the "screen." Even without the sunlight obstacle, it would have been near to impossible to see what was on the screen because the overhead project was hopelessly out-of-focus and equipped with a bulb too dim to light much more than a shoe box. Overshadowing the vision woes were the acoustics of the event: although a makeshift sound system had been set up, the echo effect of the cinderblock walls and tile flooring offered a train station effect to everything that was said. But even a better sound system would not have helped much since the noise from the kitchen staff nearby would have overpowered even that.

   If you're wondering what my reaction was, it was this: I presented to the dozing (who could blame them) urban students as though this was situation normal, then packed up my things and left with an unexpressed sense of outrage. Equal opportunity to learn? Not even close. Had these arrangements been in place at the suburban school, I would have demanded immediate remedies if they wished me to present. For the urban students, that was not a consideration for even a second. People had been walking out on them all their lives; they didn't need another added to the list. All I could hope was that somewhere in the morning's cacophony, maybe one student heard something worth remembering. I know I'll long remember the morning, but for different reasons.

   If this represents how visiting educators are treated in that school, imagine the horrors awaiting the every-day faculty. If this is the equipment offered a guest, how minimal must be the school library's offerings? But then, anyone who has worked within inner-city America knows it to be the place with the fewest books and least amount of print in America. But once those government sanctioned "accountability tests" are firmly in place, all of this will be resolved, right? Retain those at-risk kids for a couple of years and they'll be motivated just like the suburban kids. Offer enough school vouchers to at-risk families (with no car and therefore no means to transport the child from one end of the city to another) and we'll be over the education hump. If you believe that, I'll bet you believe in weapons of mass destruction in you-know-where.