The Miseducation of L.A.’s Youth

They live in the country’s second largest metropolis, yet their education has robbed them of the ability to write in their native tongue.

A mere one year away from legal adulthood, many of Los Angeles’ high schoolers maintain only the most tenuous grasp on elementary grammar.

While I’ve been a journalist for a few  years, I recently became a high school teacher as well.

During the weekends this past fall, I taught a roomful of south Los Angeles 14- to 17-year-olds the “fundaments of journalism.”

I planned the curriculum thinking I would simply cover reporting, news writing, journalism’s “function in society” and the ethical issues cropping up within the discipline’s pursuit.

But I quickly realized this might be my only opportunity to attempt to mitigate the effects of the intellectual damage these students have faced within the incompetent—or perhaps merely overwhelmed—hands of LAUSD. I realize that sounds lofty and pretentious, but I was saddened and surprised by what I faced.

Most of these students cannot really write, and they are the good ones.

Those who can are lucky enough to go to schools in wealthier areas. Those who cannot do not seem to have been blessed with the same fortune.

It’s neither an inflammatory rumor, nor is it my imagination: with few exceptions, the education those attending south L.A. schools receive bears little to no relation with the one those enrolled in academic institutions located in more affluent neighborhoods face.

Of course, it would be impossible to know where natural capability ends,  and education begins, but all of these students have those natural capabilities. They are bright and ambitious. Even with full junior- and senior-year loads, they have elected to take a three-hour journalism class on Saturdays.

So they are not the “slackers.”

Yet even most of these go-getters, the cream who rise to the top of their inner city class rooms, can only differentiate between such homonyms as there, their and they’re, its and it’s or to, two and too  with effort.

I was the first person they’d heard even mention the subjunctive and conditional tenses, let alone explain their functions. They did not know what prepositions were. Once they did, they could not distinguish between prepositions and propositions, and while they recognized conjunctions as concepts, they did not know their use.

That is not their fault. But it is to their detriment.

Yet again, the system has failed them. It has failed them by passing them when they were not ready to move to the next level.

Far more importantly, though, it has failed them because its teachers never gave them the elementary tools they would need to write, to compete with others sharing their age and potential talents, but better able to communicate their ideas.

And that’s not just a shame, it’s an injustice.

By now, this topic seems hackneyed and overblown. But a tired debate does not strip the subject of either its gravity or merit, and circuitous discussions do not do away with what is, at the end, a very real problem.

They cannot write because they do not know grammar. They do not know what good writing is because they have read too little.

One could argue that there’s a point at which individuals can no longer “blame the system,” and that is true. But these students lack neither intelligence nor a desire to learn. They ask the right questions, and they seek to improve. It is their education that has been remiss.

These students are the stand-ins for all those living in poorer neighborhoods neglected by a large, bureaucratic school district behemoth that seems incapable of spending money where it is most needed, sending well-trained teachers where they could do great good and instilling in their charges what is the “fundament” of a quality education: the ability to write.

Stagnating on an overhaul in LAUSD’s internal structure or a redistribution of its funds risks dooming these teenagers to reminiscences of their “miseducation” along the lines of those written by Sonny Carson and Lauryn Hill—while bereft of even the elementary skills with which to express them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Essays/Op. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.