Making "Bad Kids"

At her son Noah's graduation from a North Philadelphia elementary school in June 1972, Lois Mark Stalvey felt nothing but "a bleak hopelessness." When the new graduates, mostly black, began to sing We've Only Just Begun, tears streamed down her cheeks, but not from sentiment. "I was weeping for all the bright-faced children who were leaving their last chance behind," she writes in Getting Ready (Morrow; $7.95). Her new book is both a remarkable chronicle of a white family's confrontation with inner-city schools and a harsh indictment of an educational system that is a disaster for most of its pupils.

When the Stalveys moved to Philadelphia from a white suburb of Omaha in 1962, they deliberately chose to settle in the city's integrated West Mount Airy district. As each of their three young children entered the nearby school, Lois Stalvey began to get involved with their classmates, more than two-thirds of whom were black. One day in 1967, when Noah was in third grade, she broke up a fight between him and an older boy named Jelly Stowe. When she invited Jelly home for milk and cookies, Noah said, "Mom, you gotta be crazy! He's the baddest kid in school!" Two months earlier, Jelly had slapped Sarah Stalvey's second-grade teacher, and school officials described him as "very emotionally disturbed." But Lois Stalvey soon saw that beneath his bellicose exterior Jelly was a shy, affectionate and bright child. He had slapped the teacher, he explained, because "she was hittin' my brother so much."

"To my dismay," Lois Stalvey writes, "I learned for the first time that my children expected teachers to slap, hit, kick children"--some of the children, that is. The school's white principal and both black and white teachers treated white children and their parents with respect and attention. But the lower-income black children, whose speech, dress and attitudes often alienated their middle-class teachers, were consistently humiliated, labeled "slow" or "stupid" and physically abused.

Belligerent Porcupine. Of the many poor black children whom Lois Stalvey came to know and tried to help, none was more pitiful than Almira Stampp. When Noah and Almira were in the second grade, their white teacher made Almira stand in a wastebasket all afternoon--because, Noah explained, "she wouldn't say 'Yes, ma'am.'" Refused permission to go to the bathroom, Almira wet her pants. "See the pig in the pigpen," said the teacher to the class. Treatment like this inevitably had its effect on Almira (whose mother was a drug addict and whose father was in jail for a murder the child had witnessed). She became one of the school's infamous "bad kids," outwardly "as appealing as a belligerent black porcupine." But when Almira was in the eighth grade, Lois Stalvey finally won her trust; Almira asked her help in writing a book "about when I knew I was actin 'bad because I was feelin 'bad." Maybe, she said, "it'd help other kids to read about what happened." But Almira had only written five pages of the book when she abruptly moved from the neighborhood.

Noah sought his mother's help when he was assigned to write a report with his classmate Josh Pitt, the tough neighborhood bully. Lois Stalvey got to know Josh too, and soon realized that his aggression was simply a cover-up for his embarrassment; although he was clearly intelligent, Josh could not read. "I've always felt guilty about Josh," confessed the black teacher who had taught him in second grade. "When I had him in my class, 17 out of the 30 children had reading problems, and I was allowed only one hour a day for reading." Despite Lois Stalvey's efforts, Josh--too proud to accept help and burdened by the school's indifference--made no progress in reading. After a final brush with a teacher a few weeks before the end of the school year, he was transferred to an all-black school noted for its gang fights and low academic achievement.

Lois Stalvey met other nonreaders, all of them poor and black, when she did a once-a-week hourly stint as a volunteer teacher. Described to their faces by the principal as "the worst class the school's ever had," her eighth-graders had been virtually abandoned by their regular teacher, a white Peace Corps dropout who thought he would find urban education "more meaningful." When he failed to reach the students, he had become bitter and turned against them. "Some of those teachers could make kids feel dumb without saying anything," another Stalvey son, "Spike," explained to his mother. "And they kind of got across the idea to the rest of us that black kids were bad except for a few. After a while, teachers acted like those slow kids weren't even there."

Daily Assaults. By the time these victims of the system reached junior high school, "too young to drop out and too far behind to succeed," they were filled with anger--and took it out on the white minority. After weeks of manfully trying to cope with daily assaults by different groups of black students in his junior high school, Noah reluctantly gave up when a gang of blacks threw him down a flight of stairs. He transferred to another integrated--but more racially balanced--public school. Says his mother: "I realized that [the school] was the terrible sum of all the mistakes, indifference and racism I had seen accumulating over the years."

All of the Stalvey children--Spike, 18, Noah, 15, and Sarah, 14--are still in Philadelphia's public schools (Spike, in fact, the only white student in all but one of his classes), and Lois Stalvey still clings to hope for the inner-city schools. Like a militant black mother with whom she sided years ago, she believes that the schools need "white hostages" to keep from going under completely. But she is far from confident that even that can save the black students. "Why bother moving children's bodies around to achieve integrated education," she asks, "if like the black children in our school, they could not escape teachers with segregating eyes?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.