The One Where Citizen Mom Gets Schooled

by Amy Z. Quinn

Be Strong

We are not here
To dream or drift
We have hard work to do
And loads to lift
Shun not the struggle for it is God's gift!
Be strong, be strong, be strong!

—Pledge of the Mighty Mansion Knights, read to Strawberry Mansion High students as classes begin each morning

If you're ever in need of an attitude adjustment, I highly recommend spending a few hours with some teenagers, preferably ones you've pissed off by calling their school an "institution of last resort." That was the phrase I used in my first column for City Paper, where I talked about why, for so many parents exploring educational options for their children, the Philadelphia School District isn't an option at all.

As we used to say in Manayunk, "that's a fight in my neighborhood," and as I expected, plenty of people had plenty to say about the column. Most — including several school district teachers and many folks who suddenly "got Catholic" when their kids reached school age — agreed with me that Philadelphia's schools are too often not worthy of the students who attend them. Some thought I was full of shit, including some friends whose kids are in city public schools. Still others, in discussions on local Web sites, did everything up to and including accusing me of racism. Perhaps not surprisingly, the more vociferously a person disagreed with me, the less likely he seemed to actually, y'know, have children, much less be making the adult decisions that go along with having a family.

The most intelligent, articulate and, frankly, relevant responses came from a class of seniors at Strawberry Mansion High, one of the schools classified, in a report I cited, as "persistently dangerous." Social Science teacher Ben Hesse gave his students a copy of my column and asked them to write their reactions; react they did. Some of their responses ran on CP's Web site, and Hesse invited me to come and hash things out with the class.

Strawberry Mansion High School is neighbored by not a few storefront churches and a boarded-up Chinese takeout joint. The building is cavernous, its boulevard-wide main hallway festooned with trophies, awards, student artwork and images of the school's ever-vigilant mascot, the knight, who appears around nearly every corner, sometimes as a picture on a wall, sometimes more tangibly as one of several suits of armor.

It's worth mentioning that to even get inside, a visitor must first go through a metal detector, past police officers roaming each floor, and past classrooms secured by locking metal gates. Even with all this, Hesse tells me, in the three years he's taught here, he's had to break up enough fights that his eyeglasses have been broken more than once.

By the time I get in front of the kids, I'm feeling fairly smug — surely these kids must feel trapped, imprisoned in a school that's not good enough for them? Turns out, I came to the discussion with as many erroneous assumptions about them as they had about me (they all figured me for a McCain voter). When I ask how many wouldtransfer out of Mansion to a "better" school if they had the chance, not one hand goes up.

I'm sure part of that is the natural tendency to defend the familiar to an outsider, butstill. I press on: How many ofthem know someone who dropped out of Mansion before graduating? Several hands go up. The kids are all black or Hispanic, so I ask if they think I'm a racist. No, they say, correctly guessing it was another white person who'd lobbed that charge. What really angered them about what I'd written was the "institutions of last resort" line. These kids don't feel trapped. To them, those bars on the classroom doors are there to keep the too-real world out.

Their message for me, as a girl named Celeste would later write in a response, was, "If you go to school to study, then you're going to learn no matter what." (See more student responses to Citizen Mom's visit at citypaper.net/news.)

They're right about that, of course, but knowing it isn't enough to make me move back to the city and enroll my son in public school. They asked me if I'd send my kid to Mansion, and the best answer I could come up with was, "Not if I could avoid it." It was the truth, but I felt a flash of shame saying it to their faces.

That's not to say I wouldn't go back. In fact, they invited me to return to lead discussions — and one asked if I'd come to graduation in June. Of course, I said, if they'd all promise to be there. They did, and I believe them. Then, this:

"Ms. Quinn, you know somebody got shot at graduation last year, right?"

Amy Z. Quinn blogs at quinnchannel.typepad.com.