I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.