Teacher Gerry Garibaldi’s urban Connecticut high school is not short on resources. “We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works,” he writes in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. But all the money and reforms can’t help a problem no one wants to confront: teen pregnancy. “This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one,” he writes. “There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.”
“In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me. Often they sit together in my classes, sharing insights into parenting, discussing the taste of Pedialite or the exhaustion that goes with the job. On my way home at night, I often see my students in the projects that surround our school, pushing their strollers or hanging out on their stoops instead of doing their homework.”
Connecticut is particularly generous to unwed mothers, Garibaldi writes. But those benefits are tantamount to a public endorsement of single motherhood, “one that has turned our urban high schools into puppy mills. The safety net has become a hammock,” he notes.
Garibaldi’s moving piece describes his efforts to teach journalism to several teenage mothers-to-be–girls who read on the 5th grade level in high school, and expect (and receive) no help from the fathers of their children. “The young father almost always greets the pregnancy with adolescent excitement, as if a baby were a new Xbox game,” he writes. “But a boy’s interest in his child quickly vanishes. When I ask girls if the father is helping out with the baby, they shrug. ‘I don’t care if he does or not,’ I’ve heard too often.”
I keep in touch with a substantial number of my former South Bronx students. Garibaldi’s piece arrived in my inbox minutes after I left a message for one of my favorite, if most troubled, former students–an exceptionally bright, emotionally volatile young woman who at 17 has just given birth to her second child. Still in the foster care system, she lives with the mother of the young man who fathered her children. I asked her if she has the help she needs with her babies; she asked me for help finding a school where she can finish up so she can go to college. It sounds hopeful, but I’ve learned to temper my expectations. Last year I made arrangements after the birth of her first child for her to attend a transfer school with an array of support services, she failed even to show up to take an entrance exam she could have aced in her sleep.
Another of my former students, 18, who stopped going to school after 9th grade and last year stopped attending even her GED classes, recently posted on Facebook that she is pregnant. She regularly puts up pictures of her tattoed and swelling belly and updates her status daily with news of her clearly unstable relationship with the baby’s father–another former student she refers to as her “hubby.” A sweet and trusting young woman, it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that I could see this one coming years ago. Her page overflows with congratulatory messages from friends and family members about the baby, and profane advice on what to do with ”hubby.”
Back to Garibaldi:
“Every fall, new education theories arrive, born like orchids in the hothouses of big-time university education departments. Urban teachers are always first in line for each new bloom. We’ve been retrofitted as teachers a dozen times over. This year’s innovation is the Data Wall, a strategy in which teachers must test endlessly in order to produce data about students’ progress. The Obama administration has spent lavishly to ensure that professional consultants monitor its implementation. Every year, the national statistics summon a fresh chorus of outrage at the failure of urban public schools,” he concludes. “Next year, I fear, will be little different.”
Just so.
How will the revival of shame restore a culture that devalues marriage and children? Isn’t this a problem that cries out for faith-based solutions?
Comment by Just a mom — January 31, 2011 @ 11:44 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dennis Ashendorf, Robert Pondiscio. Robert Pondiscio said: Core Knowledge Blog: Teacher says teen pregnancy is turning urban schools into "puppy mills." http://bit.ly/fIS5Dh #edreform #edu [...]
Pingback by Tweets that mention Urban Schools Have Become “Puppy Mills” « The Core Knowledge Blog, The Core Knowledge Blog -- Topsy.com — January 31, 2011 @ 12:08 pm
And all the while, our society lambasts the likes of Bristol Palin, because . . . she’s white? the daughter of a conservative politician? not from an urban metropolis? not on public assistance? The problem is not just in urban schools, it is all over our country, and it does not confine itself to a particular race, ethnic group, family income level, or political persuasion.
Comment by Cindy — January 31, 2011 @ 1:09 pm
And all the while, our society lambasts the likes of Bristol Palin, because
…she opposes safe-sex education, which would help to prevent teenage girls from becoming pregnant.
Comment by Hainish — February 1, 2011 @ 2:58 pm
Frankly, I think it’s disgusting that Garibaldi want to shame these students. If they had aborted their pregnancies, he’d likely be appalled at that, too.
Comment by Hainish — February 1, 2011 @ 3:00 pm
I read Garibaldi’s article, and a few things have been bouncing around in my mind for a few days. I don’t have any experience in poor urban high schools, and I certainly don’t pretend to have any answers, but here are some thoughts.
Garibaldy says “there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant.” I think that is much understating the case. I think there is something more than a lack of shame. I think single motherhood must be an idea in this culture.
When a person, or a group, becomes defensive about something, it can be counterproductive to attack that something. It appears that the girls described by Garibaldi are defensive about their culture. Therefore when he asks questions that he hopes will cause them to reflect on their situations and their choices, they interpret that as an attack on their culture and respond defensively. This is not to criticize Garibaldi. He is doing what he thinks best, and I certainly don’t know how to do anything better. But it does seem pretty futile.
When Nicole, in Garibaldi’s article, asserts the she will never get married, Garibaldi says, “She was speaking of a hard fate that she was accepting as her future.” This sounds like Garibaldi thinks Nicole thinks of it as a hard future. But I am not convinced that Nicole thinks of it that way. My guess is that Nicole thinks of it as a good thing, the future she is aiming for, not as a future she is stuck with. My impression is that her culture has told her for many years that single motherhood is an ideal to strive for. Why would her culture tell her this, when, to us, it is so blatantly false? Well, a culture under attack will be vigorously defended by members of that culture. That’s human nature. We can say it’s stupid human nature, but that’s irrelevant.
What is the appeal of single motherhood? As a teacher of college freshmen math I have known a number of them. The ones I have known are not from an urban culture of poverty. Rather they are mostly from small town Midwestern culture, which I think of as a pretty healthy culture. I haven’t known any of these young women to any great depth, but they’ve been to see me in my office many times, trying to catch up on classes they’ve missed because of their kids, and trying to pass my class, which is not easy while they are juggling jobs and childcare. I’ve had enough contact with them to hear some talk of their lives and struggles. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard any expression of wishing they had a husband to share the burdens. I have concluded, and perhaps others can comment on this, that one great reward of single parenthood is the control they have. They don’t have to share any of that control with anyone else. They are the final decision maker for their kids, at least for a number of years. Friends, family, and society at large, accept this.
I have also observed that a new mother is the center of attention, by peers and family, but also by society at large in many ways. I suppose this doesn’t last more than a few years or so, but I think it probably starts early in pregnancy and I can imagine it can be a very heady experience, especially for someone who has never before made much of a splash in the world.
In his article Garibaldi talks a little of Nicole’s mother, who we might guess is probably in her thirties. This mother is described as sounding “bone-weary” on the telephone. We can easily understand why Garibaldi wants to do anything possible to spare Nicole this dreary future. But I think we should also understand that what is so obviously, blatantly, visible to Garibaldi will not look that way to Nicole. It takes a long time before kids begin to see life as adults do.
So what’s the solution to the problem, which the girls involved do not see as a problem at all? I wish I knew.
Comment by Brian Rude — February 4, 2011 @ 4:55 pm
[...] is trying to help a former South Bronx student, very bright, emotionally volatile, who just gave birth to her second child. She’s [...]
Pingback by “Nobody gets married any more, Mister” — Joanne Jacobs — February 6, 2011 @ 4:41 pm
I found this Ta-Nehisi Coates column a take on the conundrum…
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/02/how-to-stop-teens-from-having-sex/35319/
Comment by Rachel — February 22, 2011 @ 11:53 pm