Editor’s Note:

This is a powerful article written for a college class, Education in the USA, about the conditions that exist in our educational system, mostly unaddressed. It will allow you, if you are open to it, to see what your experience was and who you have become. Brilliant in my opinion!

BC

“Katie Carlson is not average!”
–Katie Carlson, third-grader

I vividly remember this declaration. The school bus had just dropped off my older brother, John, and me at our house; a sprawling, old colonial on top of a hill, surrounded by yellowing fields and New England stonewalls. It was “Report Card Day.” I trudged up the steep driveway with a crisp, new envelope in my hand, a blinding white stripe poking out from the official manila pocket. John probably put his report card in his backpack, but, worried that it would crease, I was unwilling to do so. As we walked, I immediately began to complain to Johnny that there had been some mistake: “I got straight 1s except for Ms. Prior randomly gave me a 3. The music teacher, of all people! The boys make her cry in class at least once a week and she doesn’t even know my name because I don’t bother her.”

John said, “Well, look at it this way,” and I knew from his tone that he was about to impart some sage sixth-grade knowledge to me. “A 1 is like an A, right? So a 3 is like a C, which is not that bad at all. In fact, a C is average.”

But I protested; I shouted, and the moment has since gone down in family history. I knew average wasn’t good enough. I knew that wasn’t me. But what could I have learned in my short life that made me so sure?

My kindergarten report card is good place to start. Mrs. Sauer (pronounced “sour”) adored me. My parents found the report so amusing and gratifying that they kept it in a sacred box along with other especially important items, like my beaded braid clippings from trips to the Caribbean, and my old ski passes. In grade school, I’d pull the box down from the shelf occasionally, and marvel at the eerie perceptiveness of Mrs. Sauer’s comments. It seemed to me that she had caught a glimpse into my soul; my essence: what else could explain how little my personality and skill set had changed from kindergarten to 12th grade? Over the years, as accolades piled on from teachers and coaches, this document seemed to confirm that my identity was stable, and that all these achievements resulted from my natural merit. In light of what I have learned in this class, I now see my former reverence for this report card as evidence that I too internalized the white myth that , as Julie Landsman put it, “If I fail, I fail as I am; if I succeed, I succeed as I am” (2006). In actuality, even at six years old, my identity was a convergence of internal factors, like my genetic personality, and many external factors, like my high-status parents.

Mrs. Sauer describes my interactions with authority figures as, “friendly and direct, (… ) respectful and responsive.” I have always assumed that I get along especially well with teachers to this day because of my mom and dad’s parenting style. From an early age, my parents encouraged full inclusion and participation in family discussions, similarly to social justice models of education (Affolter 2013). When I was five years old, I remember debating around the dinner table whether or not we would spay our cat, Tigger, weighing the pros and cons of the cuteness of the kittens and the labor for both Mommies (I was strongly pro-kitty). I believe my parents really took my input into account. Mom and Dad were both extremely involved and respected in the community: my mom was the “town doctor” and frequently gave her friends free stitches; my Dad a vocal proponent of responsible conservation practices, and the sole organizer and major sponsor of a multi-mil lion dollar athletics facility for the town. At the dinner table, they talked politics, literature, and human psychology while my siblings and I were in the room. This open environment taught me to never to be afraid to speak frankly with adults, but their parenting style was not the only variable in play. I never had any good reason to be afraid to speak, because, although I did not realize it at the time, I was white, rich, and people knew me. I learned the tools, vocabulary, and speech patterns to use the right “code” with the adults in power, often well-educated, fairly affluent white people, like Mrs. Sauer. In fact, Mrs. Sauer and my mom went to the same private, all-women’s college, and often had feminist discussions revolving around me. At this time , I took to telling Mrs. Sauer that when I grew up, I wanted to be “the first woman president,” and I received nothing but indulgence and praise (that’s why I said it, after all). Although my classroom experience was fairly homogeneously white and upper-middle class, there was some variation, and I was always one of the wealthier kids. As I got older, teachers would sometimes tell me how grateful they were that my parents “believed in the value of the public education system” and gave them the opportunity to teach me! Although Ray Rist’s study (1970) involved an urban, black school, he likely would have drawn a similar conclusion if he visited my kindergarten classroom: teachers valued the upper class, perceived students like me as superior to the lower class, and reproduced a divide that would remain with us for the rest of our lives.

Mrs. Sauer and I were very close, and at the end of the year, she concluded, “(Katie) can be an amusing, clever conversationalist.” I don’t write this paper to argue that I’m not actually as innately smart and funny as I thought I was, or to make my self feel terrible about my privilege, or to ridicule Mrs. Sauer. I only want to point out that Mrs. Sauer knew that I was smart and funny because I felt comfortable talking to her, and she felt comfortable talking to me. No doubt this was partially due to our shared race, gender, and socioeconomic background. In later grades, we learned that teachers often define higher tracked students as “the type of students you can joke with” who can indulge in their creativity and critical thinking skills, whereas lower-tracked students require “discipline” to stay under control (Affolter 2013). Mrs. Sauer observes that I “pick(ed) up directions easily,” but that I often “got work jobs done as need be, often creatively — to suit (my) needs and tastes.” In grade school, I remember often reworking assignments to include more challenging material because I thought the basic instructions were too easy. Why did my teachers rarely punish me for loosely following the assignments? Maybe they were just exceptional teachers who valued my creativity… but maybe they also decided that I was one of the “good eggs” who could get away with something like that.

Even Mrs. Sauer’s criticisms have a touch of indulgent humor to them. Mrs. Sauer remarks that my social skills are not perfect: “She tends to ‘need to’ be right… (She) can be somewhat domineering of other children, and tends to get exasperated with their relative inabilities.” This character flaw has persisted my whole life, because in our school system, it is not really a flaw! As time went on and school became less deliberative and more competitive, the model of “radical individualism” taught me that I should always strive for the stable, right answer, and that I should not collaborate with other students, because that would be cheating (Affolter 2013). The peers’ success rarely affected my success, so I had no incentive to learn patience with other students. By framing other students in terms of “relative inability,” Mrs. Sauer fixes the students’ success as stagnant indicators of their potential, whereas “developmental disadvantage” may have been more appropriate at the age of six. Sure, I had some innate gifts, but I also benefited from having been surrounded by books as a toddler, for example.

Kindergarten did not totally launch me into a world of advantages, however. Mrs. Sauer thought that, although I was still well above average, I did not have quite the talent with numbers that I did with words. Perhaps this was true, but that is a tricky thing to tell a child, because this perception has essentially reproduced itself my whole life. Even though I consistently took accelerated and AP math courses throughout high school, I was rarely satisfied with my grades, and I never saw myself as a “math person.” Now, I am an English major with a heavy Biology minor. In fact, I would be “pre-med” if I didn’t lack two key credits: Physics and Calculus, both of which I refuse to take unless I am absolutely certain that I want to be a doctor. Why this fear? My parents should never have let me see that report card. As I continued to drag that old slip of paper down from the box, I started to agree with it. I even started to think that it was full o f my own ideas. Whenever writing got tough, I persisted, but when math got tough, I saw it as a sign of my lack of talent.

Identity is a strange mixture of who we innately are and who the world perceives us to be. I received mostly positive input from my teachers, who spoke to me and other teachers about who they thought I was, and reproduced the dominant perception of me from year to year. So, without training to see the invisible reproduction of my privilege, of course I would assume that my academic success was a given, essential part of who I was.

I was terrified when I applied to Middlebury. What if the admissions officers thought I was “average”? I believed that I deserved to attend an elite institution. My parents told me that they would be very happy if I attended the local state school, but my classroom experiences taught me that that UMass was not good enough for someone like me. In my mind, the social mobility model was valid: only a certain number of people could get a “good education,” and if I was not one of them, I would be stuck with an inferior commodity (Labaree 1997). From the perspective of most of the seniors at my overwhelming white, middle class public school in Massachusetts, we were the victims. We imagined swarms of people, from Phillips Exeter to Roxbury High, converging upon our admissions spots, and we didn’t see how we could possibly measure up. In our minds, we were the lost middle ground, with too many privileges and not enough at the same time. I now recognize that something ugly laced this anxiety: fear of the racial and socioeconomic other. In such a stratified society, where people essentially lived in homogenous pockets in their own neighborhoods, we had very few opportunities for multicultural education or interaction. Our teachers preached tolerance, but always in the context of MLK, or the Watts race riots: moments that seemed far away in time and/or space. I can’t recall my teachers ever bringing up present-day race relations in America. Because we were mostly white, and supposedly integrated (a laughable juxtaposition), I suppose the teachers thought that race wasn’t an issue at our school. But, as I’ve discussed in my paper, I now realize that race is not just a minority issue. My whiteness is not invisible—or at least, it shouldn’t be: I have been shaped by my privilege.

The second part of my story has been extremely uncomfortable to write. I have deleted and rewritten it many times already, because I am afraid that if I expose my prejudice, however subconscious or passive is was, you might ignore all the other parts of my story. It also makes me feel very defensive: I want to protest that I’m not a racist person, that I like all people for who they are, that I’m actually dating an Asian, etc., etc., until, of course, I sound ridiculous.

I don’t know where to go from here. It seems pointless to just feel guilty all the time, but it seems equally unproductive to just point out the issue, congratulate myself for being so self-aware, and move on with my life. Counter-intuitively, I think that if I choose not to “move on,” that if I decide to make race and class relations (or sexuality for that matter) a conscious part of my daily life, I will actually become a less “racist” and more tolerant person. Minorities on this campus think about those minority aspects of their identities every day, so why shouldn’t I think about mine every day as well? I have felt a change in me this semester. I feel much more comfortable talking to my black, Asian, Hispanic, and gay friends about aspects of their identity that I used to feel were off-limits. I feel empowered to talk about these tensions, because I feel that they are my issues as well, and I really want to make this community a more inclusive place for the people I love.

I have spent a lot of time deconstructing my privilege, writing about all of the flaws in my education and myself. But despite all of that, I would like to believe that, ultimately, Mrs. Sauer was right—that all the adults who have loved me, cared about me, and advocated for me were right. I really love learning, at an essential, inherent level. I think I have been blessed with an exceptional ability to process, synthesize, and create new information very quickly and creatively. Simply put, I am a smart woman. I must come to terms with the fact that I was born with both exceptional ability and opportunity, in a way that does not involve bragging, condescension, or an inflated sense of self-importance. In the past, I have not handled this very well. Since grade school, I have plunged myself into this education system head-first, diving for the grade, hoping to scrape together something good enough to prove that I am more worthy of praise than my pe ers. At the risk of sounding overly sappy, I think our education system does a very poor job of loving its children unconditionally. Certainly, disadvantaged and disabled children feel this strongly, but even I, who am so skilled at playing the game, have suffered at the hands of a system that tells me that I am only as good as what I produce relative to the person next to me.

Since entering college, my boyfriend, Kevin, has actually improved my education in ways he probably does not even realize. Now that I feel that I am unconditionally lovable by someone other than my parents, I don’t need validation from education as much… and though my grades have not improved, I have actually become a better student. I avoid the temptation of the rat race. I help people with their assignments, and enjoy collaborating and chatting about what goes on in class. Just because I tend to understand concepts quickly doesn’t mean I understand everything. And, just because I have a strong opinion doesn’t mean other voices should be excluded from the conversation. I think, slowly, gradually, I am becoming a less intimidating, “domineering” person. I think it’s sad that our education system is so wrapped up in the competitive model that most people can’t recognize that individual grades are part of a specific ideology. Particularly when we discus s our issues with the honor code, we take for granted that academic work should be private, non-collaborative, and totally essential to ourselves. Obviously, we shouldn’t “cheat,” but in higher-level academia, people write lab reports and journal articles in collaboration all the time. Why should this be so rare at the undergraduate level, or the middle school level?

If I could meet my nine-year-old self, I would want to tell her that I agree with her. No, “Katie Carlson is not average,” but neither is anyone else. You have a gift to share with the world, but a report card (or, when you are old enough, an admissions decision) does not define what that gift is. Everyone should have the opportunity to find that out about him or herself.

REFERENCES

Affolter, Tara. Selected lectures and discussions. EDST 115. Middlebury College. Fall 2013.

Labaree, David F. “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals.” American Educational Research Journal 34.1 (1997): Print.

Landsman, Julie, and Chance W. Lewis. “Being White:Invisible Privileges of a New England Prep School Girl.” White Teachers, Diverse Classrooms: A Guide to Building Inclusive Schools, Promoting High Expectations, and Eliminating Racism. Sterling, VA: Stylus Pub., 2006. Print.

Purcell-Gates, Victoria. “As Soon as She Even Opened Her Mouth!”: Issues of Language, Literacy and Power.” The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. Ed. Lisa D. Delpit and Joanne Kilgour. Dowdy. New York: New, 2002. Print.

Rist, Ray. “HER Classic: Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education.” Harvard Educational Review 70.3 (2000): 292-300. Print.

With all my love and every blessing!
Namaste!