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Some people may remember Enrique Morones’ radio show, On The Record. One guest he had on his show quite often was then-Councilmember Ralph Inzunza, representative for District 8 on the City Council. Mr. Morones, an activist whom I greatly admire for his work in support of social justice and his humanitarian efforts on behalf of immigrants, did a number of shows on themes related to education. One day his topic was school uniforms, which Inzunza was there to speak in favor of; a friend of mine called and advised me to listen in. I listened, and called to speak on the topic. When my call was passed through, I said that my son had attended schools north of 8 and south of 8, as well as in South Park, and that it was only in the lowest performing schools that my son had been required to wear uniforms. The schools north of 8 didn’t have a required uniform and were high-ranked schools. One of the highest ranked elementary schools in the district, the best school my son had attended, Kumeyaay Elementary, did sell teeshirts with the Kumeyaay logo and everybody wore them on Mondays, not out of obligation but as a show of pride in their school. I said I didn’t see any correlation between wearing uniforms and better test scores; if anything, just the opposite. As I recall, Inzunza mentioned two reasons he favored uniforms, one, preventing thugs from killing students for football jackets and shoes, and two, the parents preferred uniforms.
As for the first reason, I’m thinking that’s something of an urban legend, I mean, I heard of it happening once or twice years ago, and never in San Diego, but hey here’s a thought: Ban the kids from wearing football jackets and expensive kicks! The second reason, that parents like uniforms, may be true but for obvious reasons this is a hypocritical dodge and a convenient out for politicians. Schools that are located in inner-city, lower-income communities are mainly the ones that require school uniforms. For some families, it can be less expensive to dress kids in uniforms; a pair of Levis can cost three times as much as a pair of uniform trousers, for example. Uniform clothing is also fairly sturdy; in families where there may be younger children, uniforms can be passed down in good wearable condition. There are drawbacks to uniforms, however. For one thing, standard model school uniforms are problematic for children who aren’t standard model size, especially for boys who are taller, bigger, heavier. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, but let me finish out my thought on the political side: Politicians like to talk about uniforms so they don’t have to seriously address their failure to provide quality education at schools in inner-city lower-income communities. Uniforms are irrelevant to the issue of good schools, and distract from the real problems, problems uniforms can’t solve. As I said to Inzunza that day, dressing our kids up in private school uniforms doesn’t mean our schools are providing private school educations.
I volunteered at schools where uniforms were required. It was obvious which kids came from homes where there was money to be spent on children’s appearances: the boys wore nice clean pressed uniforms with new shirts and socks, upgraded sneakers, trendy backpacks. The girls often wore ribbons in their neatly styled hair, gold earrings, necklaces, and bracelets, pretty white blouses under their uniform dresses. Next were the kids that came to school clean and neat; their uniforms may have been hand-me-downs and the sneakers from Payless, but the shirts and socks were usually new or looked new. Then there were the children whose uniforms were a tragic parody of the school uniform. I well remember two girls in particular, one an African-American whose hair was always sticking up one way or another, bare legs in all weather, feet slapping along in worn flip-flops, filthy oversized uniform dress hanging off her shoulders over a grimy stained man-sized undershirt. The other girl was Anglo, and had safety pins holding her uniform together around her thin body, neatly folded white socks trying to hide the dirty tops, but the filthy heels were still showing from above her worn sneakers, grime showing under the chipped nail polish, glitter gel on the snaggled dirty blonde hair, lice crawling through her overlong bangs.
This second girl was a pretty little girl, just dirty, but a sweet child. The other girls, rich by comparison, and snooty, laughed at her whenever she spoke in class, and she would look at them with a solemn face, proud, pained, sorrowful. Her drug-scraggly mother often kept her out of school to beg for money at the local stores; I think the child preferred that to going to school. At least she could believe that her mother loved her and didn’t just keep her around for the checks and the begging.
One of the reasons I began to volunteer at my son’s school had to do with uniforms. He was one of those children who was bigger and tubbier in the belly. I could find him uniform polo-style shirts that fit, I could find shorts that fit in the waist, but I couldn’t find pants that fit. My son wasn’t the only one, there were a few boys in each class at that school who had this problem. The boys could wear shorts in the summer, but when the weather was cold, they simply endured shorts through the winter or wore sweat pants in the required color. That’s what I did. My son wore shorts at the beginning of the school year but when the weather got cooler, I sent him to class in sweat pants. I had seen two other boys in his class who were even bigger than my son wearing sweat pants and assumed this was acceptable.
After getting a string of complaints from the teacher about my son’s behavior in class, I decided one day to go to the school and observe the class for myself. The morning went smoothly enough. At recess, the teacher had the children line up to take them out of the classroom; her system was to call the ones who were wearing full uniforms to the head of the line. The teacher then called those with half-uniforms next. Here, my son and the other two boys wearing the polo shirts and sweats got in line. The teacher then called the other children who were wearing regular clothes to get in line last.
When I asked the teacher about the system for getting in line based on their uniforms, she said she called the children in full uniform to the line first to encourage the other children to wear school uniforms. I explained that I had not been able to find pants for my son, that the sweatpants were new, pressed, and in the required color, she replied that sweat pants weren’t considered uniform pants and that she couldn’t make an exception. I spent the next weekend going from department stores to retail stores trying to find pants for my son, but the closest I could come were pants that would have to be altered. Between what the pants and the tailoring would cost, we were talking money I could scarcely afford. My son was comfortable in his sweat pants. I let it ride. Whenever the weather was good enough for him to wear shorts, he wore shorts that met the requirements (no elastic, right color, right material), which allowed him to get in the front of the line with the other kids wearing full uniforms. By the time the warmer months rolled around, he was in the front of the line all of the time.
Back to that first day, and recess. Among her other rules, this teacher would punish the children who didn’t turn in their homework by sitting them outside the classroom on the blacktop at recess with their worksheet and a pencil (the classroom was in a bungalow at the far side of the schoolyard, at the boundary of the campus). I found this out because the day I was there observing, to my shock and dismay, my son was one of the ones being sat outside. I asked the teacher why he was being punished, she said she was sending the homework packets home on Monday and he wasn’t bringing his homework back. I said he was; the packet came home with a cover note saying all the homework had to be turned in by Thursday, my son was bringing his completed packet back to school every Thursday. Oh, she said, that wasn’t what she meant, what she meant was that one worksheet from the packet had to be turned in each day, Monday through Thursday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, my son was being punished for no good reason other than his teacher wouldn’t see or admit the obvious, that my son was turning in the whole packet completed every Thursday based on a misunderstanding of her poorly worded note.
Obviously, I fixed the problem with my son; we did his one worksheet every evening and he turned it in the next morning so he wasn’t being punished for that. From what I saw that first visit, I decided that I would go every day to sit in the classroom and observe, to make sure there were no more “misunderstandings.” Since I was there, I would see that each day at recess there were always at least five and sometimes up to ten children sitting outside on the blacktop who hadn’t turned in their homework that day. The teacher would sit them down, lock the classroom and go off to the main building to hang out in the teacher’s lounge. I hated to see the kids punished like this: I would help them figure out the answers, quickly finish up their work, then collect their worksheets and release them to play, which they would joyfully run off to do (I had no authority to do this, but I did it anyway.). The teacher was not happy with me. Not happy at all.
Which brings me to M. Involved as I was dealing with my son’s issues, I don’t think I would have ever noticed M beyond that he was a quiet boy who was punished Monday through Thursday at recess time for not turning in his homework. M was a smart boy and a good student while he was in the classroom, he was friendly with the other boys, was never troublesome or acted out. He never complained when the teacher kept him out of recess because he didn’t have his homework. I would help him with his worksheet at recess, and did other little things for him and the other children in the classroom when the teacher allowed it. She and I were not on good terms so she didn’t ask me to do a lot and I didn’t feel like I could do anything without her getting pissy, and I didn’t want to cross her out of concern she would use any excuse to get me thrown out of the class.
The teacher followed the same routine every day. At recess, all of the children were seated on the rug at the front of the classroom, cross-legged and facing forward (they had to be cross-legged and facing forward or she wouldn’t move from her seat); I sat at one of the children’s desks to one side of the rug, near my son. She would get up and go to the door and call for the children who were wearing full uniforms to stand up and get in line (they had to walk, if they didn’t walk, she made them sit back down again), then the ones wearing half uniforms, then all the rest of the children. By the end of the year, as I said, my son, in polo shirt and shorts, was always one of the first ones in line.
On the last day of school that year, I was sitting in my usual spot at recess time, as the teacher walked over to the door. There had been no homework for the last week, so there would be no children sitting on the blacktop, thank God. M’s behavior caught my eye; he was normally quiet and still as he sat facing forward; today he was looking down at himself and then looking up, smiling softly, his hands folded under his chin. I watched him, wondering what was up, as he did this twice more -- and then it dawned on me. Usually M wore sweat pants, sometimes he had on a uniform polo shirt with his sweat pants, or sometimes he had on uniform pants with a regular shirt, the rest of the time he wore just regular clothes. He was always clean, and his clothes were clean, but they were somewhat old and faded, and he always wore cheap plastic sandals. M was one of the children that was in the second group or third group in line. But today, who knows why or how, M was wearing a full uniform, polo shirt and pants; he was looking at his clothes, and smiling to himself. Today, M would be one of the kids in the front of the line.
I thought about the whole year when this good little boy had never once stood in the front of the line. And he knew it, and he knew that today, the last day of school, would be different. Tears filled my eyes.
Some people may remember Enrique Morones’ radio show, On The Record. One guest he had on his show quite often was then-Councilmember Ralph Inzunza, representative for District 8 on the City Council. Mr. Morones, an activist whom I greatly admire for his work in support of social justice and his humanitarian efforts on behalf of immigrants, did a number of shows on themes related to education. One day his topic was school uniforms, which Inzunza was there to speak in favor of; a friend of mine called and advised me to listen in. I listened, and called to speak on the topic. When my call was passed through, I said that my son had attended schools north of 8 and south of 8, as well as in South Park, and that it was only in the lowest performing schools that my son had been required to wear uniforms. The schools north of 8 didn’t have a required uniform and were high-ranked schools. One of the highest ranked elementary schools in the district, the best school my son had attended, Kumeyaay Elementary, did sell teeshirts with the Kumeyaay logo and everybody wore them on Mondays, not out of obligation but as a show of pride in their school. I said I didn’t see any correlation between wearing uniforms and better test scores; if anything, just the opposite. As I recall, Inzunza mentioned two reasons he favored uniforms, one, preventing thugs from killing students for football jackets and shoes, and two, the parents preferred uniforms.
As for the first reason, I’m thinking that’s something of an urban legend, I mean, I heard of it happening once or twice years ago, and never in San Diego, but hey here’s a thought: Ban the kids from wearing football jackets and expensive kicks! The second reason, that parents like uniforms, may be true but for obvious reasons this is a hypocritical dodge and a convenient out for politicians. Schools that are located in inner-city, lower-income communities are mainly the ones that require school uniforms. For some families, it can be less expensive to dress kids in uniforms; a pair of Levis can cost three times as much as a pair of uniform trousers, for example. Uniform clothing is also fairly sturdy; in families where there may be younger children, uniforms can be passed down in good wearable condition. There are drawbacks to uniforms, however. For one thing, standard model school uniforms are problematic for children who aren’t standard model size, especially for boys who are taller, bigger, heavier. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, but let me finish out my thought on the political side: Politicians like to talk about uniforms so they don’t have to seriously address their failure to provide quality education at schools in inner-city lower-income communities. Uniforms are irrelevant to the issue of good schools, and distract from the real problems, problems uniforms can’t solve. As I said to Inzunza that day, dressing our kids up in private school uniforms doesn’t mean our schools are providing private school educations.
I volunteered at schools where uniforms were required. It was obvious which kids came from homes where there was money to be spent on children’s appearances: the boys wore nice clean pressed uniforms with new shirts and socks, upgraded sneakers, trendy backpacks. The girls often wore ribbons in their neatly styled hair, gold earrings, necklaces, and bracelets, pretty white blouses under their uniform dresses. Next were the kids that came to school clean and neat; their uniforms may have been hand-me-downs and the sneakers from Payless, but the shirts and socks were usually new or looked new. Then there were the children whose uniforms were a tragic parody of the school uniform. I well remember two girls in particular, one an African-American whose hair was always sticking up one way or another, bare legs in all weather, feet slapping along in worn flip-flops, filthy oversized uniform dress hanging off her shoulders over a grimy stained man-sized undershirt. The other girl was Anglo, and had safety pins holding her uniform together around her thin body, neatly folded white socks trying to hide the dirty tops, but the filthy heels were still showing from above her worn sneakers, grime showing under the chipped nail polish, glitter gel on the snaggled dirty blonde hair, lice crawling through her overlong bangs.
This second girl was a pretty little girl, just dirty, but a sweet child. The other girls, rich by comparison, and snooty, laughed at her whenever she spoke in class, and she would look at them with a solemn face, proud, pained, sorrowful. Her drug-scraggly mother often kept her out of school to beg for money at the local stores; I think the child preferred that to going to school. At least she could believe that her mother loved her and didn’t just keep her around for the checks and the begging.
One of the reasons I began to volunteer at my son’s school had to do with uniforms. He was one of those children who was bigger and tubbier in the belly. I could find him uniform polo-style shirts that fit, I could find shorts that fit in the waist, but I couldn’t find pants that fit. My son wasn’t the only one, there were a few boys in each class at that school who had this problem. The boys could wear shorts in the summer, but when the weather was cold, they simply endured shorts through the winter or wore sweat pants in the required color. That’s what I did. My son wore shorts at the beginning of the school year but when the weather got cooler, I sent him to class in sweat pants. I had seen two other boys in his class who were even bigger than my son wearing sweat pants and assumed this was acceptable.
After getting a string of complaints from the teacher about my son’s behavior in class, I decided one day to go to the school and observe the class for myself. The morning went smoothly enough. At recess, the teacher had the children line up to take them out of the classroom; her system was to call the ones who were wearing full uniforms to the head of the line. The teacher then called those with half-uniforms next. Here, my son and the other two boys wearing the polo shirts and sweats got in line. The teacher then called the other children who were wearing regular clothes to get in line last.
When I asked the teacher about the system for getting in line based on their uniforms, she said she called the children in full uniform to the line first to encourage the other children to wear school uniforms. I explained that I had not been able to find pants for my son, that the sweatpants were new, pressed, and in the required color, she replied that sweat pants weren’t considered uniform pants and that she couldn’t make an exception. I spent the next weekend going from department stores to retail stores trying to find pants for my son, but the closest I could come were pants that would have to be altered. Between what the pants and the tailoring would cost, we were talking money I could scarcely afford. My son was comfortable in his sweat pants. I let it ride. Whenever the weather was good enough for him to wear shorts, he wore shorts that met the requirements (no elastic, right color, right material), which allowed him to get in the front of the line with the other kids wearing full uniforms. By the time the warmer months rolled around, he was in the front of the line all of the time.
Back to that first day, and recess. Among her other rules, this teacher would punish the children who didn’t turn in their homework by sitting them outside the classroom on the blacktop at recess with their worksheet and a pencil (the classroom was in a bungalow at the far side of the schoolyard, at the boundary of the campus). I found this out because the day I was there observing, to my shock and dismay, my son was one of the ones being sat outside. I asked the teacher why he was being punished, she said she was sending the homework packets home on Monday and he wasn’t bringing his homework back. I said he was; the packet came home with a cover note saying all the homework had to be turned in by Thursday, my son was bringing his completed packet back to school every Thursday. Oh, she said, that wasn’t what she meant, what she meant was that one worksheet from the packet had to be turned in each day, Monday through Thursday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, my son was being punished for no good reason other than his teacher wouldn’t see or admit the obvious, that my son was turning in the whole packet completed every Thursday based on a misunderstanding of her poorly worded note.
Obviously, I fixed the problem with my son; we did his one worksheet every evening and he turned it in the next morning so he wasn’t being punished for that. From what I saw that first visit, I decided that I would go every day to sit in the classroom and observe, to make sure there were no more “misunderstandings.” Since I was there, I would see that each day at recess there were always at least five and sometimes up to ten children sitting outside on the blacktop who hadn’t turned in their homework that day. The teacher would sit them down, lock the classroom and go off to the main building to hang out in the teacher’s lounge. I hated to see the kids punished like this: I would help them figure out the answers, quickly finish up their work, then collect their worksheets and release them to play, which they would joyfully run off to do (I had no authority to do this, but I did it anyway.). The teacher was not happy with me. Not happy at all.
Which brings me to M. Involved as I was dealing with my son’s issues, I don’t think I would have ever noticed M beyond that he was a quiet boy who was punished Monday through Thursday at recess time for not turning in his homework. M was a smart boy and a good student while he was in the classroom, he was friendly with the other boys, was never troublesome or acted out. He never complained when the teacher kept him out of recess because he didn’t have his homework. I would help him with his worksheet at recess, and did other little things for him and the other children in the classroom when the teacher allowed it. She and I were not on good terms so she didn’t ask me to do a lot and I didn’t feel like I could do anything without her getting pissy, and I didn’t want to cross her out of concern she would use any excuse to get me thrown out of the class.
The teacher followed the same routine every day. At recess, all of the children were seated on the rug at the front of the classroom, cross-legged and facing forward (they had to be cross-legged and facing forward or she wouldn’t move from her seat); I sat at one of the children’s desks to one side of the rug, near my son. She would get up and go to the door and call for the children who were wearing full uniforms to stand up and get in line (they had to walk, if they didn’t walk, she made them sit back down again), then the ones wearing half uniforms, then all the rest of the children. By the end of the year, as I said, my son, in polo shirt and shorts, was always one of the first ones in line.
On the last day of school that year, I was sitting in my usual spot at recess time, as the teacher walked over to the door. There had been no homework for the last week, so there would be no children sitting on the blacktop, thank God. M’s behavior caught my eye; he was normally quiet and still as he sat facing forward; today he was looking down at himself and then looking up, smiling softly, his hands folded under his chin. I watched him, wondering what was up, as he did this twice more -- and then it dawned on me. Usually M wore sweat pants, sometimes he had on a uniform polo shirt with his sweat pants, or sometimes he had on uniform pants with a regular shirt, the rest of the time he wore just regular clothes. He was always clean, and his clothes were clean, but they were somewhat old and faded, and he always wore cheap plastic sandals. M was one of the children that was in the second group or third group in line. But today, who knows why or how, M was wearing a full uniform, polo shirt and pants; he was looking at his clothes, and smiling to himself. Today, M would be one of the kids in the front of the line.
I thought about the whole year when this good little boy had never once stood in the front of the line. And he knew it, and he knew that today, the last day of school, would be different. Tears filled my eyes.