My Daughter's Excellent Education Compared to Mine

While my 25-year-old daughter was visiting me recently, on my remote mountaintop here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, we participated in a host of country-related activities such as swimming in a nearby lake, hiking around my property along Story Creek, tossing horseshoes and firing my old shotgun. Two city-born souls getting into the rhythm of country living was the underlying theme.

During those three days I was once again reminded of how alike yet different we are. This is something I prayed for and helped foster by design. The last thing I ever wanted was a child who was anywhere close to being a carbon copy of me. Like most parents, I envisioned her life enriched with countless more opportunities. Even before she was born and I cut the umbilical cord, I sensed that she would be smarter, get a better education, be more self-confident and much better looking too.

Her mother and I took turns reading to Donielle Angelique LeMone, every single night without fail, beginning when she was a mere infant too small to walk. As a direct result of our devotion to routine, our daughter became an avid reader at an early age and preferred reading to watching television. When the time came for her to attend school, her mother and I skimped on all nonessential expenses so we could enroll her in the best private school we could find. At the Pasadena Waldorf School, she received the first six years of her education. Then Donielle, always confident when it came to weighing our suggestions and then making her own decisions, transferred to magnate public schools to complete her middle and high school years.

All along the way she showed a passion for learning and never failed to earn the best grades. Consequently she was accepted by every university she applied to, including Harvard, and finally chose Wesleyan, Connecticut, where she majored in music. As a testament to her vast creative expressions, she wrote a film script based on a dream she had the night of her fifteenth birthday. Two years later, when a director expressed interest in producing it, she dismissed the opportunity by saying she had come to see the story as being too trite. While I am certain she respects me for never forsaking my goal to become a successful writer, I suspect she also thinks that same stubborn desire is another sure sign that I suffer from arrested development. Like her mother, she is the strong, quiet, humble and pragmatic type.

In comparison, I am weak, loud and proud of it and have a tendency to rely on blind faith more so than pragmatism. I always loved reading as a means of escape from the pressing realities of the world outside the narrow, North Philadelphia tenement building I grew up in. However, I was never much for studying assigned lessons. My early days are tainted with harsh memories of attending schools in a rough neighborhood where fights at recess and after school were normal pasttime attractions for large enthusiastic crowds craving the sight of someone else's blood. Attending Olney High, following a move to a better neighborhood, I was part of the first influx of "Negroes" to become students at that school since their doors opened. We were a small minority, about three dozen of us, in a student body of about three thousand and the majority treated us as social outcasts.

After a few major race-related brawls, in which we stood our ground, I felt as though I had reached the crossroads as a teenager with dreams of becoming a writer who combined the terseness of Hemingway and the long-windedness of Dostoyevski. That's when I chose to rebel rather than accept the daily acts of discrimination I faced, especially in light of the fact that all the teachers and administrators blamed us "Negroes" for inciting situations which never existed before we came along.

When I was not skipping school altogether, I cut classes and was assigned to permanent morning detentions until the day I handed the principal a signed note from my mother, giving me permission to quit school on my seventeenth birthday

Years later, as a mellowed-out peace loving adult with bohemian inclinations, it was young people from violence-prone neighborhoods whom I targeted to possibly influence when I began teaching creative writing courses in affiliation with the Watts Towers Art Center. I can still recall how inspiring it was for me to discover that each class I taught--from sixth grade through twelfth-had at least three students who showed a mature talent for the art of writing.

This brings me back to my daughter, who is going into her fourth year as a teacher with Teach For America. Wendy Kopp founded TFA, in 1990, with the high goal of fixing America's broken educational system with the revolutionary idea of recruiting the nation's high-performing college grads to teach in low-performing public schools. Last year more than 25,000 graduating seniors competed for 3,700 positions. Among the candidates were ten percent of the graduating students from Harvard, Yale and Georgetown. Furthermore, TFA is on target to raise $110 million from philanthropists, a forty percent increase from last year.

This is good news considering that our nation's graduation rate presently ranks 19^th among top developing countries. In 1983, the government issued report "A Nation at Risk", warned that a "rising tide of mediocrity" threatens our country's future. Most of our 3.5 million teachers come from diploma mills and score in the low quartile of college grads. Half of them will quit within five years, driven into other professions by low pay and low status. Hopefully, our next president, Obama or McCain, will see the need to rectify these inequities for the sake of our basic underlying foundation and our future as a world-leading nation.

More encouraging news: Nationwide, former Teach For America alum are leading the charge. Numerous school leaders and elected officials got their start in public service with Teach For America. According to Donna Foote of Newsweek, "By 2010, the ranks of America's next generation of leaders will be seeded with 20,000 high-achieving alums who will have seen the crisis in our classrooms firsthand."

As a self-educated man and doting father who has always wanted nothing but the best for his daughter, I am proud that she carries the TFA torch. She admits that her job is demanding and challenging, but I have never known her surrender to any task because it was too difficult.

"After a semester in Ghana," Donielle told me, "I knew I wanted to do something meaningful and considered doing service abroad." When TFA came to recruit her to join their network, she then realized there was so much that needed to be done right here on the shores where she was born and raised.