Newspaper endorsement interviews can be fairly rote affairs. Partly it is us, as the interviewers, asking many of the same questions so as to cover the same ground with each competing candidate. Partly it is the candidates themselves, especially those on slates, who are careful to stick to the talking points so as to not allow light between them and theirs.
But in every cycle of these interviews there are the surprises and treasures, individuals who sit across our table and just talk openly about what has truly motivated them to take the extraordinary step of running for public office.
This spring that remarkable moment came when Ralph Lee came visiting. Lee is an independent candidate for the school board at Oak Park and River Forest High School. I’ve known him just a bit over the past year, but more in the context of village politics not school issues. But, as he says, the high school is what he knows best and cares about most, having taught there for 16 years, wrapping up in 1999.
Ralph Lee is a black man, relevant and irrelevant in this discussion. Not relevant when he talks persuasively about the crushing impact of ever higher school-driven property taxes. “We can’t just keep raising taxes,” he says, “Now we have to make some hard decisions. We have to set priorities and take heat for those priorities.” He couldn’t be more on target.
Having been a black teacher at the school, though, is completely relevant when he starts to sort out the complexities of race at our high school. His approach is both bold and nuanced. Everyone gets blamed. No one gets lambasted.
There is racism at work in the school, he is sure, but first acknowledges that “all human beings are racist,” himself, and the reporters circling the table, included. He talked about a 13-page analysis of achievement gap issues he wrote while still at the school and which, he says, went over like a dead weight. He says the school systems bear notable responsibility for that gap but says he “now recognizes more clearly how black households and black culture contribute” to the gap.
There are, he says without equivocation, lower academic and behavioral expectations for black students at the high school. Most black students are in the basic, or lowest, of three academic tracks, he notes. “Homework for the basic track is significantly less. [These students] spend considerably less time at work,” he says. They should be spending as much or more time on homework, Lee says. He would like the school to undertake research “to prove out” his observation about homework but in the meantime is not on any sort of crusade to do away with tracking.
“Tracking shouldn’t be wiped out. That causes wars,” he says. And Lee is, as a former teacher at OPRF, very aware of the gradual pace of change at the school.
That slow change in approach, he says, is seen in how the school’s discipline system has devolved in the face of allegations of racism. To create fairness in how punishment was meted out, he says, the number of people responsible for discipline in the school was narrowed and narrowed. While it may have created fairness, he says, it has also removed the rest of the institution’s adults-teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers-from the responsibility to enforce shared expectations of how our kids ought to be behaving in school.
“A black kid is acting out in the hall. The white teacher has to decide, ‘Am I going to challenge that kid?’ We know that some teachers have been labeled racist and kids know how to play that. Teachers don’t always get support from the administration [in those circumstances],” Lee says.
But he also knows that even if the decision were consciously made to allow the adults to be the adults, it would take years for the school culture to change.
This is the sort of straight talk on race, on racism, on values that isn’t heard often enough in Oak Park. It needs to be heard on our school board.
