Word: stalveys
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...Noah's graduation from a North Philadelphia elementary school in June 1972, Lois Mark Stalvey felt nothing but "a bleak hopelessness." When the new graduates, mostly black, began to sing We've Only Just Begun, tears streamed down her cheeks, but not from sentiment. "I was weeping for all the bright-faced children who were leaving their last chance behind," she writes in Getting Ready (Morrow; $7.95). Her new book is both a remarkable chronicle of a white family's confrontation with inner-city schools and a harsh indictment of an educational system that is a disaster...
...When the Stalveys moved to Philadelphia from a white suburb of Omaha in 1962, they deliberately chose to settle in the city's integrated West Mount Airy district. As each of their three young children entered the nearby school, Lois Stalvey began to get involved with their classmates, more than two-thirds of whom were black. One day in 1967, when Noah was in third grade, she broke up a fight between him and an older boy named Jelly Stowe. When she invited Jelly home for milk and cookies, Noah said, "Mom, you gotta be crazy...
...dismay," Lois Stalvey writes, "I learned for the first time that my children expected teachers to slap, hit, kick children"-some of the children, that is. The school's white principal and both black and white teachers treated white children and their parents with respect and attention. But the lower-income black children, whose speech, dress and attitudes often alienated their middle-class teachers, were consistently humiliated, labeled "slow" or "stupid" and physically abused...
Belligerent Porcupine. Of the many poor black children whom Lois Stalvey came to know and tried to help, none was more pitiful than Almira Stampp. When Noah and Almira were in the second grade, their white teacher made Almira stand in a wastebasket all afternoon-because, Noah explained, "she wouldn't say 'Yes, ma'am.'" Refused permission to go to the bathroom, Almira wet her pants. "See the pig in the pigpen," said the teacher to the class. Treatment like this inevitably had its effect on Almira (whose mother was a drug addict and whose father...
Noah sought his mother's help when he was assigned to write a report with his classmate Josh Pitt, the tough neighborhood bully. Lois Stalvey got to know Josh too, and soon realized that his aggression was simply a cover-up for his embarrassment; although he was clearly intelligent, Josh could not read. "I've always felt guilty about Josh," confessed the black teacher who had taught him in second grade. "When I had him in my class, 17 out of the 30 children had reading problems, and I was allowed only one hour a day for reading...