Small Victories is an account of a year spent by a former New York Times reporter observing Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A state task force on education described Seward Park in 1985 as one of “the ten worst high schools in New York State.” Its dropout rate is high, and its students average exceedingly low scores on standardized reading tests. The reader might therefore expect that Small Victories would round up the usual suspects: violent students from the underclass sabotaging the educational process.
It does not. Teachers here are not afraid of their students and students are not afraid of one another. School safety, it turns out, is not a problem. Despite a high incidence of assaults and murders in the neighborhood outside Seward Park, the school itself is a safe place in which to learn. The worst violence Freedman observed during his year was a fight between two tough girls over a boy; one girl wounded the other’s face with a box-cutter. Attacks on teachers or extortion of money and valuables from students, fixtures of many inner-city schools, do not characterize Seward Park.
Unlike violence, truancy and dropping-out are problems at Seward Park. Freedman tells of accompanying a street-wise fifty-five-year old black “school-neighborhood worker” named Dave Patterson as he makes his rounds looking for truants. He finds one of them, sixteen-year-old Darnell Reese, in the welfare hotel where he lives with his alcoholic mother. When cajoling has no impact on Darnell, Patterson threatens to report him to the welfare authorities. But he cannot save the youngster; the drug trade in the neighborhood around the school holds more attraction than a high-school education.
Actually, it might have been worse for the school had Darnell been persuaded to attend more often. As Freedman writes: “What diminishes violence in Seward Park is . . . an urban version of natural selection in which the most dangerous teenagers on the Lower East Side do not bother going to high school.” This insight explains what is otherwise puzzling: how a place like Seward Park, which is compelled to accept any junior-high-school graduate not motivated to apply to one of the more selective city high schools, nevertheless can achieve “small victories.”
Freedman’s main theme concerns those victories, won in this case by a young teacher named Jessica Siegel. The daughter of a suburban physician, Miss Siegel devotes unremitting effort to teaching journalism to immigrant Chinese and Hispanic children. We see her not only in her classroom, but in such extracurricular roles as driving several of her students for admissions interviews at the State University of New York at New Paltz, or rallying sleepy student-newspaper reporters at a 6:30 A.M. meeting. Her story has something of the appeal of a soap opera (in fact, Twentieth Century-Fox paid a six-figure price for a film option on Small Victories, and the Book-of the- Month Club selected it for mass distribution), but Freedman aspires to more than this. He wants to illustrate how urban education can overcome handicaps, including multiple language problems and the severe culture shock of moving from peasant societies to New York.
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In choosing to concentrate on Jessica Siegel and her senior-year journalism students, however, Freedman has painted a rosier picture of a big-city high school than would have emerged had he chosen to report on a more typical neighborhood school in New York, or on 9th-grade rather than 12th-grade classes. More than 40 percent of entering freshman at Seward Park drop out before graduating, which means that Miss Siegel’s students are those who have determined to stay, who want at least to graduate from high school and perhaps even go on to college, not those who find school meaningless and are waiting until they reach sixteen so they can legally escape.
Having students receptive to education helps Jessica Siegel to be the creative, dynamic teacher she is. Dedicated teachers want to be at Seward Park—the turnover rate is quite low-because their students by and large harbor educational aspirations similar to those of the children of Jewish immigrants who attended Seward Park a half-century ago. Seward Park is lucky to be located within walking distance of Chinatown, and its Chinese students in particular are usually very diligent. They may not be the most academically able children in the area—these tend to prefer Brooklyn Tech or Stuyvesant—and their English may be poor, but fully 90 percent of Seward Park students who persevere until graduation go on to perfectly respectable colleges or universities, often with scholarships. Thus, Seward Park lives in a time warp; it is typical not of contemporary New York high schools but of New York high schools of a bygone era.
Parts of Small Victories are wonderful, especially the graphic accounts of Jessica Siegel’s classroom. If proof were needed that good teaching is possible in innercity schools, this book supplies it. But it is wrong to infer from Jessica Siegel’s story, as Senator Bill Bradley is quoted as saying on the dust jacket, that a charismatic teacher can overcome “insurmountable odds.” There is less of a lesson for urban education in Small Victories than meets Samuel Freedman’s eye. True, good teachers and principals can make a difference. Yet after nine years of winning “small victories,” Jessica Siegel, exhausted, finally quit teaching.
