Yesterday was report card day, and I passed them out at 3:00. I almost handed them out earlier, with the envelopes opened, because I didn’t want to lick them all. But then I knew they’d start to compare, and there’d be all sorts of celebrating and hurt feelings and questons. So I taped the envelopes shut and kept them until the end of the day.

I got a call during the morning before school started when I was scrambling trying to get the report cards stuffed into envelopes - so that the name on the envelope matched the name on the card, because it’s embarrassing when they don’t - and my first thought was, “How could someone be calling to ask about the grades when I haven’t even sent the cards home yet?” But, of course, that was just a reflex response to the job.

The call was from a parent who wanted to tell me why her daughter didn’t turn in homework on Friday. As if some other children didn’t turn in homework? I didn’t say that. I listened politely, and heard the story about how they worked on it very hard and it somehow got lost.

She suggested that if I would send it home again, they could do it over, and would that be OK?

I told her that I understood, and that really the value was in the doing of it, and that I didn’t really need it for anything. And in the future she could send me a note and everything would be all right.

Then she said that she’d send me the note tomorrow.

I told her that the phone call was more than enough, and that I didn’t need the note now. I also told her that I hoped there wasn’t any nervousness about not doing the homework, because I’m not used to playing the villain.

This mom didn’t know that during the day, Sunday, when I’d written the report cards, I was also reading a book that I picked up at the library. It’s an oldie, with elements of the “Beat novel,” according to the Amazon publisher’s description, called “How to Survive in Your Native Land” by James Herndon. Irreverent, funny, cynical, down on schooling, I remembered the chapter called Explanatory Note #1: Find a Good School and Send your Kid There.

Herndon tells a story about how his kid burst into tears on the way to school because he forgot his homework, and he wonders why his child is frightened of the school. He said,

…There is one reason, and only one, and it is crucial. That is that an American public school must have winners and losers. It does not matter in this respect what kind of school it is. In Berkeley, now that Mr. Sullivan has integrated the schools, it is the black kids who sit in Remedial Reading and the white kids who sit in Enriched this or that. When they are together in some general course the well-dressed sharp clean-and-pressed shoe-shined poor black kid sits in the class next to the Salvation-army-surplus-store-ugly-dressed white rich kid and the beautiful pore black kid doesn’t know what the teacher is talking about and the white ugly rich kid knows everything and can read or even has read everything the teacher can, even if that surplus-store white kid disdains the whole thing and won’t answer or discuss or even attend class…try as he may to become an outcast the school knows that he is a winner even if he rejects winning….

But over in Oakland there will be an all-black school, Mr. Sullivan not having passed through that town yet. It may be that the school would prefer to have some ugly white kids to be winners but they in fact ain’t got any. Does that mean a school full of losers? Not at all. That school has got to have winners too, and so some sharp poor beautiful black kids wind up in the A group and some others in the H group. It may be that if the kids in the Oakland A winner’s group transferred over to Berkeley they would end up being losing kids, or it may be not. It doesn’t make any difference. In Oakland they are winners. The H kids find the A kids in line at the cafeteria and hit them in they mouths….

That is why Jack, my beloved son of seven years, bursts into tears and cannot be consoled. that is why some students of M.I.T. are throwing dodge balls at each other’s heads, and a large group of physicists stands around the outskirts of the school grounds crying, and why nothing can console them even if someone hits them or doesn’t hit them in they mouths.

They cry because the losers are going to get some revenge some way. but they also cry because the winning is never permanent. You may be a winner in the first grade, but but the fourth you may be losing. The rights of passage of the school go on and on. Each year it is circumcision time all over again; obviously you may weep for what has been hacked off by the time you are thirty five and have a PhD.

How does the school make certain that it will have winners and losers? Well, obviously by giving grades. If you give A’s, you must also give F’s…

I see this unholy truth, and I can see why some people believe there might be the wrong number of A’s or F’s from leaving it up to the teacher to decide who gets what. So to make it seem fair, we have Standards that apply across the board.

And we have tests with teeth that make it possible for the black kids to not have to show up over at the white kids’ school to find out that they are losers. Now they can stay right in their own neighborhoods to find that out, because standardized tests can measure anybody against anything anywhere, and tell them they go to a loser school without doing anything to change that except give them more tests and regimentation. The simplicity of standardized tests, or any other thing that is standardized for that matter, is their beauty. Boil it down to a couple of numbers and write the ticket.

Nothing like a day of doing grade reports to bring it out in me.

I opened the paper Sunday morning and found an article about the North Slope Borough School District’s Inupiat Education Initiative. There’s some Eskimo people living on the Chuchki Sea who’ve been smart enough to figure out how to make a living off whales and walrus, caribou and the geese for a very long time. But now in the last century they began losing touch with the old ways. Kids got shipped off to boarding schools for many years… Whole villages with no children. They have schools in the villages now, but some serious damage has been done, and the white man curriculum doesn’t make a lot of sense where they live.

They want their kids back, and to teach their own culture in their schools.

“In the Native way there was no failure,” said Ramona Rock. “If you were sewing and you did it wrong, you didn’t fail, you just had to do it over. Maybe you didn’t want to, but you did anyway.”

I wonder if it is possible for there to be no losers in school. If - they were measured against real world conditions, and they could do things over when they needed to, and if they risked being cold or hungry when things didn’t work out. But I don’t see that on the near horizon. As long as we say yes to this and perhaps to that, there will be winners and losers.