as a what the fuck is autism? question—as bright a blip on the high school radar as peanut allergies, celiac disease, transsexual restroom rights, and out-of-the-closet teenagers were in 1990-something. Changes trickled along, a drop or so at a time. I figured by the time my girls were teens, everyone would have joined in on the diversity dance.
I was wrong. Diversity never made it past a slow, awkward shuffle. As my students come in for one last period of pretest cramming—what we’re supposed to call a final review, but what everyone knows is an umpteenth-hour cram session—they’re all the same. Straight, mostly white, athletic. And I’ve never seen such a thing as a trans-friendly bathroom.
Testing days are both rushed and slow. This morning, we rush. I take my classes through their review, getting them ready for the SOLs. The acronym is supposed to stand for Standards of Learning, an updated version of its former self, but I’ve been calling it the Shit Out of Luck test for a year now.
Never out loud, of course. And never to Malcolm.
It’s the Shit Out of Luck test because two months ago I stood in front of thirty faces. Today I stand in front of twenty-seven. The three empty desks are still here, though, scattered about. No one bothers to remove them, or consolidate them in the back of the classroom. Or maybe that’s the plan—to leave the empty desks, the ones that used to be occupied by Judy Green and Sue Tyler and a ghost-pale boy named Antonio who kicked ass at chemistry but couldn’t hack it in number theory. Maybe the empty desks are here as a carrot.
Or a stick.
Some teachers have it worse than I do. Nancy Rodriguez, for instance, who teaches advanced programming, lost two students after last month’s tests. I’ve heard Dr. Chen’s chemistry class has dwindled from two dozen to a scant fifteen. Talk in the teachers’ lounge happens in whispers around them. Nancy’s kids better pass the lab module or she’ll find herself teaching in a green school. Chen is pulling her hair out because of the failures. And so on. As the students advance, the sieve gets finer.
It isn’t that the green schools are lousy—Freddie says her teachers are great, even if Malcolm frowns at the idea of faculty with master’s degrees instead of doctorates. And I’ve seen the homework Freddie brings back every afternoon: stacks of heavy hardcover textbooks, instructions for the quarterly science fair projects, annotated bibliography assignments that would have made a college freshman back in my day start filling out course-drop requests. The faculty is good enough that every once in a while a green school student scores out of the ballpark, ends up with a silver card, and transfers to a first-tier school.
Most of the time, though, there’s only one way for a kid to go once she’s in a green school. Down.
We aren’t supposed to look at it as “down,” per Madeleine Sinclair’s crowd. We’re supposed to view it in euphemisms: helpful, appropriate, child focused.
“Money saving” never gets a mention.
So I take my students through their Mendelian genetics; I hurl words ending in -osis and -isis at them until their eyes glaze over, until I’m confident they know the material backward and forward and upside down, until, when I say “Who’s ready for the test?” twenty hands go up. Mercedes Lopez, sitting three rows away and glancing nervously at the newly empty desk every few minutes, is first. She’s my only remaining European student. The rest fled while they could.
All the while, Judy Green’s desk sits vacant in the front row, pencils and pens and highlighters cleared from the trough on the left side, books gone from the shelf underneath it. Last month, when I asked who was ready for the test, Judy’s hand was the first one raised.
And yet her Q fell more than two full points, low enough to send her off on a yellow bus.
This isn’t what bothers me, though. What’s been eating at me since this morning, since I stood in the rain listening to Sarah scream accusations at me and punch me with words that she should have thought about first, is that even if Judy didn’t pass—even if she blanked out during