started talking about orders of magnitude in spending increases.” My mother lights a cigarette, ignoring the tut-tut sound from Dad. She sucks in smoke and blows it out in a heavy sigh. “So I’m in this meeting one day, and these people in suits start throwing around numbers. This percent of gross domestic product, that much spent per student, this much wasted—wasted—on teacher salaries, flat performance levels in math and reading and science. The way they said it, the whole school system was broken and I was part of the problem.”
“Blood pressure, Sandra,” my father offers. But his eyes tell me he’s enjoying Mom’s rant.
“Malcolm always said we were overspending,” I say.
Mom didn’t seem like she could have gotten any hotter a few moments ago, but she proves that wrong now. “Overspending? We spent some money and guess what we got? Higher scores in minority student groups. Better integration of talented kids who once upon a time would have been withering away in special ed classes because they didn’t give the right answer on a math test. That’s not overspending. That’s smart spending.” She pauses, looks at me hard, and goes on. “Then we’ve got the überclass. You know, I was in a PTA meeting and parents were screaming for the tier system. They loved the idea. Mostly because they figured it only applied to the Mexican next-door neighbors’ kids. Or the special ed crowd. Never to their own precious prodigies.” She shakes her head. “It’s like a funnel, Elena. A goddamned, ever-widening funnel. But at least we got the population problem under control.”
She’s right about that. Ten years ago the geography pundits were predicting an explosion. Miami, New York, Chicago, and L.A. were on a fast track to overcrowding. “If we keep on,” they said, “we’re looking at New Delhi proportions. Right here in our own country.”
“Anyway, now that we’ve got that Sinclair bitch as hellcat-in-charge of education, the money thing’s getting worse. For example—”
But I already know the examples. I know Madeleine Sinclair has more power than the president. I know she has a bottomless pit of funding from the top two percent and the backing of so many more—the child-free families complaining about taxes, the white supremacist assholes worrying about an immigrant takeover, tens of millions of aging baby boomers who cheered when their property taxes were cut, parents like Sarah Green who never thought the yellow bus would come for them. The Fitter Family Campaign is pure genius, taking questions and fears from everywhere, from all directions, and answering them with a single stroke of a directive-signing pen.
An irregular tapping from the back room announces my grandmother, who has apparently moved her lodgings downstairs. “Leni?”
I turn.
“Hi, Oma.”
“I have something to say about your teacher tests.”
“You heard that?”
“You remember I told you I got new ears,” she says, settling onto the sofa with help from Dad. “Now if I could only have new bones to go with the new ears.” She laughs, but no one else does. “Come sit, Liebchen. They sent your girl away, yes?”
“Yeah.”
Oma levels her eyes with mine and grasps both my hands in hers, squeezing with a force I didn’t think possible for someone so frail. “You must go to Kansas and get her back.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
There was a news story not long ago about an irate father who drove to one of the yellow schools. Bonita Hamilton, America’s least popular investigative journalist (“That Hamilton woman. She needs to climb aboard the commonsense train,” Malcolm said over Sunday breakfast), had written up the piece in the Post. The man drove out of the city, over bridges and rural roads, before pulling to a stop outside the school his daughter attended. He stopped, he parked, and he walked in. Or, I should say, he tried to walk in, Bonita wrote. He was turned away. Now here’s a question: What if this were your child?
I remember a few outbursts, a letter to the editor, a follow-up opinion piece by a retired academic asking if this was where America wanted to be. Malcolm sniffed when I mentioned it. “You have to wonder what kind of a parent lets their kid slip so far down. The schools are there—and God knows