For Public School to Offer Support to Students with Troubled Home Lives, the Federal Government Needs to Prioritize Education and Increase Arts Engagement

I never had much luck in school. At least not when it counted. I was the youngest of four who always did well in school. My extracurricular life was largely taken up by competitive baseball, from elementary school through freshman year in high school. But then a sea-change occurred. When I was 16, I quit the baseball team and started focusing on literature and art.

I had shown interest in writing fiction as early as fourth or fifth grade; I won an art contest at my school which published my rendition of the school’s edifice as the front page of the yearbook. But art and literature were always overshadowed by baseball and further complicated by an obsession with guns and the military. Baseball, guns, and the military ran in my family while the arts did not. Both vocations of baseball and guns/military were hyper-masculine—and therefore culturally encouraged—while art and literature were more femininized and easily cast aside by a child who was being socialized male in a rough schoolyard. For a time, guns and baseball won out in the battle over my consciousness. Then, as a sophomore in high school, I left my former life behind and dived headlong into a new one that was, for me, more fulfilling. 

It all started during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years when I watched a captivating Ralph Fiennes play a Hungarian count in The English Patient, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje. The fictional Count László Ede Almásy, based loosely on a real person, spoke to me for the way the elastic identity of Almásy—catalyzed by the love of a stranger—astonished the people around him, fooled world governments, and surprised even himself.

The degree of change was like night into day. I hung up my rifle and baseball gear and, instead, joined the ranks of the theatre to study acting, and I began writing lyrical poetry. My sexuality started to expand as I took on limerent infatuation with Fiennes, styling my hair and wardrobe to match his on-screen persona. I grew my hair out. The next thing I knew, all my friends and social scene were completely different than several months earlier. I occasionally had nightmares from my childhood of gun violence, although otherwise I had moved on emotionally and spiritually.

But a new focus on life brought new challenges. As if making up for lost time, I began overlooking my studies when too fewlittle of my school hours permitted me to focus on art and writing. Instead, I noticed that too many of my classes hinged on test taking. Soon I was skipping classes altogether. Which turned into skipping whole school days. The days turned into weeks. It got so bad that I was called into school one day, my parents in tow, to speak with a psychologist and counselor. Everyone was trying to figure out what was wrong. Even I could not articulate what I needed was a school that focused, entirely or at least mainly, on art and writing. I started going to class again but with very little changed, it was only a matter of time before I slipped back into truancy.

Things went from bad to worse, a few months later, when my father died suddenly from heart failure. Any tether I had before snapped, and I was unmoored completely. Under the impression that I just needed to find the right public school, I began burning through schools very fast, discovering that school after school only permitted me to exercise art and writing at best, in one or two classes. So I kept cycling through schools as the social problems grew worse.

The kind of literary arts schooling system I was looking for didn’t exist. In the end, I flunked out of six high schools—never graduating from any of them. In between I got a G.E.D.—the only “diploma” I have to my name, which I earned after about six hours of testing (reading, comprehension, and math) stretched across 10 days.

The last three years I bandied around in various high schools were the first three years of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, passed in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration. In the name of serving impoverished students (hearkening back to its legislative lineage of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration), it mainly focused on standardized test scores followed by punishing schools whose students failed testing programs. These tests, many of which are still in effect, have been proven to be subject to various forms of racial and other kinds of bias. While ushered in by bipartisan support, NCLB was finally reined in by bipartisan frustration more than 10 years later in 2015.

I was never a good test-taker. The more that teachers and administrators drilled into me how important these tests were, the more they made me nervous. They would prepare us to take the tests rather than apply the lessons to our daily lives, our community, and environment.

In the several years after the passage of NCLB, a report out of Stanford University’s SCOPE center made a conclusion that seemed to capture my role as one of many students that, in part, fell victim to the impact of the legislation: “Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students’ education.” 

As one of the students who was “rid of,” I can still feel the isolation of being left behind and forced to find my own way—outside the system.

Out of the six high schools I attended, there was one school (the very last I attended) that was an arts and sciences magnet school. It was the only one that I attended ballet dance classes in place of a generalized form of bland P.E. (Physical Education). It was also the only school I attended that offered Mexican American Studies (MAS), a holistic curriculum with origins in educational movements in the late 1960s and 1970s. It presented history and literature from the standpoint of ethnic minorities, especially Chicanx narratives. For someone like me, from a white-passing family of “mixed status” (foreign-born and U.S. citizen parents), it would’ve been the first educational program that I could identify with. I would’ve been able to see myself in the lessons. But the whole time I was at that school, I didn’t even know that MAS was an opportunity that I could choose. Rather, I went right to the white-majority “AdvancedAdvance Placement” classes in a white-minority school. I didn’t last.

WLater, when the MAS program was outlawed several years later and its books banned, an audit of the program showed that students were more likely to graduate if they took MAS than if they did not. I saw myself in the failure of the system to hold me because MAS was an elective rather than a requirement. If it had been a requirement, I believe I would not have dropped out of school.

Ten years after I dropped out of high school, the No Child Left Behind Act was replaced, in 2015, by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which gave more power to states around spending and implementing accountability mechanisms. According to experts who’ve studied the effects of ESSA, many states have been failing to meet equity requirements and have taken the same “high-stakes” approach to standardized testing, thereby compounding the problems.

Now, President Trump’s Secretary of Education (and co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), Linda McMahon, advocates for “school choice,” which will support private charter schools with increased funding while cutting funding from public schools. Supporters of so-called “parents’parent’s rights” efforts claim that social justice advocacy is overrunning the public school system. Combined with the current administration’s measures to eradicate anything they consider to be Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the funneling of public funding into private schools will ensure that classes like MAS won’t be available anywhere. 

Though my public school experiences failed me, public schools offer vital services for families who cannot afford private education and it’s these kids who are often the most in need of an education that reflects their experiences and supports their creative outlet. Just as NCLB failed a generation of students, McMahon’s policies will have an equally harmful impact on the most vulnerable students. 

The problem is not just about applying more or less funding or about improving standardized test scores. Succeeding in school is about finding out what fosters youth engagement. Programming like arts and literature, as well as cultural studies like the program outlawed in Tucson, Arizona, are still undervalued and should be expanded. Expressing myself through writing became my lifelonglife-long pursuit. It was like a spiritual awakening; the forming of a new identity. These life-altering moments of curiosity and a real desire to learn should be cultivated, especially in one’s formative years. 

Thankfully, there has been a nationwide expansion of cultural studies in public schools, as I reported in 2023 for palabra. But more is needed, especially as criticism is now being leveled at critical race theory. There are all sorts of students moved by all the passions under the sun; we need a more expansive public school system that can cultivate and support the many kinds of students at the cusp of adulthood.