Ms. Driver’s seeming willingness to comply with educators’ decisions, even when they contradict her own “gut feelings,” is not a sign that she lacks interest in Wendy’s education. The Lower Richmond teachers readily acknowledge her as a “loving,” “supportive,” and “concerned” parent. The field-workers observe her keep a close watch every day for over two weeks, on the lookout for “the paper” Wendy was to bring home from the school regarding testing, which failed to arrive. She did not call the school to ask for it, however, but preferred to wait it out.
Neither does Ms. Driver’s approach reflect a meek or timid personality. She refers to herself as “hotheaded,” and it is clear that she can be assertive. With service providers like her cable company, and with her landlord, she shows no hesitancy in making whatever demands are necessary to achieve the results she wants. When the cable company’s service representative does not show up as promised, she calls the company repeatedly and eventually asks to talk to a supervisor. When the hot water heater in their rental house begins leaking, she calls the landlord. When he instructs her to turn off the heater and wait until he can arrange to get the problem corrected, she refuses. Pointing out that she is home alone with a baby and two other young children, she insists that he come promptly and take care of the problem.
Having discovered that her landlord is not a competent plumber, on a different occasion, Ms. Driver decides to take things into her own hands:
I ask about the faucet. Debbie seems outraged. She gets up from the kitchen table and walks to the sink and turns the faucet on to full. “I don’t have any pressure! Look at this! This is full.” The water is flowing at a steady rate but not rushing down; it looks to be at roughly half pressure. She says, “I am going to call a plumber and have him fix it and then very nicely deduct it from my rent.”
This kind of assertiveness is almost wholly absent from Ms. Driver’s interactions with educators. The one exception involves Willie rather than Wendy. During a spring concert at the school, Willie, one of only a handful of white children in a crowd of Black children, is overcome by the heat. He grows dizzy and sits down in the middle of the performance. None of the teachers makes a move to help him. Ms. Driver, sitting in the audience, gets up and struggles slowly through the crowded auditorium to reach him. She is furious. Still, although she recounts the story (with obvious anger) many times to extended family members, she does not mention it to any of the teachers or anyone else at the school. Overall, unlike middle-class parents, Ms. Driver keeps her opinions about the school to herself.
Thus, in looking for the source of Ms. Driver’s deference toward educators, the answers don’t seem to lie in her having either a shy personality or underdeveloped mothering skills. To understand why Wendy’s mother is accepting where Stacey Marshall’s or Melanie Handlon’s mothers would be aggressive, it is more useful to focus on social class position, both in terms of how class shapes worldviews and how class affects economic and educational resources. Ms. Driver understands her role in her daughter’s education as involving a different set of responsibilities from those perceived by middle-class mothers. She responds to contacts from the school—such as invitations to the two annual parent-teacher conferences—but she does not initiate them. She views Wendy’s school life as a separate realm and one in which she, as a parent, is only an infrequent visitor. She does not, like Ms. Marshall, challenge the school’s authority in her daughter’s placement. She does not, like Ms. Handlon, consult with other parents about day-to-day experiences in the classroom. Nor does she call Wendy’s teachers or come to school to discuss homework assignments. Ms. Driver expects that the teachers will teach and her daughter will learn and that, under normal circumstances, neither requires any additional help from her as a parent. If problems arise, she presumes that Wendy will tell her; or, if the issue is serious, the school will contact her.
One result of this way of looking at parent-school interaction is that for Wendy, school is indeed her own world. Unlike Melanie Handlon, for instance, Wendy does not reexperience her classroom failures at home. In fact, because her mother does not initiate contacts with the school, Wendy has the opportunity to manage certain aspects of her education on her own. If she chooses not to mention a problem to her mother, it is unlikely Ms. Driver will hear about it from other sources. Indeed, in the spring of fourth grade Wendy has a run-in with Mr. Johnson, her reading resource teacher (“cause he kept hollering at me. He kept hollering at other kids and got me scared”). She simply stops going to his special education reading class for two weeks. She tells no one.10 Ms. Driver, however, does not know about this episode until much later (when Mr. Johnson tells her). She remains unaware of an important school-related issue because her key informant about the educational process is Wendy, not school personnel, or even other parents. School is Wendy’s world.
The educational and economic resources associated with Ms. Driver’s class position also affect the approach she takes with teachers and other school staff. Ms. Driver’s high school education and low-level clerical job do not equip her with the same amount of information, or even the same access to sources of information as those Ms. Marshall gained from her graduate school degree and managerial position. Ms. Marshall is fluent in the jargon educators use (e.g., Mr. Johnson’s reference to “social emotional overlay”), and she knows that her daughter’s school must allow her as a parent to have Stacey tested independently to determine her eligibility for the gifted program. Ms. Driver, on the other hand, is reluctant to sidestep or even supplement school programs. She worries that paying a private company to boost her daughter’s reading skills will just cost her money and not produce results. She does not have Ms. Marshall’s grasp of educational terminology, either. In fact, Ms. Driver seems to have significant trouble following the intricacies of the debate among the Lower Richmond staff about the nature of Wendy’s learning difficulties (she complains that she “couldn’t understand” the periodic reports the school sent her regarding Wendy’s educational progress).
That Ms. Driver has real difficulty understanding the terms professionals routinely employ is clear from the following episode at the dentist’s office. The children’s dentist, Dr. Marks, comes into the room to discuss with Ms. Driver the results of the six-month checkups she has just completed for Wendy and Willie.
Dr. Marks says that Willie has two cavities “on his permanent teeth” and she tells Debbie, “He needs to brush, especially in the back teeth.” Wendy has “tooth decay. Let me show you on the X ray.” Dr. Marks lights the X-ray viewing table. She points. “See here and here?” Debbie glances at the X ray and nods. “The decay is on her temporary teeth, but you are between a rock and a hard spot because leaving them in will cause potential damage to her permanent teeth.” Debbie interjects, “So you want to pull them?” Dr. Marks says, “Yes,” adding, “They are loose. We can do them on the same appointment.” Debbie does not seem anxious or upset at this news of cavities.
Ms. Driver makes another appointment for Wendy and Willie and then steps into the waiting room to face her questioning children: