Lolita's story - Literacy as the Path to Equal Opportunity

Lolita is a thirty-something single African American woman who has been living in West Garfield Park for most of her life. She is a rarity at Tolton. She’s not there to get her GED. She actually graduated from one of the high schools in the neighborhood. However, when she went to city college she struggled with her college courses.


Although Lolita says she went to a “pretty good high school,” the classes that she placed into were not designed for college-bound students.

She says, “I should have the skills. I don’t have the skills.”

She said that the reason that she quit college was because she couldn’t pass English 100. She took it four times and could not pass; the first three times, she received federal aid to pay for the classes, but the fourth time she had to pay for herself because the government will not pay for the same class more than three times. After she failed ENG100 a fourth time, Lolita couldn’t afford to stay in school. She wants to go back to school and study nursing (she has volunteered at a hospital for years) but wants to improve her writing first so that she can move beyond ENG100.

“Literacy will let me get higher paying jobs. It might take a while to move up… there are other factors that may keep you from moving up… but you need reading, writing, and understanding to move up in the world.”

For Lolita, the motivation for improving her reading, writing, a math skills is to be able to finally move toward her career as a nurse. She sees this as the only path to a better life. Lolita thinks that only through improved literacy will she be able to move in the path to equal opportunity.

Will Lolita's hard work at the Tolton Center really lead her to a better life? Or are there too many other factors that will keep her static despite her best try?

Catherine Prendergast wrote that after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that overturned the "separate but equal" mentality in public education, America has adopted the "notion of education as the path to equal opportunity" (Prendergast 2). Prendergast writes that the Brown v. Board of Ed decision basically created a false pretense of equal opportunity. In other words, when African American children were finally allowed to go to school with Whites, other factors that contributed to the oppression of African Americans were no longer taken into account.

What other factors of oppression are not being taken into account in Lolita's life? What about the "pretty good high school" that Lolita attended? Was it one of the underfunded public schools in Lolita's low-income neighborhood? Why did Lolita fail in community college? Was she perhaps enduring language policies that discriminated against African American English varieties?

I don't know the specifics about Lolita's life. I hope to be able to talk to her about these things some day. However, it is hard to imagine that she has had the same opportunities as someone living in a nicer part of town.

I agree with Prendergast in thinking that public education plays a big role in the perpetuation of the literacy myth. America believes that because the government provides all children with public education, that this puts everyone on equal footing to compete for jobs, access, and power. I wish I could tell Lolita that this is true.