High Price

people they knew who were educated hadn’t actually been allowed to move up in management or become anything better paid than a high school teacher or licensed practical nurse, they saw a focus on academic achievement as a distraction, one that would more likely lead to disappointment and bitterness than it would to real success.
    They’d never seen academic success genuinely rewarded. And as I eventually learned in behavioral psychology, if you have no experience with a particular reinforcer, it isn’t likely to drive your behavior. If you’ve never tasted chocolate, you’re not likely to be especially driven to get some, since you don’t even know if you’ll like it. Similarly, saying “you gotta get that education,” if you have no experience (even vicarious) with its beneficial effects, will not carry much conviction. It certainly won’t be anywhere near as compelling as telling your friends about how good chocolate looks after you watched a friend enjoy some—let alone as compelling as if you were extolling its virtues after becoming a connoisseur of high-end chocolate treats.
    Consequently, as a result of their lack of experience with true educational success, most of my relatives saw doing anything more than the minimum required in school as a waste of time.
    I know I could have been far better at math—a subject that would later be critical in my work as a scientist—if I’d been encouraged in it at home. Math was one of the few subjects that I actually liked. It didn’t rely on words I didn’t know or terms that could be twisted. It didn’t require exposing yourself to correction by the teacher for speaking in vernacular or mispronouncing words the way that reading out loud or being called on in English or history class did.
    You could just write the problems out and show how you solved them on the board. Even better, the answers were always clearly right or wrong. I liked that and my teachers soon saw that I was good at it. My math skills were reinforced.
    Indeed, my earliest experiences with school were actually pretty positive. Although officials in charge of the Miami-Dade public school system had fought hard for decades to maintain school segregation and our schools were some of the last in the United States to be integrated, busing was finally instituted in 1972, the year I started first grade. My sisters and I were bused.
    My school was located in a working-class white neighborhood that didn’t look too different from where I lived when my parents were together, with swaying palm trees and well-mowed lawns. And when I started first grade at Sabal Palm Elementary School, there was no obvious resistance to integration. The four or five black kids in my class of twenty-five or so weren’t greeted by demonstrators, dogs or fire hoses, or even dirty looks. Nonetheless, some de facto resegregation did begin almost immediately.
    Although we started our day with Miss Rose—a young, very nurturing white woman with sandy blond hair, and whom I really liked—for much of the time, all the black boys in my class would be sent to the “portable.” This was a small, supposedly temporary outbuilding at the back of the main school. Inside, it looked like a playroom with blocks, trains, and other toys. But most of our time there was spent in small groups, being drilled with flash cards on basic skills like letters and numbers. We were supposedly sent there because we had “learning difficulties.”
    Soon, though, I was bored out of my mind. Despite the fact that my parents never read to me as a child, I did know my ABCs and 123s. My older sisters had taught me about letters and numbers. I had also been sent to preschool and some kindergarten in a church basement when I was four and five. Because of all that—and because I was an avid watcher of public television’s Sesame Street and The Electric Company —I already knew the alphabet and how to count. But the school assumed that because I was black, I must be behind. So, off to the trailer I went.
    One day, however, Miss Rose took me aside and told me that I didn’t have to go with the other black boys anymore. She gave me a choice, saying that if I wanted, I could stay with the rest of the class. Someone had apparently recognized that I actually didn’t need extra help. Since all my friends were in the trailer, I was torn. It would not be the last time that I had to make a choice between friends and what might make me successful in