"When you show, you go”

I forget what a sheltered life I've led. I'd never heard that pithy little aphorism before. From News Bureau: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Schools failing to accommodate teens who are pregnant or new mothers:

The Title IX legislation of 1972 has been celebrated for the dramatic benefits it brought to girls in school sports.

But another group of girls, also guaranteed educational equality through Title IX, have seen little benefit, says Wanda Pillow, a professor of educational policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In a new book, “Unfit Subjects: Educational Policy and the Teen Mother” (RoutledgeFalmer), Pillow writes that schools today rarely make even small accommodations for pregnant and mothering teens. As in the pre-Title IX past, the majority of pregnant teens apparently still leave school and don’t return.

In some schools, the old understanding that “when you show, you go” is still in effect – at least in practice, Pillow said. In some larger school systems, pregnant students are encouraged to attend alternative schools, but the quality of these schools is unclear.

Title IX clearly requires access to equal educational opportunity for these students, but the interpretation has been left to the individual schools, Pillow writes. “Presently, beyond forbidding expulsion, there is no case law to enforce or guide the provision of educational services for teen mothers at the local or state level.”

I mean, yes, when I was in high school, pregnant girls did seem to disappear and never come back, but I'm old, and this was during the Reagan administration, so I just assumed it was death squads.

Death squad jokes. Always a good ice-breaker.

As are discussions of race and class:

Those homes [for unwed mothers] served mainly white, working-class women, and the program emphasized job skills training that would enable the single mother to support herself and her child, Pillow said. The emphasis on training would lead to a later concern about the teen mother’s right to an education, and helped lay the groundwork for Title IX.

But the homes also helped establish a clear pattern of defining the issue of unwed pregnancy by race, Pillow said. “White, unwed mothers were seen as fallen women, women who had made a mistake in their life … but who could be redeemed.” For black women, however, unwed pregnancy was seen more as a “cultural deficit,” Pillow said, and “redeeming” them was not a goal.

Those attitudes, along with concerns about moral contamination, have helped bring about a divided and shifting discussion on teen pregnancy and education, Pillow writes. The divide is between policies that view education for the pregnant or mothering teen as a right, versus those that view it as a responsibility.

“We are still treating white girls, particularly the white girls who are good students, as entitled to an education,” she said, though in reality they still face “severe limitations.” For girls of lower income or racial minorities, however, the perspective is often that they are responsible for their schooling, no matter the barriers, to avoid becoming a “burden on society,” she said.

If you're not already appalled, there's a bit on abstinence-only education, "the only form of sex education taught in Illinois and 16 other abstinence-only states." Bigot that I am, I'll thank our downstate legislators for this (even though the Republican 'burbs no doubt helped). See, this is why Chicago should secede. . .

And I didn't want to come off as even more of a rube, but it did surprise me to see that about Illinois being an abstinence-only state. So, yes, I went digging for info, and came across a (registration-required, quit your whining) Trib article from 2001, Scope of sex education varies widely:

When Mark Temple asks parents if they want their schools' sex education classes to cover potentially touchy subjects such as birth control, abortion or homosexuality, they frequently throw a question back at him.

"They'll say, 'You mean they aren't teaching this already?'

"They think it's being taught," and they want it to be taught, said Temple, an assistant professor of health education at Illinois State University and president of the Illinois School Health Association.

Like their parents, students also want plenty of straight talk on sex, said Nancy LaCursia, a health teacher at New Trier High School, which has one of the most comprehensive high school sex education programs in the Chicago area.

Later, my brain broke from irony overload on seeing the name of an organization:

Several organizations in the Chicago area are bringing abstinence-only messages into the schools. One of those is Project Reality, based in north suburban Golf and funded through grants from the Illinois Department of Human Services.

The national, non-profit organization publishes texts and videos, trains teachers to use its curriculum and sends its speakers into middle school and high school classes.

Actually, guess it depends on the stress pattern you use for the first word, and the corresponding definitio-- sorry, linguistics geekery.

Link added -- also stuck one for the book/publisher site in the first quoted bit way at the top -- to Project Reality's site. It keeps showing yet more charming little aphorisms, like "True Love Waits" and "Avoid the Pain: Abstain."

And, of course, "Condoms don't protect the heart."

There's a joke there, somewhere, about not putting the thing on properly because you're a product of abstinence-only sex ed, but I have a broken brain.

Update: On Rhetoric.