I grew up in the South. So I've got a chip on my shoulder. Because whenever I tell people where I was born and raised, most assume I'm a redneck. I grew up believing northerners were better educated and morally superior. After all, they fought against slavery and won, while some southerners are still arguing about flying the Confederate flag over their state capitals.

No one came out and said I was inferior to my northern neighbors, but all I had to do was read a history book, proof enough that because of the geographical and political landscape of my youth, I was part of a long and shameful past that permeated my soul.

I left the South the day I graduated the University of Texas and for the past 13 years I've taught high school English in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The day before the school year begins, I peruse my roster of students' home languages. Invariably, English, Spanish, Korean, Farsi and Russian compose the list. Occasionally, Mandarin or Urdu appears.

Point is, every class I've taught in the LAUSD was diverse. Or what used to be called integrated.

This September I accompanied my wife to Cleveland, where she's teaching at Case Western. I decided to substitute at her alma mater, Shaker Heights High School, which for decades has been one of the top-ranked public high schools in Ohio.

After one day of subbing, I was offered a job filling in for an English teacher about to go on maternity leave. I'd teach two classes a day, 32 students total, less than one full class in the LAUSD. I signed on.

SHHS, which integrated long before court-ordered busing, spends $13,500 per student per year, compared to the national average of $8,500 per pupil. There are fewer than 6,000 students in the Shaker system, a system so small it seems impossible for any child (54 percent African-American, 39 percent Caucasian at SHHS) to be left behind.

Occasionally, I have been stunned by my students' behaviors. I've taken brass knuckles off a student and been challenged to fist fights. I thought I was immune to being shocked inside a schoolhouse.

Until I walked into Room 105 at SHHS.

In my first-period class, 18 of my 19 students were African-American. In second my period, 12 of 13 were African-American.

And I thought segregation had been outlawed.

SHHS divides its students into four tiers; my classes were the lowest level, labeled "College Prep." These were seniors, not tough kids, just bored and years behind grade level in reading and writing. Nowhere near ready for college.

During the four days I observed their teacher, I watched students show up five, 10, 20 minutes late with no consequences. They ate, text-messaged, talked incessantly and left the room for any number of reasons. There were enough distractions to destroy any possibility of learning for those who wanted an education.

The pregnant teacher left; I took over. I started with the rules, the same ones I use in LAUSD. They included:

Bring something to read for pleasure daily

No food

No phones

No profanity

Three tardies equal one absence, seven unexcused absences and you fail

After I presented my rules to the principal, he glanced at them and said, "You're the teacher. Your rules are your rules." And then the very next day he didn't back me when a student who objected to my rules stormed out of class and complained about me.

I quit teaching not only because without the principal's support, I'd be unable to control my underachieving class, but because SHHS — this prestigious, northern public school with its almost all-white AP classes and my almost all non-white, lower-level classes — reminded me of the segregated South.

And I quit because I felt played. All my life the South, my home, has been cast as a backward, bigoted land, a place I felt ashamed to be from. But it only took six days at Shaker Heights High to realize that some parts of the morally superior north are not all that different from the region it has for so long looked down upon.

Dennis Danziger publishes an online magazine, the Mad as Hell Club (www.madashellclub.net). The site is illustrated by Clevelander Gary Dumm.

editor@freetimes.com