The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  Myran says good-bye, stands, and lines up with the five prisoners who have been speaking in the other booths. They wait silently. When the door back into the jail slides open, they walk single-file past the visiting room’s thick glass window. A young guy who has been speaking with his girlfriend in Russian blows her a kiss and mouths something to her. Myran, who walks behind him, smiles and waves. Then the prisoners begin to exit the visiting room’s field of vision. One by one, each fades from view.

  Part Four

  Schools

  Lakeside School fosters the development of citizens capable of and committed to interacting compassionately, ethically, and successfully with diverse peoples and cultures to create a more humane, sustainable global society. This focus transforms our learning and our work together.

  —Complete text of the Lakeside School Mission Focus

  Our Kids Are Not Getting

  What They Need

  One afternoon in the spring of 2006, I stop into Damian’s classroom at Zion Preparatory Academy. Damian stands at the chalkboard, a solid man in black slacks and a black sweater. The fifteen third-graders in the class—all of them African American—wear maroon and gray school uniforms and sit at three rows of desks. The walls are decorated with pictures of the three black astronauts who have been on the space shuttle; posters of LeBron James and Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander; a picture of Maurice Ashley, the first black chess grandmaster; a poster listing the Ten Commandments; and another of Martin Luther King Jr. with the words “I have a dream” written below. On his desk, Damian keeps a tattered copy of the Bible and a small boom box that he uses to play gospel music.

  Damian is leading the kids through a logic problem. He reads aloud from a workbook as the students follow along. Five people are going to a market to pick up fruit and vegetables. The question revolves around what each one is going to buy. There are clues related to each of the five people in the problem—for example, James buys twice as many bananas as Karen. The kids are supposed to figure out the exact purchases of each shopper.

  “The trick to this is that you need to make a chart to keep track of everything,” Damian says, drawing a grid on the board with a line for each character and empty boxes for the produce they get. Damian calls on individual kids to read clues and then has them decide which box to place the resulting information in.

  The school day ends before the class arrives at a solution. The kids hop up, stuff their papers and books into backpacks, and grab their coats to go either to the bus or to the school’s daycare. A couple of boys get out the game Connect 4, a vertical version of tic-tac-toe in which you stack up chips and try to get four in a row. A kid named Michael challenges me to a game, and we sit opposite each other at a tiny desk to play as the other students gather around. Michael quickly beats me—I lose focus and make a fatal error—to the delight of the kids.

  “Brother Damian, you ready?” Michael asks. Damian makes a show of thinking about whether he wants to play, and then consents. “Watch out, I don’t want to beat you too bad,” Damian says as he sits down in the kid-size chair.

  As they begin the game, Damian tells me about what he has just been teaching—test prep for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, better known as the WASL (pronounced “Wassel”), a statewide achievement test all fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-graders must take. He pauses every once in a while to talk trash to Michael: “Is that what you want to do? Are you sure? You better check yourself. Oh man, I’m shutting you down!” Michael reacts by putting his hands over his face and looking out between his fingers, eyeing the game up and down while the other kids laugh and tell him what move he should make next. “I don’t think you should listen to the peanut gallery here, Michael,” Damian says. “Doesn’t sound like good advice to me.”

  The two play almost to a tie, with the chips stacking up near the top of the plastic structure, until Michael drops one in a slot that allows Damian to get a diagonal four in a row. “Brother Damian got you!” another boy shouts to Michael, who slaps his forehead and leans back. “That wasn’t bad. You almost had a draw. You lost your concentration at the end,” Damian says as he stands up. “All right, you all need to get your stuff and get ready to go.”

  Damian and I keep talking as the kids file out. The WASL is Washington State’s response to the No Child Left Behind Act, a set of educational reforms passed by Congress in December 2001. One of the main goals of the bill was to eliminate the “achievement gap” between black and Latino students and whites—the “soft bigotry of low expectations” was George W. Bush’s sound bite on the subject. The most tangible real-world result of the bill is a mandated series of standardized tests that children must take throughout elementary, middle, and high school. Students and schools must show “adequate yearly progress.” In Washington State, students who can’t pass after several tries are not allowed to graduate from high school.

  As Damian sees it, the WASL test is just another in a line of hurdles that his students need to clear to avoid low-wage futures. “It’s a sorting system,” he says. “They’re weeding out certain people. Not everyone’s going to pass the WASL. Not everyone’s going to go to college. Some people are not going to have those good jobs. There are kids who will study and study for this test and they’re still not going to pass. That’s just the way it is.” His job, he says, is to make sure that the fifteen kids in front of him every day are in a position to do as well as they possibly can.

  Zion Preparatory Academy occupies three squat buildings arranged around a horseshoe-shaped driveway in South Seattle, one block off Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The school was founded in 1982, out of necessity, when Eugene Drayton, the pastor of Zion United House of Prayer in the Central Area, became distressed that several kids in his church’s Bible study class had a hard time reading. He also knew that black kids were getting kicked out of the Seattle public schools at an alarmingly high rate for discipline problems. When black leaders went to speak about the problem with school district administrators, the district maintained that kids who misbehaved would be suspended or expelled. But Drayton saw that these same kids behaved perfectly well on Sundays. Maybe the school district just didn’t understand how to relate to them. He thought the church could do better educating its children on its own.

  Doug Wheeler, then a thirty-five-year-old member of the congregation, took on the job of heading the new school. Wheeler grew up in the Central Area, his father a state probation officer and his mother a police matron who worked security in clubs (his parents also took in foster kids, two of whom were Jimi Hendrix and his brother Leon). The few police officers on the Seattle force in the 1950s and 1960s hung out at his parents’ house, and Wheeler always wanted to be a cop. He joined the force after graduating from Seattle University and worked his way up to become assistant director of the Victim’s Assistance Unit. Off hours, though, he was wild. But on the morning of August 9, 1980, he heard a voice that told him, “Go walk down the street.” He did, entered into the Zion United House of Prayer, and was saved. The chance to head the new school was another opportunity to take his life in a new direction.

  Zion Prep began its first year in a two-bedroom house next to the church, with eight students and an initial budget of $13.64. “We went down to the Seattle public-school distribution center,” Wheeler says, “climbed into the Dumpsters and got spiral notebooks half-used, computer paper that we could use the back of, and books that were thrown away because the bindings were broken.”

  Zion Prep took the opposite tack from the Seattle public schools, focusing first on building trust with the kids by bombarding them with love and attention. “The concept was: family, clear structure, building your character and your value of who you are, and then educate you,” says Wheeler. “The first three came first. Education was second to us. We were ridiculed by education professionals because we were quote-unquote ‘wasting time’ in classrooms on noneducational issues. That means our kids are not getting what they need. We said, ‘No, w
e’re spending time up front to get the product we want in the end.’… Well, our success, as far as the kids and the type of kids we were transforming, became known, and Zion grew.”

  Zion Prep became known among African Americans in Seattle for turning around children who had been deemed “unteachable” by the public schools. Wheeler calls it a “public school that privately funds itself,” meaning that there are no tests to get in and no one is turned away unless a class is already full. Enrollment surged to eighty-three in the second year, and by the end of the 1980s reached four hundred.

  As Zion Prep grew, it became tightly linked to some parts of our basketball team. Willie McClain hired on in 1984 as playground supervisor and bus driver; Wheeler promoted McClain to vice principal in 1989, a position he held for more than fifteen years. Damian and Willie Jr. took jobs at the school in the 1990s. The school gave all of them a chance to work at an institution headed by African Americans, deeply embedded in and committed to Seattle’s black community.

  Randy Finley also became involved with Zion Prep in the 1980s, after he started his mission to help black kids get into elite private schools. He worked with Willie McClain to identify Zion students who could make the transition. Finley, of course, did it with some panache. One of his efforts was to get the chocolate-chip cookie mogul Wally “Famous” Amos to come to the school to give a motivational speech (Amos also was the manager of Finley’s sister, Pat, an actress and local television personality). As Finley remembers it, Amos told a school assembly a story about waking up that morning in a fancy hotel room. Amos said he looked around, took in his luxurious surroundings, and made his way to the bathroom. When he got there, Amos told the students, he leaned over the sink to wash his face. When he looked up into the mirror, he told the kids, he got a shock. “I said: ‘Lord, I’m black!’ ” The whole school burst into applause and cheers.

  For Finley, the institutional structure and support of Zion were vital—they made his efforts more than just a white guy lobbying for some black kids. “The way you have to do this is working at Zion,” he says. “They can build from the inside themselves.” But Finley recalls that it was “really tough” getting the kids from Zion into private schools. It was even harder to make sure they received the attention and guidance they needed. The few kids he helped gain admission to Lakeside struggled. “I could never get Lakeside to mentor or stay with the kids,” he says. “Lakeside just wanted athletes. They didn’t want just ordinary kids.”

  Finley had more luck with the Bush School, another elite private school, where he found some teachers who seemed interested in working with the kids. The administration also was open to increasing its black enrollment. Finley got about six kids into Bush, but he still found that progress was slow. “I was forced to reevaluate constantly,” he says. “I thought I could take these kids, work with them for six or eight months, and then turn them loose, that they could make it.” The gap between Zion and the elite, mostly white and wealthy private schools of Seattle, Finley found, was larger and more complex than he had imagined.

  A major difference between Zion Prep and many other private schools in Seattle is that Zion is always short of money. Tuition is officially $7,000 a year. All families are asked to contribute something, but those that can’t afford the whole thing might pay only $100 a month. Doug Wheeler has to raise up to half of the annual budget of $3.5 million to make up for the shortfall after tuition and regular donations.

  “You don’t sleep at night, you really don’t, because sometimes you don’t know if you have enough money to cover all the payroll and wonder where it’s coming from. It just gets that tight sometimes,” Wheeler says one day when we speak in his office. A tall man with a shaved head and a salt-and-pepper beard, Wheeler wears all black—shoes, slacks, shirt and jacket—and speaks in a soft voice, gently articulating each word. A framed photo of Wheeler with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Magic Johnson hangs on his wall, as well as a plaque Wheeler received from the accounting firm Ernst & Young for being the company’s 2003 Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year in education/nonprofit work.

  Wheeler tells me that most of the school’s deficit is made up by donations from the CEOs of locally based corporations with whom Wheeler has built relationships, such as Schultz and Jim Sinegal of Costco. “It was amazing to me, literally, to watch some of the wealthiest men in the world walk into this school and sit down at this table and say, ‘What can I do? Help me figure out what I can do to help. Just tell me what you want,’ ” Wheeler says. “They love these kids, honestly they do—they will do whatever they can for these kids, and they have. It humbles you.”

  The school’s results line one hallway, called the Zion Prep Hall of Fame, which is decorated with about twenty posters of former students. Text underneath their pictures describes what they are doing today—one got a degree in engineering; one teaches preschool; one started his own line of clothing; another is the produce manager at a Safeway. “The education here prepared me for the outside world,” reads one quotation.

  The school follows in a tradition—Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute being the archetypal example—of black institutions looking to develop and prepare African Americans for survival and success in mainstream America. Just as Wheeler has developed relationships with the corporate titans of our day, Washington received much of his funding from those of his, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Wheeler says his desire is to provide “a Lakeside education on a Wal-Mart budget.”

  In the world of Seattle private schools, Zion is a feeder—for those students chosen to make the transition—into elite white institutions. Wheeler tells me that Bush still maintains a relationship with Zion, more than twenty years after Randy Finley first forged the connection. Wheeler has a deal with the school so that the parents of Zion students who get in will still get charged the same tuition they pay at Zion (high school tuition at Bush runs more than $23,000 a year). Bush, for its part, is able to enroll some of Zion’s best-performing students. In an era when “diversity” is a priority for elite schools, the arrangement between Zion and Bush is beneficial for both sides. “They want our kids,” Wheeler says.

  Zion Prep is just one of dozens of Seattle private schools, the vast majority aimed at the middle and upper-middle classes and the rich. Besides Lakeside, Seattle Prep, and Bush, other elite schools include Seattle Country Day, Villa Academy, University Prep, and the Northwest School. These schools, in turn, are just specks in the shadow of the Seattle public school system, a behemoth that for decades has been mired in a seemingly constant state of crisis. The welfare of minority students, especially, has been a continual issue. “We’re not educating our kids,” Wheeler says of the Seattle schools and black children. “Ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, it’s been the same song. And everyone says, ‘This is what we’re going to do to improve it,’ but it hasn’t improved yet.”

  Overall, Seattle’s experience with race, integration, and education has paralleled that of most other big-city districts around the country. In the early 1970s, with recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions mandating that public schools make efforts to desegregate, Seattle came up with its busing plan. The city—and the country—began to back off desegregation after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, when the Justice Department made a U-turn in its policy toward desegregation and stopped litigating such cases. The death knell for court oversight of school integration came in 1991 with Oklahoma City v. Dowell, in which the Supreme Court ruled that attempts to desegregate a school district could end if it could be shown that “feasible efforts” had been made to do so, even if they were not successful. In effect, as long as a school district did not do anything that could be found to be intentionally discriminatory, it was free to do what it wanted.

  Seattle ended race-based busing in the fall of 1997 in favor of “neighborhood schools.” After two decades of integration efforts in the city, there had been one clear outcome: In 1973, whites made up 74 percent of the student
s in the system; today they are 41 percent of the 46,000 students in the system, even though the city is about 70 percent white (an estimated 30 percent of students in Seattle attend a private school).

  In 2007, the Supreme Court put the last nail in the coffin of school integration in a decision involving the Seattle schools. After it ended busing, the district had adopted a policy to let students apply to any school they wished. It used several factors to determine admission. The major one was simply if you lived nearby. One of the “tiebreakers” was whether letting in a certain student would help the school achieve racial balance.

  A group of parents led by a white mother sued the district, charging that using race in school admissions was discriminatory and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed in a five-to-four decision. Coming five decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling meant that even the smallest measures to increase school integration were dead letters. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, delivered something of a Zen koan: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

  In terms of racial makeup, many Seattle public schools now look pretty much like they did in the early 1970s, before forced integration. In the South End, some schools are now almost 100 percent minority; North End schools are primarily white. Race and class fissures run deep. Black students are still more than twice as likely as white students to be suspended or expelled—this issue of “disproportionality” has been a hot-button issue for decades—and the “achievement gap” in test scores and graduation rates seems to be as persistent as Seattle rain. Seven out of ten African-American students receive school-lunch subsidies. Parent associations throughout the city make up for budget shortfalls by raising money to fund extra programs and teachers; in wealthy parts of the North End, this extra funding in some schools has topped $300,000 a year. Over the course of several years, the district rolled out multiple plans to shutter a number of schools to save money. The closures—which generally targeted schools that were primarily minority—met with resistance so fierce that in 2006 the superintendent announced his resignation after one particularly heated school board meeting. In 2009, the district’s new superintendent—an African-American woman—finally pushed through a closure plan.