The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  Garfield High School, over the past two decades, became a symbol of both the district’s academic successes and its racial woes. To help balance the school racially, the district made it a magnet school. Kids in the school system’s most advanced academic program were funneled to Garfield, which offered an accelerated track of course work and a comprehensive range of Advanced Placement courses. Garfield now often boasts the most National Merit Scholars in the city, beating out even Lakeside. But white and Asian students far outnumber black students in the AP classes, creating what came to be known as the “two Garfields.” African-American parents claim that the school has directed more resources toward the advanced programs than the rest of the school and that counselors steer their kids away from the more challenging courses on the basis of their race. “Our students are not getting these classes. They’re getting commercial foods, they’re getting gym, they’re getting beginning math. Never before has Garfield discouraged so many black kids as they’re doing now,” one parent told a local reporter.

  Taken as a whole, the Seattle schools comprise a ponderous, complex system. The district serves a city that includes the highest number of adults who hold advanced degrees in the country, and one that also includes thousands of recent immigrants—the district website includes translations in Amharic and Oromo (both spoken in Ethiopia), Spanish, Russian, Tagalog (the Philippines), Somali, Lao, Mandarin Chinese, Tigrigna (Eritrea), Vietnamese, and Khmer (Cambodia)—as well as special-needs kids and plain old “regular” students. The district (annual budget: $730 million) also is tasked with educating students for future positions in the global economy, though there is no agreement in Seattle or the country about how best to do this. To try to please the most people possible—and to increase diversity without mandating it—the district went to an “open enrollment” model, which means that families can apply to any school in the district (though people who live near a school get preference, and, after the 2007 Supreme Court decision, race can’t be considered). It also has invested heavily in schools with poor reputations, such as Rainier Beach High School in the South End, a majority-black school that in 2008 got a $100 million renovation that included a new performing arts center (the result has been an estimated enrollment increase of thirty kids).

  Within this system, it is perfectly possible to get a good education. Slots in the district’s advanced programs are especially coveted, an admission that for many parents means saving about $20,000 a year in private-school fees. A reporter who covered the district for several years told me that the people who can manage the system best are those who have the savvy and knowledge of bureaucracy and institutions to get what they want. The children whose parents don’t know how to do this, don’t have the time, or just don’t care end up at the whim of the district.

  In 1996, after he graduated from Seattle University, Damian approached Doug Wheeler to ask about work at Zion Prep. Wheeler wasn’t overly impressed. “Damian was a wimpy little kid,” he says. “He came in and had just finished college, didn’t have a certification, didn’t know what he wanted to do, wanted to know if there were any jobs.”

  It turned out that Wheeler had been a running partner of Sam Townsend, Damian’s pastor, back when were both on the force in the 1970s, before either of them were saved. “We were ruthless,” Wheeler says with a laugh. “I won’t go into it, but we were ruthless.” When Wheeler called Townsend to ask about Damian, his friend assured him that the kid would be a good hire. “He didn’t impress me that way,” Wheeler says, “but Sam has never been close to being wrong.”

  Damian started as the coteacher in Zion’s kindergarten class and went to school at night to get his teaching degree. After a few years he moved up to the elementary grade level. Over time he established himself as what Wheeler calls one of Zion Prep’s “cornerstones.” “If you walk though the school he has the biggest class because parents want their kid with Damian,” Wheeler says. “They want Damian. If I put him in whatever grade, that grade will be full because people know if Damian’s there—cool.”

  Over the course of several years, I stop in and observe Damian’s classes at least a dozen times. His approach to the kids is both friendly and strict—he will tell jokes but doesn’t shy from letting a kid know when he feels the student has failed to lived up to his potential. When I ask Damian to sum up his teaching philosophy, he says, “No excuses.” Damian jokes that members of his family, when they hear his ideas, sometimes accuse him of being a Republican. But his philosophy, as I find over time, is much more complicated and not easily pegged as being of the left or the right.

  “I grew up poor, OK?” he says. “That was my environment. I teach the kids you can’t allow your environment to determine who you are. I only have them for ten months, but I will try to ingrain that in them for that ten months that I have them. What they do after that, I have no control over. But at least I tried to do what I could while I was with them. While you’re in my class, you’re going to learn something.”

  Much of Damian’s worldview certainly comes in part from growing up poor. But Damian also spent large parts of his childhood—more than any other black member of our team, besides Eric—interacting with the wealthier, whiter parts of Seattle. In elementary school he was bused to the North End. Then there was our team, and the four years he spent at Seattle Prep after Randy Finley got him in. “I was educated for the most influential part of my years at an elite school, so that almost becomes a part of you,” Damian says. “They teach you that you don’t stop learning here. You learn as you leave, so you’re always reading books, it just becomes ingrained. They teach, ‘You need to be on time.’ When I was late, they made me go and clean out the garbage cans. Now I know why they did it. You have to have expectations if you want individuals to be successful and maximize their potential.”

  Low expectations for black students, Damian says, come in part from stereotypes that are hard to escape in America—even the “postracial” country that some people now hail. “I would say if you have something in the back of your subconscious—and I think white teachers, most of them, I think they have a good, genuine desire to teach, whoever it is that they’re teaching—but when the dominant culture says that and you’re raised where black people are just a little less than you, maybe they don’t work as hard as you or may not be as smart, then you can easily lower the expectations. And when you lower the expectations then of course African-American children are not going to be as successful,” Damian says.

  The other side of the equation, Damian says, is that the view of blacks as less able hasn’t crept into the heads of just school administrators and teachers, but also into a large segment of the black community itself. One Saturday, I go with Damian and his eight-year-old nephew, David, to see one of David’s friends play Peewee League football. The game is at Rainier Beach High School, the predominantly black school in South Seattle. The Rainier Beach community league is playing another league from the South End, and the games are lined up back-to-back for the whole day. Several hundred people fill the stands. Nearly everyone is black. There is a concession stand selling barbecued burgers and hot dogs and strawberry shortcake. Many people wear orange and blue T-shirts—the Rainier Beach colors—with the words WE BE FAMILY written on the back in cursive. The atmosphere is festive. Over the few hours we’re there, a constant stream of people—former students and their parents, people from church, and people he grew up with—stop and talk with Damian.

  Later, after we drop David off, Damian tells me the whole scene frustrated him. “I want to get out there and get on the bullhorn and say, ‘Stop! Stop! Send everybody home! Quit joking around! Stop!’ ” Damian tells me. “Get the organizational leaders out there and say, ‘Parents, just like you support your kids out here on the football field, I want you in your schools on a daily basis supporting your kid’s academics and making sure that the school is teaching your child what needs to be taught. Don’t hide behind a sport.’ ”

  He continues, “Their
priorities are mixed up. They want their child to be the greatest athlete since Barry Sanders, but then academics are put on the back burner, whereas out north academics is first because they know their child has to go to college to get a decent job.”

  This message about raising expectations in the black community is not new, of course. But in the past few years it has increasingly moved from one conducted behind closed doors among blacks to one with more public visibility, thanks in large part to Bill Cosby, who has traveled the country giving speeches conveying the Booker T. Washington-like message that no matter what the impact of white racism has been and still is, black people need to focus on themselves. “Bill Cosby tried to bring this home and people got mad. And he was absolutely right!” Damian says.

  Seattle’s class order and social hierarchy are apparent everywhere you look, Damian points out, though this reality is often downplayed. That’s the meaning, he says, of Lakeside students chanting, back when we were in high school, “It’s all right, it’s OK, you’ll all work for us someday” at Rainier Beach students during a basketball game. “In the big picture, people send their children to Lakeside strictly for a reason, so that they can maybe take over the parents’ business, so they need to have the proper education, or to put them in situations where they can network and have people who will hire them,” Damian says, talking about the chant. “It’s almost like, ‘Yeah, you can play basketball good, but you can’t do anything else good.’ ” Damian laughs. “That’s basically what it is—‘You can run, jump, dunk, but you’re dumb.’ ”

  Even though Willie McClain and Randy Finley tried to bridge race and class divides with our team, Damian says it is almost impossible to do that in reality, simply because society is structured so that people with more money feel superior to those with less. “When you feel you have reached a certain status, it’s ‘I’m always better than you.’ Although you may not say it with your words, the actions demonstrate that. I don’t think that that will change because that’s human nature.”

  This analysis of his own experience forms the foundation for Damian’s teaching philosophy and works in with a larger observation about the shifting roles of African Americans within the United States as well as the role of America in the world economy. First, the influx of immigrants from East Africa, Latin America, and Asia to South Seattle has made African Americans just one minority among many scrambling to make it. “Things are changing,” Damian says. “As you see more and more Asians being successful, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, Africans coming here, I’m hearing it in the community, ‘If they can come here and be successful …?’ So you’re hearing it, but we got a long way to go.” In the bigger picture, the United States is also losing its economic hegemony. Before long, Damian tells me, the day will come when large numbers of middle-class white Americans will be shocked when they find themselves answering to Chinese or Indian bosses. “Oh man, it’s going to blow some people away,” he says. “They’re not going to be able to understand it.”

  For the kids Damian teaches, the future is inside this highly competitive world where the old economic structures—even the one that kept blacks as a group subordinate to whites—have crumbled. For a lot of Americans, Damian believes, the result is going to be lower wages and a lower standard of living. People who don’t keep up will just fall off the edge. “That’s why they’re building the prisons, because they know a certain number of people are going to have to commit crimes in order to survive,” he says. The election of Barack Obama helps to demonstrate all of this, he says—it shows that a black person can rise to the highest position in this country, yet the situation of poor blacks remains absolutely unchanged. Obama, Damian says, isn’t going to alter the underlying global economic structure.

  Several months after the day I watched Damian teach test prep for the WASL, the scores for that year come out. The reaction reinforces many of Damian’s points. Of the seventy-eight thousand tenth-graders in Washington State, half had failed the math portion of the exam. Under state law, they would not be allowed to graduate if they could not pass. There was a flurry of activity as parents and politicians contemplated the prospect of half of the state’s high school students falling short of a diploma. The government introduced legislation to delay implementation of the requirement and added a $197 million plan for better math education. Newspapers around the state ran editorials about what to do next.

  When I speak with Damian about it, he finds some grim humor. “My point is, with the WASL, it is no different than any other systematic way of eliminating certain groups of people; that’s what it does,” he tells me. “Now that it’s starting to affect white people, now, ‘Oh,’ all of a sudden the state gets an epiphany—‘Now we may need to change how we do this because not enough people are passing the math, now we need to change it.’ But if it kept on affecting just black people, ‘Let’s keep it right there.’ ”

  Damian laughs as he tells me this. When I ask why it doesn’t seem to upset him more, he says, “Because, man, that’s just the way things are.”

  …

  In the fall of 2009, Doug Wheeler laughs in disgust when I mention the WASL. After years of problems with the test—mainly too many kids failing the math portion—the new state superintendent of schools has announced plans to scrap it for some other form of testing regime. The WASL—and the whole system of standardized testing as required by the No Child Left Behind Act—was starting to seem like another educational fad that hadn’t achieved its goals. “The WASL was supposed to help identify how to close the achievement gap, based on the scores, but it was nothing like that,” Wheeler tells me in his office. “It was a bunch of craziness that teachers were afraid to give and get the scores back, and kids were afraid to take, and it still didn’t tell you anything. No, the WASL was stupid, but we took it because we wanted to be measured with our donors.”

  As we speak, Wheeler seems far less optimistic than when I had interviewed him a few years earlier, and it turns out that the financial crisis has hit Zion hard. Before the property crash, Wheeler had lined up a deal to sell the school’s current building and seven acres of land—which is only a block from Seattle’s new light-rail line, making it valuable space for developers looking to build condos—for $23 million. The plan was to move into another, much cheaper location not far away, and add the remaining money to the endowment to try to gain some financial stability. Not only did the crash kill the deal, but it also pretty much wiped out Zion’s existing $3 million endowment, Wheeler tells me.

  In addition, many Zion parents felt the effects of the collapse particularly hard—bank tellers at the now-disappeared Washington Mutual; people who worked for real estate companies, insurance firms, and escrow companies; support workers at hotels and convention centers that have seen business vanish. “That means that the single mom who was making $3,000 a month before taxes but sacrificed $250 or $300 because this is a great place for her child now is trying to see how she handles unemployment,” Wheeler says. As a result, the school’s tuition payments and enrollment shrank. Wheeler, who had to take dramatic action to save the school, eliminated grades six through eight.

  There also are problems with the school’s positioning within the wider network of Seattle schools. Wheeler tells me that Zion has been hurt because it hasn’t been able to offer state-of-the-art computer or sports facilities. While the school’s philosophy of instilling discipline and motivation was fine in the 1980s and 1990s, Wheeler says, families are increasingly worried about their children’s preparation for the future economy. With Zion unable to afford the necessary equipment, parents have pulled their children and put them back in the public schools.

  In addition, while Zion’s Afrocentric focus garnered the attention and contributions of donors in its first few decades, the educational trend has recently moved toward globalism and “multiculturalism.” Zion, in the increasingly diverse South End, would seem to be in a position to take a leading role in this shift. But when I ask Wheeler whether the scho
ol has moved to embrace the ethnic mix of the area, he expresses regret. “We didn’t step up to the plate,” he says. “Sometimes you’re so busy keeping things going that you don’t stop long enough to see where things are going. So when the Ethiopian community came in, and the Hispanic community exploded, when the African community exploded in this community, we did not embrace the transition of those cultures into our community.” Wheeler tells me the school has recently begun a concerted effort to reach out to Ethiopian families and has enrolled a few Ethiopian students as a result. “We are now beginning to do something we should have been doing a while back, which would have helped Zion greatly if we would have opened our eyes sooner.”

  Another change in education has been a focus on innovating methods to teach inner-city children. Much of this has sprung from the advent of charter schools, which are publicly funded schools run outside the public school system by nonprofit groups. Students pay no tuition. Charter schools, which now operate in forty states, have allowed for some experimentation with new pedagogical methods. For example, the charter schools of the Knowledge Is Power Program—also known as “KIPP”—have reported dramatically improving test results by teaching a curriculum based around drilling in fundamentals and maintaining high expectations. Donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation like the way these programs can deliver measurable results in the form of test scores and a system that can be duplicated in other schools. (Despite the strong results of schools such as KIPP, a Stanford University study found that only about a fifth of charter schools offer a better education than comparable public schools, and that many are worse—the performance of charter schools varies hugely depending on the rigorousness of the academic program and individual management.)