The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  Gates, dressed in a dark gray blazer and blue shirt, capped the afternoon with some reminiscences about his school days. He recalled being assigned to computerize the school’s class schedule and how he made sure to put the attractive girls in his classes and give himself Fridays off. He said that Lakeside was the type of place that allowed kids like him to fool around with computers in those early days instead of having teachers regulate their use, and that’s how he learned to program. He was supporting the school now, he said, because he saw a “deep need for leadership in the world,” something he thought Lakeside could provide. “If there had been no Lakeside,” he said, “there would have been no Microsoft. And I’m here to say thank you.”

  In the three decades since Gates had attended Lakeside, it had become one of the most prestigious private schools in the country, its success paralleling the rising fortunes of the Northwest (which in large part were driven by Gates and Microsoft). The Wall Street Journal has ranked Lakeside among the most successful high schools in the country at getting its students into “selective” colleges. As Lakeside’s profile shot up, so did demand—the school now receives about four hundred applications for thirty-two slots in each incoming fifth-grade class. It charges more than $20,000 a year in tuition. Its endowment has grown to more than $150 million.

  Just as all the individual members of our basketball team have had to adjust to changing times, Lakeside as an institution has faced the challenge of transforming or falling behind. One persistent blemish on the school’s image has been the perception that it is only for rich white kids. Over the years, Lakeside has had a consistently hard time retaining black students and faculty. As recently as 1999, every faculty member at the Upper School was white. A few years later, the school commissioned a consulting firm to conduct a survey about Lakeside’s perception in Seattle, and the answer came back as “rich, white, and elite.”

  The fund-raising drive kicked off by Bill Gates was one of continuing efforts by the school to change its image. “I want as many students as possible, from as many different backgrounds as possible, to enjoy a Lakeside education,” Gates told the crowd that afternoon. “So I think it’s important to put the financial aid program at Lakeside on such a solid footing that money will never be a reason for denying a Lakeside education to a promising student.”

  The idea behind the event was quite radical. The school was stating that it was going to do everything it could to draw more students from minority and nonwealthy backgrounds, even if that meant fewer slots for its traditional constituency, the city’s elite families. Instead of minority students coming to Lakeside in a haphazard way, as they did when I was a student there, the school was seeking to develop a sustainable pipeline. Minority and nonwealthy students who were qualified for Lakeside would be sought out and their tuition paid. This would negate the need for anyone to devise an integration program such as our basketball team—Lakeside would already have a diverse student body. In essence, the fund-raising drive was asking alumni families to donate to an effort that, if successful, would diminish the chances of their own offspring gaining entry to the school.

  But besides the basic outline of the program—the idea that there would be many more students and teachers from minority backgrounds—the school had a hard time pinpointing what its diversity push would mean, though notes from planning meetings reflect that administrators thought the effort could turn Lakeside into a “rock star” school. In March 2004, as the diversity campaign was gearing up, the school’s director of admissions, an African-American woman, wrote an e-mail expressing her concern about comments she’d heard from white students and families who thought that new minority teachers and students would “reduce the quality” of the school. “My first few years at Lakeside were hard ones,” she wrote. “I was publicly accused of being unfair, to offering too much financial aid, to being inattentive to connected and affluent families. Each of these accusations was ill-founded and inflammatory, and it is difficult to ignore my suspicion that most of these accusations would not have been made if I had been a white male. My experiences and others I’ve observed make me wonder why it is okay in this community for people to attack its newest, most vulnerable members with such vigor.… My fear as I sit down to write this is for the new students and adults of color who will join us next fall. Will this community have changed enough by then so that they don’t have to have their abilities questioned because of their race?”

  More than a year later, as Gates spoke from the podium, the diversity campaign was already hitting snags that in the coming months would get worse, attracting embarrassing attention from the national media, and eventually resulting in a lawsuit that charged the school with fostering racial discrimination.

  “Diversity” started to become a buzzword at Lakeside in the mid-1980s, when private schools across the United States—led by the National Association of Independent Schools—stepped up efforts to recruit students who were not wealthy or white. “Multicultural education,” the thinking went, would not only broaden the opportunities available to minority students, but also aid traditional private school students in “developing respect for the immense complexity of humanity and gaining insights and perspectives into their own particular cultures,” the NAIS wrote in the 1980s.

  In 1987, Lakeside devoted twelve pages of its quarterly magazine to diversity. In an introduction to the set of short articles—most by staff and faculty members employing yawn-inducing jargon about things such as curriculum development and statements of educational purpose—the headmaster, Dan Ayrault, wrote that the school had not made enough progress since admitting its first black students in 1965: “Given the number of advantages and resources we have inherited, we should be a model of excellence in diversity, and we are far short of that.”

  Lakeside was serious in its intent to increase its diversity. In the fall of 1986—a few months after our basketball team had its run—Ayrault hired a new Middle School head who was nationally known as a leader in the diversity-in-private-schools movement. The new head began to increase the school’s recruitment of minority students. At the same time, Bob Henry, an African-American teacher who had grown up in Seattle, joined the school as the Middle School’s diversity coordinator. “It was a lot of work and a lot of interesting times, and not all of it easygoing and fun,” Henry says of his early years at Lakeside when I meet with him in a classroom at the Middle School, where he now teaches history.

  By the early 1990s, the number of nonwhite students at the Middle School had climbed to nearly 25 percent, Henry tells me, but then things got sticky. The diversity push had an unexpected setback when Ayrault, a dynamic and respected headmaster, died of a heart attack in 1990. Other hurdles were perhaps more easily foreseen, such as the zero-sum game of private school admissions. “With every diversity admit, there was a traditional nonadmit, and I think that had an impact,” Henry says. “I don’t know if it was ever said, ‘Hey look, you gotta get off of that case because our kids are not getting in,’ but something was made known. And obviously the school has to earn its living, therefore you can’t close your doors on the families that have supported the school traditionally.”

  The other problem that came with higher minority enrollment, Henry tells me, was a perceived shift in the school’s culture. Parents began to grumble that the “diversity admits” were diminishing Lakeside’s academic quality. In addition, some parents complained that a few of the African-American boys were starting fights and messing around in class. Henry says that a lot seemed to come down to the “subtle” ways people see race: Some of the black kids were aggressive, he says, but there were also aggressive white kids—that comes with adolescence. “What complicates it or exacerbates it is the color line, because the color line is a trigger for all kinds of emotions and all kinds of primal responses,” Henry says. “If it’s black kids bullying, then it becomes a different thing, oddly. Everything becomes different when the color factor plays in.”

  By 1993, the Middle
School head who had been hired to increase diversity had left. Support for the diversity program had not only evaporated, Henry says, but also many of the newly enrolled black students dropped out once they got to the Upper School. Henry, a trim, thoughtful man who picks his words carefully, was chastened.

  He tells me that he had viewed diversity through the lens of his own experiences in the 1960s, when his had been one of the first African-American families to move out of the Central Area to the South End. He integrated a white public middle school and found that, because he felt he was representing all blacks, he forced himself to become a “stellar student.” When he came to Lakeside as diversity director, Henry looked for potential students who were not only solid academically, but who also could handle the “stress” of being one of the only blacks in a white institution. In other words, Henry says, he was looking for young versions of Jackie Robinson. “Of course, we’re talking about kids. That’s the difference,” he says. “Jackie Robinson can make the decision on his own and stick to it.”

  Henry also began to question some of what he was doing. In the early 1990s, stories began to appear in the media touting the idea that “black men are an endangered species,” Henry tells me. He thought that black male students at the school should have a forum to discuss issues like that, so he started Lakeside’s first affinity group, the African American Brotherhood. Now, Henry, who tells me he has been influenced by the writings of black conservative Shelby Steele, wonders if affinity-based groups—Lakeside also has groups for Asian and gay students—do more harm than good. “It’s institutionalizing seeing yourself and being yourself as a racial person—as a racial identity, a sexual identity, whatever,” he says. “I think that’s limiting, and potentially closes one to the opportunities to experience the broader world. To really be educated is to see all those possibilities of who you are because you are so many things.”

  Henry left the diversity job and switched to teaching full time. “I think I did a couple good things in the role and raised some good questions, but it was draining, emotional work,” he tells me. “To some extent it’s what one should do and can do wherever they are, but to another extent, as Malcolm X says, you’re in the belly of the beast, so you better take care of what you’re doing and what you’re saying and where you’re saying it. That was a strain, so I chose to be a schoolteacher and have my impact in the day-to-day back-and-forth with kids.”

  Lakeside’s diversity tide ebbed until 1999, when Bernie Noe came on as the new headmaster. If the board of trustees wanted a forceful leader, it got one in Noe, who came to the school from the prestigious Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.—the alma mater of Chelsea Clinton and current school of Malia and Sasha Obama—where he had been the Upper School principal.

  Noe is a short, energetic man about fifty years old. He still has a somewhat boyish look—his hair, though now silver, is parted in the middle and falls down across his forehead. His tan sports jacket and tightly knotted tie add to the preppy look. From his office windows, which offer a view over the Lakeside quad, you can see students trundling between classes with backpacks slung over one shoulder. Inside, large, framed posters of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. hang on the walls. When he speaks, Noe, who has spent his career educating the children of the rich and powerful, emanates an unwavering belief in his ideas.

  From the moment he arrived at Lakeside in 1999, Noe proceeded as if his intention was to raise Lakeside to the level where its national reputation would be on a par with his former employer. He started by shaking up the old guard. Noe instituted a formal faculty review process, which the school had not had before (the classrooms had been basically the fiefdoms of individual teachers). Several teachers who had been at the school for years either left or were told that their services were no longer needed.

  In 2003, Noe shifted the focus to where the school was going in the next decade. “We held a retreat,” Noe tells me. “All the faculty, the board of trustees, the parents’ association, the alumni association, representatives from the staff, representatives from the student body, and we looked at the mission statement and said, ‘What do we need to do here? What will these kids need to know graduating into this new world?’ The two conclusions were: We need to be a more diverse community—at the adult and student level we need to be better at doing diversity. And we need to be teaching the kids about a global world.”

  After the meeting, department heads immediately began to look for teachers of color, Noe says. The administration discussed ways to make minority students feel more comfortable, such as holding “Diversity Days.” They also set a goal to increase the number of students receiving financial aid to a third of the student body within a decade, a rise from about 13 percent when Noe arrived at the school. “The goal is to have everybody feel like it’s their school,” Noe says. “So from the most privileged to the least privileged and everybody in between, you’re equally valued, equally celebrated, equally appreciated.”

  Of course, offering more financial aid, not to mention sending kids to foreign countries for “global learning,” was going to cost a lot of money. The school launched the “Living Our Mission” campaign with the goal of raising $105 million, which Bill Gates helpfully kicked off with his $40 million contribution. In the meantime, under Noe’s direction, Lakeside had already started to aggressively seek minority students and teachers to fulfill its goals.

  Terrance Blakely was twelve when he came home from a basketball trip in the summer of 2000 and saw the letter from Lakeside on his bed. He was so upset that he started to cry before he even opened it—he knew that he must have been accepted.

  Blakely had come to Seattle three years earlier. His father had been in the army, and the family had lived in Alaska, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and San Antonio before his dad’s final assignment at Fort Lewis in Tacoma. Blakely’s parents had decided to remain in the area and moved to Tukwilla, a South End neighborhood that has seen its African-American population balloon with the movement out of the Central Area.

  In public elementary school, Blakely was put on the “gifted” track, leaving his regular classroom for special classes with other advanced students. When Blakeley was in the sixth grade, one of his teachers told his mom that she should look into Lakeside. About five times that year, Blakeley did half days at his elementary school, and then traveled the twenty miles north to Lakeside to take part in a battery of tests and interviews.

  Blakely hated the idea of leaving his friends and crossing the city to go to Lakeside. He tried to bomb the entrance exam, purposely leaving questions on the multiple-choice test blank. It didn’t work. When the acceptance letter came, his mom told him to go for a year and see how it went. In addition, administrators at Lakeside put on a hard sell. “In my interview, I said, ‘I’m probably not coming here. I don’t feel like this is really the place for me.’ I was really polite about it,” Blakely says. “And it was like, ‘No, it would be a great place for you, we would feel honored if you came,’ the whole nine yards. As a sixth-grader, some adults are completely fascinated with me? I’m like, ‘Maybe there is something there.’ ”

  The seventh grade was a shock. “The things they did for fun were not what I did for fun,” Blakely says. “Kids in seventh grade were talking about going to the symphony and going out on boats. I was used to playing football in the street and having a sleepover.”

  For the first several months, Blakely lived “two separate lives,” traveling up to Lakeside for school but then coming back to the neighborhood every afternoon to hang out with his old friends. Eventually he was caught in between—he wasn’t comfortable with the kids at Lakeside, but the neighborhood kids started to distance themselves. “I now became the spoiled kid on the block, and I just ended up not really having anything to do,” Blakely says.

  When basketball season came around, Blakely faced a choice: If he stuck to his position of disassociating himself with Lakeside kids, he’d have to skip the season and miss doing something
he really liked. He chose to play, and the kids on the team ended up as his closest friends throughout the rest of his time at the school. “I had a common bond with them,” he says, “and if I was going to be friends with anyone else at the school, I figured it would be the kids I played basketball with.”

  Eric Hampton, when we spoke, made the point that going to Lakeside for him was a confrontation on both race and class levels—he felt he was different because he was African American, and because his family, in comparison to the average at the school, was poor. People treat you differently because of your race, and, at the same time, you don’t really get their world because the financial gap means they do things that you don’t.

  Several other African-American alums of Lakeside I contacted expressed feelings similar to Eric’s, and talked about their means of dealing with them. Stan Evans, who graduated in 1973 in the same class as Bill Gates, was still processing the experience three decades later. Evans, who got into the school through its summer program for minority students, later went on to earn a law degree. He said that Lakeside had taught him analytical skills he would not have learned in public school, but he had mixed feelings. Mainly, he thought that leaving the black community to attend Lakeside had always made him a man in the middle—it severed his relations with the kids he grew up with, but he said that when he went back to Lakeside for alumni reunions he felt that all he had was “superficial friendships.” “The majority of blacks I know have a little regret that they went to Lakeside,” he told me.

  Ronnie Cunningham, who graduated in 1986, told me he fit in through playing sports and then “decided to get what I could” out of the school. He said that though he received acclaim as an all-city running back, he regretted that he didn’t gain confidence in his academic skills until years later, when he was in graduate school working toward his Ph.D. in psychology.