The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  When he died at age fifty-one in 1989, America lost a brilliant scholar and a brave, wise voice.

  Gardner and Giamatti’s counsel to find a way into the future together without absolutely surrendering our most cherished beliefs takes on a new urgency when we contemplate these numbers: There are a little more than 311 million of us now. By 2050, that number is expected to exceed 440 million. That means more efficiency and cooperation will be required in every part of our lives, from jobs to food, politics to security, medicine to energy, culture to education.

  We have much to learn, and the schoolhouse is a place to begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  K Through Twelve and the Hazards

  Along the Way

  FACT: The U.S. Department of Education estimated in 2010 that more than forty million Americans are functionally illiterate. According to the federal agency, 10 percent of students at four-year colleges take remedial reading courses. American fourth and eighth graders rank, respectively, eleventh and eighth in the world in international science aptitude tests. By grade twelve, American students are near the bottom of the international scale. America’s African American and Hispanic minorities are much further down the scale in reading, math, and science.

  QUESTION: In 2010, President Obama’s big educational initiative, Race to the Top, offered states a total of $4.35 billion in grants to change their education policies to make them more effective. That is less than what the Department of Defense spent in Iraq in June of the same year. Does that make sense to you?

  In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a report called A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform. It concluded that the foundation of the American education system was being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatened our future as a nation and as a people.

  That report was issued almost two decades ago, before China and India began moving up the economic food chain. By 2009, the United States was falling even farther behind. American fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-fifth out of thirty-four countries in math, fourteenth in reading, and seventeenth in science.

  What does that tell you about their ability to meet the even greater demands of higher education or to be prepared for the modern workplace?

  The American Dream is freighted with so many interpretations it defies a tidy, all-inclusive definition, but if there is a common denominator it is education. It is part of our country’s promise and lore, from Abe Lincoln educating himself by the light of a fireplace, to the kind of rural one-room schoolhouse my mother attended, to the power of our vast system of higher education, stretching from the ivied halls to the new for-profit institutions and all the large and small public and private colleges in between.

  Five years after the Nation at Risk report, I was in Seoul, South Korea, for the Olympic Games, which were being telecast by NBC Sports. NBC News had a significant presence because there were reports of possible terrorist attacks taking place during the games. It was showcase time for Korea, which had begun to flex its well-toned industrial muscles in the world markets.

  Because of the time difference I anchored Nightly News at 5:30 A.M. Seoul time. We broadcast from a building roof overlooking a local junior high school. The first morning when I finished at 6:00, I was startled to see the school courtyard crowded with uniformed students, hunched over their textbooks, studying by flashlight, waiting for the doors to open at 6:30.

  They were there every morning during my stay. I returned to America to share that story with friends and audiences. I would be met with smiles of appreciation, but through the nineties American education remained stuck in old conventions and failing schools.

  I was reminded of that Seoul experience when I read U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan’s account of a meeting between President Obama and South Korean president Lee Myung-bak. Duncan recalled President Obama’s asking his Korean counterpart, “What is the biggest challenge you have in education?”

  President Lee answered, “The biggest challenge I have in education is that the parents are too demanding.”

  THE PAST

  Those South Korean parents share a cold, rocky peninsula with a lunatic nuclear-armed regime just to the north. China hovers over them like a dark storm cloud, ominous and intensely competitive. China tried to conquer South Korea in the early 1950s, and when the United States rushed to its aid in the first shooting war between the West and China, nearly thirty-four thousand Americans died.

  At the time of the war, South Korea was, by twentieth-century standards, a primitive, agrarian society; a large portion of the population lived as they had a hundred years earlier. The national literacy rate was not much above the nineteenth-century standard, and the industrial economy was only a faint promise of what was to come.

  Thirty years later, South Korea had become an industrial and electronic colossus, the fifth largest producer of automobiles in the world. Samsung, Daewoo, and Hyundai were filling American stores with state-of-the-art electronic appliances. Per capita income in South Korea went from nine hundred dollars in 1952 to twenty-eight thousand by the early part of the twenty-first century, much greater than in Brazil, Russia, India, or China, the foursome known as BRIC for their muscular economic potential.

  South Korea’s meteoric rise in industrial productivity and prosperity did not, of course, go unnoticed.

  I once interviewed a Russian member of the young intellectuals Mikhail Gorbachev promoted in a futile effort to save Communism in the Soviet empire. When I asked him just when it was that he realized the Russian system was failing, he said, “When the South Koreans came to Moscow with all of their prosperity; their automobile business and electronics. They did that in such a short time and here we were, a much larger nation with so many more resources, still so far behind.”

  Now, as we rocket our way through the twenty-first century, South Korean parents are still demanding more education, better schools, higher standards. South Korean school years are 220 days long, and it’s estimated that South Korean parents spend up to 30 percent of their income on education, including hiring tutors, for their children.

  They have millions of counterparts in China—where the economic expansion has been even more dramatic—and in India, Vietnam, and Singapore. To resort to a sports metaphor, those are the teams the U.S. children will be playing against in the twenty-first century. Do American parents have it within themselves to demand as much from the classroom as they do from the Little League coach or Saturday soccer officials?

  Ask almost any American parent what they’d like for their children and the answer is likely to include “a college education,” even if the child in question is a skateboard slacker who’s spent more time at juvenile hall than in a classroom. However unrealistic the chances are for some individual students, twenty-first-century America as a whole needs a higher college graduation rate and more emphasis on math and sciences if we’re to compete in the international arena, where our chief rivals are pouring money, resources, and students into educational systems designed to meet the needs of a modern, technological world.

  Reorganizing American education is a priority on a level with containing the war on terrorism, for it is just as essential to national and economic security.

  As it now stands, education in America is an uneven landscape, shaped by income and community priorities. In every measurable way, it is the economically poor—including white students but mostly racial minorities—who have been left behind by political indifference, apathy within their culture and communities, or a combination of both. With the competitive demands of the twenty-first-century global economy we can ill afford to be a nation deeply divided by the skills, education, and access to economic stability these fundamentals foster.

  Reforming public education is to the twenty-first century what the civil rights movement was to the mid-twentieth century. It is nothing less than a national imperative to maintain the health of our country’s status.

  Education is a massive prob
lem, but as developments along several fronts have demonstrated, it is not insoluble. Unconventional and impressive efforts at the local, state, and national levels have broken the chains of low expectations and stereotypes. Many of these efforts represent what I believe will be an important movement for America in the twenty-first century: public-private partnerships to address the systematic dysfunction eroding the undergirding of American society, from education to health to public service and beyond.

  In an effort to describe for myself and others the place of education in society I’ve settled on the familiar phrase “the coin of the realm,” for a well-educated population is the strongest currency to take to the international marketplace and to advance the place of a pluralistic society on the home front.

  Now, at least, the urgency of educational reform has been acknowledged.

  As the debate over public versus charter schools heats up school board meetings, op-ed pages, and think tanks, my own experience leads me to believe that a mix of public and private is the best approach. Plainly there are areas where public school parents need another choice for their children. However, successful public schools and the role they play as anchors in neighborhoods and communities ought not be discarded.

  The expanding public-private model is part of a growing nationwide trend to involve other parts of the public sector as well as private enterprise in the essential task of education. These new efforts are deeper and more systematic than the old model of a service club or private benefactor offering a medal or a modest scholarship to the top students in each graduating class.

  In every state there are encouraging examples.

  THE PRESENT

  In Mississippi my friend Jim Barksdale took a big chunk of the fortune he made as CEO of Netscape, the breakthrough Internet browser, and set up a foundation with the ambitious goal of eliminating illiteracy in his home state. Mississippi consistently ranked at the bottom of the public education performance scale. Barksdale and his late wife, Sally, donated $100 million to a program run by Jim’s brother out of the University of Mississippi to improve teaching techniques in the state. When the Barksdales decided on literacy as their cause an estimated seven hundred thousand adult Mississippians were reading below the eighth-grade level.

  The Barksdale Reading Institute (BRI) sponsors in-depth research on improving the way reading and writing are taught, and works to increase parental involvement with students, emphasizing early childhood development. BRI contracted with four Mississippi school districts to place its own principals on the job with authority to develop curricula, hire teachers, set grade expectations, and organize schedules.

  “We believe the ability to read and education are the core to anyone’s life, economic and social,” says Jim. He had firsthand experience with reading difficulties as a third grader. His parents could afford a tutor and he caught up with his peers, but he’s often wondered what would have happened to him if he had not gotten the extra attention.

  The Barksdale Reading Institute is one of several corporate and private efforts around the country to improve education performance and opportunities at the local level.

  None is more impressive than what a philanthropic Georgian developer launched in a run-down Atlanta neighborhood that was home to an equally run-down golf course, East Lake, where the legendary Bobby Jones played his first and last rounds of golf. In the post–World War II years, East Lake began a slide into a dark pit of drugs, violent crime, and shattered families. It was such an urban war zone it became known as Little Vietnam.

  Local police estimated the local drug trade was a thirty-five-million-dollar-a-year business; the crime rate was eighteen times the national average. Almost two-thirds of the residents were on some form of welfare, and fewer than one-third of the students graduated from high school.

  Enter Tom Cousins, a wildly successful developer of many of Atlanta’s most prestigious structures. Cousins, an aw-shucks Georgia native and golf enthusiast, had a bold idea: Restore East Lake Golf Club and use it as an anchor to revitalize the neighborhood. With like-minded friends, he established the East Lake Foundation to do just that.

  Tom Cousins with students from his East Lake project (Photo Credit 3.1)

  Cousins said he got the idea when he “read that in New York seventy percent of the inmates in the state’s prison system came from just eight neighborhoods.” When Cousins inquired about the Georgia inmate population, he got a similar answer. He decided to do something about that in the East Lake neighborhood.

  When he approached the president of the University of Georgia, his alma mater, the president immediately told him it was a bad idea. Cousins replied, “I’ve wasted a lot of money on other people’s bad ideas. Now I’m going to waste some on one of mine.”

  Cousins knew from experience that it was not enough to simply build new low-income housing. He wanted to change the whole environment, from housing to schools, from opportunity to role models. “A child has no control over where he or she is born,” he told newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts. For the children in East Lake, “the future was set and hopeless.” Cousins was honest enough to admit he doesn’t know what would have happened to him if he’d been raised in that environment.

  So with the proceeds from the restored golf club, the East Lake Foundation built a community of mixed-income housing at affordable prices so stable families would be attracted to the area. The shabby public school was razed and replaced with an ultramodern charter school named for Charles R. Drew, a pioneering African American physician who was instrumental in developing blood plasma processing and storage. Dr. Drew died in 1950 but, given the success of the school that bears his name, he lives on in ways he could not have imagined during his lifetime.

  Before Cousins and his friends got involved in East Lake, just 5 percent of local fifth graders were equal to their contemporaries in state math levels. In 2010, ninety Drew students were selected to participate in the statewide MathFest, a tribute to Drew’s ranking as the number one school in Georgia for math scores.

  More than 90 percent of Drew students met or exceeded the state standard in math, language arts, and reading in 2010, and a Drew student won the Atlanta Public School System spelling bee.

  When my colleagues at CNBC produced a documentary on Cousins and his East Lake project, his friend Warren Buffett saw it, called Cousins, and asked, “How can I help?” One of the founding fathers of the hedge fund industry, Julian Robertson, wanted in as well.

  So the three of them established a new foundation called Purpose Built Communities to replicate the East Lake model in other cities, including the washed-out neighborhoods of New Orleans.

  Buffett, who sizes up people as he does the companies in which he makes an investment, says flatly of Tom Cousins, “I’d invest in anything he does; he’s one of my heroes. He’s just a very good guy—smart, modest, and with great values.”

  Tom worried that maybe failure was a fixed part of the culture of low-income minorities but, he told me, “All they needed was a chance. We just helped them get that opportunity.” Tom Cousins and his wife, Ann, are proud of what they’ve created in East Lake, but what impressed me when we talked about it was their determination to keep the success focused on the families and children who are turning their lives around.

  Up north, in Cincinnati, the East Lake equivalent was Taft High School, an inner-city school failing on every level. The graduation rate in 2001 was 21 percent. The state declared Taft an academic emergency with fewer than half the students proficient in reading and just 25 percent proficient in math.

  That year the Cincinnati Public School District decided to try a bold approach. It renamed it the Taft Information Technology High School and sent in principal Anthony Smith to turn it around.

  Smith made some quick fixes, such as ending the two-hour lunch period and shaping up the tutoring program. He went door-to-door in the neighborhood and asked the families for help in transforming the school, explaining that his “covenant was with the
community, not necessarily with the board of education.” Local residents knew the penalty of not having a good education. Half lived below the poverty line, and just over half had a high school diploma.

  Smith kept the old staff and teachers, meeting with them to determine what was working and what wasn’t. He also appealed to their pride by asking, “How does it make you feel to be possibly the worst school in the state of Ohio?” During a faculty conference he told the teachers that if they weren’t prepared to sign on to his program they shouldn’t return after lunch. They all came back, ready to try a new approach.

  But for all his energy and inspiration, Smith couldn’t do it on his own. Fortunately, he met Jack Cassidy, the hard-driving CEO of Cincinnati Bell. Cassidy is a leading member of Cincinnati’s impressive business community, which also includes Proctor and Gamble, a major General Electric division, Kroger, and American Financial Group.

  Cassidy was stunned by what he learned about Taft. “My God,” he said, “as a taxpayer and a citizen, can we really have this as a place we call a center of education?” Cassidy soon coined a new motto for Taft students: “Go big or go home.”

  The transformation of the school and its mission soon drew students from areas outside the neighborhood; they were attracted by more than the name. Cincinnati Bell underwrote a new computer lab, and Bell employees volunteered as tutors.

  The company also offered a cellphone and a computer to any student who maintained a 3.0 grade point average, and installed high-speed Internet broadband in neighborhood homes, because, as Cassidy explained, “College exists on the Internet.”

  When I asked Cassidy why he got involved, he said it was a mix of civic and corporate duty. “Why shouldn’t America’s inner cities be capable of the same kind of growth? Besides, as a capitalist, I want a return on my investment. Business is the consumer of the product that schools produce, and academics have lost a sense of that.