The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  “We did it because we believed it would create better customers and better employees. World economic growth is coming from countries that not long ago were thought of as ‘Third World economies.’ Look at China.

  “But,” he cautioned, “business should not control the curriculum. There is a danger in letting business write the history books. And it’s not just about dollars. Trillions have been spent on education. We don’t need more money. We need better content that produces results.”

  Jack Cassidy, CEO of Cincinnati Bell, and Tony Smith, principal of Taft High (Photo Credit 3.2)

  Cassidy goes to Taft football games and other school activities. He also gives out his personal cellphone number so students can reach him directly. “It keeps me engaged,” he says, “and it tells the kids they have no excuses unless they’ve exhausted all the opportunities, including talking to me.”

  Success doesn’t start and stop with one school in Georgia or Ohio. Business and educational leaders have reached out to other innovators, such as the former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, to get fresh ideas.

  In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made education reform and improvement a centerpiece of his administration. The system was shaken up first internally by Chancellor Klein. He took on the teachers’ unions, fired principals, and encouraged the development of more charter schools and magnet public schools. When some charter schools failed to live up to the new, higher standards, he closed them down.

  He also had help from New Visions for Public Schools, a collection of nonprofits and community organizations that partnered with new schools on a wide range of issues. The New Visions website provides access to papers on all the relevant issues of modern education, from teacher training to techniques for improving attendance. As for a credo, New Visions says partnerships mean all stakeholders are responsible for the city’s youth.

  As part of their stakeholder mission, Chancellor Klein and other community and philanthropic groups pressed the New York state legislature to lift the cap on charter schools within a school district. Old-line New York politicians, many of them closely aligned with the teachers’ unions, resisted but were forced to accede to the community’s wishes.

  When Klein retired, Mayor Bloomberg stumbled in naming his replacement. He chose a friend, magazine publishing executive Cathleen Black, who was enthusiastic but woefully unprepared for running a massive, complex public education system with well-entrenched and outspoken constituencies. After just a few months on the job, she stepped down at Bloomberg’s request, and he named Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott as her replacement.

  Walcott comes from the streets of the borough of Queens, a man who has always worked within the system whether as a teacher, social worker, head of the New York chapter of the Urban League, or deputy mayor. If he succeeds, he can affirm what a lot of veteran educators are saying: Schools can be reformed from the inside as well as from the outside.

  Amanda Blatter knows that. The success of the charter schools and the support they received did not escape the attention of the more enterprising public school teachers and administrators. Blatter, the energetic principal of PS 109, an elementary school in the South Bronx, went to many of the same benefactors of the charter schools and said, in effect, “Hey, I need help, too.”

  She outlined plans to convert a barren second-floor bookfree space back into the library it once had been and added a new twist: make it a community study center for residents of the surrounding impoverished Hispanic neighborhood and invite parents to use it in the early evening as a study hall with their children.

  Blatter was so successful that she raised enough money for a full complement of computers and e-readers. On the day she dedicated the facility, the students poured into the room and powered up the computers and e-books, accessing their favorites beneath a banner that read “A room without books is like a life without a soul,” the observation of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

  A few weeks after the dedication, Blatter told me, “The library has been an amazing success. Children are visiting every day and checking out so many books we need to significantly increase our inventory. We have the library open two nights a week until six o’clock for parents taking English as a second language—ESL—classes.”

  Amanda Blatter and her faculty worked hard before the library was rebuilt to make PS 109 one of the best-performing schools in the South Bronx. They now feel they have an opportunity to do the same for the neighborhood and the parents.

  Blatter is a reminder that with all the attention focused on charter schools and the role of outside interests, dedicated and gifted public school teachers and administrators continue to show up every day. They are more than instructors and managers, there only to collect a paycheck and benefits. They’re surrogate parents, community advocates, and a vital link between hope and despair for their charges.

  At Jack Britt High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, students have a similarly creative principal, Denise Garison. She attacked student and community indifference with a bold, unconventional approach. She was frustrated by the constant gap between the test scores of white students and those of her African American and Hispanic students. Whites consistently scored almost 13 percentage points higher. She refused to accept the whispered stereotype that the minority students just weren’t as bright.

  So she dug into the records of the underperforming students and found that many of them were chronically absent and came from families where school failure was endemic—passed along from generation to generation.

  Garison went to her teachers and challenged them to change the game at Jack Britt High, just as a new coach would challenge his staff and the community to improve the record of a losing football team.

  Teachers responded by spending more individual time with the at-risk students identified in the survey; they even handed out their own email addresses so students could be in touch when they encountered homework problems. In a radical departure from convention, Garison persuaded the school district to pay twenty dollars an hour to teachers who volunteered to be at the school on Saturdays from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. so students could get extra tutoring on standardized tests. When that money ran out, many of the teachers voluntarily showed up on Saturdays without compensation. A community organization provided the Saturday school lunch.

  Jack Britt student Teshiya McClean was failing everything as a freshman, but when her teachers began to take a special interest in her, she responded. By her senior year she was on the school honor roll. “I am very proud,” she says. “They taught me I can do anything I put my mind to.”

  Denise Garison at Jack Britt High School (Photo Credit 3.3)

  This aggressive approach at Britt has paid off. The gap between white students and their African American and Latino counterparts has narrowed to under 5 percent.

  In the end, it comes down to what Jack Cassidy in Cincinnati calls “the moral responsibility of all of us to leave the country and its institutions better than what we found.”

  In Cincinnati that moral responsibility is embodied in a school that is going from worst to first. Taft’s graduation rate in ten years went from 21 percent to more than 95 percent. Proficiency in math and reading jumped to 95 percent in the same period.

  PS 109, Jack Britt High, East Lake, and Taft are striking examples of what author and businessman Wes Moore calls “environment versus expectations.” Moore, an African American, was raised in minority neighborhoods in Baltimore by a single mother after his father died when he was three. He was a bright but indifferent student, more interested in scoring points in playground basketball games than on classroom tests.

  When he was in the eighth grade his mother arranged to send him to a military school. He rebelled against the discipline and tried repeatedly to run away in the first month, but his mother kept sending him back.

  Slowly he learned something about himself. “I liked being a leader,” he told me. “I was responsible for my squadron and that gave me pride.” T
hat pride began to show up in the classroom and soon he began making his mark in academics as well as on the parade ground, basketball court, and football field.

  Moore came up against another reality. “I learned it’s a much larger world than my old Baltimore neighborhood,” he told me with a laugh. “I thought I was pretty hot in basketball, that I could dunk on anyone, but I quickly learned there were others who could dunk on me.”

  It never occurred to Moore than he might be a candidate for a Baltimore school he barely knew about: Johns Hopkins University, one of the elite academic institutions in the world. “No one in my old neighborhood thought about going to Johns Hopkins,” he said. “We all thought we were going to the NBA.”

  Moore’s military school record was so impressive he made it to Johns Hopkins, and there the new expectations for his life carried him even higher. He became the school’s first African American Rhodes scholar, then an officer in the elite U.S. Army Rangers and served in Afghanistan. He returned to the United States and became a White House fellow, working alongside Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the State Department.

  All this he documented in detail in his New York Times bestselling book The Other Wes Moore, a model for understanding and addressing the issues of education and expectation in the inner cities of America. It is the story of two young men, both named Wes Moore, raised a few blocks from each other, each by a single mother. One’s life was defined by the temptations and perils of the drug trade, a violent, lucrative, and lawless society in almost every big-city minority neighborhood.

  The errant young man tried once to get loose of the hold drugs had on him by applying to Job Corps, but he failed and returned to a life of crime. He was eventually involved in a robbery in which an off-duty policeman was killed. The “other Wes Moore” went to prison, and when the author’s mother told him of the coincidence of their names and childhoods, a lesson began to take shape.

  The Rhodes scholar Wes Moore asked to see the felon Wes Moore in prison, and a visit was arranged. They met more than a dozen times, exploring why one had found such a rewarding life while the other ended up in a penitentiary. When Moore asked the inmate if he thought the environment in which he grew up was the cause of his fate, the answer was, “No, it was expectations. No one expected anything of me,” adding that when he began to develop a police record, his troubles multiplied. He dropped out of school and moved deeper into the underworld of his community.

  During one of their conversations the prisoner Moore said to his new friend, “Listen, I have wasted every opportunity I ever had and I am going to die in here so if you can make a difference, you should do it.”

  That prompted Moore to write the book about two men, same name, different fates, and to use their starkly different lives as a call to service in education. He says, “Teachers, tutors, mentors, and volunteers who work with young people are as important to our survival and advancement as a nation as the armed forces.”

  Moore carries that message with him everywhere, and this unique story combined with his passion and charismatic personality has landed him spots on national television shows and a featured role at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He works with returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure they have the educational opportunities they need to advance their lives, and he does the same for Baltimore kids caught in the criminal justice system.

  While doing this, Moore has a full-time job in financial services but, as he says, “Public service doesn’t have to be an occupation but it must be a way of life.” For boomers and other grandparents, public service as a school volunteer should be a natural calling—an extension of their formative years when they set out to change the world.

  THE PROMISE

  Boomer or other grandparent volunteers can meet and work with a new generation of like-minded activists such as Geoffrey Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone, an educational and community services oasis in the heart of Manhattan’s storied African American neighborhood.

  The Children’s Zone grew out of the desperate need to do something about the destructive effects of the crack cocaine epidemic of the eighties, and it has proved to be a model of public and private cooperation, providing everything from parenting workshops to classes on how to control asthma, a persistent health threat in the area.

  Canada presides over more than one hundred city blocks of programs and services designed to offer hope to local families, with the emphasis on education and preparing youngsters to take their place in a society beyond their ’hoods. He runs a tight ship, constantly monitoring the effectiveness of programs within the Zone. Those that don’t measure up lose their funding, and he moves the money to those that get the job done.

  Michele Rhee, the dynamic and iconoclastic former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school system, embodies what a very modern school administrator can become.

  Rhee, a striking and hard-driving Korean American single mom, had no experience as even a junior high principal before she was hired to fix one of the most broken systems in the country. She was a teacher in Baltimore who had attracted attention for her work in Teach for America.

  She came to the nation’s capital and immediately began to raise hell with a school district that was a collection of parental and teacher union fiefdoms, with a student population in constant turmoil. Rhee began by firing hundreds of principals and teachers and replacing them with principals and teachers with proven track records. She took on parents’ groups and consolidated schools to get the efficiencies she needed.

  Perhaps Rhee’s most controversial innovation was a program called “Capital Gains,” in which students received money for good grades and good behavior. They could earn as much as two hundred dollars a month. She worked out an arrangement with a local bank for the students to establish accounts so they could develop money management skills.

  When I visited Rhee at Shaw, one of her middle schools in northeast Washington, she laughed as she recounted critics saying, “You’re paying kids to come to school? Since when do you gotta pay kids to come to school?” Rhee responded, “The crazy thing is not that we’re paying kids to come to school. The crazy thing is that for decades we allowed kids not to come to school and didn’t do anything about it.”

  Michelle Rhee and Brian Betts, the enterprising principal she recruited from the Maryland suburbs (Photo Credit 3.4)

  Rhee had no illusions that handing out money for good grades and behavior is a silver bullet solution. As she put it, “Not one thing will turn the district around; it’s going to be fifty different strategies and initiatives that add up to success.”

  While visiting Rhee, I got an insight into how “Capital Gains” had very practical implications. One of the programs involved assigning students roles—for example, a married mom with two kids, a single man, and so on. The students were then given a checkbook with a phantom balance in it and told to do the family’s shopping for food, clothing, and other necessities.

  One student told me, “I wasn’t that good at math so I thought it was a good project, but I knew it would be hard to do. We had to pay bills, look for houses, go to the store. Get groceries. We’re learning how to deal with real life.”

  I teasingly said, “If you could fix the economy, that would be a big relief to all of us.”

  A member of the class immediately shot back, “We’re working on that now.”

  In an economy that is growing more and more complicated, with difficult decisions to be made about health care policies, choosing a pension plan, finding or refinancing a mortgage at favorable rates, sizing up bond or mutual funds, preparing a tax return, and calculating currency exchange rates, fundamental instruction in consumer finance should be as much a part of every school’s curriculum as basic math and English. We can hope this early training will temper young people’s attitudes toward thrift and credit card debt, and give them pause when a mortgage broker slides a subprime loan across the desk and says, “Hey, I can get you into a big home fo
r no money down and interest only for ten years.”

  Rhee’s aggressive approach was just three years old, and the results in student performance were encouraging, but time ran out before her systems could be fully realized. Her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in the Democratic mayoral primary after one term for what was widely believed to be his aloof manner, especially with fellow African Americans in the poorest neighborhoods. Shortly thereafter, Rhee resigned.

  In a joint statement to the city that is such a curious combination of wealthy and poor blacks, old-line white neighborhoods and the citadels of government and corporate power, Fenty and Rhee acknowledged that when it came to ensuring broad support for their efforts, they fell short.

  Nonetheless, they were justifiably proud of the progress district students had made in a little more than three years. They urged the entire community to get behind the new mayor in his efforts to continue the progress. “We have laid the foundation,” they said, “but the hardest steps are yet to come.”

  In the short time she was in the job, Rhee came to believe fervently that the old claims about ethnicity and zip codes as an excuse for failing grades are more about the general failing of society than about children and their families. She also recognized that schools must value the students.

  The embodiment of that sentiment was the principal at Shaw Middle School, Brian Betts, a cheerful, athletic white Southerner who made a name for himself as an administrator in the wealthy, leafy suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland, next door to Washington and light-years away in terms of income, family stability, and expectations for students.

  Within a few days on his new job, Betts, who had a phenomenal memory, was a fixture on the schoolhouse steps every morning, in rain, sleet, or snow, greeting his hundreds of charges by name and cheering them on for the day ahead.