How Schools Work LIES, LIES EVERYWHERE Education runs on lies. That''s probably not what you''d expect from a former secretary of education, but it''s the truth. How schools work best is often by confronting and fighting these lies, but this is exhausting and sometimes perilous work usually undertaken by an isolated teacher or principal. So, the lies persist. They are as emblematic of our system as an apple left on the corner of a favorite teacher''s desk. But, unlike the apple, the lies aren''t sweet. They are overripe and rotten. I''ve been aware of education''s lies since childhood: I saw them every day at an after-school program that my mom, Sue Duncan, ran on Chicago''s South Side--but as a child I never fully appreciated how insidious they were.
That began to change when I got to know someone named Calvin Williams. That fall I was set to begin my senior year at Harvard, where I studied sociology and co-captained the Crimson basketball team. Like many young people who have the good fortune to get an elite college education, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. (I got into Harvard through elbow grease and athletic skill, and the only reason I could afford it was because my dad''s employer, the University of Chicago, paid most of the tuition.) Many of my friends were going into law or investment banking, and I considered these too. But I wanted to test myself. I wanted to figure out whether the work my mom did was only a piece of me, or if it was truly who I was. And then there was basketball.
Even though my Harvard team wasn''t very good--we won nine games against seventeen losses in my final season--I had a decent game and I hoped to play professionally, if not in the NBA, then perhaps overseas. I was young and I needed to at least try to play ball professionally, didn''t I? It had been my childhood dream, after all. Still, I knew basketball wouldn''t last forever and that someday I''d need to make use of the opportunities granted by a Harvard education. The question remained: would education be my life''s calling after basketball? If my experiences at the Sue Duncan Children''s Center were any indication, the answer was probably yes. For more than twenty-five years my mom had been helping kids in the North Kenwood/Oakland neighborhood get their educations. From three in the afternoon to eight at night she worked to make up for what the local schools couldn''t or wouldn''t teach between eight and three. My brother and sister and I had also grown up at her after-school program, and I knew that it was the perfect place to explore whether I wanted to work in education later in life. So, I took a year off after my junior year--which was practically unheard-of at Harvard--and went to work in her program while simultaneously doing fieldwork for my senior sociology thesis.
The year was 1986. I spent most of that year working with older kids, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who were preparing for the ACT, or with kids who wanted to finish high school strong so they could have a shot at a decent-paying job. It was a hard time in life for these teenagers, many of whom sat around and talked about whether it was possible for them to live past thirty. This was not something I sat around and talked about with my friends at Harvard; we all expected to live and hoped to thrive. One of the neighborhood kids who walked through the center''s doors that July was Calvin Williams. I''d known the Williams family for years. They lived less than a block away from the Kenwood-Ellis Church, where my mom''s program was located. Like nearly every kid in the neighborhood, Calvin was African American; but unlike many kids, his family was intact.
He had two brothers, and all of them lived at home with their mom and dad, who both toiled away at working-class jobs. Most families in North Kenwood/Oakland were broken and scattered, without fathers or with siblings divided among aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. Not the Williamses, though. They were seemingly immune to the violence and gang activity that hung over the neighborhood like a cloud, darkening everything that happened on the streets and in homes. (This cloud also hung over my mom''s program. Once, in 1970, when I was only five, the center was located in the nearby Woodlawn Mennonite Church, but had to be relocated after the minister, Reverend Curtis Burrell, refused to allow a gang called the Blackstone Rangers to use it as an arsenal to store their guns. The punishment for that refusal was the Rangers firebombing the church, which thankfully they did at night when the building was unoccupied. No one was hurt, but the fire fatally compromised the building and my mom was forced to move out with what she could salvage.
One of my earliest memories was of shuttling boxes of books from Woodlawn over to Kenwood-Ellis Church, where the center was still located in 1986. Another time years later, we were driving down a street a few blocks from the center to pick up one of her students. The car was full of kids and, like always, Sue ambled along at about ten miles per hour. But on that day, someone jumped in front of us with an assault rifle and aimed past the car at the older brother of the kid we were picking up. My mom jammed the brakes, threw our station wagon in reverse, and screamed away as fast as the car would go, probably thirty-five or forty miles per hour. No one got shot and no one was hurt that time either. To this day we still laugh that by far the fastest we ever saw her drive was going backward!) One summer day I found myself sitting on the church steps, waiting for Calvin. The church, a gray Romanesque fortress of a building, its high-peaked gable end facing Greenwood Avenue, had stood watch over the neighborhood for more than one hundred years.
Like any structure that manages to survive that long in an American city, Kenwood-Ellis had witnessed a lot of change, from the neighborhood''s early days as a leafy enclave for wealthy Chicagoans to the neighborhood''s current state as a mostly neglected black ghetto. My family lived in a small house less than two miles away, on the other side of the Forty-Seventh Street divide, in the racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood of Hyde Park. I''d walked to the church that day, a stroll that took barely thirty minutes. It''s a strange feature of cities, how quickly they can change from block to block. My family was solidly middle-class--it''s not like I was living in some walled-off community--but Calvin and I might as well have lived on opposite ends of the state of Illinois. I specifically remember the heat that day as I caught sight of Calvin striding up Forty-Sixth Street. I was in the shade but it was humid and no breeze came off the lake to the east. I waved when Calvin was about a half a block away.
He smiled and waved back before breaking into a light jog. He looked happy. He looked eager. The Williams boys were great kids who stayed out of trouble and in school. They didn''t drink or smoke and they got good grades. They were on track to grow up and live decent lives. Maybe they''d get out of the South Side, maybe they''d choose to stay, but whatever happened, all signs indicated that the Williams boys had a better chance at succeeding than many of their neighbors. However, the most important thing about Calvin was that he could really play ball.
He was seventeen in 1986 and was easily twice the player I''d been at his age. He was long, lithe, and quick, had a good shot and better instincts on both ends of the court. I''d played pickup games with him; he was fun to play with and let his game talk for him. He was one of those players who made things easier for teammates and a hell of a lot harder for opponents. I had three years of college ball under my belt, and it was obvious that Calvin''s future college career had a lot more upside than mine ever did. He''d always been a good student, consistently making the B honor roll a few blocks away at Martin Luther King High School, where his Jaguars had gone 32 and 1 in ''86 and won the Illinois State AA Championship. Bottom line: his game was good enough to earn a scholarship to a rarefied program at a Division I school. All we had to do was get him up to par on his test-taking skills so that he could get a decent score on the ACT.
"Hey, Arne!" Calvin said, stopping at the bottom of the church steps. He was in the sun, I was in the shade. "What''s up?" "Nothing. Just trying to stay cool. You?" "Same, man. It''s hotter than you know what out here." Chicagoans love to complain about the temperature no matter the season. Too hot in the summer, too cold the rest of the year.
Cry us a river. "Have you thought about what we talked about last time?" I asked. "About where you want to go for college?" "Honestly, since school''s out, it''s all I think of," he said. "Coach was saying I could aim high for Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia Tech. I was thinking maybe Illinois too, just to stay close to home. I don''t know where else. ''Cuse, maybe? They were good last year." "I think it might be colder there than here," I joked.
"Yeah, maybe. More snow, I think. That''s what they say, anyway." I stood and stretched out my arms, my T-shirt clinging to my shoulders. Snow was the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. "You''re good enough for any of those places, that''s for sure," I said. "I guess, man. No.