Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  Since he didn’t do any homework, there was no reason for him to bring books home from school. On a few occasions he did reluctantly carry them home, not to study but to appease his mother when she asked him how come he never had any work to do.

  He too received an answer sheet for certain tests, and he knew in general that the taking of exams was irrelevant, because the teacher was going to give whatever grade he or she deemed appropriate regardless of his performance.

  “Sometimes we wouldn’t even take our exams, we’d just get a grade,” said Derric. “We could take ’em but it didn’t matter how we did on ’em because they were going to give us whatever they wanted to.” Four or five times during his senior year he didn’t take the exam but just sat back and waited for the honor grade. “I was getting nineties, eighties, whatever, they just give me a grade,” he said.

  Under conditions such as these, Derric Evans, just like Gary Edwards, loved David W. Carter High School. “I loved goin’ to school because I didn’t have to do nothin’. I just went,” said Derric.

  Sometimes the Carter Cowboys’ football coach, Freddie James, lectured his talented subjects on the evils of what would happen if they acted too wild and showed no respect for rules and order. They listened, but they didn’t pay much attention because they knew that after the season there would be a bevy of college recruiters begging for them as desperately as a baby begs for his mother’s milk—regardless of their performance in or out of the classroom.

  And if answer sheets and waivers from homework weren’t enough to pass, they also had something else to fall back on—the unusual grading policy that had been especially approved for Carter by the Dallas Independent School District. Carter had always been a troubled school, with test and performance scores that fitted the profile of an inner-city minority school. It was 96 percent black, but it wasn’t in the inner city, and most of its students did not come from deprived backgrounds but from middle-class ones. They drove nice cars and they dressed in beautiful clothes, and as Gary Edwards put it, the school had a reputation of being the “fashion show” of the Dallas school district.

  The solution to the problem of poor performance scores had been a new system of grading that would encourage students to stay in school as well as improve their self-esteem. Beyond these important, admirable goals, it also had a more immediate purpose: it would undoubtedly reduce the school’s notoriously high failure rate, which had become an embarrassment to the school and to the school board. Under the plan, equal weight was given to class participation (which to some teachers meant simply showing up, because how on earth were you supposed to quantify participation?), homework, weekly tests, and a final exam at the end of every six-week period. A student could flunk every weekly test as well as the final exam and still pass a course for that period.

  In lofty bureaucratic doublespeak the policy was called the School Improvement Plan. But to many educators, a more honest title would have been the School Futility Plan, a concession to the notion that simply showing up for class was all students had to do to pass a course at Carter High School. Others suggested that the true purpose of the Carter plan was to make sure that none of its football players fell victim to the no-pass, no-play rule, particularly this season, when the team was obviously loaded with the talent to go all the way. After all, if a student could flunk every exam he took and still pass, how hard could it be?

  But then something unexpected came along, an unforeseen roadblock. It started as a small dispute, something that could be quietly taken care of in-house. But it spilled out into the open, setting off a series of events that even by the hyperbolic standards of Texas became quite incredible.

  By the time it was over, the name of Gary Edwards, a seventeen-year-old with a face that still looked boyish, would become a household word in the state of Texas. The name David W. Carter High School would become a household word also. The newly appointed Dallas superintendent of schools, representing an outraged black constituency, would become hopelessly mired in it. So would superintendents from surrounding school districts, representing outraged white constituencies. So would the state’s highest education official, trying to uphold the integrity of the no-pass, no-play rule. So would Dallas school board members. So would state legislators. So would legions of lawyers. So would just about every person in the state of Texas, where attitudes on the subject became quickly defined on the basis of whether you were black or white.

  Suits would be filed over it. Hearings would be held over it. Depositions would be taken over it. Emergency injunctions would be sought over it. Black versus white. City versus suburban. Local control versus state control. The right of blacks to determine the best educational course for their children without whites telling them what to do. All these issues spilled out into the open as a result of something that seemed shockingly inconsequential: Gary Edwards’s grade in algebra II.

  Had Gary not been a high school football player, it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference. No one would have cared, except for him and his parents and the teacher who had taught him.

  But he was a high school football player. And it therefore made all the difference in the world.

  II

  There was one teacher at Carter who didn’t pay homage to the Carter Cowboys.

  His name was Will Bates and he looked like his name, rotund, sallow-looking, with the exact mannerisms that one might expect from a man who had dedicated his life to the teaching of math and industrial arts. He seemed intent on not turning his classroom into a mill where everyone passed regardless of how much or how little they knew. He had a notoriously high failure rate, which of course made him the anathema of Carter High School.

  Will Bates was Gary Edwards’s teacher in algebra II, which seemed amazing given the fact that Edwards was a Carter Cowboy and Bates was a hard-nosed grader who made no bones about flunking kids.

  Bates tried to follow the school policy guidelines for grades in daily participation and homework. But that proved tricky in Gary Edwards’s case when he missed class one day so he could watch game film in the coaches’ office. Should he receive a zero for class participation that day? Or should the grade for class participation be waived because the absence was a valid one?

  Edwards clearly struggled in algebra II. He got a 40 on the first weekly test, and then a 60, and then another 60, and then a 35.

  A crisis was developing, not because Gary Edwards was having desperate trouble in algebra II, not because he might need a tutor or remedial help, not because the enormous rigors of football were interfering with his ability to do schoolwork and maybe he should think about quitting football. The concern was much more basic than that. At the rate he was going, he would no longer be eligible for football once he received his grade for the six-week period. He wasn’t making a 70.

  With little more than a week left in the six-week grading period, school principal C. C. Russeau transferred Gary Edwards out of the course to one with another teacher. And he reported Bates, who had a doctorate and thirty-five years’ teaching experience, to the school administration for not being in compliance with the so-called School Improvement Plan. Because of the lateness of the transfer, and because he was behind, Gary Edwards didn’t receive any grades for homework or participation with his new teacher. This was also against the School Improvement Plan, but no one seemed to mind. He scored an 80 on the six-week exam, and with the transfer grades that he received from Bates he managed to pass algebra II for the six weeks with a 72. It wasn’t the lowest grade he received for the six-week period. That came in Spanish, where he had scraped by with a 70. It also wasn’t the highest. That came in football (the actual name of the course), where he got a 100.

  In the meantime, the Carter Cowboys kept on winning. They finished the regular season with a record of eight wins and a tie and number-six ranking in the state. As they headed into the playoffs, many considered them a serious contender to win it all. Until the anonymous phone call.

  Take a look at Gary E
dwards’s grade in algebra II, state investigators were told over the phone. See how it was calculated. Try to figure out how he came out with a 72 when the only way he could have gotten it was by the people over at Carter inventing a new math in which precious points were plucked out of the air for football players needing a 70 to stay eligible. Get the teacher who had passed him, an algebra teacher no less, to do the computations again. Find out that Gary Edwards hadn’t passed algebra at all but flunked it. Conclude from that that Gary Edwards had actually been ineligible for the past three weeks, which meant, under the rules, that Carter would have to forfeit all three games played during that period. Now do new computations. Take Carter’s district record of four wins and a tie and change it to two wins and three losses, a record that would no longer be good enough to make the playoffs.

  Agatha Christie couldn’t have erected a more chilling, more perfect plot. It was one thing for Gary Edwards to be ineligible. It was another for him to be discovered to be ineligible at a time when he would take the whole Carter team down with him.

  The anonymous caller turned out to be exactly right. When the grade was recalculated, it came out to 68.75.

  Marvin Edwards, the newly installed superintendent of the Dallas schools who had come from Topeka, Kansas, arrived at a simple conclusion based on the obvious proof in front of him. Gary Edwards was ineligible to play, Carter had to forfeit the three games in which he had played, and Carter was out of the playoffs. It seemed straightforward enough, but Marvin Edwards apparently forgot one thing: he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

  Supporters of the Carter Cowboys were livid at his decision. Several angry meetings were held that night, and people arranged for some of the city’s most powerful black lawyers to represent them and immediately begin preparations to file suit to prevent the Carter Cowboys’ ouster from the playoffs. They got on the phone to school board members, and Marvin Edwards himself (no relation to Gary) came to one of the meetings and saw just how upset people were.

  As long as Gary Edwards had a failing grade in algebra II, there actually wasn’t much that could be done. But Russeau, the Carter principal, then came forward with a solution of his own to the problem.

  He changed Gary Edwards’s grade.

  Peering into Bates’s grade book, a document that was later brandished about in the courtroom as if it were a murder weapon, he saw the notation “NC” for one of the daily homework grades. To Bates, that “no credit” was the equivalent of a zero, because Gary never had made up the homework by the time he was transferred out of the class. Russeau decided it should have been a 50. It was a fortuitous number, because it meant that Edwards’s grade in algebra, as changed by Russeau, was now 70.4.

  Gary had now passed algebra II by four-tenths of a point and the Carter Cowboys were back in the playoffs, if the superintendent of schools could somehow be convinced that Gary Edwards had in fact not failed algebra II.

  A day later, after seeing grade reports provided by Russeau, Marvin Edwards reversed himself. Gary Edwards had passed algebra and Carter was back in the playoffs for the opening-round game that night against Plano East.

  In later weeks, as the controversy raged, Marvin Edwards defended his decision by saying that it had nothing to do with football. At issue, he said, was local control and the right of a school system to determine in good faith the grade of a student without interference from anyone else. But many felt that Edwards had been unprepared for the outrage that greeted his initial decision to keep the Carter Cowboys out of the playoffs. The motivation for him to change his mind, they felt, was a desire to appease a constituency whipped into a frenzy over high school football. The issue wasn’t local control. The issue was a state championship, which hadn’t been won by a Dallas school in thirty-eight years.

  “The superintendent was pushing it because he was going to get lynched if he didn’t push it,” said assistant state attorney general Kevin T. O’Hanlon, one of more than a dozen lawyers who eventually became caught in the quagmire. “The Dallas Independent School District hadn’t had a state champion in I don’t know how long.”

  Edwards’s reversal set off great celebrations of joy as black students from Carter held hands and danced at an impromptu pep rally. It also set off protests of fury as about five hundred students from South Grand Prairie, the school that initially was supposed to go to the playoffs in Carter’s place, staged a walkout and had to be urged to go back to class.

  Back in the playoffs, the Carter Cowboys beat Plano East 21-7 with two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. Gary Edwards scored the go-ahead touchdown, intercepted a pass to squelch a Plano East comeback, and then scored again.

  The following week, the Texas Education Agency ruled that Carter should remain in the playoffs. The same day, the school board of Plano, a predominantly white suburb outside Dallas, announced that it was filing suit to seek an injunction preventing Carter from continuing in the playoffs the next night. That Friday, the scheduled day of the playoff game, Texas education commissioner William Kirby, the state’s highest education official, became the latest in a long list of people trying to figure out Gary Edwards’s grade in algebra II, and also figure out what on earth was going on in the state of Texas.

  III

  Peering out into the crowd in the hearing room, one contingent of which was black and from the city of Dallas and another contingent of which was white and from the suburbs, Commissioner Kirby couldn’t help but wonder if the priorities of the public had gone slightly mad.

  American education was faltering and Texas was no shining exception. The state ranked thirty-fifth in the nation in expenditures per pupil for public education. Its average SAT scores ranked forty-sixth in the nation. Earlier in the year, a landmark $11 billion lawsuit that would determine how local school districts were funded by the state had played to an empty courtroom. Here, with the issue of whether the Carter Cowboys would stay in the playoffs or be replaced by the Plano East Panthers, the place was packed and frothing.

  “The secretary of education spoke here in Austin on Monday and decried the academic achievement of American children when compared with other industrialized countries. We ranked thirteenth out of thirteen in science,” Kirby noted before beginning the hearing. “Yes, football and extracurricular activities are important, but shouldn’t we also concern ourselves with science, and math, and reading, and writing? Tonight I’m told there may be forty thousand people in the Cotton Bowl watching a [high school] football playoff. Today this room has many interested and concerned individuals. The papers have been filled with stories of the controversy. All of these are appropriate and all of these should have been done.

  “But I urge you all and all of the people of Texas and America, don’t leave the weightier matters undone. Put some of your time and effort and attention and energy on improving academics and on emphasizing academics.”

  After saying that, Kirby then plunged into the morass. It seemed a trivial thing for the state’s highest education official to spend time doing, but Kirby felt compelled to uphold the integrity of the no-pass, no-play rule. If a principal could come in and simply change a grade from fail to pass without any compelling reason, then what was the purpose of the rule and how could it possibly achieve the intended purpose of shifting the focus of Texas high schools away from the gridiron to the classroom?

  Kirby patiently listened to the testimony and ruled that Gary Edwards had flunked algebra II and was ineligible to participate in football under the rule of no-pass, no-play. An hour later, the University Interscholastic League, which sanctioned high school sports in the state, kicked Carter out of the playoffs and replaced it with Plano East. Supporters of Plano East cheered and said that justice had been done.

  But lawyers for Carter and the Dallas school district weren’t about to quit. With the kind of frantic behavior that is usually associated with trying to stay the execution of a death row inmate, they rushed to the Travis County Courthouse in Austin and asked district court judge Paul Davis
to grant a temporary restraining order delaying the playoff game until the court had had an opportunity to consider all the issues in the case. Among their legal arguments, the lawyers said that depriving the Carter Cowboys from competing in the playoffs would cause irreparable harm.

  With ninety minutes left before the game, Davis granted the order.

  The Carter Cowboys had been saved from the electric chair. They were back in the playoffs. The game was rescheduled to Saturday, and Carter won 28-0. A week later, Carter easily won its third playoff game against Lufkin, 31-7. Gary Edwards scored a touchdown and intercepted a pass.

  The following week, a hearing began in Judge Davis’s courtroom to consider once again Carter’s right to play football. Carter supporters had raised $17,000 to help pay legal fees, and the number of lawyers representing Carter and the Dallas school district in the case, eight, was more than the number of lawyers who had represented the school district in various stages of a federal desegregation suit filed against it. There were some other unusual developments as well.

  Will Bates, who a month before had been an unheard-of math teacher, was suspended from his job with pay, reportedly because of concerns over his safety if he continued to teach at Carter. Gary Edwards, a high school senior, suddenly found himself as hounded by the media as Ollie North.

  “I didn’t have any privacy,” he later said. “I would walk into my classes and there they were, right there in my classroom. I was walkin’ down the hall, there they were. I would go to football practice, there they were at my locker. I’m standin’ there naked and there they are trying to nail me. I go out to practice, they want to ask questions, this and that.

  “Then I go home and the phone’s ringing and they want to talk to my mother, my father, and me and drive by. Sometimes, I just snuck out the back door and went to my grandmother’s or somethin’.”