Sixty current Dunbar students protested the 180-day delay by showing up unannounced at the mayor’s office and demanding to talk to him. His response was, “I’m with you.”25 Nothing happened in the 180 days; spring turned to fall, and the city seemed to be running out the clock. The new school was set to open in the new year, about six months away, yet the old school loomed in the background. The council hoped to get Dunbar I down by April 1, 1977, during spring break.
1977
After the 180-day delay came and went, the alumni association filed suit in the DC Superior Court for an injunction to stop the April 1 demolition. The alumni claimed city officials had not adhered to the Landmark Commission’s conditions. There was no evidence of open, good-faith meetings or discussions of alternatives to knocking down Dunbar. A judge gave the city a week to produce proof of any such meetings or provide any transcripts of public hearings held for concerned citizens to discuss options for a DC landmark. City officials failed to provide any such evidence. The judge issued an order to stop the demolition of Dunbar High School until three public hearings were held and the city fulfilled its obligation to make a good-faith effort to hear plans to save the landmark. Old Dunbar was still standing on the day New Dunbar opened.
“We have been second-class citizens too long. Now we have a building that’s first class, and we must have pride in it!” announced Principal Phyllis Beckwith to her students—or at least she said it to the ones who showed up for the opening day of Dunbar II. Attendance was off by 20 percent that first day, Tuesday, April 12, 1977. At that point, the auditorium wasn’t quite done, and the budget had climbed to $20.6 million.26 Still, it was an exciting and slightly confusing time. The new building was big—big enough for 1,500 students, and the current population was 1,350.
Students were given a handbook with eleven floor plans so they could find their way around the huge campus. For lunch in the cafeteria, head to Third Floor West. For the library, take a ramp to Second Floor East. The main office was on the first floor in Building B. It was ramps up and ramps down, past all the classrooms in the big tower. By midafternoon, a few kids had turned off the escalators. Apparently the easy proximity of an emergency button was too big a temptation for some teenagers. The problem continued throughout the year, so much so that the student newspaper took a stand on the issue. “The students should be more mature and learn that responsibility plays an important role in their lives,” wrote the assistant editor of the Dunbar Newsreel. “If the immature students play with the escalators for kicks, imagine how the school will look before the end of the year!”27
The building was an experiment with a new way to use space as part of the teaching plan, and the students and faculty were excited. The noise level might be an issue, but everyone assumed they would get used to it. The teachers didn’t have a choice because the walls didn’t reach the ceiling and a maintenance worker was needed to adjust the partitions. One outstanding issue loomed larger than the rest. “We need our athletic field.” Beckwith wanted her school complete. “Who ever heard of a school in this day and age without an athletic field?”28
This time the city followed all the rules. Three meetings. Well advertised. Very public. The requirements were specifically these:
The owner of the building, the Government of the District of Columbia, has proposed the demolition of the building. D.C. regulation 73–25, as interpreted by the court in Dunbar High School Alumni Association et al v. Government of the District of Columbia as requires the State Historic Preservation Officer and the Joint Committee on Landmarks of the National Capital to negotiate with the owner, civic groups, public agencies, and interested citizens to find a means of preserving the building. Participants are requested to direct their comments to the question of realistic alternatives to demolition.”
What happened next would come down to semantics. Long before there was any debate about what the definition of “is” is, the two sides in Alumni v. City had very different understandings of the words “negotiate” and “realistic.”
By the end of the three mandated meetings, all fifteen alternatives presented to the city by concerned citizens were rejected. Among the suggestions were to place the stadium/field on an angle in a northeast/southwest direction and only remove 15 to 20 percent of Old Dunbar; to have Dunbar use RFK Stadium; and to convert Old Dunbar into a community center or an administration building for the board of education, which was currently renting space there. The city had tables, charts, facts, and figures to explain why every suggestion was not a cost-effective, realistic alternative.
When the city returned to the court with proof it had adhered to all the requirements put forth by the judge and the various preservationist organizations, the Dunbar alumni tried one last maneuver. The group filed a motion objecting to the city’s position that it had negotiated in good faith. The alumni’s motion even included Merriam-Webster’s definition of “negotiate”: “conferring with another so as to arrive at the settlement of some matter.”29 The alumni plaintiffs believed the city had never given any serious thought to any of the suggested alternatives or presented a single new option, and that the person presiding at the meetings worked for the city, which meant he was inherently biased. It was a last-ditch attempt to keep the demolition ban in place. The motion read:
The plaintiffs request that this motion be therefore not granted but that instead this court should require all parties to return to the bargaining table, with a truly neutral person designated by this court to preside at the negotiation sessions.
Judge Harold Greene’s mandate was to rule on the law, not on the actual issue of whether or not Dunbar High School was worthy of saving. Judge Greene ruled the city had met its obligation and engaged in “meaningful negotiations.”
On Thursday, June 2, 1977, Judge Greene lifted the ban on the demolition of Dunbar. The first wrecking ball hit the building that weekend.30
13 CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND
2008
Michelle Rhee, the lightning-rod chancellor of the DC schools, told me she respected the history of Dunbar High School. “I had definitely heard about the school and knew its kind of longstanding reputation before. And then I also knew that in the 2000s the school had really gained a reputation as being one of the lowest-performing high schools in the city.”
Almost exactly thirty years to the day that the wrecking ball toppled Old Dunbar, Rhee was appointed the DC schools chancellor, arriving on the scene in June 2007 like an ER crash unit. Many of the city’s public schools had been left for dead, too sick to cure, or too far gone to bring back to life. Dunbar was one of the particularly ill patients.
“When I took over it was a school that had not met an adequate yearly progress in more than five years, which means that according to the No Child Left Behind Act, it was categorized as a failing school that they were mandating restructuring in. And if you looked at the achievement levels of the kids in that school, they were dismally low.”
The achievement data coming out of Dunbar revealed that the basics were just not there. In English, only 21.79 percent of students were proficient, with 1.07 percent considered advanced. In math, 18.57 percent tested proficient and just 0.36 percent advanced.1 That meant only three or maybe four Dunbar students could solve an advanced math problem. The brightest kids at Dunbar were the minority. And those who did well at the school weren’t up to national standards. One student, a girl who worked hard, participated in clubs, earned good grades, and was in the top ten of her class, scored in the mid-400s on both her math and English SATs. The handful who were recruited to very competitive colleges were outliers. By 2007–08, in fifteen categories rating school quality, Dunbar scored unsatisfactory and unsound in eight, and only partially up to standard in the other seven.2 It was found that:
Dunbar did not meet one standard for a successful school.
… The administration does not always use a systematic, school wide approach for supporting teachers and meeting student needs.
�
�� Efforts to implement consistent professional development program are fragmented, ineffective, and void of any staff input.
… Although valiant efforts are being made to successfully manage the open space environment all stakeholders have voiced concern regarding the extreme challenges and dangers that student and teacher face each day in this unique learning community.3
It is extremely unfair to single out Dunbar High School’s recent record, however. The school is like so many other urban schools in economically distressed areas, absorbing the blows of drugs, violence, and dysfunction. A list of statistics showing the problems with the DC school system could fill its own book. In the year Rhee took over, DC seniors scored the second-lowest SAT verbal scores in the country and the lowest math scores. The national average of high school graduates who currently enroll in college is 48 percent. In Washington, that number is 29 percent, and only 9 percent of those enrollees make it to college graduation.4
A concrete example of Dunbar’s place in the DC academic landscape was revealed by a Washington Post reporter. Jay Matthews, who covers education for the newspaper described Dunbar this way: “Dunbar is your classic inner-city school with well-meaning teachers who have—who’ve been given no mandate to raise standards, and so they’ve limped along with their little engineering program.” To give an indication of the school’s academic health, Matthews pointed to a practical example: how few students took advanced placement tests. “AP is a good measure of their efforts to prepare kids for college, and they were doing next to zip. You know, twenty kids were taking an AP test, and none of them were passing, and that didn’t seem to bother anybody. They were happy to have a few of them taking AP, but [there was] no real determined effort to raise the school up to a new level.”
The principal was bothered but appeared resigned.5 Principal Harriet Kargbo’s daily professional life was tough. A reporter covering DC schools pointed to Dunbar to get the flavor of a DC high school poised for transition. She told him, “The mentality of excellence? … We wish we could have that…. But this is the reality.”6 She was referring to the metal detectors. Earlier in the year, nineteen Dunbar girls had been arrested for fighting. When he asked about the smell of pot in the hallways, she didn’t acknowledge the telltale odor.7
Kargbo was dealing with other safety issues. Armstrong, Dunbar’s former counterpart, was abandoned and had become a way station for the homeless and drug addicts. The schools are adjoined, and some of the vagrants were migrating onto Dunbar’s campus, setting up mattresses near the back doors of the school. And given the inadequate maintenance of the building, not all of the ninety-seven doors closed.8 It was a wonder Kargbo could do her job—or maybe she didn’t do it. The very afternoon on which she gave the reporter the tour of Dunbar, Kargbo was fired.9 She was one of twenty-four principals ousted by the end of May 2008.10
The twenty-first century Dunbar High School wasn’t a particularly special case, and that is what made its condition sad, because it had once been a very, very special place. The only thing the school had in common with its former incarnation was that the population was still all black.
Rhee was not afraid to introduce race into the conversation and was clear about the disparity in DC. “We have, in some circumstances, 70 percentage points’ difference between our white kids and our black kids, and that makes me so angry. This is the result of the adults in this system not doing their jobs.”11
However, one thing was obvious about Dunbar’s situation: the physical plant itself. “I don’t know if you’ve been to the school recently,” Rhee added, “But we often say that whoever designed and built this building did not like children. It’s this concrete structure that looks like an institution of some kind. It is not conducive to learning. It’s not the kind of place that you would look at and say, ‘Oh, I want my kid to go to school in that facility.’ ”
That might be the one thing Michelle Rhee said during her explosive tenure that almost everyone would agree upon. People said Dunbar looked like a parking garage and worse. “It looks like a prison,” one alumnus said, echoing many others who observed the same thing. “What kind of message does that send to our children?”
The Dunbar building serves as a bit of a warning about the pitfalls of considering the now and not the future. In the 1970s, the energy crisis was at the top of most people’s minds, so the school was built with very few windows in an effort to conserve energy. It was also built with the 1968 riots in the not-so-distant past. So much had been broken in the black community, and this was a concrete fortress, a muscular monument that could not be penetrated. In the 1970s, brutalist architecture like this (from the French béton brut, meaning raw concrete) was cutting edge, but its aesthetic appeal aged about as well as the avocado-colored refrigerator and the orange shag rug. And no building can function, or at the very least look good, if it is not maintained. From 2002 to 2007 there were ninety-three open repair requests for the school. Some were routine—a broken intercom or faucet. But many were urgent—siding hanging off the exterior of the building; no working shower in the locker room; dangling, broken windows.12
The outside was not pretty, but what was happening inside was uglier in some ways. On any given day students could and would wander the halls, wings, and mezzanines, cursing their way up and down the five ramps that traversed the building. Who knew when the escalators had last worked? The grooves on the steps were jammed with wrappers and paper. An evaluation of the school revealed, “The condition of the building demonstrates at least a lack of respect for a learning environment, and at most a physical hazard to the students and the staff.”13
And then there were the walls. Or lack of walls. Another holdover from the 1970s was the momentary fascination in education circles with the open classroom methodology. Forty years later, the lack of barriers in the urban school opened up the building, grounds, and students to constant disruption. Dunbar’s teachers complained of noise and students wandering in and out of each other’s classes. Some teachers went as far as to create makeshift walls just to define their own space.
One thing Dunbar did have was a really nice football field. One of the main reasons the 1916 building had been torn down was to accommodate the athletic teams. The field got a lot of use, and it was important. For a lot of students, sports was a way to a scholarship or of staying out of trouble or of creating some kind of family if the structure at home wasn’t there. Dunbar was a powerhouse when it came to sports. Between 2005 and 2011, the girls track team had racked up twenty-eight cross-country and track titles.14 Today, Dunbar has one of the best high school football teams in the country. The Dunbar Crimson Tide made it to the citywide championships in eleven consecutive years, winning over half the games to be the district champs. The NFL is home to Dunbar alumni Vontae Davis, Vernon Davis, Arrelious Benn, Joshua Cribbs, and Nate Bussey. The sports teams have come a long way from the days when they were called the Poets. But when it came to academics, back in the day, the Poets were champions.
“I think it was a school that many people who have lived in this city for a long time—people kind of used to sort of orient me to kind of what had happened to the school district overall in the city. And they just sort of used Dunbar as a sort of prime example of that,” Rhee recalled as more and more e-mail pings rang from her computer. She was a master multitasker.
They said years ago Dunbar was a place where African American students could get an excellent education, and though the city’s school system was largely segregated at that time, it was not only a place where learning was going on, but [one] that produced a significant number of some of the most premier African American scholars today. And then they sort of described from that as the kind of pinnacle high point to where it had gotten when I took over was this sort of nosedive over time, and that there was this huge desire to sort of see a rebirth or a regrowth of that institution in particular to go back to sort of glory that it once had.
The economic and social woes of DC were Dunbar’s woe
s. As Dunbar became a neighborhood school, the neighborhood’s problems became Dunbar’s problems. On a Wednesday morning, January 26, 1994, gunshots were heard on the third floor of Dunbar High School. The shooter ran down the stairs and out of the building where the shooting continued— fourteen more shots. The seventeen-year-old shooter was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The incident had allegedly begun as words over a girl.15 A few days later, Vice President Al Gore traveled the two miles to Dunbar to visit the school and talk to the students about what had happened and about their safety in school. A handpicked group of students was invited to give Gore their perspective about gun violence and how they felt as teenagers. One senior asked a very direct question to the sitting vice president. Alenia Fowlkes looked at him and asked, “What are you going to do? … And when are you going to do it?”16
Years later, thirty-six and a clothing designer, Lena remembered that day. “Of course I was nervous—it was the vice president of the United States. I almost chickened out. But there were so many young people, we were losing each other. Every week there was a report of who got shot. I remember my first year in college I returned home for at least three or four funerals. Most of them were drug related. Three young men. It was sad. It was really sad.”
Although only a teenager, Lena was wise enough to not let the opportunity go by as just an I-feel-your-pain photo-op. She found the backpack checks, metal detectors, and lockdown drills disconcerting. She had the chance to perhaps, in some small way, make a difference. “I hope he was listening, and I think that was one of the reasons why the question was so provocative. I wasn’t the only person to ask a question of that nature, but I was the only one who said it with such simplicity. He is a politician, and they are infamous for roundabout answers, pacifying answers. It was such a simple question. As kids, you just want a straight answer.” The students’ doubt did not go unnoticed. A day after the visit a memo was sent from Keith Boykin, a young African American aide, to then-White House advisors Ricki Seidman, George Stephanopoulos, Mark Gearan, and Alexis Herman.17
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