First Class

by Alison Stewart

  When Vice President Gore on Thursday visited Dunbar High School, the scene of a schoolyard shooting the day before, students reacted skeptically. “What happens tomorrow?” one student asked. “What happens after the press is gone?”

  In response to the students, Gore said crime bills being considered by Congress would put more police on the streets and could pay for more metal detectors for schools. However, “he made no proposals that would specifically help Dunbar,” the Washington Post reported.

  Before the Vice President left the event, several students virtually cried and pleaded to him. “Don’t forget us. Don’t forget our faces. Don’t forget the fear,” one girl said as network TV cameras recorded the exchange.

  The fear, distrust, and cynicism felt by our youth is alarming and must be addressed. These kids are no doubt impressed by the stature of the White House, but they also know that their real life concerns will not be eliminated by photo ops and compassionate rhetoric.

  The issue mattered to her because Lena really loved her school. The violence in the school and neighborhood was incongruous with her experience. From her perspective, Dunbar was “awesome.” She wasn’t from the area and had tested into Dunbar’s rigorous pre-engineering program. The magnet program focused heavily on the sciences and was partially financed by corporate sponsors—General Motors, IBM, Potomac Electric, and METCOM. It had been set up in 1982 by the superintendent, Floretta McKenzie, and Dunbar’s principal, Thomas Harper.

  The first pre-engineering class had fifty students. “We had physics. We had Calc II. Statistics. Differential equations. It was tough, but it was a lot of fun,” said Lena. “We kind of felt like we were all in it together. I liked math from the creative part. I was interested in the hands-on part.” She couldn’t believe the troubles Dunbar was facing. “It was awesome, everything you could want or needed. It was so good at the time, I thought it would go on forever—youthful naïveté.” Lena had been encouraged by how much DC had improved in the early 1990s. The drug epidemic of the 1980s was waning in school in her opinion. She loved the fact that Dunbar’s athletic teams were so great. She just wanted to be a teenager.

  Many kids did live their lives that way, not wearing Kevlar to school. A ’90s yearbook offers a snapshot of what was on young Dunbar students’ minds at the time. Normal teenage stuff.

  In: Tommy Hilfiger Out: Calvin Klein

  In: HBCU Out: Ivy League

  In: Your hair Out: Store hair

  “It was the best of times and worst of times. There was a day care for all the young mothers. There was a strict lockdown rule. You couldn’t go out at lunchtime because we had drive-by shootings. There was a student who was paralyzed from the waist down. If you pop a balloon, everyone would hit the deck. We were trained to clear out.”

  In looking back, Lena really believed that despite the societal issues in the 1980s, kids at New Dunbar could get a good education. She earned a great scholarship and maintained nothing but love for her alma mater. “It was probably more rosy than one might think. Dunbar was a beautiful, state-of-the-art facility when I was there.” No longer full of youthful naïveté but with the wisdom of an adult, she added, “Yes, there were dark spots—some scars last forever.”

  “For me it was all about getting out of the ghetto. I can’t play basketball, and I can’t sing, so I got to figure some way out.” Ron Worthy laughed, but he was very serious about how pivotal the Dunbar preengineering program had been in shaping his life. Unlike the general population at the school, like Lena he had access to advanced math, more science, dedicated computer classes, engineering drawing, physics, and advanced-placement courses and options.

  “Math and science was the thing. Engineering was how I was going to get out of the ’hood.” Like Lena, Worthy had lived in another neighborhood and tested into the program in the 1980s. He was the valedictorian for the pre-engineering program as well as the general population. But before he went to college, he had one debt to settle. “I was forced to work in General Motors in Michigan because they were private partners for pre-engineering. After I graduated, within two days I was in Detroit. The idea was ‘We [GM] are giving you guys computers…. Your top guys need to come here.’ ” It was just a couple of months, and soon after he would be a freshman at Stanford.

  Worthy recognized that he had been fortunate to make it into the magnet program at Dunbar given that he had gone to school during the time of DC’s drug epidemic. “You got a lot drugs—this was in the middle of crack. There was a lot going on externally, so that kids are either guys … selling the drugs and the girls [who] are trying to be with drug dealers because they got money. So if you are poor … you want to be around money. Socially, for me, it was difficult because I was a hard-core nerd, aggressive nerdy.”

  The nerd thing worked out well for him. After business school he got involved with an up-and-coming thing called the Internet. Long story short, Ron helped facilitate the $80 million acquisition of Blackpeople meet.com by Match.com and now runs his own consulting firm.

  Worthy’s high school success came down to his own motivation and what he described as “solid” teachers. Ron felt that many of the teachers tried to live up to Dunbar’s history, “especially Ms. Rousseau—the way she carried herself. She was a power presence. She put in mind, like, a female pastor. Every time she walked into her room. For us, it was ‘Don’t embarrass us. We have a history here. Do not act foolish. We do not need people in the broader community to look at us Dunbar students in a negative light.’ There was a sense of that.”

  Dr. Eva Rousseau has something in common with Ron; she was Dunbar’s valedictorian, in 1962. “When I came back some of my teachers were there. It was a tremendous source of pride to have a student return as a educator.” Dr. Rousseau still has the manner and the tone of someone to be respected. The sound of her voice immediately makes one sit up straight. She won’t comment on Dunbar’s decline but she will tell you what worked when she was there: locking down the school. She was fierce about keeping bad elements out. Expanding the pre-enginering program to twenty partnerships, including a program with NASA. And the school being the first comprehensive public high school in Washington, DC, to be awarded the Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the US Department of Education in 1993. Into the 1990s, there always seemed to be some custodian of the spirit of Old Dunbar. Dr. Rousseau still held her school and herself to high standards. “And most importantly our children went to college and stayed in college.” Her message to her students: “Believe you can succeed and you will.”

  If a student at Dunbar had the will and was lucky enough to encounter teachers like Rousseau or Arman Mazique, a former marine who challenged his students every day, there was a good chance he or she could graduate and do well. Mazique was the kind of teacher whose students, now as adults, find him and friend him on Facebook. He is still a wall of a man, broad and strong, which came in handy in the 1980s when he had to help escort gang members from the property. Mazique, an engineering teacher, considered the economic and academic diversity a strength in some ways because it taught students to get along with all types. He felt Dunbar’s biggest problems came from the bureaucracy at the central office downtown, which he called “the puzzle palace.” “I have a saying I like from the Japanese: ‘Fix the problem, not the blame.’ ” He didn’t want to waste his energy on politics outside of the classroom. While the pre-engineering program attracted math and science whizzes, Dunbar of the late twentieth century also produced a few successful writers. The poet Thomas Sayers Ellis graduated in 1982. Yaba Baker, class of 2000, started a cottage industry with his “Just Like Me” books and Princess Briana books, featuring a self-sufficient princess of color who needs no prince to get it done.

  Jewel Haskins (Dunbar 1997) is now the head park ranger at the Paul Laurence Dunbar house in Dayton, Ohio. “Mr. Mazique was my favorite all-time teacher. He made learning fun. The work was daunting and he would sit down and work with you. Sometimes all you need is the confidence to kno
w you can do it.”

  For a huge part of the population, the concept of believing that a public DC education would enhance their chance at mainstream success was a cruel joke. The DC underclass was either entirely absent from the school system or being passed along, competency just an afterthought. Leon Dash, a journalist at the Washington Post, covered the student uprisings at Howard University in the 1960s and won a Pulitzer Prize for his long-term reporting about DC’s forgotten poor, most of whom are black. What he found helps explain how the problems of the DC school system are deeper than building structure and the lack of AP classes.

  For years, Dash investigated and wrote about a woman who spent her life spinning in the poverty cycle. The woman’s parents were part of the second migration of hardworking farm laborers, descendants of slaves, who couldn’t find work or housing in the big cities. They wound up first in alley housing and then in housing projects, where they were largely ignored. The woman he followed for years, Rosa Lee, went to Washington, DC, public schools in the 1940s, dropped out of seventh grade, and was illiterate.

  Most of Rosa Lee’s children cycled through the public school system until they too dropped out. The public schools had failed her, and she failed to fight to educate her children. As an adult, Rosa Lee was too intimidated to even approach a school on behalf of her many children when they were in trouble or didn’t show up. She did not have the knowledge or skill set to protect her children’s futures, unlike middle-class white parents and middle-class black parents. “They [the middle class] were not intimidated by anyone in the school system—teachers, administrators, vice principals, anyone in the school—because they were as highly educated as these people, and that is not the case with poor parents. They are easily intimidated, and sometimes treated with disdain.” The Rosa Lees of this world were succumbing to the societal quicksand of poverty and a lack of education. And the public schools reflected this every day.

  Dash felt the issues of race, poverty, and class, all of which were showing up in the public schools, needed to be out in the open, and he worked for four years on the Post series. He received nearly one thousand voice mails from middle-class and upper middle-class blacks admonishing him for this reporting. The common thread was that what he wrote confirmed stereotypes, not just about poor blacks, but all blacks. Dash, who is African American and now a journalism professor in Illinois, observed something that had plagued Washington for years: “The psychological burden of the black middle class [is] proving yourself worthy of inclusion. Dunbar grads and middle-class Washington had worked so hard for inclusion, or at least access to the best things. The larger society has all these myths about your humanity, and they had to work hard to overturn them.”

  But Dash felt that they, too, had been harsh on those left behind, and that was where the classism in DC came in. “The majority of the black poor haven’t even made it [to] working-class society. They don’t speak the King’s English, and that is a social marker—a distinct class marker. They also distinguish themselves by generations going back in Washington. The social markers are very clear.”

  For the last forty years, various reports and studies have been released, all citing the same problems with DCPS: the 1989 COPE Report (DC Committee on Public Education) called “Our Children, Our Future,” the 1995 “Our Children Are Still Waiting” report, and the 2005 “Restoring Excellence to DCPS” report from the Council of the Great City Schools. The problems remained: Failure is tolerated. The buildings need repair. And bureaucracy and poor academic performance plague schools.

  So why does the District of Columbia, a place with some of the greatest minds, the most educated white and black people, the capital of the United States of America, have such a problem fixing its schools? Journalist Bill Turque theorized, “I think, because it’s in Washington, because it’s the backyard of Congress, it’s been a laboratory for a lot of reform. The charter school movement started here. I think it all feeds—it makes it very passionate, it makes an interesting cover, but it also makes it hard to get by in a community that simply wants to get things done because everything is created with huge suspicion.”

  Turque has covered education for years. We met at a middle school cafeteria where a meeting about the structure for a new middle school was being discussed. The conversation between parents, mostly African American, and the DCPS representatives descended quickly to a standoff. The African American parents knew the importance of protecting middle schools. They knew what had happened in the 1940s and 1950s, when the middle schools were in bad shape.

  “That was pretty much a typical DCPS meeting. They always follow a very familiar arc.” Turque said the tension and raised voices were par for the course. “You know, the DCPS people will come [with] a lot of energy, the best of intentions, but they end up serving in a posture of instead of soliciting ideas and input, they’re basically there, it feels like a fait accompli. You know, it feels like, ‘This is what will happen, but we’re asking your opinion.’ But it’s a pro forma exercise so the anger is more than the anger of that situation. It is also residual resentment. Decades of bad decisions about schools, about neighborhoods, about being disenfranchised. You cannot separate all that resentment of being disenfranchised. It colors literally every decision in every meeting like that, so they’re all like that.”

  Today, with the chancellor’s position tied to whoever is mayor, another layer of politics is added to an already saturated situation. Turque makes an excellent point about the bigger issues at stake: “Education has become so politicized and mechanized. It’s really a civil rights issue…. It packs in all the stuff in one small space. Race. Class. Income inequality. Every flammable issue is packed in to this very small school district.”

  Pre-1954 Dunbar had protected itself and protected its students’ educational civil rights. The principals had a lot of power. The community helped raise the kids. The teachers were highly educated and fairly compensated. The parents and caregivers made a living, and the students had basic life needs fulfilled. Yes, the rooms were overcrowded, the books old, and the commute long for some students, but basically when the playing field was close to level, Dunbar proved that black children of all classes and shades could learn and excel. In the modern Dunbar, the average student appears to have been left behind.

  In 2008, Dunbar was set for restructuring with nine other district high schools. To get on this academic hit list, a school had to fail to make adequate yearly progress for five years. The federal No Child Left Behind Act mandated that Dunbar accept one of these five options:

  Reopen as a charter school

  Replace all or most school staff relevant to AYP [Academic Yearly Progress] failure

  Contract with an external partner

  State takeover

  Other major restructuring, which could include being shut down.18

  Closing down the first public high school in the country for African Americans was politically impossible. One-third of Washington’s schools were already charter schools, and charters weren’t necessarily the panacea they originally seemed to be. A state takeover didn’t apply. It was decided that the second and third options were the best courses of action for a school described as having “significant obstacles.” The restructuring recommendation concluded:

  The school has a rich history and promising future, but the organization needs a massive cultural shift in the present to bring about the changes necessary to cultivate a climate conducive to student achievement. The right outside partner will bring to the table extensive capacity to manage change in Dunbar’s challenged environment.19

  A massive cultural shift requires either revolution or the patience for evolution. The plan was broken down into phases. The first phase would take place during the 2008–09 school year. The outside partner would observe, learn the current culture, craft a plan to be implemented in the following year, and then take over.

  The subtext of the Rhee administration was that the revolution was going to come from non-Washin
gtonians. So far, the locals had not made changes for the good, so they should let someone from outside the Beltway try. For Dunbar, the idea was to bring in a private educational management company with a proven track record. New blood. Independent. No ties.

  But was that even possible in the most political town in the country?

  The gravelly voice of an elderly, yet feisty, man on the other end the phone was insistent. “You don’t need to write that old story. Everybody knows the old story. There’s a new story going on at Dunbar. An exciting story! Forget all that old stuff. It’s a new day.” For twenty minutes Dr. Lawrence Graves, Dunbar class of 1940, told me what he thought I needed to write about Dunbar. And he was determined that I look forward not back. “You are witnessing something new. It is a great story to write down. The past is the past.”

  All roads of Dunbar history, legacy, and truth led to Lawrence Graves. A career educator in Washington, he was active in spreading the word about all things Dunbar. Passings of graduates. Accomplishments of current students. Once you were on his mailing list, he would send you obituaries, updates on scholarships, and photos of students’ accomplishments. He could tell you exactly who had and had not contributed to the scholarship funds and why or why not. He was a firm believer that the graduates of Old Dunbar needed to embrace and support those at the school now, to once again build a community around the kids—and fill in the gaps DCPS or a difficult home life had left empty. When a student named Ronald Rivers asked to interview Dr. Graves for a project about Dunbar’s history, Dr. Graves summed up the reasons why Dunbar was something special in its day and why it had changed.