“You know, before I came here today, my right knee was hurting, and I thought it was because I was aging, but the pain is gone now because I am inspired by what I see in this ballroom. You know, my name is George Leonard. I’m part of a company called Friends of Bedford, and we come out of New York. And, you know, we didn’t know that much about Dunbar, but when we entered the building last year we were very upset with what we saw. Students were in the hallways. Violence was just about on every floor. Learning was not happening in that building, from what I could see, at any level that you would be pleased with.”
There was a stir in the room. “Who is this again?” one lady whispered to another. It was an uncomfortable moment for some.
“They are from New York. They are going to run the school,” Dr. Graves replied.
“Hmm,” was the response.
Leonard continued, “There were no classrooms. There were spaces, open space, and the rest that resembled a prison, and the mentality of the students and the staff in no way represents the legacy of the school as important as Paul Laurence Dunbar.”
There was something about his presentation that was irking some people. It seemed to be a case of “How dare you call my ugly sister ugly?” Still George Leonard continued, seemingly unaware of the rumbles in the room.
“I have learned so much today, more than I’ve learned in the first year. I observed the school in operation. But I will tell you this: the Friends of Bedford will not let you down. We are charged with the mission of turning this school around. We had long talks with so many people in DC to try to understand how did this school end up in this condition after reading about all the success and all the scholars that have come out of that school. Please explain to me how this school can exist this way with the name Paul Laurence Dunbar as the name of the school. I did not like the answers to the questions! So, at that point I realized that I have to take it upon myself to make the changes that I know need to happen at a school like Paul Laurence Dunbar with a legacy that rich.”
Leonard was on a roll with no signs of stopping. “I circled Charles Drew’s picture. It was on the walls. I circled it. So, students said to me, ‘Who is that?’ Yeah, right. And that was my reaction. Wow. There’s a lot of other pictures I have to circle for you so that you could understand what building you’re in and what it represents. I sat her down, and I explained to her who Charles Drew was. And when I was in New York, I had a club that was called the Charles Drew Institute, and little did I know that I would be involved in a project that was going to turn the school around where Charles Drew graduated from.”
His presentation reached a crescendo. “We will not let you down! I promise you!” He was almost yelling.
“We did not come to DC to play games. We left our families in New York to come for this mission. And our wives, you know, they’re saying, you know, come back home, and when my wife walked that building she said to me, ‘Now I understand why you cannot come back home, because there is no way that a school should be in that kind of condition.’ We will not let you down.”
The reaction of the alumni was mixed.
“I was impressed, but I also felt, why do they have to get somebody from outside? Why can’t they do this? Why do they have to spend money to have someone come to the school? And, we know it’s filthy. We know there are rats running around. We know an open classroom with a bunch of adolescents—are they insane? So, I don’t see, why did they have to waste money getting a bunch of foreigners—when I say, ‘foreigners,’ they’re not part of the system here—to come in and tell them and show them what to do?”
Some praised what seemed to be Leonard’s tough-love stance.
“It’s about a stable, that in order to clean that stable out, they had to run, like, a river of something through it to clean it. They got a lot of lousy teachers who haven’t been properly trained, who are busy trying to wear designer clothes. They are not interested in the truth. They are interested in the salary they get. Now, I admit, teachers are not paid worth—they are not paid what they should get. They educate these stupid basketball players who make millions, and they get nothing,” said one Dunbar alumnus.
“He is so enthusiastic, and he really meant what he was saying. Now, I don’t know how he’s going to go about it,” said another.
Leonard ended his speech with a bold prediction: “You have folks who have sacrificed so much for Paul Laurence Dunbar to be the kind of school that it was. There is no way that we are going to stop at what we’re doing in DC until Paul Laurence Dunbar is the number-one high school in DC. We have to be the role model for that community, and after being here today … I was already fired up before I came here. Now, it’s a whole different type of energy that comes out of me, and I will go back on Tuesday and I will tell those students, ‘Keep a-plugging away.’ ”
14 FROM BED-STUY TO SHAW
GEORGE LEONARD WAS SURPRISED that some of the alumni had grumbled at his blunt assessment of modern-day Dunbar. For all his sophistication, the French cuffs, the suspenders, and deliberate speech pattern, George Leonard could come at people in an unvarnished fashion. “I thought they would appreciate the fact that we were honest.” He hadn’t really expected to make a full-on podium-pounding speech, but something had moved him that day.
Niaka Gaston, chief operating officer of Friends of Bedford, is Leonard’s former student. He can finish his mentor’s sentences, and Leonard can do the same for him. “Yeah, we could see the discomfort in some of their faces, because they love their school, but we’re not talking about what your school was,” Gaston acknowledged. “We’re not talking about … we don’t want you to love it less.”
“It is the unfortunate reality of what this,” Gaston gestured around at the off-, off-, off-white cinderblock walls and eye-frying fluorescent lights, “what this is.” The Bedford team was sitting in a big conference room within a classic high school main office. It was a springlike day in March 2010, but you couldn’t tell inside of Dunbar because windows are few and often high up on the walls, near the ceiling. Their BlackBerrys were buzzing. Their laptops were lined up on three six-foot-long folding tables arranged in a U shape so the members of the team could see each other. Often they made eye contact, a nod here and there, acknowledging some e-mail that popped up on a screen. A whiteboard had some notes that would only make sense to them.
Almost two years earlier, Friends of Bedford had been among the candidates being interviewed to partner with DCPS at four of the under-performing area high schools: Anacostia, Ballou, Coolidge, and Dunbar. A member of Leonard’s extended family was a graduate of Coolidge and knew of the results Leonard and his team were achieving in New York. Introductions were made. After earning a reputation for a series of successful programs that provided inner-city kids with the tools they needed to compete on state and college exams, Friends of Bedford moved on to a big project: Bedford Academy in Brooklyn, New York.
It was simple. They started a successful public high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where one-third of the population lives below the poverty level and unemployment hovers around 17 percent.1 The student profiles were similar to that of an average Dunbar student. Many were from single-parent homes or weren’t being raised by their parents at all. About 63 percent of Bedford Academy students needed free lunch. But here’s the big finish: 95 percent of Bedford Academy students graduated and most went to college, including several to the Ivy League.2
Originally Friends of Bedford was slated to take over two of the other DC high schools set for restructuring, but then they were asked to come take a look around Dunbar. “We got to Dunbar, and wanted to run back out. It was a dungeon,” Niaka Gaston recalls with a laugh, the kind of laugh that lets you know the subject is anything but funny.
“It was very gloomy,” Leonard added.
“Dark and dirty carpet …” Gaston continued.
“The ramps—”
“The ramps!”
“The ramps,” Leonard echoed what everyone thought. “It
was a mixture of a prison and parking garage. There were kids everywhere.”
“Kids everywhere.”
The team left and was settling into preparing to tackle Coolidge and Anacostia High Schools. Rhee wanted them to take on Dunbar. “We cannot underestimate our children and what they are capable of if we provide the right environment for them,” she said. She believed Bedford could create that sense of expectation.
We brought in the Friends of Bedford. We put a significant amount of resources in building walls in the school, with trying to sort of paint and clean and pull up the old moldy carpeting and that sort of thing. And is the school perfect now? Heck no, far from it. But can you notice that a shift is occurring, absolutely. And so for kids, many of whom have been in an environment for years where they’ve been suggested to low expectations and poor quality, in terms of what they were being provided, in terms of an educational academic program, et cetera, you know, a lot of people think, well, when you get to these older kids, sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds that are so hardened that it’s too late, right? And what the children at Dunbar show you is, it is not too late. You can talk to seventeen-year-olds who are overage, under-credited, and you talk to them about what they want to do, and they still have a sense of hope and aspiration around what they eventually want to do. And that’s what I think is amazing about our kids, and in the long term is what’s going to allow this school to change course very quickly is because of the students. And again, as long as we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing as adults, the kids are going to arrive to those expectations very quickly.
Friends of Bedford were signed to a three-year, seven-figure deal. “We went through an emotional roller coaster,” Gaston jumped right back in. “When you see the conditions that these students are in, and that quite honestly—and this is not to blame anybody, OK? Everybody’s to blame, right? That their place is such a situation of failure, of guaranteed failure, and that’s OK, you know?” His laugh of incredulity bubbled back up.
“You get this mixture of emotions. First you’re just shocked, because this can’t be America.” He laughs again.
And that’s how you feel. This can’t be 2009, 2008—this can’t be now. Then you become upset. Because now the reality sank in that this is actually happening, and this continued to happen for some decades. Then now you’re excited about the prospect of jumping in this, but then you get this rage about you, because now you’re getting angry, and you don’t know who you’re angry at, but you’re angry. And then we came back to being hopeful and determined to take this on.
This hope was not only because of the future, but because of the past as well. “And for us, I mean, once we went back, and the research on Dunbar, geez, it was our honor.”
Gaston finished up with his hand on his chest. This group was not one that could be described as humble, but in this case they were all sincere.
“Our honor,” Leonard softly echoed his former student.
Leonard had been a biology teacher. He had originally wanted to go to medical school but didn’t get in because, as he admitted honestly, he didn’t have the grades. With a college degree heavy on the biology, he did a short stint as a drug rehab counselor in Brooklyn, New York. At the suggestion of a friend, he considered teaching, something he had no real desire to do. Yet he got his license and was on his way.
His protégé had a similar story, but with very different origins. “I wanted to be a healer,” the thirty-something Gaston claims. With his long dreads tied in the back, trailing down his suit, and his round spectacles, if you said he was Spike Lee’s boho baby brother, someone would believe you.
“My wife tells me now—well, she told me a couple years ago, you know—you said you wanted to heal? Well, that’s exactly what you’re doing. So, even though I didn’t do what I sought out to do, I have absolutely no regrets. I think that this has allowed me to do so much more than what I was searching for.” Gaston had more in common with some of the Dunbar students than anyone realized. He had nearly fallen through the cracks more than once, but had teachers in his high school and college who picked him back up.
“See, I sat where they sat. I mean, I’m from Bedford-Stuyvesant. I was homeless. My family were—they were drug members, they were committing crime. I get this. I mean, I get all of their stories … when you hear the things that they’ve gone through. But I was them. Or, I was a step away from being them. I remember being in college and not totally prepared for college. And I went to Columbia University from Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. I wasn’t totally as prepared as I should’ve been.”
One day Gaston went to the dean and said, “I don’t know if this is going to work out.”
“So, what are you going to do if you leave?” the dean asked.
“I’m going to go home—either I’m going to end up selling drugs, or I’m going to die. That’s that.”
Gaston has empathy for the issues Dunbar students face. “That’s their—that’s many of their options, I mean, growing on all the other things that happened to them. I didn’t, thank God,” he said laughing. “He helped me work through that. They deserve as many opportunities as I’ve had, and when I look back at my life, I’m not successful because of myself. It’s because of what others have done for me. I’ve had phenomenal educators. Mr. Leonard was my biology teacher in high school. I’ve been blessed with mentors and others who have helped to keep me focused. I want to give that to everybody, and we’ve committed to doing that.”
The Bedford model is based on five tenets listed in this order on the organization’s website: parental involvement, academic rigor, culture and climate, community engagement, and discipline. They are heavy on the tutoring, the teacher training, small academies, Saturday classes, with the work being done during school, not after. Parental involvement turned out to be a big issue. Dunbar’s 2008 quality school review by DCPS noted that there was a “significant lack of parent involvement” and that parents reported “limited and inconsistent communication from the school.” The Bedford team found the parents who did come in were defensive and ready for a fight. “I don’t blame them.” Leonard said. “They have not been treated well.” Leonard and his team get charged up when they discuss the Bedford philosophy to envision, engage, and encourage, producing what they call the “cycle of success.”3 It is a great sales pitch.
At this point in the meeting Leonard displayed a little of the arrogance that some in the District, including some members of the local teaching staff, found irritating. “We’re educators, and we feel that we can take on any challenge, and we were so successful in New York, we were ready for the next challenge or the next step, or whatever it looked like. And we realized that this is clearly the next step, because of what we saw.”
They saw a building that was obviously broken and sick. The DCPS masters facilities plan included a 2008 assessment of the building. Dunbar’s condition assessment read as follows:
ADA Compliance-Unsatisfactory
Convey Systems-Unsatisfactory
Electrical-Fair
Exterior Finish-Fair
Interior Finish-Poor
Plumbing-Poor
Roof-Poor
Structure-Fair
Technology-Poor
Carpet tiles were moldy. Paint was peeling. Some gym equipment was broken and worn beyond use. The roof was unstable. However, even before repairs, the first order of business was a housecleaning; the place was filthy. One teacher claims he and an accomplice sent moldy tiles to the Washington Post and that helped “motivate” DCPS to move the process along.
The effort was part of what was called the Summer Blitz. Seventy schools needed to be stabilized, including Dunbar.4 Doors fixed. Gym equipment patched. Garbage thrown out. The only problem was that the job was done so quickly that many valuable artifacts from Dunbar’s golden years ended up in the Dumpsters, including an original Elizabeth Catlett print similar to the one that hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A portrait of one of the school�
��s original founders, William Syphax, donated to the school by Mary Gibson Hundley, was found outside in a shopping cart with some discarded Christmas decorations.5 The history of the school was lost on many who were there; they didn’t even know what they were trashing.
Physically, the building needed to be reconfigured. Teachers had done their best to create a better atmosphere, stacking file cabinets to create makeshift walls. It was a huge change to have walls put up so the students could be in individual classrooms. Dunbar II was built to accommodate twenty-four hundred students. Then Dunbar had anywhere between eight hundred and nine hundred students on the books, of which about five hundred showed up every day. That was a lot of unused, and more importantly unattended, space. Violence in the school was not uncommon.
The fifty-nine-year-old Leonard recalled finding a kid lingering in the halls. The young man was hauled into the office for cutting gym. “This student who was so disgruntled in here…. And he didn’t want to talk. ‘I’m angry; my life is in the toilet. I don’t even want to talk to you with that tie on. And I just want to be left alone until that bell rings so I can go to my next class that I may cut also. But I got to get away from you. Because you represent everything that’s bad in my life,’ ” Leonard recalled, giving words to the boy’s frustration.
Leonard sat and talked to the kid for half an hour. “The reason I was able to break through, [was] because we had a conversation for about thirty-five minutes, which probably is the longest he’s ever spoken to anybody that represents what I represent. But he gave me enough information so that I understand what he’s angry about. And when that bell rang, he couldn’t wait to get out of here. But I made it uncomfortable for him to be quiet, to hold his head down, and to accept the reality that, at the rate he’s going, he’s not going to graduate. And he didn’t like that. That I was telling him that he’s not going to graduate. Because I got his attention, I guess.
When the teenager got up to leave he asked, “So, now you think that I’m not going to make it?”
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