The Time of Our Lives (8 page)

While doing this, Moore has a full-time job in financial services but, as he says, “Public service doesn’t have to be an occupation but it must be a way of life.” For boomers and other grandparents, public service as a school volunteer should be a natural calling—an extension of their formative years when they set out to change the world.

THE PROMISE

Boomer or other grandparent volunteers can meet and work with a new generation of like-minded activists such as Geoffrey Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone, an educational and community services oasis in the heart of Manhattan’s storied African American neighborhood.

The Children’s Zone grew out of the desperate need to do something about the destructive effects of the crack cocaine epidemic of the eighties, and it has proved to be a model of public and private cooperation, providing everything from parenting workshops to classes on how to control asthma, a persistent health threat in the area.

Canada presides over more than one hundred city blocks of programs and services designed to offer hope to local families, with the emphasis on education and preparing youngsters to take their place in a society beyond their ’hoods. He runs a tight ship, constantly monitoring the effectiveness of programs within the Zone. Those that don’t measure up lose their funding, and he moves the money to those that get the job done.

Michele Rhee, the dynamic and iconoclastic former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school system, embodies what a very modern school administrator can become.

Rhee, a striking and hard-driving Korean American single mom, had no experience as even a junior high principal before she was hired to fix one of the most broken systems in the country. She was a teacher in Baltimore who had attracted attention for her work in Teach for America.

She came to the nation’s capital and immediately began to raise hell with a school district that was a collection of parental and teacher union fiefdoms, with a student population in constant turmoil. Rhee began by firing hundreds of principals and teachers and replacing them with principals and teachers with proven track records. She took on parents’ groups and consolidated schools to get the efficiencies she needed.

Perhaps Rhee’s most controversial innovation was a program called “Capital Gains,” in which students received money for good grades and good behavior. They could earn as much as two hundred dollars a month. She worked out an arrangement with a local bank for the students to establish accounts so they could develop money management skills.

When I visited Rhee at Shaw, one of her middle schools in northeast Washington, she laughed as she recounted critics saying, “You’re paying kids to come to school? Since when do you gotta pay kids to come to school?” Rhee responded, “The crazy thing is not that we’re paying kids to come to school. The crazy thing is that for decades we allowed kids
not
to come to school and didn’t do anything about it.”

Michelle Rhee and Brian Betts, the enterprising principal she recruited from the Maryland suburbs
(Photo Credit 3.4)

Rhee had no illusions that handing out money for good grades and behavior is a silver bullet solution. As she put it, “Not one thing will turn the district around; it’s going to be fifty different strategies and initiatives that add up to success.”

While visiting Rhee, I got an insight into how “Capital Gains” had very practical implications. One of the programs involved assigning students roles—for example, a married mom with two kids, a single man, and so on. The students were then given a checkbook with a phantom balance in it and told to do the family’s shopping for food, clothing, and other necessities.

One student told me, “I wasn’t that good at math so I thought it was a good project, but I knew it would be hard to do. We had to pay bills, look for houses, go to the store. Get groceries. We’re learning how to deal with real life.”

I teasingly said, “If you could fix the economy, that would be a big relief to all of us.”

A member of the class immediately shot back, “We’re working on that now.”

In an economy that is growing more and more complicated, with difficult decisions to be made about health care policies, choosing a pension plan, finding or refinancing a mortgage at favorable rates, sizing up bond or mutual funds, preparing a tax return, and calculating currency exchange rates, fundamental instruction in consumer finance should be as much a part of every school’s curriculum as basic math and English. We can hope this early training will temper young people’s attitudes toward thrift and credit card debt, and give them pause when a mortgage broker slides a subprime loan across the desk and says, “Hey, I can get you into a big home for no money down and interest only for ten years.”

Rhee’s aggressive approach was just three years old, and the results in student performance were encouraging, but time ran out before her systems could be fully realized. Her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in the Democratic mayoral primary after one term for what was widely believed to be his aloof manner, especially with fellow African Americans in the poorest neighborhoods. Shortly thereafter, Rhee resigned.

In a joint statement to the city that is such a curious combination of wealthy and poor blacks, old-line white neighborhoods and the citadels of government and corporate power, Fenty and Rhee acknowledged that when it came to ensuring broad support for their efforts, they fell short.

Nonetheless, they were justifiably proud of the progress district students had made in a little more than three years. They urged the entire community to get behind the new mayor in his efforts to continue the progress. “We have laid the foundation,” they said, “but the hardest steps are yet to come.”

In the short time she was in the job, Rhee came to believe fervently that the old claims about ethnicity and zip codes as an excuse for failing grades are more about the general failing of society than about children and their families. She also recognized that schools must value the students.

The embodiment of that sentiment was the principal at Shaw Middle School, Brian Betts, a cheerful, athletic white Southerner who made a name for himself as an administrator in the wealthy, leafy suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland, next door to Washington and light-years away in terms of income, family stability, and expectations for students.

Within a few days on his new job, Betts, who had a phenomenal memory, was a fixture on the schoolhouse steps every morning, in rain, sleet, or snow, greeting his hundreds of charges by name and cheering them on for the day ahead.

Dana, a student who had been suspended ten times a year earlier, became a model student. Why? “Mr. Betts. He’s a very positive person and he has a good attitude. And being around people like that lifts your spirit. It helps you be a better person. So it’s all about Mr. Betts.”

It was not just a parlor trick for Betts. He told every student that he cared about them.

Tragically, Betts was murdered in his home in the spring of 2010. Two young men he met online were charged with killing him and stealing his car. His death was front-page news in the nation’s capital, and his students and their families mourned deeply for weeks, with good reason. Not enough inner-city students have a Mr. Betts experience.

The absence of a teacher who is also a surrogate parent is not a condition confined to African American or Latino children. In the 1980s, in a documentary called
To Be a Teacher
, I interviewed Lenny Stanziano, who taught math in Toms River, New Jersey. He, too, stood at the schoolhouse door and greeted students by name, saying he was often the first person to acknowledge them that day.

Many of his students were white, working- and middle-class kids, who lived with single parents or in households where both parents rushed off to work before dawn. Every student I talked to had high praise for Mr. Stanziano as a teacher and because he saw them as someone other than just a name in roll call.

Stanziano worked weekends in a large liquor store, stacking beer cases in the refrigerator to supplement his meager teacher’s salary, which was just over twenty-six thousand dollars in 1976. His classroom skills and commitment to education paid off. For the past eleven years he’s been principal of Toms River High School South.

Can we take a moment to remember Mr. Betts? And hope for more Denise Garisons and Lenny Stanzianos?

They’re out there in small and large school systems across the country. I’ve come across them in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Omaha, Montana, rural Texas, Georgia, and Maine—the foot soldiers of American education: dedicated and inspirational teachers and administrators who for six to eight hours every day take responsibility for educating, comforting, and protecting our nation’s most precious resource, its children. It is hard and noble work and, yes, it is not always done perfectly, but the failures of the system ought not to be blamed on the teachers alone. We all have a stake.

CHAPTER 4
 

Old School Ties and
New World Requirements

FACT:
The best economic argument about education is in the numbers, period. With every passing year more education means more income in the short and long term. The median annual income for a wage earner with a bachelor of arts degree is $55,700.

On average, that’s close to $22,000 more annually than a high school graduate can expect to earn. Wage earners who have completed just some college courses earn on average 17 percent more than high school graduates.

QUESTION:
What exactly does higher education mean in a modern global society, and how should it be organized for the masses as well as for the intellectually and financially elite?

F
or all the income advantages of a college education, there are mitigating numbers as well. The increasing cost of higher education is a number that has to be factored into the dividend of getting a degree. College graduates entering the workaday world in the middle of an economic downturn may not do as well as, say, a high school graduate with a capacity for fixing or demystifying a computer program.

The societal value of a well-educated citizenry is self-evident, but no one should have any illusions about the demands of the global economy. When young people with obvious aptitude announce they’re going to college to be a “mass com” (mass communications) major, adding that they hope to be an anchor on a news program shortly after graduation, I have to temper my reaction.

While I try not to discourage them, I explain that the best journalists I know studied political science, history, economics, or biology, adding that they mastered their professional craft by working the police beat or covering the school board, city hall, or state legislature.

“Taking any economics courses?” I’ll ask. “Or accounting or computer science or biology? How about writing?” The eagerness of my new young friends often turns to unease. “What is he talking about?” they seem to be thinking. “I want to be Diane Sawyer or Matt Lauer, not some wonk.”

I was equally frustrated when a bright young African American student who won state honors at a Mississippi high school science fair announced he would be a marketing major when he enrolled at Boston University. He stuck to his plans despite my gentle efforts at dissuasion, and he graduated with honors in marketing. I am sure he’ll be a success. It’s his life, after all, but does America need another marketing executive rather than another scientist?

THE PAST

In the nineteenth century, a little remembered Vermont politician inspired a federal program that became one of the most important and enduring contributions to the development of modern America. It was the establishment of land grant colleges, the inspiration of Justin Smith Morrill, a Vermont congressman and later senator, who correctly surmised that the young nation needed a network of institutions to promote agricultural education, the mechanical arts, and military tactics, three pillars of nineteenth-century America. Now there is at least one land grant school in every state.