TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100592/10059953.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 11.8 KB | 244 lines

                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 58

Breaking Out, Then and Now


Revisiting his alma mater, a TIME correspondent finds that even
for bright, ambitious Chicago youths like Keri Wingo, the obstacles
to success are far more formidable than the ones he faced 25
years ago

By SYLVESTER MONROE CHICAGO

    Do you feel that you are getting a good education at
Phillips High School?" asks Leroy Lovelace, pacing the aisles
of his classroom. "Yeah," booms a male voice from the back row,
"because most of the teachers seem concerned if you fail or not.
A whole lot of teachers up here care. Even you, Mr. Lovelace."

    "How do you know whether or not I care?" the teacher
challenged.

    "Because you told us not to miss more than 10 days every
semester or our grades would start going downhill," the student
said.

    "Then why is it, Russell, that we have such a serious
attendance problem?" Lovelace asked.

    "Some students just get tired of coming to school," said
Russell. "They forget it, and just quit coming."

    For the past 33 years, Lovelace's caring, demanding
classroom style has helped keep countless kids in school and
pushed many further than they thought they could ever go. I
know. I was one of them. Lovelace was my freshman honors-English
teacher and the man who first inspired me to become a writer.
But even though Lovelace is still at his post, Phillips today
bears little resemblance to the school I attended 25 years ago.
Back then, it had 4,000 students and anchored the black Chicago
community where I grew up. Today, with enrollment down to only
1,171, there is talk of closing the three-story, 88-year-old
brick structure that is the alma mater of such celebrities as
Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke and Dinah Washington as well as
hundreds of black business and professional leaders. "Although
the school is not what it was back in the '60s, it certainly
does do a lot for this community," says Lovelace. "A lot of
students look upon this school as a positive force."

    One of them is Keri Wingo, 17. A senior at Phillips this
year, Keri is a bright, motivated kid who goes to school every
day. He does not use drugs and is not in a gang. A varsity
football and baseball player, he is hoping a scholarship to
college will help him break free of the ghetto. "I want to get
out of the projects," says the 6-ft. 2-in., 240-lb. lineman and
outfielder. "I want to go to college. I want to make something
of myself. I don't just want to be another victim of the
ghetto." But sometimes Keri finds it difficult to keep focused.
The short two-block walk to school from the small, spartan
apartment he shares with his mother and two younger brothers is
anything but encouraging. Boarded-up windows, piles of bricks
from collapsed buildings, burned-out vacant lots and bustling
liquor stores are all that's left of the neighborhood he calls
home.

    "If you look at all the abandoned businesses and you see
all the homeless people, it's very depressing," he says. "Where
is the community service? Where are the kids going to play on a
cold day?" In many ways, Phillips is all that stands between
Keri and the mean streets of Chicago. If the school does close,
he says, he might drop out rather than run the gauntlet of
hostile gangs to attend school in another neighborhood. His
mother's insistence and his own determination, though, will
probably prevent that drastic step. Another thing that keeps
Keri in school is concern for his brothers, five-year-old
Quentin, who has a learning disability, and three-year-old
Detwone. "I don't want them to end up victims of the streets,"
he says. "I want them to get their education and try to follow
my footsteps so far."

    In many ways, Keri's life mirrors my own. As eldest
children in single-parent families, we both lived in public
housing projects with supportive mothers who drummed the value
of education into us from an early age. "My mother's real strong
with me," he says. "She made sure I didn't hang out with the bad
groups, and she made sure I got good grades." Both of us also
had the good fortune of landing in Leroy Lovelace's classroom.
When Keri's grades slipped during his first semester with
Lovelace, the teacher landed on him with both feet. "At some
point," says Keri, "everybody needs to have a teacher like Mr.
Lovelace."

    But the similarities end there. When I was at Phillips, it
was an asset to be young, gifted and black. Today being a young
black from this desolate neighborhood is a serious liability.
Not that the situation was idyllic in my day: even then,
Phillips was an example of 100% de facto segregation, as was the
neighborhood where I grew up and where Keri now lives. But there
was hope in our world. The civil rights movement was in high
gear, and most kids my age still dared to dream. And with hard
work, determination and a little help from a variety of
successful Great Society programs, many of those dreams came
true. In my case, the road up and out was a scholarship to St.
George's, a prep school in Newport, Rhode Island, via a special
outreach program called A Better Chance.

    Originally funded through the now defunct federal Office
of Economic Opportunity, ABC still places minority kids in
up-scale independent schools across the country. More than 8,100
have graduated since the program began in 1964. But the program
no longer receives any government money and is completely
funded by private grants and alumni contributions.

    Even when government support was at its peak, the
relatively small ABC reached only a limited number of students.
But there were numerous other community-based programs -- a 4-H
Club, student socenters and one-on-one adult mentoring sessions,
for example -- that helped fill the gap. Funded by federal and
state grants to the school district, such after-hours programs
kept kids off the streets even while reinforcing what was
learned in class. Today that kind of support has been decimated
by budget cutbacks, and the community's social and economic
infrastructure has all but vanished. "All those positive things
to get you involved and keep you involved, we lack those today,"
says Lovelace. "We just don't have the funds for it. And kids
are getting involved in gangs and what-have-you because they
don't have anything else to do."

    Today there often isn't even enough money to ensure that
the schools open at all. In fact, money is the biggest
difference between the Chicago school system I attended in the
'50s and '60s and the one Keri Wingo attends today. In my 10
years in Chicago public schools, I never missed a single day of
class because of a teachers' strike or budget deficit. But every
September for the past decade, Keri has had to wait and wonder
whether his school would open on time. Five times it did not.

    So severe is the money crunch that next June the remaining
43 of 129 Head Start classes taught in Chicago public schools
since 1965 will be phased out. School officials voted two years
ago to end Chicago's 27-year relationship with the highly
regarded preschool program because of concerns that federal
grants for the program would not cover a 21% pay raise for
teachers.

    When I went to school in Chicago, even though the schools
I attended were black, the school system was mostly white.
Today only 11.6% of Chicago's 409,731 public school children are
white. Phillips' current problems reflect the great divide that
separates nearly all inner-city schools from their suburban
counterparts. "The numbers are just devastating," says educator
Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, a scathing
comparison of America's inner-city and suburban schools. In
Chicago the $5,500 a year spent on each pupil is barely half
what the richest suburban school districts outside Chicago are
spending. Kozol recounts that after telling audiences about
public schools in Chicago, where one-quarter of all teachers are
substitutes and toilet paper has to be rationed, he is
constantly asked if money really matters. "It's an extraordinary
question," he says, "as though it were bizarre to suggest that
money is the answer to poverty."

    Many argue that the problem facing blacks today is more a
matter of economic class than race. Others insist that blacks
simply must become more self-reliant, taking more responsibility
for their own lives and depending less on government handouts.
Both positions have merit. But neither fully explains why so
many African-American communities, which once struggled to
produce successful members of society, are now struggling just
to survive.

    In years past, thousands of Phillips High School graduates
routinely went on to successful careers in education, medicine,
law and government. Today it is much harder for students to move
up while everything else is collapsing around them. While the
Douglas-Grand Boulevard community in which I grew up has been
overwhelmingly black for decades, the residents have grown
steadily poorer. In 1970, 36.1% lived below the federal poverty
line; today 57% do.

    Once, 27,000 people lived in the Robert Taylor Homes
housing project. Today its 19,000 residents, all of them black
and poor, are warehoused there with virtually no hope of
escape. The 2 1/2-mile stretch of 28 16-story buildings that
make up the country's largest public housing complex has become
an American equivalent of Soweto. A deliberate government policy
of racial isolation and abandon ment created this enclave, and
government must play a large role in solving its problems.

    "There's a special role for government in this particular
area," argues Chicago Alderman Bobby Rush, a former Black
Panther who is running for Congress, "because the decay and the
decadence that you see, the lack of opportunity you see, are all
the result of governmental policies that address the problems
that we are confronted with. Governmental policies are the key.
They are the lifeblood that this community needs, that umbilical
cord that connects us to the overall society."

    A committee from the National Research Council agreed in
its 1989 report, A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society.
Purposeful actions and policies by governments and private
institutions make a large difference in the opportunities and
conditions of black Americans," the committee concluded. These
polices have been "essential for past progress, and further
progress is unlikely without them."

    Nowhere is the damage wrought by racial discrimination and
isolation more evident and painful than in the schools. "In a
way, the most tragic years for African-American kids are the
years from fourth to sixth grade," says Kozol. "Those are the
years in which the dream dies. In many ways, poor white kids and
poor black kids suffer equally. But in the inner-city schools,
where the injury of caste is compounded by the injuries of race,
the misery is of a different order."

    That misery weighs heavily on the shoulders of even the
most motivated inner-city kids. Keri is no exception. Says
Lovelace: "It's the government's responsibility to educate these
students equally as well as all other students." Beyond that,
Keri's success or failure depends largely on himself. "Getting
out of [the ghetto] depends on Keri," the teacher says. "But
Keri has to realize that, unfortunately, because he's black,
because he came out of this neighborhood, he's going to have to
work a wee bit more, a wee bit harder."

    There's nothing new about that. For every successful
African American, self-help and personal responsibility have
always been a part of the equation. What is new is that if
people like Keri manage to make it out of their grim
neighborhoods, they will do so only by clearing hurdles that
many black students of my generation never faced.