Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (50 page)

Since he didn't do any homework, there was no reason for
him to bring books home from school. On a few occasions he
did reluctantly carry them home, not to study but to appease
his mother when she asked him how come he never had any
work to do.

He too received an answer sheet for certain tests, and he
knew in general that the taking of exams was irrelevant, because the teacher was going to give whatever grade he or she
deemed appropriate regardless of his performance.

"Sometimes we wouldn't even take our exams, we'd just get a
grade," said Derric. "We could take 'em but it didn't matter how
we did on 'em because they were going to give us whatever they
wanted to." Four or five times during his senior year he didn't
take the exam but just sat back and waited for the honor grade.
"I was getting nineties, eighties, whatever, they just give me a
grade," he said.

Under conditions such as these, Derric Evans, just like Gary
Edwards, loved David W. Carter High School. "I loved goin' to
school because I didn't have to do nothin'. I just went," said
Derric.

Sometimes the Carter Cowboys' football coach, Freddie
James, lectured his talented subjects on the evils of what would
happen if they acted too wild and showed no respect for rules
and order. They listened, but they didn't pay much attention
because they knew that after the season there would be a bevy
of college recruiters begging for them as desperately as a baby
begs for his mother's milk-regardless of their performance in
or out of the classroom.

And if answer sheets and waivers from homework weren't
enough to pass, they also had something else to fall back
on-the unusual grading policy that had been especially approved for Carter by the Dallas Independent School District. Carter had always been a troubled school, with test and performance scores that fitted the profile of an inner-city minority
school. It was 96 percent black, but it wasn't in the inner city,
and most of its students did not come from deprived backgrounds but from middle-class ones. They drove nice cars and
they dressed in beautiful clothes, and as Gary Edwards put it,
the school had a reputation of being the "fashion show" of the
Dallas school district.

The solution to the problem of poor performance scores had
been a new system of grading that would encourage students
to stay in school as well as improve their self-esteem. Beyond
these important, admirable goals, it also had a more immediate
purpose: it would undoubtedly reduce the school's notoriously
high failure rate, which had become an embarrassment to the
school and to the school board. Under the plan, equal weight
was given to class participation (which to some teachers meant
simply showing up, because how on earth were you supposed
to quantify participation?), homework, weekly tests, and a final
exam at the end of every six-week period. A student could
flunk every weekly test as well as the final exam and still pass a
course for that period.

In lofty bureaucratic doublespeak the policy was called the
School Improvement Plan. But to many educators, a more honest title would have been the School Futility Plan, a concession
to the notion that simply showing up for class was all students
had to do to pass a course at Carter High School. Others suggested that the true purpose of the Carter plan was to make
sure that none of its football players fell victim to the no-pass,
no-play rule, particularly this season, when the team was obviously loaded with the talent to go all the way. After all, if a
student could flunk every exam he took and still pass, how hard
could it be?

But then something unexpected came along, an unforeseen
roadblock. It started as a small dispute, something that could
be quietly taken care of in-house. But it spilled out into the
open, setting off a series of events that even by the hyperbolic
standards of Texas became quite incredible.

By the time it was over, the name of Gary Edwards, a seventeen-year-old with a face that still looked boyish, would become
a household word in the state of Texas. The name David W.
Carter High School would become a household word also. The
newly appointed Dallas superintendent of schools, representing an outraged black constituency, would become hopelessly
mired in it. So would superintendents from surrounding school
districts, representing outraged white constituencies. So would
the state's highest education official, trying to uphold the integrity of the no-pass, no-play rule. So would Dallas school board
members. So would state legislators. So would legions of lawyers. So would just about every person in the state of Texas,
where attitudes on the subject became quickly defined on the
basis of whether you were black or white.

Suits would be filed over it. Hearings would be held over
it. Depositions would be taken over it. Emergency injunctions would be sought over it. Black versus white. City versus suburban. Local control versus state control. The right
of blacks to determine the best educational course for their
children without whites telling them what to do. All these issues spilled out into the open as a result of something that
seemed shockingly inconsequential: Gary Edwards's grade in
algebra II.

Had Gary not been a high school football player, it wouldn't
have a made a whit of difference. No one would have cared,
except for him and his parents and the teacher who had
taught him.

But he was a high school football player. And it therefore
made all the difference in the world.

II

There was one teacher at Carter who didn't pay homage to
the Carter Cowboys.

His name was Will Bates and he looked like his name, rotund, sallow-looking, with the exact mannerisms that one might expect from a man who had dedicated his life to the teaching
of math and industrial arts. He seemed intent on not turning
his classroom into a mill where everyone passed regardless of
how much or how little they knew. He had a notoriously high
failure rate, which of course made him the anathema of Carter
High School.

Will Bates was Gary Edwards's teacher in algebra II, which
seemed amazing given the fact that Edwards was a Carter Cowboy and Bates was a hard-nosed grader who made no bones
about flunking kids.

Bates tried to follow the school policy guidelines for grades
in daily participation and homework. But that proved tricky in
Gary Edwards's case when he missed class one day so he could
watch game film in the coaches' office. Should he receive a zero
for class participation that day? Or should the grade for class
participation be waived because the absence was a valid one?

Edwards clearly struggled in algebra II. He got a 40 on the
first weekly test, and then a 60, and then another 60, and
then a 35.

A crisis was developing, not because Gary Edwards was having desperate trouble in algebra II, not because he might need
a tutor or remedial help, not because the enormous rigors of
football were interfering with his ability to do schoolwork and
maybe he should think about quitting football. The concern
was much more basic than that. At the rate he was going, he
would no longer be eligible for football once he received his
grade for the six-week period. He wasn't making a 70.

With little more than a week left in the six-week grading period, school principal C. C. Russeau transferred Gary Edwards
out of the course to one with another teacher. And he reported
Bates, who had a doctorate and thirty-five years' teaching experience, to the school administration for not being in compliance with the so-called School Improvement Plan. Because of
the lateness of the transfer, and because he was behind, Gary
Edwards didn't receive any grades for homework or participation with his new teacher. This was also against the School Im provement Plan, but no one seemed to mind. He scored an 80
on the six-week exam, and with the transfer grades that he received from Bates he managed to pass algebra II for the six
weeks with a 72. It wasn't the lowest grade he received for the
six-week period. That came in Spanish, where he had scraped
by with a 70. It also wasn't the highest. That came in football
(the actual name of the course), where he got a 100.

In the meantime, the Carter Cowboys kept on winning. They
finished the regular season with a record of eight wins and a tie
and number-six ranking in the state. As they headed into the
playoffs, many considered them a serious contender to win it
all. Until the anonymous phone call.

Take a look at Gary Edwards's grade in algebra II, state investigators were told over the phone. See how it was calculated.
Try to figure out how he came out with a 72 when the only way
he could have gotten it was by the people over at Carter inventing a new math in which precious points were plucked out of
the air for football players needing a 70 to stay eligible. Get the
teacher who had passed him, an algebra teacher no less, to do
the computations again. Find out that Gary Edwards hadn't
passed algebra at all but flunked it. Conclude from that that
Gary Edwards had actually been ineligible for the past three
weeks, which meant, under the rules, that Carter would have
to forfeit all three games played during that period. Now do
new computations. Take Carter's district record of four wins
and a tie and change it to two wins and three losses, a record
that would no longer be good enough to make the playoffs.

Agatha Christie couldn't have erected a more chilling, more
perfect plot. It was one thing for Gary Edwards to be ineligible.
It was another for him to be discovered to be ineligible at a time
when he would take the whole Carter team down with him.

The anonymous caller turned out to be exactly right. When
the grade tvas recalculated, it came out to 68.75.

Marvin Edwards, the newly installed superintendent of the
Dallas schools who had come from Topeka, Kansas, arrived at a simple conclusion based on the obvious proof in front of
him. Gary Edwards was ineligible to play, Carter had to forfeit
the three games in which he had played, and Carter was out
of the playoffs. It seemed straightforward enough, but Marvin
Edwards apparently forgot one thing: he wasn't in Kansas
anymore.

Supporters of the Carter Cowboys were livid at his decision.
Several angry meetings were held that night, and people arranged for some of the city's most powerful black lawyers to
represent them and immediately begin preparations to file suit
to prevent the Carter Cowboys' ouster from the playoffs. They
got on the phone to school board members, and Marvin Edwards himself (no relation to Gary) came to one of the meetings
and saw just how upset people were.

As long as Gary Edwards had a failing grade in algebra II,
there actually wasn't much that could be done. But Russeau, the
Carter principal, then came forward with a solution of his own
to the problem.

He changed Gary Edwards's grade.

Peering into Bates's grade book, a document that was later
brandished about in the courtroom as if it were a murder
weapon, he saw the notation "NC" for one of the daily homework grades. To Bates, that "no credit" was the equivalent of a
zero, because Gary never had made up the homework by the
time he was transferred out of the class. Russeau decided it
should have been a 50. It was a fortuitous number, because it
meant that Edwards's grade in algebra, as changed by Russeau,
was now 70.4.

Gary had now passed algebra 11 by four-tenths of a point and
the Carter Cowboys were back in the playoffs, if the superintendent of schools could somehow be convinced that Gary Edwards had in fact not failed algebra II.

A day later, after seeing grade reports provided by Russeau,
Marvin Edwards reversed himself. Gary Edwards had passed
algebra and Carter was back in the playoffs for the openinground game that night against Plano East.

In later weeks, as the controversy raged, Marvin Edwards defended his decision by saying that it had nothing to do with
football. At issue, he said, was local control and the right of a
school system to determine in good faith the grade of a student
without interference from anyone else. But many felt that Edwards had been unprepared for the outrage that greeted his
initial decision to keep the Carter Cowboys out of the playoffs.
The motivation for him to change his mind, they felt, was a
desire to appease a constituency whipped into a frenzy over
high school football. The issue wasn't local control. The issue
was a state championship, which hadn't been won by a Dallas
school in thirty-eight years.