The Corner (48 page)

You might want to tell them the rules. Or a little about yourself. Talk to them about teaching, or learning, or what they can expect if they’re willing to work. You might start with a story, something with the right lesson attached.

“Once upon a time …”

Story time always works, even here in a high school. Right away, you’ve got their attention.

“… we’re talking a long time ago and we’re talking insects. You know, your basic insect community …”

Some nervous laughter. You’re playing them now and they’re a bit off guard.

“… and you know, most insects are hard workers. It’s not that they are all about work, but work comes first. Work first—and then play. So in this community, we’re talking ants and grasshoppers and one grasshopper in particular …”

The short kid in the second row pipes up: “I know this one. I like this one.”

You’re off. You’re teaching.

“… and the grasshopper comes around to the ants’ house and tries to get them to go party. But they’re about business. It’s not that they’re rude and brush him off. In fact, one tells him that when they’re finished, they’ll hook up with him …”

You’ve got them. They’re buying it.

“… so when the winter comes, our man is caught short. At first, all
the other insects are willing to carry him, but this is a long winter and the stash gets low …”

“They gonna burn ’im,” says a boy in the back.

“… so one day, while the grasshopper’s away, the wise old beetle calls a community meeting. And it’s decided that they can no longer take care of the grasshopper. So when our man shows up and makes his play, he’s told that’s all there is and there ain’t no more.”

The moral is right there, waiting for them. But you play the thing out to the very end, taking your lazy grasshopper from door to door across Insectville, and finally dragging him out into the deep snow of a bleak, unforgiving winter.

“And,” you say, savoring the lesson, “you know what happens to a hungry grasshopper in the dead of winter, don’t you?”

A hand goes up, and you nod your head.

“He goes down the welfare building and gets his food stamps.”

You look down at the wiseass in question, but what stares back at you from the middle of the end row is a neatly dressed, well-mannered girl who’s not even trying to be funny. She has answered in absolute earnest and her answer is, in every sense, accepted and understood by the rest of the class.

You’ve crossed the chasm. You’re a city teacher.

As such, you’re beginning to realize not only that Aesop won’t play in Baltimore, but that for the children of Fayette Street, the idea of education—the formal education of a classroom, at least—has no meaning. To those who argue that the urban school systems of this nation are underfunded, or understaffed, or poorly managed—and in Baltimore, at least, these are fair accusations, every one—there is this equal and opposing truth: The schools cannot save us.

The debate over tax bases and class size, efficacy and alternative curricula matters only for that finite portion of children ready and able to learn, to set genuine goals, to adapt their lives to the external standards of the culture. For these children, the key is a functional family and their place in that family. For them, some semblance of victory was assured before they ever walked into the classroom.

True, a better school might cultivate a few more minds, salvaging more of the marginal students in an environment that rewards skilled teaching and assures consistent discipline. It’s always good to be better. But it’s also true that in cities like Baltimore, the thing is now beyond the fine tuning of school superintendents and educational experts. Take
the entire Phillips Exeter Academy, drop it into West Baltimore, and fill its ivy-covered campus with DeAndre McCulloughs, Richard Carters, and four hundred of their running buddies, and see just how little can be had for a dollar’s worth of education.

As it is with our laws and our legal deterrents, our educational theories no longer matter within the all-consuming universe of the corner. We want the drugs to disappear because they are illegal or, more basically, because they are bad for people. But the drugs will not disappear in a culture where everything else—jobs, money, hope, meaning—has already vanished. With the same naïveté, we want the children to learn because learning is worthy, and right, and the last, best hope for their own future. It was the way out for us, and our parents, and the legacy that our grandparents worked to ensure. The public schools that launched the immigrant masses out of the pushcart ghettos and into manicured suburbs hold a place of honor in the American mythology.

But Fayette Street is no place for myth. Those that escaped from the heart of West Baltimore did so in a different time and a different way, with union-scale factory jobs or government work in a nation-state that seemed to have some use for them. But the factories are closed now, and the government isn’t hiring, and the jobs today are all about doing something with a computer somewhere out in the county. For that kind of work, a City of Baltimore diploma and 750 on the college boards can ‘t matter. Down on Fayette Street, they know how many finished products of the city school system are standing with them at the next register over in the Kentucky Fried. Or in the intake area of the Rosemont social service offices. Or, after a time, in the vacant lot off Vine Street, waiting patiently for the New York Boys to bring out the morning testers.

It’s too simple to mistake this for cynicism; it is, in fact, certainty. Knowledge of the eventual outcome isn’t limited to those already lost to the corner, or to those about to arrive there. It’s there in the eyes of third-graders who have already segregated the world of education, pushing the classroom to the fringes of their lives.

By middle school, they’re spouting future-tense fantasies in the same sing-song cadence used to offer remorse to a juvenile master or probation agent. Gonna stay in school. Get educated. Be a doctor. A lawyer. A pediatric neurosurgeon. Either that, or a cosmetologist. But take a closer look and you see a child with only the weakest grasp of literacy and basic arithmetic. Algebra, biology, composition—what does any of
it mean to the corner, to the only working economic engine in their lives, to the place where most of them will eventually be consigned?

Even the socializing effect of an alternative curriculum—the kinds of skills designed by desperate educators to get these kids to the most basic level of employment—has no real application on Fayette Street. Job interview techniques, cooperative learning, managing emotions, interpersonal discipline—stuff like that will get you hurt at Fayette and Monroe, where the rules of the corner demand not social skills, but unhesitating ruthlessness.

At this age, these children are not yet aware that they are horribly alone, that the rest of America—its dreams, myths, standards—has walked away from West Baltimore. They don’t fully sense that this country has reshaped itself as distinct and apart from the core of its cities, that it no longer even pretends to have a use for an underclass that once might have served it with raw labor, filling its rural spaces or crowding its sweatshops. These children don’t know the whole truth, and yet by middle school, the compartmentalization that has allowed them to straddle both worlds is beginning to crumble. By middle school, the more savvy are already asking themselves and each other whether knowing the names of four African rivers will help them spot a drug corner stickup a minute before it happens. Or whether awareness of the Pythagorean theorem will allow them to squeeze ten more vials from an eight ball. Everything taught in the classroom becomes strangely dissonant; the contradictions between general knowledge and the rules of the corner are there and inexplicable.

And if, God forbid, you are a child with a genuine and innocent interest in something other than the business of the street, you’ll be battered down. For the sake of their math book, how many twelve-year-olds are ready to endure the certainty of ostracism? Caught in the crossfire, they burrow in, play dumb, watch from the sidelines as the streetwise kids wreak havoc time and again, only to suffer precious little consequence. Eventually even the most timid realize that there isn’t much bite behind all those rules.

The teachers learn as well. They recognize the ones who care—the kids who are still walking the fine line—but understand that they have to survive. Call on the same child repeatedly for right answers and, eventually, he’ll shut down. Point out the high test score, and the unlucky achiever will be made vulnerable to the group. It’s peer pressure, same as it is anywhere, but in urban Baltimore, it’s compounded by the weight
of numbers. In the classrooms at Harlem Park, or Lombard or any other inner-city middle school, it’s not one or two roughnecks who refuse to buy into the educational experience. Here, in the toughest schools, that alienation can consume half a class or more.

By eighth grade at the latest, the choice has been made, with children opting out of the classroom in every way save for their physical presence. Creativity ceases, and what classwork remains is so disjointed and distant that it can be ignored in its entirety. By the end of middle school, a child is filling a desk in the Baltimore school system as little more than a social experience. He’s there for banter and play. She’s there for girlfriends and lunch.

This is a school system that dares not speak to the heart of the problem—the fact that its children now come from a world apart. But walk with a Baltimore teacher into a ninth-grade class and see the future:

It comes in the shape of Anthony, a child so beaten down by circumstance that in this class of kids going nowhere, he occupies the bottom rung. For him, there is no one at home who can manage the slightest recognition or interest. He’s easy to spot; his filthy shirt and denims are the only set of clothes in his possession. There’s always a fight when someone has to sit next to Anthony.

Or Marie, who sits nearest the door and at thirteen is going on thirty, now that her body has filled out and caught the interest of a twenty-four-year-old drug slinger. She can’t be bothered with a notebook, spending her class time with pocket mirrors and jewelry and nail polish, preening for the other girls. Most days, her boyfriend sits outside the school at two-thirty, idling a glittering Acura, waiting to collect his girl. By next year, she’ll be a transfer to the system’s special school for young mothers.

Or Neal, a lumbering bear with the dead eyes of a battlefield casualty. Twice wounded in shootouts, he sits in the back of the class, content to do or say nothing the entire year. But he rules the hallways, with a group of lesser gangsters drawn to him because of the way he carries himself and the impressive rep of his older brothers’ drug crew.

Or Michelle, a small, wiry fourteen-year-old in the middle row, her face a profusion of scars and scratches, reminders of her tooth-and-nail struggle for a small niche in this world. She’s been living at her boyfriend’s mother’s house for the past two months. Her own mother is on lockup at women’s detention.

Or the amazing Michael, a spinning whirlwind of disruption, unable
to remain in his assigned seat for more than an instant. He’s rushing about the classroom, coins clasped in his hand, offering lunch tickets, candy, and comic books for sale to any and all takers. Evasive to authority, he’ll keep moving until he’s cornered. He’s living with his mother. His father gets supervised visits, and the written notes in the file hint at abuse.

Or Durrell, who comes to school from a homeless shelter. Or Clyde, a special education student with borderline retardation, who needs special attention and is, instead, doomed to this class. Or Tonya, who responds to any confrontation by fighting savagely and, by the end of the year, will be expelled for carrying a lock-blade. Or C.J., who will disappear in midyear never to return, amid news reports that have him fatally shooting an older boy in an argument over drugs and being sentenced as a juvenile to Boys Village until his eighteenth birthday.

And what remains for the teacher? What training, what lesson plan, what act of educational artistry will be sufficient to the reality? In Baltimore, as in every other beleaguered city system, the administrators and bureaucrats have for decades wrapped the failure in the latest educational trends, programs, and jargon, as if changes in approach or technique could ever matter. Back-to-basics, alternative schools, privatization, magnet schools, teaching the whole child—all of it is offered up as slogans in place of meaningful endeavor, as if the Titanic could have reached the New York harbor narrows with a more seaworthy set of deck chairs.

Ignore the hyperbole and slogans. Regardless of how many times an urban school system reconstitutes itself, the choice that remains for teachers at Harlem Park, or Lombard, or Hamilton middle schools is no choice at all.

They work in classrooms in which creativity and intelligence have been almost willfully extracted, a room of silences and by-rote drills and copied information. For many teachers in the city system, there is still the willingness to fight the inertia, to use their talents to battle back into the heads of children who have shut down, who cannot find it in themselves to bridge the chasm between their own lives and a world of learning. Sometimes, despite the long odds, these teachers actually succeed.

But for many others, a separate peace has been made with the forces arrayed against them. In too many city classrooms, in too many city schools, there is a readiness to participate in the charade, to pretend that
dittoed handouts and assignments merely copied from the board constitute an educational experience. Similarly, there is a willingness to pretend that the relative few who make it to a high school commencement in Baltimore have actually received the equivalent of a high school education. These are the teachers and administrators who have given up on a system that cannot salvage its standards.

As with the drug war, the struggle to save the Baltimore school system has always been framed in incremental terms: With a little more money, with a teacher’s union that is a little less obstinate, with more responsive administrators, the children will be saved. But the truth is that these things don’t add up when the weight of numbers prevents anyone from accurately assessing and rewarding real achievement, or responding in earnest to disruptive behavior, or even making a legitimate effort to find out why so many desks are empty every day. In Baltimore, three social workers and four case managers are responsible for tracking two thousand chronic truants—children who have missed anywhere from a month to an entire year of their education. Facing this strange new generation of corner children, too many teachers will not extend themselves for a system that pays them thousands less than their counterparts in suburbia, arms them with torn, broken-back textbooks and ancient filmstrips, and then deposits them in a classroom environment so chaotic that no fewer than an average of one hundred and fifty teachers and thirty school police officers are assaulted each year. Those that can get out, will— either to the safe haven of a county school system or to another profession entirely. Those trapped by the inertia of years, by a vested pay scale, or by their own rank incompetence will remain. These teachers are not likely ever to rediscover a belief in their purpose, their students, or for that matter, in whatever acronym or slogan or program is now being touted as salvation by the superintendent’s staff. Some of them were once good teachers; others never had a clue. But all of them are now looking only for survival, ready and willing to penetrate a young mind so long as classroom decorum can be maintained. It’s perversely fair: By middle school, the students are pretending to learn; their teachers, pretending to teach.