The Prize (24 page)

Still, in most classes he continued to disrupt and often got kicked
out. The
BRICK
leadership team vowed not to promote students who couldn't perform at their grade level, and Alif was held back a second time. When he arrived in seventh grade in the fall of 2012, he was old enough to be a high school freshman but far behind most of his classmates. However, his mother, Lakiesha Mills, noticed changes in his attitude. He told her how much he liked the new principal, Charity Haygood, even on days when she disciplined him for disrupting class. During recess, which Haygood supervised daily, she insisted that students line up on time, quietly, in a straight line to reenter the building after playing. “I expect you to line up
well
,” she would say. “I'm asking you to make a decision to be disciplined, to be mature. If you're not in place by the end of the countdown, you stand with me.” Alif did a lot of standing with her. “My boys learn that I do that out of love and concern,” she said. “I want them to do better. I want them to
be
better. The purpose is to make sure they can learn, they understand their value, they know they
are
somebody.” Even after Haygood flunked him, Mills said Alif was eager to go to school the next fall instead of having to be dragged there. He'd tell his mother, “Mrs. Haygood needs to
see
me. She said she
wants
to see me.”

In the fall of 2012, Kathleen Carlson, a special-education teacher who normally taught students with cognitive impairments, was completing her training in a reading program for students who had failed to learn to read in conventional classrooms. Her final requirement for certification was to teach the program, the Wilson Reading System, one on one, to a student who had a considerable reading deficit but no diagnosed disability. Assistant Principal Melinda Weidman paired Carlson with Alif. After teaching special education in Newark for almost twenty years, Carlson was accustomed to encountering students with terrible behavior histories who changed dramatically as their learning problems were addressed. She told Alif she wasn't judging him, but she wanted to hear, in his own words, why he got in trouble so often.

His answer burned itself into her memory. “I get frustrated when
I don't understand what's going on,” he said. “If I get thrown out of class, nobody finds out I can't read.”

“I was blown away that he could verbalize that,” Carlson said. As with many of her students, the learning issue was tangled up with disruptive behavior, but in her experience, few kids were able to recognize that connection, much less articulate it. To Carlson, Alif seemed like a fugitive, tired of running, who finally had found a safe place to turn himself in—a teacher with real, nonjudgmental interest in what he was feeling.

Carlson tested Alif on the Woodcock Reading Mastery index to gauge his baseline skills. At fourteen, he was reading at a second-grade level. In a test of word attack—or sounding-out—skills, he was able to read only four percent of words expected for his grade level. He stumbled on words as simple as “duck” and “quack.” He knew only eighteen of twenty-four consonant sounds, seven of fifty-six vowel sounds. Of 120 sounds in the English language, he knew only forty, or thirty-three percent.
“He was missing all the basic skills for kindergarten to third grade. Why?” Carlson asked. His math scores on standardized tests, by contrast, had been on grade level every year, and in some years above.

Weidman rearranged Alif's schedule so that he met daily with Carlson at 2 p.m. in her special-education resource room. For the first week or so, Alif was persistently late or absent, but Carlson tracked him down and coaxed him to try. Working one on one in the privacy of the resource room, he no longer ran from what he was: a second-grade reader. Like Princess Williams's kindergartners—who used another Wilson program for pre-readers—he tapped a finger to his thumb as he verbalized each letter sound, creating a sensory connection. Starting over as a reader, he learned how letters combined to make sounds, and sounds to make words. For Carlson, short-circuiting Alif's frustration and hopelessness was at least half the battle. She fought daily to turn his attention away from how far he had to go and toward however far he had come. The Wilson program came with bar
graphs that Alif filled in every week to illustrate the ground he was gaining. Carlson used the weekly ritual as an occasion to celebrate his success, something he'd never known as a reader. It didn't hurt that she also brought snacks, which her lean and growing student eagerly devoured. Soon he was arriving on time, even early. One afternoon, Carlson was absent to attend a workshop and sent word they would not meet. The following day, Alif was waiting at her door, demanding to know where she had been. He began to talk of her not just as a teacher but as someone “who came into my life.” He encouraged friends to go to a remedial class Carlson taught, telling them about his experience. “She'll help you—really,” he said.

In January, on a follow-up Woodcock test, after one semester working with Carlson, he registered a fivefold increase in the number of words he could sound out. He was still years behind, but he finally believed Carlson's assurance that he was on his way to becoming a proficient reader. Weidman and Haygood noticed a marked improvement in Alif's behavior in general. This was in part because it was basketball season, his favorite time of year. Alif had loved the game since age six, showing up on courts around the public-housing complex where he lived with his two brothers and his mother, playing anyone who was there. His mother had been Newark's most valuable player among middle school girls back in the day, and his father had played varsity basketball in neighboring East Orange. Besides that apparent genetic advantage, what distinguished Alif as a player, said Shawn McCray, who had coached him since first grade in a local league known as the Zoo Crew, was his furious determination to get to the basket, no matter who stood in his way. By middle school, he was a standout on Newark's neighborhood courts, where grown men spoke of him as a kid with a future.

Seventh-grade science teacher Marc Harris, who coached the Avon Rams basketball team, noticed a change in Alif as the 2012 school year got under way. “Last year, he was just as athletic, but it was like he disappeared in some games. He wasn't consistent. This year, he is like my quarterback every game. He gets everywhere he needs to be—de
fense, rebounding, slashing, driving to the basket,” Harris said. His teammates voted him captain, and Harris noticed that he led with humility, never showboating. Under Harris's direction, the boys gelled into a squad of team players, passing rather than hogging the ball, producing unusually balanced scoring game after game. It was a winning combination, and Avon went into the citywide playoffs undefeated, marching straight to the championship game on June 6, 2013, in the Weequahic High gymnasium, Newark's newest and showiest basketball venue. Alif made a point of dropping by the Avon school office after dismissal on the day of the big game to make a promise to his principal: “Don't worry, Mrs. Haygood, I'm going to bring this home for you tonight.”

By game time, the Weequahic bleachers were packed from floor to ceiling with family, friends, and alums of the competing schools, Avon from the South Ward and Dr. E. Alma Flagg from the Central Ward. Shawn McCray, the Zoo Crew youth coach who now was head coach at Central High, announced the game, keeping up a patter about how hard this player had worked since age six, what speed and grace that one had developed. The mood was celebratory, but Newark was experiencing a spasm of street violence, and unease was palpable. Wearing the Newark chip heavily on his shoulder, McCray said during one time-out, “Let's see if they put this game on the front page of the
Star-Ledger
tomorrow. They put our faces there when someone gets arrested, but never for something positive.” He also issued a warning about outsiders peddling big promises—a familiar Newark theme. “Those private schools tell parents negative things about our district schools to lure your sons away. They want to take all the talented kids out. Stay home! Newark needs you!”

The Flagg squad was taller and more muscular, but Avon opened a double-digit lead in the first half. Then Flagg roared back to within three points with less than two minutes left in the game. Alif later recalled being seized at that moment by a single thought: “Every time they inbound, I have to steal or score. Don't let the game slip away.”
In the next thirty seconds, the skinny shooting guard wearing number 2 stole the ball three times and scored eight points, streaking like a guided missile past everyone between him and the basket. He made one steal as he staggered to his feet after being knocked to the floor, one basket by lofting the ball into the net underhanded while he was trapped under the goal. Coach Harris called a time-out, and as Alif ambled into the huddle, everyone shoved his shoulder, slapped his back, rubbed his head. “Alif is whilin'!” his mother yelled from the stands.

When the clock ran out and the game ended, Avon was the champion, and McCray was announcing that Alif was the tournament's most valuable player. Looking stunned and ecstatic, he was ushered to center court along with Coach Harris, and each was handed a towering trophy—Alif for MVP, Harris for the championship. Asked by the emcee what basketball means to young men in Newark, Harris responded: “A lot of my players, if they don't have this, I don't know what they'd be doing right now. It's better to be here than to be out in the streets.” Harris was on the mark. Alif, his mother, and his younger brother would arrive home that night to learn someone had been shot and killed behind their apartment building.

The emcee asked Alif what he told his teammates in the final huddle with the game on the line. “I just put in their head we didn't come this far to lose,” he said. “We never gave up and we fought to the end.”

Alif fantasized about playing college basketball, but he had known for years that he likely wouldn't make the grades required by the NCAA because of his reading. “No coach wants a dumb player. They'll take a smart, okay player over a dumb player any day,” he said. For years now, he had seen himself as dumb, unfit for the life he longed for. But that was changing. One afternoon, sitting in Kathleen Carlson's classroom, he said, “I don't want to go on with my life and not read. They say you need to read to do everything. I want to play basketball and I got to be able to read my contract so my lawyer won't be able to take money from me.”

Hope was taking root in Alif, and Weidman, Haygood, and Carl
son were determined not to let it die this time. They felt that the Newark Public Schools had allowed that to happen once—or certainly hadn't tried to stop it—and it was their obligation to combat this horrible legacy of illiteracy in Alif. Their two-pronged strategy was to work with his mother to get him on track academically, and to keep him playing basketball, which was his life. But now those two goals were in conflict. With Alif in seventh grade, two years behind his class, he would be too old to play high school sports as a senior, the year college scouts came prospecting. Somehow, they had to get him to high school the following fall. “This is about Alif's life as well as his academics,” Weidman said. “He has a chance to get a college basketball scholarship, and we can't let him miss that opportunity.” Weidman had attended graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she knew of basketball stars who got hours of tutoring a day. She envisioned that kind of support for Alif in college. But how could they send a boy who read at perhaps a third-grade level to high school in the fall?

A few days after the championship game, Alif went to Kathleen Carlson's special-education classroom for an end-of-year Woodcock Reading Mastery test. In his
BRICK
uniform—yellow polo shirt and navy khakis—he sat down in a plastic chair at a wooden table, his long legs extended so that he was slightly slouched. Opposite him sat Carlson, outfitted in a black polo shirt with
BRICK
printed in small, pastel-colored letters above a pocket. Between them was a spiral-bound book of words, poised atop a stand. Alif trained his dark eyes, edged with thick lashes, on the book. He sat perfectly still except for his trademark fidget—twirling a couple of fingers in his thick black hair. As Carlson turned the pages, Alif read the words appearing before him.

He flew through “black,” “house,” “away,” “wonderful,” “without,” and “question,” but stumbled on “piece” (he pronounced it “picey”), “brought,” and “cattle.” As the words became more challenging, he used the Wilson technique of tapping out each letter sound on his fingers as if playing an instrument. He accurately sounded out “dan
gerous,” “garage,” “entrance,” and “extinguish,” but missed “cruel,” “budget,” and “ache.” Because he had only an elementary vocabulary, relatively simple words were unfamiliar. Sounding out “pioneer” and “circumstance” proved as laborious as decoding the jumble of letters in a nonsense word. As the words got harder to read, his mood sank visibly. “I can see you're getting frustrated,” Carlson said. “Yeah, you don't know all these words, but that's why we're going to continue next year. You're going to get there.” He pressed on, barely missing “baroness” (he used a long “o”) and struggling through “lethargic.”

“Do you know what that means?” Carlson asked.

Alif shook his head.

“That's you right now,” she said. “It means tired.” He smiled weakly.

Alif kept going, stumbling with more frequency, and then came a stretch when he was zero for six—“transient,” “edifice,” “verbatim,” “ptomaine,” “itinerary,” and “jujitsu.” On that section of the exam, when a student misses six words in a row, the testing ends. He stared flatly at Carlson and sank into his chair, looking completely deflated.