The Hustle (24 page)

Overall, Seattle's experience with race, integration, and education has paralleled that of most other big-city districts around the country. In the early 1970s, with recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions mandating that public schools make efforts to desegregate, Seattle came up with its busing plan. The city—and the country—began to back off desegregation after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, when the Justice Department made a U-turn in its policy toward desegregation and stopped litigating such cases. The death knell for court oversight of school integration came in 1991 with
Oklahoma City v. Dowell
, in which the Supreme Court ruled that attempts to desegregate a school district could end if it could be shown that “feasible efforts” had been made to do so, even if they were not successful. In effect, as long as a school district did not do anything that could be found to be intentionally discriminatory, it was free to do what it wanted.

Seattle ended race-based busing in the fall of 1997 in favor of “neighborhood schools.” After two decades of integration efforts in the city, there had been one clear outcome: In 1973, whites made up 74 percent of the students in the system; today they are 41 percent of the 46,000 students in the system, even though the city is about 70 percent white (an estimated 30 percent of students in Seattle attend a private school).

In 2007, the Supreme Court put the last nail in the coffin of school integration in a decision involving the Seattle schools. After it ended busing, the district had adopted a policy to let students apply to any school they wished. It used several factors to determine admission. The major one was simply if you lived nearby. One of the “tiebreakers” was whether letting in a certain student would help the school achieve racial balance.

A group of parents led by a white mother sued the district, charging that using race in school admissions was discriminatory and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed in a five-to-four decision. Coming five decades after
Brown v. Board of Education
, the ruling meant that even the smallest measures to increase school integration were dead letters. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, delivered something of a Zen koan: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

In terms of racial makeup, many Seattle public schools now look pretty much like they did in the early 1970s, before forced integration. In the South End, some schools are now almost 100 percent minority; North End schools are primarily white. Race and class fissures run deep. Black students are still more than twice as likely as white students to be suspended or expelled—this issue of “disproportionality” has been a hot-button issue for decades—and the “achievement gap” in test scores and graduation rates seems to be as persistent as Seattle rain. Seven out of ten African-American students receive school-lunch subsidies. Parent associations throughout the city make up for budget shortfalls by raising money to fund extra programs and teachers; in wealthy parts of the North End, this extra funding in some schools has topped $300,000 a year. Over the course of several years, the district rolled out multiple plans to shutter a number of schools to save money. The closures—which generally targeted schools that were primarily minority—met with resistance so fierce that in 2006 the superintendent announced his resignation after one particularly heated school board meeting. In 2009, the district's new superintendent—an African-American woman—finally pushed through a closure plan.

Garfield High School, over the past two decades, became a symbol of both the district's academic successes and its racial woes. To help balance the school racially, the district made it a magnet school. Kids in the school system's most advanced academic program were funneled to Garfield, which offered an accelerated track of course work and a comprehensive range of Advanced Placement courses. Garfield now often boasts the most National Merit Scholars in the city, beating out even Lakeside. But white and Asian students far outnumber black students in the AP classes, creating what came to be known as the “two Garfields.” African-American parents claim that the school has directed more resources toward the advanced programs than the rest of the school and that counselors steer their kids away from the more challenging courses on the basis of their race. “Our students are not getting these classes. They're getting commercial foods, they're getting gym, they're getting beginning math. Never before has Garfield discouraged so many black kids as they're doing now,” one parent told a local reporter.

Taken as a whole, the Seattle schools comprise a ponderous, complex system. The district serves a city that includes the highest number of adults who hold advanced degrees in the country, and one that also includes thousands of recent immigrants—the district website includes translations in Amharic and Oromo (both spoken in Ethiopia), Spanish, Russian, Tagalog (the Philippines), Somali, Lao, Mandarin Chinese, Tigrigna (Eritrea), Vietnamese, and Khmer (Cambodia)—as well as special-needs kids and plain old “regular” students. The district (annual budget: $730 million) also is tasked with educating students for future positions in the global economy, though there is no agreement in Seattle or the country about how best to do this. To try to please the most people possible—and to increase diversity without mandating it—the district went to an “open enrollment” model, which means that families can apply to any school in the district (though people who live near a school get preference, and, after the 2007 Supreme Court decision, race can't be considered). It also has invested heavily in schools with poor reputations, such as Rainier Beach High School in the South End, a majority-black school that in 2008 got a $100 million renovation that included a new performing arts center (the result has been an estimated enrollment increase of thirty kids).

Within this system, it is perfectly possible to get a good education. Slots in the district's advanced programs are especially coveted, an admission that for many parents means saving about $20,000 a year in private-school fees. A reporter who covered the district for several years told me that the people who can manage the system best are those who have the savvy and knowledge of bureaucracy and institutions to get what they want. The children whose parents don't know how to do this, don't have the time, or just don't care end up at the whim of the district.

In 1996, after he graduated from Seattle University, Damian approached Doug Wheeler to ask about work at Zion Prep. Wheeler wasn't overly impressed. “Damian was a wimpy little kid,” he says. “He came in and had just finished college, didn't have a certification, didn't know what he wanted to do, wanted to know if there were any jobs.”

It turned out that Wheeler had been a running partner of Sam Townsend, Damian's pastor, back when were both on the force in the 1970s, before either of them were saved. “We were ruthless,” Wheeler says with a laugh. “I won't go into it, but we were ruthless.” When Wheeler called Townsend to ask about Damian, his friend assured him that the kid would be a good hire. “He didn't impress me that way,” Wheeler says, “but Sam has never been close to being wrong.”

Damian started as the coteacher in Zion's kindergarten class and went to school at night to get his teaching degree. After a few years he moved up to the elementary grade level. Over time he established himself as what Wheeler calls one of Zion Prep's “cornerstones.” “If you walk though the school he has the biggest class because parents want their kid with Damian,” Wheeler says. “They want Damian. If I put him in whatever grade, that grade will be full because people know if Damian's there—cool.”

Over the course of several years, I stop in and observe Damian's classes at least a dozen times. His approach to the kids is both friendly and strict—he will tell jokes but doesn't shy from letting a kid know when he feels the student has failed to lived up to his potential. When I ask Damian to sum up his teaching philosophy, he says, “No excuses.” Damian jokes that members of his family, when they hear his ideas, sometimes accuse him of being a Republican. But his philosophy, as I find over time, is much more complicated and not easily pegged as being of the left or the right.

“I grew up poor, OK?” he says. “That was my environment. I teach the kids you can't allow your environment to determine who you are. I only have them for ten months, but I will try to ingrain that in them for that ten months that I have them. What they do after that, I have no control over. But at least I tried to do what I could while I was with them. While you're in my class, you're going to learn something.”

Much of Damian's worldview certainly comes in part from growing up poor. But Damian also spent large parts of his childhood—more than any other black member of our team, besides Eric—interacting with the wealthier, whiter parts of Seattle. In elementary school he was bused to the North End. Then there was our team, and the four years he spent at Seattle Prep after Randy Finley got him in. “I was educated for the most influential part of my years at an elite school, so that almost becomes a part of you,” Damian says. “They teach you that you don't stop learning here. You learn as you leave, so you're always reading books, it just becomes ingrained. They teach, ‘You need to be on time.' When I was late, they made me go and clean out the garbage cans. Now I know why they did it. You have to have expectations if you want individuals to be successful and maximize their potential.”

Low expectations for black students, Damian says, come in part from stereotypes that are hard to escape in America—even the “postracial” country that some people now hail. “I would say if you have something in the back of your subconscious—and I think white teachers, most of them, I think they have a good, genuine desire to teach, whoever it is that they're teaching—but when the dominant culture says that and you're raised where black people are just a little less than you, maybe they don't work as hard as you or may not be as smart, then you can easily lower the expectations. And when you lower the expectations then of course African-American children are not going to be as successful,” Damian says.

The other side of the equation, Damian says, is that the view of blacks as less able hasn't crept into the heads of just school administrators and teachers, but also into a large segment of the black community itself. One Saturday, I go with Damian and his eight-year-old nephew, David, to see one of David's friends play Peewee League football. The game is at Rainier Beach High School, the predominantly black school in South Seattle. The Rainier Beach community league is playing another league from the South End, and the games are lined up back-to-back for the whole day. Several hundred people fill the stands. Nearly everyone is black. There is a concession stand selling barbecued burgers and hot dogs and strawberry shortcake. Many people wear orange and blue T-shirts—the Rainier Beach colors—with the words
WE BE FAMILY
written on the back in cursive. The atmosphere is festive. Over the few hours we're there, a constant stream of people—former students and their parents, people from church, and people he grew up with—stop and talk with Damian.

Later, after we drop David off, Damian tells me the whole scene frustrated him. “I want to get out there and get on the bullhorn and say, ‘Stop! Stop! Send everybody home! Quit joking around! Stop!' ” Damian tells me. “Get the organizational leaders out there and say, ‘Parents, just like you support your kids out here on the football field, I want you in your schools on a daily basis supporting your kid's academics and making sure that the school is teaching your child what needs to be taught. Don't hide behind a sport.' ”

He continues, “Their priorities are mixed up. They want their child to be the greatest athlete since Barry Sanders, but then academics are put on the back burner, whereas out north academics is first because they know their child has to go to college to get a decent job.”

This message about raising expectations in the black community is not new, of course. But in the past few years it has increasingly moved from one conducted behind closed doors among blacks to one with more public visibility, thanks in large part to Bill Cosby, who has traveled the country giving speeches conveying the Booker T. Washington-like message that no matter what the impact of white racism has been and still is, black people need to focus on themselves. “Bill Cosby tried to bring this home and people got mad. And he was absolutely right!” Damian says.

Seattle's class order and social hierarchy are apparent everywhere you look, Damian points out, though this reality is often downplayed. That's the meaning, he says, of Lakeside students chanting, back when we were in high school, “It's all right, it's OK, you'll all work for us someday” at Rainier Beach students during a basketball game. “In the big picture, people send their children to Lakeside strictly for a reason, so that they can maybe take over the parents' business, so they need to have the proper education, or to put them in situations where they can network and have people who will hire them,” Damian says, talking about the chant. “It's almost like, ‘Yeah, you can play basketball good, but you can't do anything else good.' ” Damian laughs. “That's basically what it is—‘You can run, jump, dunk, but you're dumb.' ”

Even though Willie McClain and Randy Finley tried to bridge race and class divides with our team, Damian says it is almost impossible to do that in reality, simply because society is structured so that people with more money feel superior to those with less. “When you feel you have reached a certain status, it's ‘I'm always better than you.' Although you may not say it with your words, the actions demonstrate that. I don't think that that will change because that's human nature.”