Guess What? -- The Playing
Field Is Not Level
By
Johnie H. Scott
(WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, February 16, 2000)
I am a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). As a child growing up during the 1950s, I attended 102nd Street Elementary School (recently re-named Florence Griffith Joyner Elementary School in tribute to this Olympian who graduated from 102nd Street some time after me).
In the early 1960s, I attended and graduated from Edward Markham Junior High located on104th Street and Compton Avenue before going on to nearby David Starr Jordan Senior High on East 103rd Street. I graduated from Jordan in February 1964, at a time when the LAUSD still had Winter and Summer graduations.
South Central Los Angeles then, as it is today, was a de facto segregated community. It could be described as predominantly African American with a small percentage of Mexicans and Japanese. It was an area, at the time, with no idea that one landmark site in the area would earn international fame: Simon Rodia's Watts Towers. What was important then, just like it is important today, is that the community, and Watts in particular, ranked as the poorest section in the city. The poverty was reflected not only in the average income per family, but the quality of schools in Watts itself.
Those schools ranked at the very bottom in the LA Unified – and this despite the heroic efforts of educators whose names were legend, not only in the Black community, but throughout the city. This included leading figures like Isaac “Ike” McClelland, the first Black high school principal hired by the District. There were others, like a young George McKenna, Claude Ware, Glanville A. Lockett, Gladys Haynie, Samuel Anderson, Cleopatra Johnson, X.L. Smith, Oliver Lattimore, Lena Trotter, Lee Joseph, John Randolph, Ramon Mann and Robert Norris.
Counselors like Samuel Harper. Noblesse Hill and Alma Valdez worked hand-in-hand with instructors like the ones named, putting in countless hours, not only during the school day, but in the evenings and on the weekends as well, trying their very best to make a difference in and turnaround the fortunes of those young boys and girls like myself who had little idea of the “real” world we would soon be entering – some of us due to becoming dropouts and force-outs, leaving the safe haven of the school sooner than others. Of course, we wouldn’t know what a safe haven that going to school could be until forced out into those angry streets.
I think of classmates like a Benny Robinson who went on from Jordan to graduate from West Point, a Stan Sanders who would become the first African American Rhodes Scholar out of black Los Angeles, a Billy Tidwell who would found the National Urban League’s State of Black America, a Charles Alcorn going onto become a nuclear physicist, and a Tommy Lott who would earn his doctorate in philosophy and ten go on to become one of the most quoted public intellectuals today with The Invention of Race. All of us were the children of Watts.
At the same time, I think of nearby schools like Fremont, Jefferson and Manual Arts whose student bodies were very much like our own. These schools also produced graduates who’d go on to make their mark in the world like Jefferson High School’s Alvin Ailey while, through sheer will of effort and example, setting on its head the notion that schools situated in the ghetto and those of us attending them had to be, somehow and someway, simply inferior to those in more affluent communities.
Still, there was no getting around the fact that we had to struggle during those years to get an education. We had to make do with textbooks that came as hand-me-downs from nearby lilywhite South Gate and Huntington Park High Schools with missing pages, taking Chemistry in ill-equipped science labs, not to mention coping with substitute teachers who didn’t have a clue as to what was going on in the classrooms and with the high absentee rates.
It was routine for Jordan, Fremont, Jefferson and Manual Arts to score at the very bottom on those district wide achievement tests. It had come to be expected, as a matter of fact. The individuals I named earlier, like a Benny Robinson, Stan Sanders, or attorney Baltimore Scott (no relation) all were considered exceptions to the rule and not your typical ghetto student.
You would hope that the situation might change, given 30 to 40 years of so-called social and civic progress. You would think that, with the world making the transition from the Industrial Age (with good-paying assembly line jobs in Los Angeles at places like Goodyear Rubber on Florence and Central Avenues, or North American and Douglass Aircraft that are now just dim memories for many and totally unknown to those less than 40 years old) to the Information Age (just think of all those Super Bowl commercials paid for by Internet.com companies!), some really serious improvements had taken place in the community.
Isaac McClelland is deceased, but scholarships have been established in his name. George McKenna is no longer teaching at Jordan as he had starting out in the 1960s, then later going on to George Washington High where he really distinguished himself for his efforts in working with those inner-city kids and was rewarded with a major motion picture (i.e., The George McKenna Story) with none other than Denzell Washington in the starring role.
Highly acclaimed across the nation, this extraordinary film examined his achievements at what McKenna renamed George Washington Preparatory High School to raise standards and expectations among students, teachers, administrators and parents who had come to expect what we euphemistically called “the same old same old.” Certainly, the bandwagon that was rolled out saying “Let’s put an end to Affirmative Action because the playing field is now level” sounded good at the time to the ears of the unsuspecting and those truly hopeful for a change.
George McKenna went onto become Superintendent of the Inglewood School District and left there to come back to the LAUSD. Like so many committed, dedicated inner-city educators from that time period (e.g., Jaime Escalante, Joe Clarke, Marva Collins, et al) Dr.McKenna's professional career has been embroiled in controversy. Looking at them, we see that wishful thinking (if that’s what you want to call it) about “level playing fields” is not going to change reality anytime soon and that’s the bottom line I want to address.
The 1999 Academic Performance Index (API) measuring and ranking the state of California’s elementary, middle (i.e., the new nomenclature for “junior”) and senior high schools was released on Tuesday, January 25, 2000 by the California Department of Education. The API for that year showed 88 percent of California’s schools falling below achievement-level targets, proving conclusively that the playing field is nowhere near being level.
More important for those whose children are inner city students, the facts revealed then and today by the API must be looked at for what they really say: not only is it a fact that Jamal and Shani can’t read, but it doesn’t matter that they now live in Watts, Carson or the Westside (sorry ‘bout that, hip hop fans!). These young people all share something in common: they have already been placed on a fast tracking system to second-class citizenship in the Information Age.
There are no other conclusions to draw from the data, not when you see kindergarten and first graders now labeled as “discouraged learners” at the same time college administrators are marching in syncopation to the “let’s raise college admission standards and eliminate programs proven to have made differences in the lives of those survivors of the inner city war zones who arrive on campus” drumbeats.
All one has to do is “the math” when taking into account the racial and ethnic composition of those schools at the bottom of the barrel, look where these institutions are located, look at the kids who attend those schools. Do that, and you’ve just gotten a good look at what the future has in store. Fortunately, there are some who have already taken those first steps by getting involved on the ground-floor with the children themselves in trying to provide life-saving alternatives. Their efforts, while badly-needed and much-welcomed, are just a start.
The playing field is not level, and hasn’t been now for at least half a century. It is time for parents to get involved and stop pointing fingers at others while waiting on the politicians and school boards to take action. There’s no other way to save our children!
(This article has been edited and revised from the original published in the WAVE with links embedded as well for those desiring more in-depth historical and current information – JS).