Failed Expectations

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Cohn grew up an economically disadvantaged member of a minority in the city of Long Beach. After parochial high school, he studied to be a priest. In 1968, he walked out of seminary and “decided it was important to do something.” He started teaching at Dominguez High School in Compton and from there went to Long Beach Poly as a counselor. During that time, he studied for a master’s degree and doctorate at UCLA and then went off to teach at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to Southern California in the 1980s and, in 1992, was named superintendent of the Long Beach school system. Through a decade of hard work in his hometown, he garnered national attention, and Long Beach’s schools piled up recognition.

That story is etched in the annals of Southern California’s public school history; there’s no dearth of information on Cohn or the many wreaths that have been laid at his feet. Less clear are the underlying factors that brought him back into the fray. In the contemporary picture, America’s schools (and particularly its inner-city schools) cry out for dedicated men and women like Cohn. And for one who’s spent his life in public service, that need is undeniable.

America’s schools have been waylaid in the past 50 years by a set of unforeseen influences resulting, in part, from the Holy Grail of 20th-century social movements—civil rights. When the utopian American notion that all children should receive the same level of high-quality education met the hard reality of the country’s economic stratification, failure was almost inevitable. The fact is, the generally munificent expectations of the civil rights era have put an unbearable strain on American pedagogy.

A notion derived from frank discussions with educators like Cohn—rare men and women beyond the need for political sidestepping—is that America’s inner-city schools are straining under the weight of an age-old class struggle and the colossal, unexpected fallout of civil rights victories. And nowhere is the proof so tangible as at schools with names like Lincoln, Hoover and Crawford (a 20- year superintendent of the San Diego school district)—those bastions of glory erected, paradoxically, in the name of powerful white men, yet serving the educational needs of an inner-city sea of economically foundering minorities.

THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN boys, adorned in Southern California hip-hop chic—heavy jackets, shorts and high-tops —convene at the top of the steps overlooking the Crawford High School cafeteria. They’re engrossed in a story about a near-fight, and their conversation spills out in a smooth ebonic flow of slang and black English, one interspersed with staccato teenage outbursts of testosterone and angst.

“So this Somali nigga steps up to me, and I say, ‘Why you fuckin’ with a black nigga, nigga?’ ” says one of them. He takes a demonstrative step and throws his arms into a display of rapid, confrontational motions. “Then three other Somali niggas walk up on me, and I’s like, ‘Fuck you, den, niggas.’ ”

The absurdity of the statement is mind-boggling: a dark-skinned black boy from the mean streets of San Diego calling a dark-skinned black boy from the ghettos of Somalia a nigger. My mind’s eye envisions David Duke and James Earl Ray doing pirouettes and pissing on the Bill of Rights while Karl Marx laconically mutters I told you so into his German pilsner.

It’s the winter of 2005, and I’ve accepted a two-week substitute-teaching assignment at Crawford High School near City Heights. For a substitute teacher, there are two kinds of schools in the world: the ones where you go and introduce yourself to the principal, call afterward, return days later and then generally pester whomever you have to, just to get a spot on the golden call list; and then there are the ones that call you.

Beware of the latter.

The first type has to be stalked, because it offers a desirable atmosphere and the real opportunity—even for a substitute teacher —to obtain the magic of genuine interaction with willing students. The latter is the type with no established call lists, precisely because nobody wants to teach there. It has to resort to a lottery system of calls every morning.

Though my background is in English, my 30-day emergency certificate to teach in California says I can teach any subject in any classroom, kindergarten through 12th grade. At Crawford, I’m assigned to a freshman and sophomore science class for two weeks. My math background is weak and my science knowledge suspect, but I look forward to the chance to be in the same classroom for more than a day (and avoid the perpetual posturing, browbeating and head-butting for A-dog status that is part of the daily substitute-teaching dance).

In my substitute-teaching experience—from Baltimore to Oregon—lesson plans are almost always waiting on the teacher’s desk. In this science class, there are none. What’s more, the room is trashed. I’m able to flag down another teacher before the first bell rings, and she gives me the bad news: There hasn’t been a regular teacher in the room the entire semester. My good fortune —two weeks of hard-earned but steady pay in the same classroom—has just turned into a nightmare.

The science teacher quit shortly after the start of the school year, I learn, and the school hasn’t been able to entice a single licensed aspirant (it’s nearly the end of the fall semester) to take over the role. One of the teachers I encounter in the department is young and indicates she is partaking in a special state program allowing her to forgo the mandatory six months of unpaid student teaching to instead earn paid experience on a campus that’s proved undesirable and hard to staff with qualified teachers—one like Crawford.

(John Spiegel, a principal at Crawford, says he doesn’t recall the unfilled position in that science classroom and can’t account for the vacancy. He adds that after two full years of the small-schools model—in which large urban schools have been split into smaller units—Crawford has succeeded in addressing students on a more personal level, and “the way students interact with each other on campus is noticeably different.”)

After querying the office, the teacher next door and the head of the department, I’m shown a textbook the class uses and given a hearty “Good luck.” I feel as if I’ve been abandoned behind enemy lines. (After all, we are—the students and me—walking the thin, contentious line of class struggle existing in all of America’s urban centers.) In the Army, at least, I would have been given a cigarette, a prayer and maybe some extra ammunition.

As I come to learn (report cards are issued the third day of my stint), almost all the students in four of my five periods have F’s—in all subjects. These are the underachievers of the dropout class, and the last thing they want is to be pestered during this, their hour-long respite, with the burning inconvenience of schoolwork. After two days of improvised lessons, fighting a class that doesn’t care and certainly isn’t willing to pay attention, I give a test. Nobody passes. Less than a quarter of the class bothers to take it.

One of the bright spots during these anxious, contentious days of head-butting, pleading and threats (teenagers are devilishly smart—they know the office doesn’t want them, and once they know that, my threats ring hollow) is a black-skinned, 15- year-old Somali boy named Abdalla. His English is so broken I can barely understand him. His family, he tells me, arrived in the country a year before (three brothers and three sisters living in a two-bedroom townhouse in City Heights), and he was thrown into public school. He shows me his report card—straight F’s. The irony is that, in talking to the kid, I know he’s at least crafty and probably smart—as wise as a kid has to be to survive on city streets without the benefit of language skills. What’s more, he’s one of the very few kids who seem willing to learn.

Abdalla starts showing up during his lunch hour, and I give him whatever cursory English lessons I can. In return, he fills me in on the goings-on at Crawford. I glean that the African-American/Somali-American beef has been evident there for years. Tribalism being an inherent element of human nature, I’m not surprised to learn two diverse populations with markedly different social and cultural backgrounds, packed into the same general living quarters, have developed internecine friction. It’s probably my naïve American sense of universal equality—and the fact both populations are black —that led to the supposition these boys would be friends and allies, in the first place. The truth is, the American boys are products of the hardest, most economically blighted streets of San Diego—boys presented with hard choices about gangs and lethal weapons at the age most kids in this country are beginning to awaken to the heart-racing realities of the opposite sex.

The Somali boys are tall, thin and less hearty. They come to this country lacking English skills, money and any sense of cultural belonging. But they aren’t, as far as I can tell, meek. As Abdalla explains, he grew up on the mean streets of Mogadishu, where bands of armed men—the products of various warlords—roved the city menacingly. Slight as he is, Abdalla assures me he won’t be cowed by the threat of American gang-bangers—boys far less armed than the mercenaries he’d encountered at home.

The police are a constant presence at Crawford. During the time I’m there, at least one cruiser is on hand, every day, for the last bell and student dispersal. There’s also a special assembly during that time, in which Somalis and African-Americans are strictly separated and lectured to, by the police, about gang violence. There are reportedly several off-site neighborhood shootings. The campus is on edge, but I gather this isn’t a special circumstance at Crawford.

At some point during the first week, I give up. The idea of imparting knowledge to people who not only don’t want to learn but who are hostile to the notion of teaching is absurd. Whatever bright, cheery and defiant notions I had of heroically trudging through the cultural divide and the learning barrier, for the sake of the children and for the sake of learning, are crushed under the slow torpor of mass indifference. The lessons are mine, and the most important one I take home is the fact that one can’t teach a person who doesn’t want to learn. One can threaten, harangue, humiliate and punish, but one can’t force facts into the brain or wisdom into the heart.

DR. COHN IS pleasantly forthright. He doesn’t duck hard questions, and he doesn’t seem to pull any punches. His outlook is honest and blunted—but not without hope. He believes that despite conditions across the nation similar to those at Crawford (and in fact, many that make Crawford look like a model learning institution), there’s light at the end of the tunnel. There has to be, he says. He’s also honest about the fact that light may take decades, perhaps an entire generation to shine through.

He is an outspoken critic of the No Child Left Behind Act, which is a rarity among those of his position—men and women who are plugged into the upper levels of the country’s public education system and who are expected to be good soldiers and wear smiles in the face of policy. One of the basic mandates of No Child Left Behind is that students have to pass a standardized test. Cohn can live with that. The problem, he says, comes when he has to sanction and chastise schools (to the point of labeling them failures and bringing in outside help) for students who don’t meet those standards.

When I tell him about the myriad unfortunate, unproductive and often repugnant experiences I’ve had in his district’s schools, he nods his head knowingly. I tell him I came away doubting the relevance of compulsory education. If you’re merely interested in getting kids to school, you can do that, I tell him. And you can do it effectively, by threatening to jail parents for their children’s truancy. You can keep a lot of kids in school who don’t want to be there. But it only takes a handful of those kids and their hostile, inflammatory behavior to make it impossible for a teacher to have any effect on the rest of them.

Cohn, in his measured clip, talks about a lecture he gave in 1999, as superintendent of Long Beach schools, chronicling the evolution of that system during the latter half of the 20th century. For it, he did something interesting. He dug up a speech given to the district’s teachers, by its superintendent, in September 1949.

“It was fascinating,” Cohn says. “That superintendent was lamenting the high divorce rate and the breakup of the family. He talked about high school–age youngsters who couldn’t read their textbooks and a 50 percent dropout rate. That was 1949. And he didn’t even get into the fact that youngsters with disabilities, English-language learners and large numbers of kids of color weren’t being educated. In Long Beach in the late ’40s and early ’50s, if you were industrious and hard-working and didn’t like school, the military and McDonnell Douglas were viable options. You could go to work at McDonnell Douglas and eventually buy a tract home in Lakewood and join the middle class—albeit lower-middle income—but you could feed your family.

“Today, you drop out of high school and you may be facing a lifetime of unemployment and/or incarceration. I would argue that what’s changed is that we’re being asked to educate all kids. And now, starting in the ’90s, an even more subtle change has taken place: We’re being asked to educate all kids to high standards. There used to be this ‘We’re going to educate all kids, but there’s a select group that will go on to higher ed, and there’s this other group over here,’ and now, since the early to mid-’90s, the mantra has been: ‘You’ve got to educate all kids to those high standards.’ I think that’s the real difference.”

My peek into the crucible of 21st-century public-school education led to two striking conclusions, I tell him. All men aren’t created equal, and the world needs ditch-diggers, too. And maybe it’s time to reexamine the logic of forcing all our young through the same forge of liberal, intellectual education and high expectation—particularly when those young people come from backgrounds that are so unequal, so wildly disparate in terms of wealth and means. The beleaguered lower levels of our compulsory, one-size-fits-all system seem bitter, dispirited and hostile to the front-line teachers trying to help them. And their rancor and reticence to participate is draining the potential of the top. The idea that another set of standardized expectations is going to pull up the bottom is naïve, mildly absurd and divorced from reality.

“What you’re honing in on is the ballgame,” Cohn says, “which is a lack of local accountability. Independent of what Sacramento or Washington say or do, we, at the local level, have to correct those bad school situations. And you correct those situations, first of all, by selecting school principals, leaders, who are not going to concede any aspect of dress, behavior or achievement; you’ve got to have high standards. Then they’re going to demand accountability from classroom teachers. Historically, that’s the way good schools in America were run before state capitols or Washington got into the business.

“I would argue that it’s a revival of local accountability that’s going to rescue poor kids, and not anything to do with Sacramento or Washington. How do you get that? You get that by putting in place outstanding people, and then ultimately you’ve got to reward them for staying, creating this stable environment that mirrors places that are more affluent in the sense that people want to be there.”

In August, I track down Abdalla. He’s 18 now, another dropout statistic. His voice has grown deeper, and his English is much improved. He’s living in Las Vegas, working as a customer-service agent with a transit company.

Sometime after our shared experience at Crawford, Abdalla says, he was jumped by a group of African-American kids, off campus. Days later, in retaliation, he says, he jumped one of his assailants on school grounds. He was asked to leave the school —and later invited back, he says—but returning to Crawford isn’t an option for him.

“Man,” he says, displaying a solid command of the vernacular through his heavy Somali accent. “I can’t go back there, you know? Not to that school. It’s not safe for me.”

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The real names of the teachers were not used in this story.—Editor

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