Saturday, May 17, 2008
Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas
A few days ago, as part of our cross-country road trip, Emily and I spend the better part of a day in Little Rock, Arkansas. I found it to be quite an interesting place, kind of a hip and relatively liberal mecca in a region of the US often stereotyped as backwards and conservative. Presumably Bill Clinton's legacy and influence have something to do with this, but I imagine the man was equally a product of the place.
After setting up our tent, our first stop was a scenic overlook at a nearby state park. As we were doing our best to point a camera at ourselves blindly with one hand, another couple arrived and offered to take our picture. They were a 'classic' Arkansas couple: he a straggly white guy sporting a goatee and a Home Depot polo, she a slender black woman with a pronounced posterior, and both exceedingly friendly and polite.
The man asked where we were from, and after I gave him a brief synopsis, I asked if they lived around here. He positively swelled with pride and drawled, "Why, yes sir, we do!"
"You're lucky," I told him, nodding at the sprawling, tree-covered delta spread out below us. They both smiled and offered some suggestions of things to see in the area, most notably the Big Dam Bridge.
I mention their races because it reinforces something I've noticed in my limited time in the American South. Despite northern stereotypes about racist hillbillies, Southern cities seem to be a lot more socially integrated than those in the North. I've seen many more inter-racial couples or even just groups of friends having dinner or coffee together than I do in places like Boston or Chicago.
Then again, that's only half of the story. I've also heard it said that, "In the South, they don't care how close you get, as long as you don't get too big; in the North, they don't care how big you get, as long as you don't get too close." It may be that opportunities for higher-level education, employment, and economic success are harder for many blacks to come by in the South; I'm really not in a position to say. And of course the Klan is still alive and well in many Southern states. But issues of racial equality, justice, and segregation are very important to me, and I'm always particularly mindful of them when traveling in a new region or culture.
On that note, we also visited Central High School in Little Rock, which in 1957 was the site of a riot that attracted international attention. The Supreme Court had recently declared the racial segregation of public schools to be illegal, but when nine black students attempted to enter Central High School in September, they were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus.
A federal judge then ordered the school integrated. Faubus withdrew the National Guard, but a crowd of over a thousand angry whites gathered to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school. The mayor of Little Rock wrote President Eisenhower for help, and he responded by federalizing the Guard and sending 100 members of the 101st Airborne Division to support the local police in maintaining order. A violent riot ensued. The students were threatened, and many reporters were beaten.
Eventually, the riot ended and the Little Rock Nine did attend school that year, with the only senior among them becoming the first black student to graduate from Central High School. The next year, however, Governor Faubus closed the state's three high schools rather than proceed with their integration, and students of all colors were forced to find new schools.
It's sad but important to realize that this was not the work of one misguided governor or a small but loud minority of virulent segregationists. Even after closing down the public high schools altogether, a Gallup poll found that Faubus was one of the ten men most admired by Americans in 1958.
One thing I find interesting about the civil rights movement is the role that pictures and other forms of media coverage have played in its successes. The style of nonviolent resistance popularized by Gandhi and King relies heavily on appealing to the conscience, not only of the oppressors, but of the world at large. You may have seen this powerful image from the Little Rock riot before:
It's one thing to have a political disagreement about whether schools ought to be integrated. Personally, I don't consider it a matter, like tax cuts, on which reasonable people can disagree. But especially in that era it kind of was, and regardless, there is such a world of difference between disagreeing with the decision of a judge or politician and cursing, spitting at, and attacking children.
Here we see a crowd of angry adults who are both older and far more numerous than the teenagers trying to do nothing more than attend a school that the highest court in the land has told them they have the right to attend. A lone girl walks calmly and bravely past a mob driven wild by hate, epitomized by the sneer on one woman's face.
Images like these provoked a kind of moral crisis for white Americans. They were able to overlook or make excuses for the fear, mistrust, hatred, and racism that informed their own support for segregation. But an angry mob attacking children cannot be interpreted as anything but a moral failing of the highest order. Over time, images such as this forced many people to change their opinions and drop their support for many of the most overt forms of discrimination.
This creates an interesting phenomenon where a town like Little Rock, which once festered with racism, can in many ways end up being less racist, or at least more conscious of its enduring racism, than more progressive cities that never saw such a singularly explosive incident of racism.
The epilogue to the picture above is that the the two women, the black teenager and the sneering white woman, met at Central High forty years later to reconcile. There was another moving photo (I couldn't find it online) of them standing arm in arm. The white woman was in tears.
When a woman, and more broadly a city, is so dramatically confronted with her own racism and forced to acknowledge their wrongdoings, they can ultimately end up more sensitive to the issue and conscious of the need to work actively to overcome it. For the millions who witnessed the Little Rock spectacle and others like it on television, however, it can have the opposite effect: they externalize racism as a belief held by redneck hillbillies who are not at all like themselves. They are inclined to think that if they are not burning crosses or shouting racial epithets, then they are not part of the problem.
Later the same day, we passed through Memphis, but didn't have much time to spend there. That's a shame, because I really would have liked to have visited some of the civil rights sites there. It's a part of American culture that I find really interesting both historically and as a lesson for today. Despite the progress that has been made, so many of the problems targeted by the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's, such as segregation and educational inequality, persist today. Yet there is no movement on the scale that there was 40-50 years ago. Why not? Which of those strategies can and should be revived? Which failed? Which need to be adapted for contemporary America?
If any of you have made it through this rant and want to hear yet more of what I have to say on the subject, you might be interested in my review of Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities.
Stumble It!
After setting up our tent, our first stop was a scenic overlook at a nearby state park. As we were doing our best to point a camera at ourselves blindly with one hand, another couple arrived and offered to take our picture. They were a 'classic' Arkansas couple: he a straggly white guy sporting a goatee and a Home Depot polo, she a slender black woman with a pronounced posterior, and both exceedingly friendly and polite.
The man asked where we were from, and after I gave him a brief synopsis, I asked if they lived around here. He positively swelled with pride and drawled, "Why, yes sir, we do!"
"You're lucky," I told him, nodding at the sprawling, tree-covered delta spread out below us. They both smiled and offered some suggestions of things to see in the area, most notably the Big Dam Bridge.
I mention their races because it reinforces something I've noticed in my limited time in the American South. Despite northern stereotypes about racist hillbillies, Southern cities seem to be a lot more socially integrated than those in the North. I've seen many more inter-racial couples or even just groups of friends having dinner or coffee together than I do in places like Boston or Chicago.
Then again, that's only half of the story. I've also heard it said that, "In the South, they don't care how close you get, as long as you don't get too big; in the North, they don't care how big you get, as long as you don't get too close." It may be that opportunities for higher-level education, employment, and economic success are harder for many blacks to come by in the South; I'm really not in a position to say. And of course the Klan is still alive and well in many Southern states. But issues of racial equality, justice, and segregation are very important to me, and I'm always particularly mindful of them when traveling in a new region or culture.
On that note, we also visited Central High School in Little Rock, which in 1957 was the site of a riot that attracted international attention. The Supreme Court had recently declared the racial segregation of public schools to be illegal, but when nine black students attempted to enter Central High School in September, they were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus.
A federal judge then ordered the school integrated. Faubus withdrew the National Guard, but a crowd of over a thousand angry whites gathered to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school. The mayor of Little Rock wrote President Eisenhower for help, and he responded by federalizing the Guard and sending 100 members of the 101st Airborne Division to support the local police in maintaining order. A violent riot ensued. The students were threatened, and many reporters were beaten.
Eventually, the riot ended and the Little Rock Nine did attend school that year, with the only senior among them becoming the first black student to graduate from Central High School. The next year, however, Governor Faubus closed the state's three high schools rather than proceed with their integration, and students of all colors were forced to find new schools.
It's sad but important to realize that this was not the work of one misguided governor or a small but loud minority of virulent segregationists. Even after closing down the public high schools altogether, a Gallup poll found that Faubus was one of the ten men most admired by Americans in 1958.
One thing I find interesting about the civil rights movement is the role that pictures and other forms of media coverage have played in its successes. The style of nonviolent resistance popularized by Gandhi and King relies heavily on appealing to the conscience, not only of the oppressors, but of the world at large. You may have seen this powerful image from the Little Rock riot before:
It's one thing to have a political disagreement about whether schools ought to be integrated. Personally, I don't consider it a matter, like tax cuts, on which reasonable people can disagree. But especially in that era it kind of was, and regardless, there is such a world of difference between disagreeing with the decision of a judge or politician and cursing, spitting at, and attacking children.
Here we see a crowd of angry adults who are both older and far more numerous than the teenagers trying to do nothing more than attend a school that the highest court in the land has told them they have the right to attend. A lone girl walks calmly and bravely past a mob driven wild by hate, epitomized by the sneer on one woman's face.
Images like these provoked a kind of moral crisis for white Americans. They were able to overlook or make excuses for the fear, mistrust, hatred, and racism that informed their own support for segregation. But an angry mob attacking children cannot be interpreted as anything but a moral failing of the highest order. Over time, images such as this forced many people to change their opinions and drop their support for many of the most overt forms of discrimination.
This creates an interesting phenomenon where a town like Little Rock, which once festered with racism, can in many ways end up being less racist, or at least more conscious of its enduring racism, than more progressive cities that never saw such a singularly explosive incident of racism.
The epilogue to the picture above is that the the two women, the black teenager and the sneering white woman, met at Central High forty years later to reconcile. There was another moving photo (I couldn't find it online) of them standing arm in arm. The white woman was in tears.
When a woman, and more broadly a city, is so dramatically confronted with her own racism and forced to acknowledge their wrongdoings, they can ultimately end up more sensitive to the issue and conscious of the need to work actively to overcome it. For the millions who witnessed the Little Rock spectacle and others like it on television, however, it can have the opposite effect: they externalize racism as a belief held by redneck hillbillies who are not at all like themselves. They are inclined to think that if they are not burning crosses or shouting racial epithets, then they are not part of the problem.
Later the same day, we passed through Memphis, but didn't have much time to spend there. That's a shame, because I really would have liked to have visited some of the civil rights sites there. It's a part of American culture that I find really interesting both historically and as a lesson for today. Despite the progress that has been made, so many of the problems targeted by the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's, such as segregation and educational inequality, persist today. Yet there is no movement on the scale that there was 40-50 years ago. Why not? Which of those strategies can and should be revived? Which failed? Which need to be adapted for contemporary America?
If any of you have made it through this rant and want to hear yet more of what I have to say on the subject, you might be interested in my review of Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities.
Labels: narrative, personal, race, trip report
Stumble It!
Friday, July 20, 2007
LA Gangs
I happened today to come across two media pieces dealing, at least tangentially, with the issue of gangs in Los Angeles. Gangs and related problems of crime and drugs are issues in virtually every major metropolitan area in the US, but LA seems to be the epicenter both in terms of incidence and as a barometer of how the country generally addresses the issue.
I'll start with the good news. My friend David Wiltz is garnering still more media attention for the work that he has done with youth in LA. He and one of his former debaters were interviewed in this National Public Radio segment.
There are nearly two dozen urban debate leagues in the US, and I'm more familiar with some than with others, but everything I've seen suggests that few leagues do as good a job as LA has done to reach young people already in gangs or at high risk of getting involved with one. To some extent, this is simply a matter of necessity. Gangs are such an omnipresent part of urban life in LA that it would be nearly impossible to work with the populations Dave does without addressing the issue.
But I also know that in some leagues, and unfortunately I must count my own Boston Debate League among these, coaches and administrators have not done everything they could to reach out to these students who may ultimately have the most to gain from an activity like debate. The temptation, especially for young leagues and teams, is to start with the "naturals", students who are already, responsible, high-achieving, engaged with their schoolwork, and generally on a relatively good track. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, as these students deserve opportunities as much as anyone and will often still have college access difficulties for economic reasons or because even the best students at their schools simply do not receive an education that is on par with that provided to their competitiors from wealthier areas.
But debate has the power to change lives, to interest students in academic subjects in a way that school does not, to engage them in a way that traditional pedagogy does not, and to imbue them with a sense of confidence and power that they sorely need. I've seen many seemingly unlikely students take a remarkable interest in debate and change the trajectory of their lives because of it. I really admire the work that Dave has done to reach students most in need, and he's a constant reminder to me of what I could and should be doing in Boston.
On the flip side of the coin, however, I also came across a New York Times article entitled "The Wrong Approach to Gangs" that argues,
"No city has failed to control its street gangs more spectacularly than Los Angeles. The region has six times as many gangs and double the number of gang members as a quarter-century ago, even after spending countless billions on the problem. But unless Congress changes course quickly, the policies that seem to have made the gang problem worse in Los Angeles could become enshrined as national doctrine in a so-called gang control bill making its way through both the House and Senate."
LA is a paradigmatic example of a city that over-invests in heavy-handed and punitive responses to drug- and gang-related problems and under-invests in prevention and avoidance measures, including educational initiatives like the LAUDL. The willingness of policy-makers to write off people as young as 11 or 12 as irredeemably criminal is both heartbreaking and self-fulfilling. As my namesake Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, nothing breeds crime like prisons. Handing out prison sentences for petty offenses serves only to harden the offender, limit his access to legal employment, and connect him to other criminals.
It is beyond disheartening to see the federal government on the brink of replicating LA's preference for punishment over prevention.
Stumble It!
I'll start with the good news. My friend David Wiltz is garnering still more media attention for the work that he has done with youth in LA. He and one of his former debaters were interviewed in this National Public Radio segment.
There are nearly two dozen urban debate leagues in the US, and I'm more familiar with some than with others, but everything I've seen suggests that few leagues do as good a job as LA has done to reach young people already in gangs or at high risk of getting involved with one. To some extent, this is simply a matter of necessity. Gangs are such an omnipresent part of urban life in LA that it would be nearly impossible to work with the populations Dave does without addressing the issue.
But I also know that in some leagues, and unfortunately I must count my own Boston Debate League among these, coaches and administrators have not done everything they could to reach out to these students who may ultimately have the most to gain from an activity like debate. The temptation, especially for young leagues and teams, is to start with the "naturals", students who are already, responsible, high-achieving, engaged with their schoolwork, and generally on a relatively good track. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, as these students deserve opportunities as much as anyone and will often still have college access difficulties for economic reasons or because even the best students at their schools simply do not receive an education that is on par with that provided to their competitiors from wealthier areas.
But debate has the power to change lives, to interest students in academic subjects in a way that school does not, to engage them in a way that traditional pedagogy does not, and to imbue them with a sense of confidence and power that they sorely need. I've seen many seemingly unlikely students take a remarkable interest in debate and change the trajectory of their lives because of it. I really admire the work that Dave has done to reach students most in need, and he's a constant reminder to me of what I could and should be doing in Boston.
On the flip side of the coin, however, I also came across a New York Times article entitled "The Wrong Approach to Gangs" that argues,
"No city has failed to control its street gangs more spectacularly than Los Angeles. The region has six times as many gangs and double the number of gang members as a quarter-century ago, even after spending countless billions on the problem. But unless Congress changes course quickly, the policies that seem to have made the gang problem worse in Los Angeles could become enshrined as national doctrine in a so-called gang control bill making its way through both the House and Senate."
LA is a paradigmatic example of a city that over-invests in heavy-handed and punitive responses to drug- and gang-related problems and under-invests in prevention and avoidance measures, including educational initiatives like the LAUDL. The willingness of policy-makers to write off people as young as 11 or 12 as irredeemably criminal is both heartbreaking and self-fulfilling. As my namesake Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, nothing breeds crime like prisons. Handing out prison sentences for petty offenses serves only to harden the offender, limit his access to legal employment, and connect him to other criminals.
It is beyond disheartening to see the federal government on the brink of replicating LA's preference for punishment over prevention.
Labels: race, urban debate league
Stumble It!
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Vegas Taxi Driver Blog
I was browsing this blog from a Vegas taxi driver and was very glad to see this post about all the racism surrounding NBA All Star Weekend. I was in Vegas while Mandalay Bay was hosting the NBA All Star game, in fact I was staying just next door at the Luxor, but as that was only the second time I'd ever been to the city, I didn't really have a point of comparison for the crowds, traffic, etc. Before realizing that this event was going on, I did note that Vegas seemed a lot more diverse than I remembered it, but I never felt particularly unsafe or saw any criminal behavior or anything like that.
The next time I was in Vegas, which was about a month later, however, I heard from cab drivers, poker dealers, and hotel employees (all white) about how bad that weekend was, not just in terms of crowds, but about how it was unsafe to walk outside, people were getting shot in the street, etc. Like I said, I had been walking around the Strip that weekend without seeing any of this, but I kept hearing the same thing from so many people that I started to think maybe there was some truth to it, even though my spidey sense was telling me this was mostly just racism talking, as there were so many more black tourists that weekend than there usually are in Vegas.
Anyway, I was glad to see that at least one Vegas cab driver felt the same way I did about all this fear-mongering. He reports overwhelmingly posititive experiences from that weekend and argues that the traffic and crime were not abnormal for a three-day weekend in Vegas. Best of all, he frames his anti-racist ethic in a classically Vegas way:
"Las Vegas needs to grow up and respect all races and cultures that visit and spend money." (emphasis added)
Stumble It!
The next time I was in Vegas, which was about a month later, however, I heard from cab drivers, poker dealers, and hotel employees (all white) about how bad that weekend was, not just in terms of crowds, but about how it was unsafe to walk outside, people were getting shot in the street, etc. Like I said, I had been walking around the Strip that weekend without seeing any of this, but I kept hearing the same thing from so many people that I started to think maybe there was some truth to it, even though my spidey sense was telling me this was mostly just racism talking, as there were so many more black tourists that weekend than there usually are in Vegas.
Anyway, I was glad to see that at least one Vegas cab driver felt the same way I did about all this fear-mongering. He reports overwhelmingly posititive experiences from that weekend and argues that the traffic and crime were not abnormal for a three-day weekend in Vegas. Best of all, he frames his anti-racist ethic in a classically Vegas way:
"Las Vegas needs to grow up and respect all races and cultures that visit and spend money." (emphasis added)
Stumble It!
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Criminalizing the Classroom
I came across a very interesting/disturbing report today from the New York Civil Liberties Union entitled "Criminalizing the Classroom". The following is an excerpt from the Executive Summary:
"Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. These numberswould make the NYPD’s School Safety Division alone the tenth largest police force in the country – larger than the police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas.
Because these school-assigned police personnel are not directly subject to the supervisory authority of school administrators, and because they often have not been adequately trained to work in educational settings, SSAs and police officers often arrogate to themselves authority that extends well beyond the narrow mission of securing the safety of the students and teachers. They enforce school rules relating to dress and appearance. They make up their own rules regarding food or other objects that have nothing whatsoever to do with school safety. On occasion they subject educators who question the NYPD’s treatment of students to retaliatory arrests. More routinely, according to our interviews and survey, they subject students
to inappropriate treatment including:
• derogatory, abusive and discriminatory comments and conduct;
• intrusive searches;
• unauthorized confiscation of students’ personal items, including food, cameras and essential school supplies;
• inappropriate sexual attention;
• physical abuse; and
• arrest for minor non-criminal violations of school rules.
These types of police interventions create flashpoints for confrontations and divert students and teachers from invaluable classroom time. They make students feel diminished, and are wholly incompatible with a positive educational environment.
Statistical analysis shows that all students are not equally likely to bear the brunt of over-policing in New York City schools. The burden falls primarily on the schools with permanent metal detectors, which are attended by the city’s most vulnerable children. The students attending these high schools are disproportionately poor, Black, and Latino compared to citywide averages, and they are more often confronted by police personnel in school for “non-criminal” incidents than their peers citywide. These children receive grossly less per-pupil funding on direct educational services than city averages. Their schools are likely to be large and overcrowded, and to have unusually high suspension and drop-out rates. "
Having spent the last few years working around public schools in Chicago and Boston, I can't say I'm shocked by anything that they're reporting, either about the results of putting police officers in schools or the fact that schools in low-income, largely minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of the policing.
The obvious retort will be that those neighborhoods also have the highest crime rates and the most crime in the school, so of course that's where the officers will go. Controlling the criminal element will help improve the school for the majority of law-abiding students, yada yada yada.
Well if you're so fucking interested in improving the quality of education at the school, why not improve teacher pay, lower the size of the average classroom, buy up-to-date materials, or repair structural damage to the buildings? Even if police in the schools improves the quality of education for at least some students (and the NYCLU report suggests otherwise), there's a reason why, of all the barriers to quality educaton at these schools, crime is the one on which the city chooses to focus.
The truth is that in many of this country's largest cities (though thankfully I have not seen much of this trend in Boston), public schools are becoming terrifyingly similar to prisons. There are bars on the windows, metal detectors at the doors, police officers in the hallways, uniforms, randome searches, and security cameras.
These security measures take priority over such staples of education such as TEACHERS TO ACTUALLY TEACH THE FUCKING CLASSES. In Chicago, many of the most heavily securitized schools were so short in teachers that they would stick any warm body they could find in a classroom, and failing that, students would be herded into the cafeteria or somewhere else for an entire period where nothing was taught or expected of them.
A friend of mine who attended one such school in Chicago told me that her freshman year, her social studies class was without a teacher for SIX MONTHS! She was one of only about ten student, in a class of forty, to pass the test required for graduation. Thirty students were held back for failing a test on material they'd never been taught.
When the test results were announced, there was a small riot in the classroom, with students overturning desks and throwing chairs out of windows. This criminal behavior, of course, becomes a justification for all of the security. Anecdotes like this, and I've heard many, make it very clear to me that the purpose of some schools is not to educate but to warehouse the urban poor until they are old for prison, where many of them eventually end up.
Stumble It!
"Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. These numberswould make the NYPD’s School Safety Division alone the tenth largest police force in the country – larger than the police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas.
Because these school-assigned police personnel are not directly subject to the supervisory authority of school administrators, and because they often have not been adequately trained to work in educational settings, SSAs and police officers often arrogate to themselves authority that extends well beyond the narrow mission of securing the safety of the students and teachers. They enforce school rules relating to dress and appearance. They make up their own rules regarding food or other objects that have nothing whatsoever to do with school safety. On occasion they subject educators who question the NYPD’s treatment of students to retaliatory arrests. More routinely, according to our interviews and survey, they subject students
to inappropriate treatment including:
• derogatory, abusive and discriminatory comments and conduct;
• intrusive searches;
• unauthorized confiscation of students’ personal items, including food, cameras and essential school supplies;
• inappropriate sexual attention;
• physical abuse; and
• arrest for minor non-criminal violations of school rules.
These types of police interventions create flashpoints for confrontations and divert students and teachers from invaluable classroom time. They make students feel diminished, and are wholly incompatible with a positive educational environment.
Statistical analysis shows that all students are not equally likely to bear the brunt of over-policing in New York City schools. The burden falls primarily on the schools with permanent metal detectors, which are attended by the city’s most vulnerable children. The students attending these high schools are disproportionately poor, Black, and Latino compared to citywide averages, and they are more often confronted by police personnel in school for “non-criminal” incidents than their peers citywide. These children receive grossly less per-pupil funding on direct educational services than city averages. Their schools are likely to be large and overcrowded, and to have unusually high suspension and drop-out rates. "
Having spent the last few years working around public schools in Chicago and Boston, I can't say I'm shocked by anything that they're reporting, either about the results of putting police officers in schools or the fact that schools in low-income, largely minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of the policing.
The obvious retort will be that those neighborhoods also have the highest crime rates and the most crime in the school, so of course that's where the officers will go. Controlling the criminal element will help improve the school for the majority of law-abiding students, yada yada yada.
Well if you're so fucking interested in improving the quality of education at the school, why not improve teacher pay, lower the size of the average classroom, buy up-to-date materials, or repair structural damage to the buildings? Even if police in the schools improves the quality of education for at least some students (and the NYCLU report suggests otherwise), there's a reason why, of all the barriers to quality educaton at these schools, crime is the one on which the city chooses to focus.
The truth is that in many of this country's largest cities (though thankfully I have not seen much of this trend in Boston), public schools are becoming terrifyingly similar to prisons. There are bars on the windows, metal detectors at the doors, police officers in the hallways, uniforms, randome searches, and security cameras.
These security measures take priority over such staples of education such as TEACHERS TO ACTUALLY TEACH THE FUCKING CLASSES. In Chicago, many of the most heavily securitized schools were so short in teachers that they would stick any warm body they could find in a classroom, and failing that, students would be herded into the cafeteria or somewhere else for an entire period where nothing was taught or expected of them.
A friend of mine who attended one such school in Chicago told me that her freshman year, her social studies class was without a teacher for SIX MONTHS! She was one of only about ten student, in a class of forty, to pass the test required for graduation. Thirty students were held back for failing a test on material they'd never been taught.
When the test results were announced, there was a small riot in the classroom, with students overturning desks and throwing chairs out of windows. This criminal behavior, of course, becomes a justification for all of the security. Anecdotes like this, and I've heard many, make it very clear to me that the purpose of some schools is not to educate but to warehouse the urban poor until they are old for prison, where many of them eventually end up.
Stumble It!
Monday, March 26, 2007
BDL Tournament Four
Saturday was the fourth Boston Debate League tournament of the 2006-07 season, the last before our two-day City Championships event. It got off to a rocky start. I had to bring coffee, donuts, awards, a computer, and a printer with me, which meant that I had to borrow my girlfriend’s car and drive to Dorchester, where the tournament was held.
Driving in the Boston area is something that I usually avoid, and with good reason. Streets rarely run in a straight line for more than a few blocks, and they are known to change names or make sudden turns such that by going straight, you might leave Cambridge Street and end up on Dorchester Avenue. If you were later to find a road called "Cambridge Street", it might not be the same road you left, as you may have crossed into Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, or another neighboring city that re-uses street names Boston has already used for other streets. That, of course, assumes you find a sign at an intersection at all.
An intersection might well be the convergence of six roads, two of which come to an end, one of which changes names, and one of which doubles back on itself at a two hundred degree angle. Needless to say, when there are signs at all, they are a confusing maze of circles and arrows that cause motorists to slam on their breaks and veer suddenly across three roads of traffic. It’s a delight.
After picking up five dozen donuts, twenty-five Munchkins, and three Boxes o’ Joe from the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I began what should have been a twenty-minute drive to the Dorchester Education Complex. Armed only with Google Maps directions, I arrived forty-five minutes later to find a handful of students, one volunteer judge, and one of the teachers from the Academy of Public Service (our host school), standing around outside. "I take it you aren’t just enjoying the fresh air?" I asked them.
Dan, the teacher, shook his head mournfully. "I just called the headmaster, he’s going to be here in a few minutes." Fortunately, it was a nice day, already in the fifties at 8AM and sunny. I broke out the coffee and donuts, only to find that Dunkin’ Donuts had not given me cups, cream, sugar, or napkins. A lot of coffee was about to go to waste.
A few minutes later, Zac, the headmaster, showed up to let us in the building. In my five years of working around urban education, I’ve rarely met anyone as capable and dynamic as Zac. He took over as headmaster when Dorchester High School, with the help of a Gates Foundation grant, broke down into three small schools inside the same building. One of those schools, the Academy of Public Service, got off the ground just one year before the Boston Debate League, and was still searching for its identity. To my delight, I learned that Zac wanted to build the school around forensics and public speaking, and we had several conversations about how debate might fit into that vision.
I’ve never seen a headmaster as committed to his school’s debate team. Despite working what are probably sixty hour weeks, he comes to all of our competitions, walks around to watch all of our students debate, stops to talk to me about his school and the direction of the League, and as a member of the Boston Debate League’s Advisory Board, does what he can to advocate for and promote our organization.
The results of his commitment and dedication are plain to see. The Academy of Public Service, despite its geographical location in what is derogatorily known as ‘Dumbchester’ among Boston youth, has the largest and one of the most competitive teams in the League. They’ve got a great coaching staff who certainly deserve a lot of the credit, but Zac’s fingerprints can be seen as well. He treats the debate team as a component of the school culture that is every bit as important as the football or basketball teams. He buys embroidered vests for the team, prominently displays their trophies in a case in the hallway and in his office, and meets with them all individually every week.
This isn’t necessarily a replicable model. Zac is a young, charismatic, deeply caring black man. All of those characteristics help him to relate to his students in ways that other headmasters, no matter how competent and well-intentioned, might not be able to do. But what he does works, and his team is better off for it.
Once I’m inside the building, it’s time to tackle the next problem. The coach of each team submits to me on the Wednesday prior to a tournament the names of the students who will be competing for her school. As you might guess, however, there’s quite a bit of variation between the students registered on Wednesday and the students who show up on Saturday morning. For instance, I was still trying to find the school when I got a call from a coach telling me not one of the five students she had registered would be competing today.
Then there are other students who don’t show up, or show up late, or show up but were not registered on Wednesday. Technically, I am supposed to turn all of these students away. But our participation has been low enough this year that I can’t afford to do that, so I delay the start of the first round (our schedule has time built into it for just such delays) and redo the schedule that I put together last night. The only reason I bother doing it the night before is so that I will have something to work with in the event that my computer breaks or we’re locked out of the building for over an hour in the morning or anything else catastrophic happens.
We finally get the first of three debate rounds underway about fifteen minutes after their scheduled start time. A debate round consists of two students from one school arguing against two students from another school for nearly ninety minutes while a volunteer evaluates their efforts and chooses a winner at the end. Many of our volunteers are college debaters or former high school debaters now in college, which presented a problem, as many universities are on Spring Break this weekend.
There was a silver lining, however, in that this forced me to reach out to some new sources of volunteers who had not worked with the League before. In particular, we got two black students from Boston University Law School, one of whom had eight years of debate experience between high school and college! Of course we appreciate any volunteers we get, but I’m always conscious of the fact that so many of the coaches, judges, and administrators, myself included, are white, while so many of the debaters are not. It definitely helps to dispel common myths and stereotypes about debate when we have more diversity among our adult employees and volunteers.
On a similar note, I was glad to have back as a volunteer judge an alumnus from the very first season of the Boston Debate League. Two years after graduating from high school, Chris is pursuing a BS in Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales College. I called him largely out of the blue because Zac had invited some important people from Boston Public Schools to the tournament and wanted to have some alumni from the League for them to meet. In particular, he said, they would want to meet young black males, a key demographic in urban politics.
I hadn’t seen Chris in two years, and frankly one thing I’ve learned from putting this League together over the last few years is that even people whom you’d expect to be very reliable often fail to come through for you in crucial ways. So I was happily surprised when he immediately agreed to drive up from Rhode Island for the afternoon. Although in my opinion a former debater in the League ought to feel some responsibility to help out after graduating, this has generally not been the case, and in fact I’ve had a lot of difficulty staying in touch with our alumni. I was really touched that Chris was willing to go to such great effort with so little prompting. It’s so rare that you find people who really will come through in a pinch, and I have great respect for anyone who does.
Chris wasn’t able to make it in time for the first round, but was happy to judge the second and then be on hand to speak with any dignitaries who came. The only guest we ended up having was a woman invited by me, not Zac, but because she was the vice-president of the Boston Schools Committee, she was quite an important guest. I told Chris she was around and he told me he’d seek her out and schmooze her.
I found the two of them watching the same debate and went to introduce them. Before I could say anything, Chris blatantly pointed at her and said, "Is this that lady you wanted me to talk to?" Subtle. They seemed to hit it off well, though, and I think she was generally impressed with what she saw. She stuck around for the awards ceremony and announced some of our winners, so we were able to get a lot of good pictures of her with our debaters.
The event was a little bittersweet for me because, since I won’t be at the City Championships (I need to take two of our debaters to a national competition in Atlanta the same weekend), this was the last time I may see some of the debaters there. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, because that’s not my style, but I did wish them all well and tell them how proud I was.
That’s no exaggeration, either. There are few things that people fear more than public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke that, since public speaking is America’s number one fear and death is number two, most people, if at a funeral, would prefer to be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. I’m thoroughly impressed by any high school student, especially one from a school, home, and/or neighborhood culture where academic pursuits are sometimes discouraged, who is willing to join her school’s debate team and share her opinions in public.
Stumble It!
Driving in the Boston area is something that I usually avoid, and with good reason. Streets rarely run in a straight line for more than a few blocks, and they are known to change names or make sudden turns such that by going straight, you might leave Cambridge Street and end up on Dorchester Avenue. If you were later to find a road called "Cambridge Street", it might not be the same road you left, as you may have crossed into Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, or another neighboring city that re-uses street names Boston has already used for other streets. That, of course, assumes you find a sign at an intersection at all.
An intersection might well be the convergence of six roads, two of which come to an end, one of which changes names, and one of which doubles back on itself at a two hundred degree angle. Needless to say, when there are signs at all, they are a confusing maze of circles and arrows that cause motorists to slam on their breaks and veer suddenly across three roads of traffic. It’s a delight.
After picking up five dozen donuts, twenty-five Munchkins, and three Boxes o’ Joe from the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I began what should have been a twenty-minute drive to the Dorchester Education Complex. Armed only with Google Maps directions, I arrived forty-five minutes later to find a handful of students, one volunteer judge, and one of the teachers from the Academy of Public Service (our host school), standing around outside. "I take it you aren’t just enjoying the fresh air?" I asked them.
Dan, the teacher, shook his head mournfully. "I just called the headmaster, he’s going to be here in a few minutes." Fortunately, it was a nice day, already in the fifties at 8AM and sunny. I broke out the coffee and donuts, only to find that Dunkin’ Donuts had not given me cups, cream, sugar, or napkins. A lot of coffee was about to go to waste.
A few minutes later, Zac, the headmaster, showed up to let us in the building. In my five years of working around urban education, I’ve rarely met anyone as capable and dynamic as Zac. He took over as headmaster when Dorchester High School, with the help of a Gates Foundation grant, broke down into three small schools inside the same building. One of those schools, the Academy of Public Service, got off the ground just one year before the Boston Debate League, and was still searching for its identity. To my delight, I learned that Zac wanted to build the school around forensics and public speaking, and we had several conversations about how debate might fit into that vision.
I’ve never seen a headmaster as committed to his school’s debate team. Despite working what are probably sixty hour weeks, he comes to all of our competitions, walks around to watch all of our students debate, stops to talk to me about his school and the direction of the League, and as a member of the Boston Debate League’s Advisory Board, does what he can to advocate for and promote our organization.
The results of his commitment and dedication are plain to see. The Academy of Public Service, despite its geographical location in what is derogatorily known as ‘Dumbchester’ among Boston youth, has the largest and one of the most competitive teams in the League. They’ve got a great coaching staff who certainly deserve a lot of the credit, but Zac’s fingerprints can be seen as well. He treats the debate team as a component of the school culture that is every bit as important as the football or basketball teams. He buys embroidered vests for the team, prominently displays their trophies in a case in the hallway and in his office, and meets with them all individually every week.
This isn’t necessarily a replicable model. Zac is a young, charismatic, deeply caring black man. All of those characteristics help him to relate to his students in ways that other headmasters, no matter how competent and well-intentioned, might not be able to do. But what he does works, and his team is better off for it.
Once I’m inside the building, it’s time to tackle the next problem. The coach of each team submits to me on the Wednesday prior to a tournament the names of the students who will be competing for her school. As you might guess, however, there’s quite a bit of variation between the students registered on Wednesday and the students who show up on Saturday morning. For instance, I was still trying to find the school when I got a call from a coach telling me not one of the five students she had registered would be competing today.
Then there are other students who don’t show up, or show up late, or show up but were not registered on Wednesday. Technically, I am supposed to turn all of these students away. But our participation has been low enough this year that I can’t afford to do that, so I delay the start of the first round (our schedule has time built into it for just such delays) and redo the schedule that I put together last night. The only reason I bother doing it the night before is so that I will have something to work with in the event that my computer breaks or we’re locked out of the building for over an hour in the morning or anything else catastrophic happens.
We finally get the first of three debate rounds underway about fifteen minutes after their scheduled start time. A debate round consists of two students from one school arguing against two students from another school for nearly ninety minutes while a volunteer evaluates their efforts and chooses a winner at the end. Many of our volunteers are college debaters or former high school debaters now in college, which presented a problem, as many universities are on Spring Break this weekend.
There was a silver lining, however, in that this forced me to reach out to some new sources of volunteers who had not worked with the League before. In particular, we got two black students from Boston University Law School, one of whom had eight years of debate experience between high school and college! Of course we appreciate any volunteers we get, but I’m always conscious of the fact that so many of the coaches, judges, and administrators, myself included, are white, while so many of the debaters are not. It definitely helps to dispel common myths and stereotypes about debate when we have more diversity among our adult employees and volunteers.
On a similar note, I was glad to have back as a volunteer judge an alumnus from the very first season of the Boston Debate League. Two years after graduating from high school, Chris is pursuing a BS in Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales College. I called him largely out of the blue because Zac had invited some important people from Boston Public Schools to the tournament and wanted to have some alumni from the League for them to meet. In particular, he said, they would want to meet young black males, a key demographic in urban politics.
I hadn’t seen Chris in two years, and frankly one thing I’ve learned from putting this League together over the last few years is that even people whom you’d expect to be very reliable often fail to come through for you in crucial ways. So I was happily surprised when he immediately agreed to drive up from Rhode Island for the afternoon. Although in my opinion a former debater in the League ought to feel some responsibility to help out after graduating, this has generally not been the case, and in fact I’ve had a lot of difficulty staying in touch with our alumni. I was really touched that Chris was willing to go to such great effort with so little prompting. It’s so rare that you find people who really will come through in a pinch, and I have great respect for anyone who does.
Chris wasn’t able to make it in time for the first round, but was happy to judge the second and then be on hand to speak with any dignitaries who came. The only guest we ended up having was a woman invited by me, not Zac, but because she was the vice-president of the Boston Schools Committee, she was quite an important guest. I told Chris she was around and he told me he’d seek her out and schmooze her.
I found the two of them watching the same debate and went to introduce them. Before I could say anything, Chris blatantly pointed at her and said, "Is this that lady you wanted me to talk to?" Subtle. They seemed to hit it off well, though, and I think she was generally impressed with what she saw. She stuck around for the awards ceremony and announced some of our winners, so we were able to get a lot of good pictures of her with our debaters.
The event was a little bittersweet for me because, since I won’t be at the City Championships (I need to take two of our debaters to a national competition in Atlanta the same weekend), this was the last time I may see some of the debaters there. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, because that’s not my style, but I did wish them all well and tell them how proud I was.
That’s no exaggeration, either. There are few things that people fear more than public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke that, since public speaking is America’s number one fear and death is number two, most people, if at a funeral, would prefer to be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. I’m thoroughly impressed by any high school student, especially one from a school, home, and/or neighborhood culture where academic pursuits are sometimes discouraged, who is willing to join her school’s debate team and share her opinions in public.
Labels: boston debate league, narrative, personal, race
Stumble It!
Friday, February 9, 2007
Public Debates Part Three: Faneuil Hall
I wake early on Saturday morning in order to get to Faneuil Hall by 8:45. The event doesn’t start until 11, but I’ve arranged for the debaters to come in early in order to work with some volunteers who will help them “put finishing touches” on their presentations. This is a nice way of saying that I have reason to think some of them will be massively underprepared, and I don’t want them to embarrass themselves (or, by extension, me).
I’m on my way out the door when my phone rings. I’m terrified that this will be someone canceling on me at the last minute, but it’s just Ho asking for directions by public transportation.
When I get to Faneuil Hall, I’m relieved to see that Carla, who I am expecting to be the least prepared, is first to arrive. Better yet, she tells me she’s got her whole first speech written and wants me to look at it.
It turns out to be a very detailed and dry history of Supreme Court litigation concerning school segregation. A lot of it does not appear to be in her words, though there are no quotes or citations. (By the way, I hesitate to call this plagiarism, though I guess technically it is, because I don’t believe it was her intent to pass off the work as her own. When I pointed out that she needed to cite her sources, she was happy to do so, and in general I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge about proper research and citation among the students I’ve worked with. Once teacher showed me papers he was grading where bibliographies included sources such as “termpapers.com”.)
I explain to Carla that she needs to cut out a lot of the history and focus more on making arguments about the current state of affairs. She’s surprisingly calm about the fact that I’ve just told her to rewrite her speech two hours before show time. Conveniently enough, the volunteer I wanted to have work with her shows up just then, so I introduce the two of them and then get to work preparing the stage for the public debates.
The good folks at Faneuil Hall have provided us with two long tables and a beautifully carved wooden podium. I ask if it’s alright to move the podium, and the property manager tells me, “Just be careful, it’s only held together by wooden pegs.” I shove it gingerly across the stage, all the while worrying that with my luck, I’ll be the one to destroy Samuel Adams’ lectern.
Surveying the stage now, it occurs to me that a single high school student might get pretty nervous sitting at the long table all by herself with dozens of people staring at her. So even though these debates will be one on one (unlike most of our competitions, which are two on two), I decide to suggest that each debater invite another student from her school to sit at the table with her during her debate for moral support. Carla in particular looks relieved when I suggest this.
It’s now 9:15, and nine of my ten debaters are here. The only one missing is Ho. His teacher is here, but she hasn’t heard from him. Just then, my phone rings again, and I answer to hear Ho tell me, “I just want to tell you, I am going to be fifteen minutes late.”
“You’re fifteen minutes late now, Ho.”
He’s silent for a minute. “I am going to be thirty minutes late.”
“Alright,” I can’t help but laugh. I know he’s plenty prepared already, so I’m not too worried about it, though Carla is really antsy to meet him and find out what exactly he’ll be arguing. Unlike the regular debate tournaments our students attend, this event is intended to be more about drama than debate. I don’t want the students worrying about who wins or trying to make each other look stupid on stage, so I’m giving them a chance to meet their opponents and run through their debates ahead of time. This proves very popular, as everyone is nervous and quite willing to strike a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal with her opponent.
When Ho finally arrives (nearly an hour late), he is looking very sharp in a dark suit and handsome tie. I’m wearing a Brooks Brothers that set me back a couple hundred dollars at 50% off, but I can’t disagree when he looks me up and down, straightens his tie, smiles, and says, “Ah ha, now I show you up!”
With about a half hour to go, I take all the students up on stage with me to show them where they’ll sit and stand and when. The sound guy we hired gives them a quick tutorial on how to adjust the height of the microphones, how close to put their mouths to them, etc., which is a great idea and something that hadn’t occurred to me. As he pointed out, it’s one less thing for them to be nervous about when they’re up there.
The last thing I explain is how to handle the audience. They are accustomed to being cross-examined by their opponents after a speech. For the public debate, however, the audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions, which means they could be asked pretty much anything. We go over some strategies for dealing with off-the-wall questions or things they just don’t know how to answer.
“First off, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. If a question is really tangential, everyone will realize that, and you won’t look bad for saying, ‘I’m not prepared to answer that,’ or, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information,’ or something along those lines.
The other thing you can do is have some talking points. Have you ever seen politicians answer questions? “
“They don’t,” Ho interjects.
“Exactly. They smile, nod, say ‘Very good question,’ and then just say whatever they want to say, even if it has nothing to do with the question. So I’d suggest that you each think about important points you want to emphasize during cross-examination, and then if you get any questions out of left field, you can just brush it off and go to your talking points.”
As of 11AM, our scheduled start time, we still don’t have much of an audience. I take a look outside, and heavy winds are gusting heavy snowflakes through the crisp Boston air. Nothing’s sticking on the ground, but it looks and feels like a blizzard. No wonder so few people have chosen to come out. Oh well.
The emcee for the event, the headmaster of one of the schools in the League, thanks everyone for coming and then introduces the guest moderator for the first debate. As much preparation as we’ve done with the students in the debate, we’ve done very little with the guest moderators, and it shows. Despite my wild gesticulating from the back of the room, she lets the cross-examination of the first speaker go on for way too long, then thanks the students for a great debate and starts giving her closing remarks.
I run over to the foot of the stage and wait for an opportunity to interrupt her and tell her there are still three more speeches left. She blushes a bit and introduces the second speaker, who gives her four minute speech and then takes some questions from the audience. Now, with two speeches left to go, the moderator says, “Sorry about trying to cut you off prematurely before, now thank you both for a great debate,” and starts to leave the stage. I don’t have the heart to embarrass her again, and we’re already behind schedule, so I just mouth, “Don’t worry about it,” to the students on stage, who are shooting me confuzzled looks. Neither seems too disappointed to leave the stage without delivering a rebuttal speech, though.
After that things go smoothly, and the audience fills out a bit more. Mostly they are friends and family of the people in the debate, but occasionally some tourists come in and sit for a speech or two, which is very cool. Faneuil Hall is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Boston, and though it’s technically closed to them for our event today, we told the officers outside to invite anyone who came to see the building to come in and watch a bit of the debates. Faneuil Hall is, after all, of interest to the tourists precisely because it was a public forum where issues of pressing national importance were debated.
As the fourth debate is drawing to a close, I pull Carla and Ho out of the audience and line them up at the foot of the stage, ready to be introduced. Ho is fine about going up on stage alone, but Carla, even with a friend at her side, is shaking like a leaf. “Andrew, I don’t know this!” she whines. It’s very, very tempting to make a comment about she maybe could have started preparing before last night, but that’s not going to make a difference now, so I just tell her she’ll be fine. She looks less than reassured as the guest moderator for her debate announces her name and she takes the stage, clutching at her friend’s hand.
Ho is the first to speak, and he does a great job. We worked together on a brief opening, but he’s revised it since Thursday, and it’s better than ever. He introduces himself and his school, provides some quick background on the desegregation cases now before the Supreme Court, and dives right into his arguments against forced integration.
“Although forced integration schemes were intended to desegregate schools, the have ironically caused more segregation by driving students out of urban school systems,” he begins, and I smile. “Take my school, for example. In the 1970’s it was a white school, like 90%. Now, only 7% of students are white.”
This is killer stuff. For these debates, I tried to choose topics that were of national interest and importance but still personal and relevant to the students. Frankly, there’s nothing all that special about getting some people to talk about a random issue. This event is supposed to be a celebration of the voices and opinions of Boston’s young people, and it’s really, really good to hear some personal experiences brought into the debate.
When his four minutes are up, Ho confidently announces, “I am open for cross-examination.” Carla lobs him a few softball questions, and I can see immediately that his answers are scripted. Fine by me, but as soon as the floor is opened to the audience, things get rough. One of Ho’s teachers is in attendance, and with an impish grin, he rises from his seat.
“You argue that as America becomes more diverse, schools will naturally become more integrated. But the country is much more diverse than it was in 1954, yet schools have not been as segregated as they are now since the Brown decision. How can you be sure that this trend will change in the next fifty years?”
“Could you repeat that please?” I know damn well that Ho understood the question the first time, and I can see the wheels spinning in his head as his teacher struggles to rephrase.
“What assurance do you have that more diversity in the country will mean more integration in schools? Haven’t we seen just the opposite in the last fifty years?”
“Ah! That is a very good question. But I feel it is better to let integration happen naturally, because when you force it, you can actually make schools more segregated.”
With a knowing smile, the teacher sits back down, seemingly satisfied with his student’s stalling and evasion tactics.
Now it’s Carla’s turn to speak, and there’s an awkward silence as she fumbles to adjust the microphone. Once she starts talking, though, she sounds good, real good. Remnants of the history lesson, with proper citation, remain, but her speech is now chock full of strong arguments as well. The only indication of her nervousness is some slightly excessive pausing between sentences, and I’m confident that 75% of the audience doesn’t even notice.
Carla handles her cross-examination gracefully, turns over the floor to Ho for his rebuttal, and then concludes the debate with a strong rebuttal of her own. Now it’s my turn to take the stage for the first time all day to join Alan Khazei, co-founder of City Year and keynote speaker at the event, in handing out medals to all of the participants. “Nice job,” I tell Carla as I shake her hand and Dr. Khazei drapes a medal around her neck.
“Shut up, I sucked,” she smiles, taking her place alongside the others.
Afterwards, there is a lot of milling around and picture taking. As a way of reassuring them, I had promised the debaters that they’d have a sympathetic audience, since everyone would be there because they were interested in the debates. That turned out to be not entirely true, as Ho’s teacher had offered extra credit to her students if they came to the event. About half a dozen of them showed up and were (understandably) completely disinterested in the debates, sleeping or whispering quietly to each other the entire time. I didn’t really care since they filled out the audience and weren’t disruptive.
What was surprising was the way they treated Ho afterwards. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was a rock star: they all wanted to have their picture taken with him, shake his hand, congratulate him, etc. To the best of my knowledge, these were not friends of Ho’s or members of the debate team or even honors students, they were just random kids who knew him from school.
It’s a common assumption, one that I’ll admit to harboring when I first started working with the Chicago Debate League, that urban public schools students would have no interest in a debate team. In an environment where kids are supposed to be ‘hard’ and show no interest in academics or education, who would want to join a debate team? Even other nerds at my suburban high school poked fun at me on occasion.
But the truth is that you’ll find as many bright, articulate, outgoing, and/or intellectual students as you would anywhere else. And unlike at schools in more affluent areas, where college-bound students are offered multiple AP courses and a bevy of academically-oriented after-school activities, these students have fewer outlets. Sometimes you get these kids, sometimes even ones who have never done well in school before, who just fall in love to with debate because it is so different from anything that’s been available to them before. It’s tough and rigorous but it also very open-ended, so they can pursue arguments they are interested in and really be in control of what they are learning and doing in ways that they can’t in a classroom.
OK, tangent over. Bottom line: the event went well in a lot of ways, and the students surprised me by demonstrating some skills that I wasn’t sure they had acquired. I wish there was more of an audience, but now that we’ve done it once and ironed out the kinks, hopefully in future years we can put more effort into publicizing it.
Stumble It!
I’m on my way out the door when my phone rings. I’m terrified that this will be someone canceling on me at the last minute, but it’s just Ho asking for directions by public transportation.
When I get to Faneuil Hall, I’m relieved to see that Carla, who I am expecting to be the least prepared, is first to arrive. Better yet, she tells me she’s got her whole first speech written and wants me to look at it.
It turns out to be a very detailed and dry history of Supreme Court litigation concerning school segregation. A lot of it does not appear to be in her words, though there are no quotes or citations. (By the way, I hesitate to call this plagiarism, though I guess technically it is, because I don’t believe it was her intent to pass off the work as her own. When I pointed out that she needed to cite her sources, she was happy to do so, and in general I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge about proper research and citation among the students I’ve worked with. Once teacher showed me papers he was grading where bibliographies included sources such as “termpapers.com”.)
I explain to Carla that she needs to cut out a lot of the history and focus more on making arguments about the current state of affairs. She’s surprisingly calm about the fact that I’ve just told her to rewrite her speech two hours before show time. Conveniently enough, the volunteer I wanted to have work with her shows up just then, so I introduce the two of them and then get to work preparing the stage for the public debates.
The good folks at Faneuil Hall have provided us with two long tables and a beautifully carved wooden podium. I ask if it’s alright to move the podium, and the property manager tells me, “Just be careful, it’s only held together by wooden pegs.” I shove it gingerly across the stage, all the while worrying that with my luck, I’ll be the one to destroy Samuel Adams’ lectern.
Surveying the stage now, it occurs to me that a single high school student might get pretty nervous sitting at the long table all by herself with dozens of people staring at her. So even though these debates will be one on one (unlike most of our competitions, which are two on two), I decide to suggest that each debater invite another student from her school to sit at the table with her during her debate for moral support. Carla in particular looks relieved when I suggest this.
It’s now 9:15, and nine of my ten debaters are here. The only one missing is Ho. His teacher is here, but she hasn’t heard from him. Just then, my phone rings again, and I answer to hear Ho tell me, “I just want to tell you, I am going to be fifteen minutes late.”
“You’re fifteen minutes late now, Ho.”
He’s silent for a minute. “I am going to be thirty minutes late.”
“Alright,” I can’t help but laugh. I know he’s plenty prepared already, so I’m not too worried about it, though Carla is really antsy to meet him and find out what exactly he’ll be arguing. Unlike the regular debate tournaments our students attend, this event is intended to be more about drama than debate. I don’t want the students worrying about who wins or trying to make each other look stupid on stage, so I’m giving them a chance to meet their opponents and run through their debates ahead of time. This proves very popular, as everyone is nervous and quite willing to strike a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal with her opponent.
When Ho finally arrives (nearly an hour late), he is looking very sharp in a dark suit and handsome tie. I’m wearing a Brooks Brothers that set me back a couple hundred dollars at 50% off, but I can’t disagree when he looks me up and down, straightens his tie, smiles, and says, “Ah ha, now I show you up!”
With about a half hour to go, I take all the students up on stage with me to show them where they’ll sit and stand and when. The sound guy we hired gives them a quick tutorial on how to adjust the height of the microphones, how close to put their mouths to them, etc., which is a great idea and something that hadn’t occurred to me. As he pointed out, it’s one less thing for them to be nervous about when they’re up there.
The last thing I explain is how to handle the audience. They are accustomed to being cross-examined by their opponents after a speech. For the public debate, however, the audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions, which means they could be asked pretty much anything. We go over some strategies for dealing with off-the-wall questions or things they just don’t know how to answer.
“First off, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. If a question is really tangential, everyone will realize that, and you won’t look bad for saying, ‘I’m not prepared to answer that,’ or, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information,’ or something along those lines.
The other thing you can do is have some talking points. Have you ever seen politicians answer questions? “
“They don’t,” Ho interjects.
“Exactly. They smile, nod, say ‘Very good question,’ and then just say whatever they want to say, even if it has nothing to do with the question. So I’d suggest that you each think about important points you want to emphasize during cross-examination, and then if you get any questions out of left field, you can just brush it off and go to your talking points.”
As of 11AM, our scheduled start time, we still don’t have much of an audience. I take a look outside, and heavy winds are gusting heavy snowflakes through the crisp Boston air. Nothing’s sticking on the ground, but it looks and feels like a blizzard. No wonder so few people have chosen to come out. Oh well.
The emcee for the event, the headmaster of one of the schools in the League, thanks everyone for coming and then introduces the guest moderator for the first debate. As much preparation as we’ve done with the students in the debate, we’ve done very little with the guest moderators, and it shows. Despite my wild gesticulating from the back of the room, she lets the cross-examination of the first speaker go on for way too long, then thanks the students for a great debate and starts giving her closing remarks.
I run over to the foot of the stage and wait for an opportunity to interrupt her and tell her there are still three more speeches left. She blushes a bit and introduces the second speaker, who gives her four minute speech and then takes some questions from the audience. Now, with two speeches left to go, the moderator says, “Sorry about trying to cut you off prematurely before, now thank you both for a great debate,” and starts to leave the stage. I don’t have the heart to embarrass her again, and we’re already behind schedule, so I just mouth, “Don’t worry about it,” to the students on stage, who are shooting me confuzzled looks. Neither seems too disappointed to leave the stage without delivering a rebuttal speech, though.
After that things go smoothly, and the audience fills out a bit more. Mostly they are friends and family of the people in the debate, but occasionally some tourists come in and sit for a speech or two, which is very cool. Faneuil Hall is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Boston, and though it’s technically closed to them for our event today, we told the officers outside to invite anyone who came to see the building to come in and watch a bit of the debates. Faneuil Hall is, after all, of interest to the tourists precisely because it was a public forum where issues of pressing national importance were debated.
As the fourth debate is drawing to a close, I pull Carla and Ho out of the audience and line them up at the foot of the stage, ready to be introduced. Ho is fine about going up on stage alone, but Carla, even with a friend at her side, is shaking like a leaf. “Andrew, I don’t know this!” she whines. It’s very, very tempting to make a comment about she maybe could have started preparing before last night, but that’s not going to make a difference now, so I just tell her she’ll be fine. She looks less than reassured as the guest moderator for her debate announces her name and she takes the stage, clutching at her friend’s hand.
Ho is the first to speak, and he does a great job. We worked together on a brief opening, but he’s revised it since Thursday, and it’s better than ever. He introduces himself and his school, provides some quick background on the desegregation cases now before the Supreme Court, and dives right into his arguments against forced integration.
“Although forced integration schemes were intended to desegregate schools, the have ironically caused more segregation by driving students out of urban school systems,” he begins, and I smile. “Take my school, for example. In the 1970’s it was a white school, like 90%. Now, only 7% of students are white.”
This is killer stuff. For these debates, I tried to choose topics that were of national interest and importance but still personal and relevant to the students. Frankly, there’s nothing all that special about getting some people to talk about a random issue. This event is supposed to be a celebration of the voices and opinions of Boston’s young people, and it’s really, really good to hear some personal experiences brought into the debate.
When his four minutes are up, Ho confidently announces, “I am open for cross-examination.” Carla lobs him a few softball questions, and I can see immediately that his answers are scripted. Fine by me, but as soon as the floor is opened to the audience, things get rough. One of Ho’s teachers is in attendance, and with an impish grin, he rises from his seat.
“You argue that as America becomes more diverse, schools will naturally become more integrated. But the country is much more diverse than it was in 1954, yet schools have not been as segregated as they are now since the Brown decision. How can you be sure that this trend will change in the next fifty years?”
“Could you repeat that please?” I know damn well that Ho understood the question the first time, and I can see the wheels spinning in his head as his teacher struggles to rephrase.
“What assurance do you have that more diversity in the country will mean more integration in schools? Haven’t we seen just the opposite in the last fifty years?”
“Ah! That is a very good question. But I feel it is better to let integration happen naturally, because when you force it, you can actually make schools more segregated.”
With a knowing smile, the teacher sits back down, seemingly satisfied with his student’s stalling and evasion tactics.
Now it’s Carla’s turn to speak, and there’s an awkward silence as she fumbles to adjust the microphone. Once she starts talking, though, she sounds good, real good. Remnants of the history lesson, with proper citation, remain, but her speech is now chock full of strong arguments as well. The only indication of her nervousness is some slightly excessive pausing between sentences, and I’m confident that 75% of the audience doesn’t even notice.
Carla handles her cross-examination gracefully, turns over the floor to Ho for his rebuttal, and then concludes the debate with a strong rebuttal of her own. Now it’s my turn to take the stage for the first time all day to join Alan Khazei, co-founder of City Year and keynote speaker at the event, in handing out medals to all of the participants. “Nice job,” I tell Carla as I shake her hand and Dr. Khazei drapes a medal around her neck.
“Shut up, I sucked,” she smiles, taking her place alongside the others.
Afterwards, there is a lot of milling around and picture taking. As a way of reassuring them, I had promised the debaters that they’d have a sympathetic audience, since everyone would be there because they were interested in the debates. That turned out to be not entirely true, as Ho’s teacher had offered extra credit to her students if they came to the event. About half a dozen of them showed up and were (understandably) completely disinterested in the debates, sleeping or whispering quietly to each other the entire time. I didn’t really care since they filled out the audience and weren’t disruptive.
What was surprising was the way they treated Ho afterwards. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was a rock star: they all wanted to have their picture taken with him, shake his hand, congratulate him, etc. To the best of my knowledge, these were not friends of Ho’s or members of the debate team or even honors students, they were just random kids who knew him from school.
It’s a common assumption, one that I’ll admit to harboring when I first started working with the Chicago Debate League, that urban public schools students would have no interest in a debate team. In an environment where kids are supposed to be ‘hard’ and show no interest in academics or education, who would want to join a debate team? Even other nerds at my suburban high school poked fun at me on occasion.
But the truth is that you’ll find as many bright, articulate, outgoing, and/or intellectual students as you would anywhere else. And unlike at schools in more affluent areas, where college-bound students are offered multiple AP courses and a bevy of academically-oriented after-school activities, these students have fewer outlets. Sometimes you get these kids, sometimes even ones who have never done well in school before, who just fall in love to with debate because it is so different from anything that’s been available to them before. It’s tough and rigorous but it also very open-ended, so they can pursue arguments they are interested in and really be in control of what they are learning and doing in ways that they can’t in a classroom.
OK, tangent over. Bottom line: the event went well in a lot of ways, and the students surprised me by demonstrating some skills that I wasn’t sure they had acquired. I wish there was more of an audience, but now that we’ve done it once and ironed out the kinks, hopefully in future years we can put more effort into publicizing it.
Labels: boston debate league, narrative, personal, race, urban debate league
Stumble It!
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Public Debates Part Two: Charlestown
The next day, I’m headed to Charlestown High School to meet with Carla’s opponent in the desegregation debate. I’m waiting for the bus when I get a call from the reporter. Turns out she was really fascinated by the League and thinks there is “more to the story.” Rather than rush something to air in time for the public debate, she wants to follow the students she met yesterday to a real competition, meet their families, etc. It sounds good, but we need the publicity for the public debate, too. “Are these ideas mutually exclusive?” I ask her.
She hems and haws for a minute and finally just says, “Yeah. If we run a story on the public debate, we won’t be able to do anything else.”
I agree to the larger story she’s got in mind and tell her I’ll call her tomorrow, as my bus has just arrived.
Along with Southie, Charlestown was the other epicenter of Boston’s busing riots. Much of the area has been gentrified in the last few decades, and rents have skyrocketed, but the population of the high school, situated in the midst of a strip of public housing units, has become largely non-white students from low income families. Entering the school is like invading a castle: I have to circle a five-story building the size of a city block and climb a wide ramp, painted an ugly, peeling orange, that doubles back on itself twice, then either get lucky enough to arrive at the two sets of eight-foot high double doors at the same time that someone is leaving or ring the bell and hope that someone is in the vicinity of the front office.
School just let out about ten minutes ago, so I have to weave my way through dozens of congregated students (generally not an issue, just don’t push anyone) and up five flights of stairs to the debate coach’s classroom to where Ho (not his real name) is waiting for me.
Ho is one of the most senior debaters in the League, having joined his school’s debate team as a sophomore three school years ago. Of the ten tournaments we’ve had since then, I don’t think he’s missed more than one, if any. Two years ago, he was one of the youngest students in the League, fairly new to the English language, and consequently pretty shy. But he kept at it, and although he still speaks kind of slowly and with a pretty heavy accent, his vocabulary probably exceeds that of 75% of native English speakers in the US.
“Heeeey,” he grins broadly when I walk through the door. “You take the day off just to see me?”
“Just for you, Ho.”
“Oh, ha ha. I am so flattered,” he ribs me.
I take a seat next to him, and he (first generation Chinese), his coach (one white parent and one black is my guess, though I’ve never asked), and I (generic white guy) spend the next hour talking about segregation.
Ho has actually done his reading, so he gets a lot of the arguments we talk about right away. His strategy is not to argue in favor of segregation, but rather to contend that integration will happen on its own as the US becomes an increasingly diverse country, and that forcing the issue can actually make segregation worse. He is struggling to put the argument into words, and as he tries to explain back to me, he pauses for nearly two minutes. I’m about to help him along with the English when he says, “How about: ‘Although forced integration schemes were intended to desegregate schools, the have ironically caused more segregation by driving students out of urban school systems.”
Damn. I’m still staring in surprise when he continues, “Students will go to Newton and other suburbs, and it will be like an invasion of minorities all over Massachusetts.” Now both his teacher and I can’t help but burst out laughing.
“Ho, you should use a word other than invasion,” she explains, still smiling. “That has kind of a negative meaning to it.”
“Oh, ha ha, thank you. I do not want the people to throw tomatoes at me!” Seeing us laugh, he continues, “Faneuil Hall, it is just across the street from the market. It would be easy for them to get tomatoes, if they do not like my speech.”
“One more question, before you go,” Ho’s teacher asks. “He asked me whether he should dress up, and I told him to wear a tie.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to wear, Ho, but I’ll tell you this: I’m going to be wearing a suit. Are you lookin’ to get shown up by me?”
He laughs knowingly, and I’m sure he’ll find something appropriate to wear.
The next day, I call the reporter, who doesn’t have time to talk. There’s been a stabbing at a nearby high school, and she’s going to be covering that all day. It’s frustrating that every news outlet in the state is going to cover this stabbing, but I can’t get a single radio station to do more than one story on something positive that’s going on in the state’s troubled public high school system.
I’m still a little worried about the level of preparation of some of the students, but there’s nothing more I can do about it now. I’ve done my part, and now I just have to hope that eventually their fear of being embarrassed in public will motivate them to put some work into this.
I’m also a little worried, despite her teacher’s assurances, that Carla, who hasn’t been in school all week, isn’t going to show tomorrow. So I’m initially relieved when I answer my phone at about 9PM and hear her voice say, “Andrew, I’ve got a question about tomorrow.” However, it’s more than a little discouraging when the next thing she says is, “What side of the debate am I on again?”
Doing my best to remain calm, I walk her through the issue of desegregation again. Her gut reaction is to say it’s stupid for a school system to tell a student she can’t go to a certain school because of the color of her skin (ie the opposite side of the case she’s arguing), so I try to help her think about the possible benefits of integrated schools.
“Like, you get to meet different people and expand your horizons and stuff?”
“Yeah, and when would that be useful?”
“I don’t know, just like, to know more about different types of stuff.”
Hmmm, time for dealing with kids 101: make your examples specific to them. “What do you think it would be like if you were to a school with all Hispanic kids.”
“Hmmm. You mean, like, if you put a whole bunch of Spanish kids in one school, everybody would just act all crazy and stuff?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think that’s what you want to argue.”
“Well, I guess if you never had any experience with different types of people, you couldn’t like, get along with them later.”
“Like if you’re at your job and you have to work with a black person or a white person or something.”
“Yeah, alright, I get you.”
“Remember, Carla, show up early tomorrow morning. We’re going to have some volunteers from college debate teams to help you put the finishing touches on your speech.”
“I’m going to write my speech tonight, Andrew. Sorry to call you so late.”
“It’s alright, you can call me again if you need anything. Whatever time, I’ll keep my phone on all night.” I’m not sure if it’s a good sign or not, but my phone doesn’t ring again.
Stumble It!
She hems and haws for a minute and finally just says, “Yeah. If we run a story on the public debate, we won’t be able to do anything else.”
I agree to the larger story she’s got in mind and tell her I’ll call her tomorrow, as my bus has just arrived.
Along with Southie, Charlestown was the other epicenter of Boston’s busing riots. Much of the area has been gentrified in the last few decades, and rents have skyrocketed, but the population of the high school, situated in the midst of a strip of public housing units, has become largely non-white students from low income families. Entering the school is like invading a castle: I have to circle a five-story building the size of a city block and climb a wide ramp, painted an ugly, peeling orange, that doubles back on itself twice, then either get lucky enough to arrive at the two sets of eight-foot high double doors at the same time that someone is leaving or ring the bell and hope that someone is in the vicinity of the front office.
School just let out about ten minutes ago, so I have to weave my way through dozens of congregated students (generally not an issue, just don’t push anyone) and up five flights of stairs to the debate coach’s classroom to where Ho (not his real name) is waiting for me.
Ho is one of the most senior debaters in the League, having joined his school’s debate team as a sophomore three school years ago. Of the ten tournaments we’ve had since then, I don’t think he’s missed more than one, if any. Two years ago, he was one of the youngest students in the League, fairly new to the English language, and consequently pretty shy. But he kept at it, and although he still speaks kind of slowly and with a pretty heavy accent, his vocabulary probably exceeds that of 75% of native English speakers in the US.
“Heeeey,” he grins broadly when I walk through the door. “You take the day off just to see me?”
“Just for you, Ho.”
“Oh, ha ha. I am so flattered,” he ribs me.
I take a seat next to him, and he (first generation Chinese), his coach (one white parent and one black is my guess, though I’ve never asked), and I (generic white guy) spend the next hour talking about segregation.
Ho has actually done his reading, so he gets a lot of the arguments we talk about right away. His strategy is not to argue in favor of segregation, but rather to contend that integration will happen on its own as the US becomes an increasingly diverse country, and that forcing the issue can actually make segregation worse. He is struggling to put the argument into words, and as he tries to explain back to me, he pauses for nearly two minutes. I’m about to help him along with the English when he says, “How about: ‘Although forced integration schemes were intended to desegregate schools, the have ironically caused more segregation by driving students out of urban school systems.”
Damn. I’m still staring in surprise when he continues, “Students will go to Newton and other suburbs, and it will be like an invasion of minorities all over Massachusetts.” Now both his teacher and I can’t help but burst out laughing.
“Ho, you should use a word other than invasion,” she explains, still smiling. “That has kind of a negative meaning to it.”
“Oh, ha ha, thank you. I do not want the people to throw tomatoes at me!” Seeing us laugh, he continues, “Faneuil Hall, it is just across the street from the market. It would be easy for them to get tomatoes, if they do not like my speech.”
“One more question, before you go,” Ho’s teacher asks. “He asked me whether he should dress up, and I told him to wear a tie.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to wear, Ho, but I’ll tell you this: I’m going to be wearing a suit. Are you lookin’ to get shown up by me?”
He laughs knowingly, and I’m sure he’ll find something appropriate to wear.
The next day, I call the reporter, who doesn’t have time to talk. There’s been a stabbing at a nearby high school, and she’s going to be covering that all day. It’s frustrating that every news outlet in the state is going to cover this stabbing, but I can’t get a single radio station to do more than one story on something positive that’s going on in the state’s troubled public high school system.
I’m still a little worried about the level of preparation of some of the students, but there’s nothing more I can do about it now. I’ve done my part, and now I just have to hope that eventually their fear of being embarrassed in public will motivate them to put some work into this.
I’m also a little worried, despite her teacher’s assurances, that Carla, who hasn’t been in school all week, isn’t going to show tomorrow. So I’m initially relieved when I answer my phone at about 9PM and hear her voice say, “Andrew, I’ve got a question about tomorrow.” However, it’s more than a little discouraging when the next thing she says is, “What side of the debate am I on again?”
Doing my best to remain calm, I walk her through the issue of desegregation again. Her gut reaction is to say it’s stupid for a school system to tell a student she can’t go to a certain school because of the color of her skin (ie the opposite side of the case she’s arguing), so I try to help her think about the possible benefits of integrated schools.
“Like, you get to meet different people and expand your horizons and stuff?”
“Yeah, and when would that be useful?”
“I don’t know, just like, to know more about different types of stuff.”
Hmmm, time for dealing with kids 101: make your examples specific to them. “What do you think it would be like if you were to a school with all Hispanic kids.”
“Hmmm. You mean, like, if you put a whole bunch of Spanish kids in one school, everybody would just act all crazy and stuff?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think that’s what you want to argue.”
“Well, I guess if you never had any experience with different types of people, you couldn’t like, get along with them later.”
“Like if you’re at your job and you have to work with a black person or a white person or something.”
“Yeah, alright, I get you.”
“Remember, Carla, show up early tomorrow morning. We’re going to have some volunteers from college debate teams to help you put the finishing touches on your speech.”
“I’m going to write my speech tonight, Andrew. Sorry to call you so late.”
“It’s alright, you can call me again if you need anything. Whatever time, I’ll keep my phone on all night.” I’m not sure if it’s a good sign or not, but my phone doesn’t ring again.
Labels: boston debate league, narrative, personal, race, urban debate league
Stumble It!
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Public Debates Part One: South Boston
Some quick background for those who don’t know this already: I was a nationally competitive debater in high school and college. In a lot of ways, I credit debate for making me the person I am now: confident, smart, socially conscious, well-read, and ethical. Debate helped me in school and helped me get into a good college. While in college, I started volunteering with, and then working for, Chicago’s Urban Debate League, a non-profit organization that starts debate programs in public high schools in Chicago.
After graduating from college, I turned down an offer of a full-time job with benefits (not a wise thing for a kid with a degree in philosophy to do) in the urban debate field so that I could be with my girlfriend in Boston. I missed the debate league, though, and so along with a friend of mine, I started a similar one in Boston. Two years later, six schools and about sixty students participate in our debate competitions.
Anyway, last Saturday we put on a series of public debates at Faneuil Hall, an historic building in Boston where Samuel Adams argued for revolution, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass argued for abolition, and Susan B. Anthony argued for women’s suffrage. I was obviously very excited to have my students become a part of the tradition of great debate at Faneuil Hall, but there was a lot of preparation to be done getting them ready to debate in front of an audience (generally, a single judge is the only witness to their debating).
Ten students from four different schools debated five different topics in a series of one-on-one debates. Although I provided them with background reading and some advice about how to prepare more than a month ago, I’ve worked with high schoolers long enough to know better than to expect that they will have done much of anything until I sit down with them and make them do it. So in the weeks before the event, I visited all of their schools to talk to the participants in person and explain what they would be doing and how they should prepare.
Two weeks before show time, I visited South Boston high school to meet with three of the public debaters. Although I recognize the faces of most of my debaters, I’m more of an administrator than a teacher or coach these days, so I don’t know them personally as well as I would like. It’s something I miss a lot. So although I knew who Carla (not her real name) was, it was almost like I was meeting her for the first time on this particular Wednesday.
Carla is in her first year of debate, and with only two competitions under her belt, is one of the least experienced students participating in the public debate. However, her coach, a wiry, balding, middle-aged history teacher who is also a boxer, ice hockey player, and lawyer, described her to me, in this thick Boston accent, as a “wookhaas” [workhorse] and assured me she’d be ready.
As I expected, she knew virtually nothing about her assigned topic, which was to argue that the Supreme Court should not prevent school districts from taking a student’s race into consideration when assigning her to a school. (For those who don’t know, two separate cases, one originating in Louisville and one in Seattle, are before the Supreme Court this term. In both cases, the school districts were seeking actively to integrate their schools by prohibiting, for instance, more black students from attending public schools that were already disproportionately black.)
When the Supreme Court first ruled in Brown v Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, it provoked massive conflict in the American South, where the only thing keeping black and white students separate were the laws prohibiting them from attending the same schools. In the North, however, neighborhoods were sufficiently segregated that the ruling had little effect, and with or without laws enforcing segregation, white students went to white schools and black students to black schools.
In the 1970’s, the Court started pursuing integration more actively, ordering the busing of students across major cities from white neighborhoods to black schools and vice versa. There were protests and riots akin to those seen two decades ago in the South, and in few places was the rioting worse than in South Boston, a working class white neighborhood.
Carla and I discussed this history a bit but talked mostly about the continued segregation of public schools in the US. Boston abandoned its controversial busing in favor of an “open enrollment” scheme where any Boston public high school student could end up at any high school in the city as a result of a complex preferencing system, similar in many ways to those in Louisville in Seattle, but with the important distinction that race is not a factor in the final assignment. Though the neighborhood of South Boston remains largely white, whites are now a minority at South Boston High. At least once year to this day, a teacher at the school tells me, students arrive at their school one morning to find graffiti reading, “Niggers go home. Keep Southie white.”
Carla is a pretty Hispanic girl, clearly very intelligent. She was flattered to be chosen as a participant in the event and blushed when I told her all the reasons she was selected (this to make her less nervous about speaking in front of an audience.) I don’t know how long her family has been in the US, but I’m guessing she is not first generation, given how well she speaks English.
I ask if anyone has any more questions, and Carla asks if I will be back next week. I wasn’t planning on it, but when she promises to have a draft of her speech typed up for me to review, I can’t say no. “I want to have everything finished by Monday, so I won’t have to worry about it,” she tells me. Add responsibility to her list of character traits.
On Friday, I realize that Monday is Martin Luther King day, and schools are closed. I call Carla’s coach and arrange to visit the school on Wednesday instead. On Tuesday night, I get a call from a reporter interested in doing a story on the public debate. I invite her to come with me to South Boston the next day, and she agrees.
When I arrive on Wednesday, two of the three students in Saturday’s debate, including Carla, are absent. Her coach tells me Carla hasn’t been in school all week. “What are the odds that she won’t show up on Saturday?”
“She’ll be thah,” he assures me.
I promised the reporter, who is from a local NPR affiliate, a chance to hear run-throughs of Saturday’s speeches. The only public debater present is Nina (not her real name), who is going to be advocating for guest worker legislation. I ask if she is ready to practice her first, four minute speech.
“Um, not quite.”
“Just give it your best.”
She stares at the reporter’s gigantic boom mic. “I have a question first.”
I walk over to stand next to Nina and look over her shoulder at her notes. “What’s up?”
“What’s guest worker legislation?”
Thankfully, as a radio reporter, our guest has no video camera to record the look of horror that flashes across my face. Not wanting to panic Nina, I do my best to explain the issue to her calmly and emphasize the importance of reading up on it in the next two days.
Although she didn’t get to hear as much public debate preparation as I’d promised, the reporter seemed really impressed with what she saw anyway. While I worked with some other students on the team, she interviewed Nina and the coach, and then when the students left, she interviewed me.
My philosophy is that the students make the best salespeople for the Boston Debate League. It’s virtually impossible to speak to them without being impressed by how smart, articulate, and outgoing they are. Consequently, I do what I can to encourage media coverage to focus on them rather than on me.
The story of a kid who plays poker to support a debate league for inner city youth seems like it might be a bit too enticing, so when she asks if running the League is a full-time job for me, I just tell her, “It feels that way sometimes.” Thankfully she laughs and moves on.
To be continued
Stumble It!
After graduating from college, I turned down an offer of a full-time job with benefits (not a wise thing for a kid with a degree in philosophy to do) in the urban debate field so that I could be with my girlfriend in Boston. I missed the debate league, though, and so along with a friend of mine, I started a similar one in Boston. Two years later, six schools and about sixty students participate in our debate competitions.
Anyway, last Saturday we put on a series of public debates at Faneuil Hall, an historic building in Boston where Samuel Adams argued for revolution, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass argued for abolition, and Susan B. Anthony argued for women’s suffrage. I was obviously very excited to have my students become a part of the tradition of great debate at Faneuil Hall, but there was a lot of preparation to be done getting them ready to debate in front of an audience (generally, a single judge is the only witness to their debating).
Ten students from four different schools debated five different topics in a series of one-on-one debates. Although I provided them with background reading and some advice about how to prepare more than a month ago, I’ve worked with high schoolers long enough to know better than to expect that they will have done much of anything until I sit down with them and make them do it. So in the weeks before the event, I visited all of their schools to talk to the participants in person and explain what they would be doing and how they should prepare.
Two weeks before show time, I visited South Boston high school to meet with three of the public debaters. Although I recognize the faces of most of my debaters, I’m more of an administrator than a teacher or coach these days, so I don’t know them personally as well as I would like. It’s something I miss a lot. So although I knew who Carla (not her real name) was, it was almost like I was meeting her for the first time on this particular Wednesday.
Carla is in her first year of debate, and with only two competitions under her belt, is one of the least experienced students participating in the public debate. However, her coach, a wiry, balding, middle-aged history teacher who is also a boxer, ice hockey player, and lawyer, described her to me, in this thick Boston accent, as a “wookhaas” [workhorse] and assured me she’d be ready.
As I expected, she knew virtually nothing about her assigned topic, which was to argue that the Supreme Court should not prevent school districts from taking a student’s race into consideration when assigning her to a school. (For those who don’t know, two separate cases, one originating in Louisville and one in Seattle, are before the Supreme Court this term. In both cases, the school districts were seeking actively to integrate their schools by prohibiting, for instance, more black students from attending public schools that were already disproportionately black.)
When the Supreme Court first ruled in Brown v Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, it provoked massive conflict in the American South, where the only thing keeping black and white students separate were the laws prohibiting them from attending the same schools. In the North, however, neighborhoods were sufficiently segregated that the ruling had little effect, and with or without laws enforcing segregation, white students went to white schools and black students to black schools.
In the 1970’s, the Court started pursuing integration more actively, ordering the busing of students across major cities from white neighborhoods to black schools and vice versa. There were protests and riots akin to those seen two decades ago in the South, and in few places was the rioting worse than in South Boston, a working class white neighborhood.
Carla and I discussed this history a bit but talked mostly about the continued segregation of public schools in the US. Boston abandoned its controversial busing in favor of an “open enrollment” scheme where any Boston public high school student could end up at any high school in the city as a result of a complex preferencing system, similar in many ways to those in Louisville in Seattle, but with the important distinction that race is not a factor in the final assignment. Though the neighborhood of South Boston remains largely white, whites are now a minority at South Boston High. At least once year to this day, a teacher at the school tells me, students arrive at their school one morning to find graffiti reading, “Niggers go home. Keep Southie white.”
Carla is a pretty Hispanic girl, clearly very intelligent. She was flattered to be chosen as a participant in the event and blushed when I told her all the reasons she was selected (this to make her less nervous about speaking in front of an audience.) I don’t know how long her family has been in the US, but I’m guessing she is not first generation, given how well she speaks English.
I ask if anyone has any more questions, and Carla asks if I will be back next week. I wasn’t planning on it, but when she promises to have a draft of her speech typed up for me to review, I can’t say no. “I want to have everything finished by Monday, so I won’t have to worry about it,” she tells me. Add responsibility to her list of character traits.
On Friday, I realize that Monday is Martin Luther King day, and schools are closed. I call Carla’s coach and arrange to visit the school on Wednesday instead. On Tuesday night, I get a call from a reporter interested in doing a story on the public debate. I invite her to come with me to South Boston the next day, and she agrees.
When I arrive on Wednesday, two of the three students in Saturday’s debate, including Carla, are absent. Her coach tells me Carla hasn’t been in school all week. “What are the odds that she won’t show up on Saturday?”
“She’ll be thah,” he assures me.
I promised the reporter, who is from a local NPR affiliate, a chance to hear run-throughs of Saturday’s speeches. The only public debater present is Nina (not her real name), who is going to be advocating for guest worker legislation. I ask if she is ready to practice her first, four minute speech.
“Um, not quite.”
“Just give it your best.”
She stares at the reporter’s gigantic boom mic. “I have a question first.”
I walk over to stand next to Nina and look over her shoulder at her notes. “What’s up?”
“What’s guest worker legislation?”
Thankfully, as a radio reporter, our guest has no video camera to record the look of horror that flashes across my face. Not wanting to panic Nina, I do my best to explain the issue to her calmly and emphasize the importance of reading up on it in the next two days.
Although she didn’t get to hear as much public debate preparation as I’d promised, the reporter seemed really impressed with what she saw anyway. While I worked with some other students on the team, she interviewed Nina and the coach, and then when the students left, she interviewed me.
My philosophy is that the students make the best salespeople for the Boston Debate League. It’s virtually impossible to speak to them without being impressed by how smart, articulate, and outgoing they are. Consequently, I do what I can to encourage media coverage to focus on them rather than on me.
The story of a kid who plays poker to support a debate league for inner city youth seems like it might be a bit too enticing, so when she asks if running the League is a full-time job for me, I just tell her, “It feels that way sometimes.” Thankfully she laughs and moves on.
To be continued
Labels: boston debate league, narrative, personal, race, urban debate league
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