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129 CHAPTER NINE Race, Diversity, and a Bilingual Future The kids were starting to arrive at the Brennan-Rogers School, which serves some of New Haven’s most challenging students from kindergarten through eighth grade. It was half past eight on an overcast, lateMarch morning. Karen Lott, the principal, was patrolling the corridors of the Katherine Brennan building, which houses grades three and up. Lott, forty-five years old and African American, projected a no-nonsense demeanor, wearing a gray business suit and carrying a walkie-talkie. A tall girl with long braids passed by. Lott joked with her about the earmuffs she was wearing, but at the same time made it clear she wanted them off. The girl replied that no one had told her to remove them. “You have to be told not to wear earmuffs in school?” Lott responded. Next, Lott sidled up to a boy she had just seen bump into another student . “Ricky, was that really a polite thing to do?” she asked. “What?” “Just walk into him like that?” She gently put her hands on Ricky’s shoulders and guided him in the right direction. Everywhere you looked, there was an inspirational message of one sort or another. Overhead was a big red sign that said “Never Stop Trying.” On a wall in the lobby was the “Brennan-Rogers Code of Conduct”—five bullet points that simply read “Unity,” “Respect,” “Craftsmanship,” “Problem Solving,” and “Perseverance.” On another wall was a large poster labeled 130 CHAPT ER NINE “Celebrate Black History.” In the outer office was a sign hand drawn by the school secretary, Celeste Brown, reading “Only the Educated are Free,” accompanied by a smiley face. I had driven to Brennan-Rogers that morning with Melissa Bailey, the managing editor of the New Haven Independent, who had been covering the city’s nationally recognized education reform effort since its launch in 2009. By the time of our visit in 2011, Bailey had written dozens of stories about school reform. She had also put in many hours at BrennanRogers , a so-called turnaround school—an institution for low-achieving students where Lott had been granted authority to lengthen the school day, hire teachers of her choosing, and get rid of those who didn’t measure up. I observed as Bailey sat in on a meeting of eighth-grade language-arts teachers who discussed a class project based on the television series Lost. We listened as a teacher sought advice on how to help a student with reading problems. The highlight—and what Bailey ultimately chose to write about—was a meeting between Lott and a first-year teacher who was starting to find her footing after a rocky start. We were allowed to observe this formal teacher-evaluation session, or “T-Val,” on the condition that we not identify the teacher.1 The New Haven education reform story is about many things—whether administrators and union officials can work together to repair a broken school system; whether poor kids, many of them from dysfunctional families , can catch up with their peers rather than being permanently relegated to the underclass; whether Mayor John DeStefano, who had been in office for nearly two decades, could establish a new sense of mission late in his political career. As much as anything, though, it is a story about race. And that is because New Haven itself is a story about race. A majority of New Haven residents are nonwhite. Many of them are poor, with about a quarter of the city’s families living in poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43 percent of the city’s 129,779 residents are white, 35 percent are black, and 27 percent are “of Hispanic or Latino origin.” The racial tilt is far more pronounced in the city’s public schools: only 11 percent of the system’s nearly 21,000 students are white, compared to 55 percent African American and 31 percent Hispanic.2 The city has had just one nonwhite mayor in its history—John Daniels, an African American who served four years in the early 1990s and was succeeded by DeStefano. Yet the school system itself stands almost as an independent political power center, headed by a black superintendent, Reginald Mayo, who was named to the position in 1992, when Daniels was mayor.3 The city’s board of education is appointed rather than elected, which gives the [3.144.253.161] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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