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67 If you scanned a sheet of Southwestern High School statistics, you’d see underneath the bolded headings, such as Student Population, that the school had a total enrollment of about 1,600, that (Ethnicity) 86 percent of our students were African American, 13 and change were white, and a small fraction of a percent were “other.” These are rather benign digits. But you’d also see under Population Per Class that the school had 604 freshman and only 206 seniors. This fact might spark your mental alarms. While it took three English teachers —Noelani, me, and Ms. Patterson—to instruct rowdy classes of ninth graders all day, only one teacher taught the senior English curriculum. Ms. Ellis was in her fifties, moved about the hallways slowly in sensible two-inch stacked heels, never raised her voice, or her eyebrows. When handed a memo that announced some outrageous policy that the rest of the teachers derided, Ms. Ellis just shrugged. She’d been around the block, she’d seen it all in Baltimore City. Her kids—those few that comprised one third of the original entering ninth-grade class—all had the same quality: steady, patient, unfaltering. It took a special quality to reach the “Senior Year” benchmark in west Baltimore. After all, hundreds of their peers hadn’t made it with them. When I passed Ms. Ellis’s classroom , it was only ever half full, and her kids—looking like fully grown men and women—spoke in low tones and had their books out. Sometimes I wondered if, when they glanced around the half-empty room, they remembered all the other kids, the ones who’d dropped out along the long way. On that stats sheet beneath Economics, you’d also read that half our kids qualified for free or reduced lunch. The sheet wouldn’t tell you, though, that nearly all the students would have qualified if they hadn’t been too ashamed to snag the form from the front-office counter. “They’re embarrassed to be seen with it,” said Ms. Brown in an extraordinary moment of candor, and she nodded to a stack of blank documents that asked students to report their households’ incomes. Chapter 5 When the State Walks In 68 Teaching in the Terrordome For Academic Performance you’d learn that forty percent of all ninth graders hadn’t passed the basic writing exam, that sixty percent of all ninth graders hadn’t passed the basic math test. Because these were called “functional” tests, this meant that, according to Maryland, about half the students were not. Not “functional,” that is. And you’ve already gotten a glimpse of what “non-functional reading” looked like in my first period. None of these statistics met what the state considered “Satisfactory.” Nor did Southwestern meet the “Satisfactory” standard for Attendance Rate, which was about sixty percent. A significant minority of names on my rosters never showed, or showed only for the first few days, and another significant minority of names faithfully attended each day. But the bulk of my students graced the building sporadically. Some popped in for a single weekly appearance, baffled by whatever I happened to be teaching that day. I was reminded of that adage, You can never stand in the same river twice, but in this case, I never taught the same class twice. Eventually, I got to be a good enough teacher that my lessons built on the previous ones, but this skill worked against my students and me, as I would say, “Remember yesterday, when . . .” and look out at the classroom but realize that “yesterday” featured Donte, Denise, James, Shonday, and today features Dezmon, another Dante, and Shontay, the twin sister of Shonday, but not Shonday. Neither was Southwestern “Satisfactory” in the category of School Climate. For the school to have possessed a “Safe and Orderly Climate,” it had to reduce its number of proposed suspensions for disruptive behavior by eighty percent. Eighty percent. The school attempted to achieve this by not suspending its students when they engaged in disruptive behavior. That the school was considered neither safe nor orderly was evident to any visitor who, after trudging up the stairs and through the halls, always asked me, “Are you between classes.” “No,” I said once to a suited white woman, and added, “This is second period.” Her eyebrows rose. The halls were crazy. No matter the time of day—morning or night, during class or between—the halls were never...

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