Old School

Hell is always in the details. Our packets are full of brightly colored bar graphs breaking down the bad old news that test scores and other more comprehensive measures of academic progress reveal that way too many black students — 70, 80 percent — are not making the grade. They’ve never made it. Many of us who are solid members of the black middle class raised on the idea of education being the great equalizer — next to money — stare at the figures like we might stare at a palm reading that reveals something outlandish but incontestably true. No one says anything because there’s little to say. The midday sun pours in through the exit doors, which are starting to look very tempting; everyone feels summer ebbing, and the dire verdict growing, by the minute.

Then Marguerite LaMotte, the newly elected board member who represents Dorsey and adopted the initiative as a premier cause, starts speaking. Her voice quavers out of habit or fatigue, her hair doesn’t move, and in a blue pantsuit she cuts as bureaucratic a figure as anyone else in the LAUSD crowd. But as LaMotte explains the particulars of the graphs with an ex-principal’s rote composure, she is angry and rueful, and she connects with those of us who feel the same way but who have been too focused on shoring up positive energy, or too willing to ignore the feelings altogether, to vent them. This is our chance. The room rumbles with agreement and a fresh, improbable energy as LaMotte snaps into the mike that we all must stop being complacent, that we must stop setting the bar so low for black students that a five-point gain in test scores from one year to the next is cause for celebratory press conferences. “We have got to stop saying that black students are achieving when they’re not,” LaMotte says hotly, to rousing cheers. “When I was young, I was expected to achieve. Until we sit down now with LAUSD and be honest with ourselves, ain’t nothing gonna change.” The good news is that we know how to fight, she says, and that she knows from experience that kids, whatever their test scores, are never a lost cause. “Once you know where a child is,” LaMotte says, “you can take him or her as far as they can go.”

I leave feeling like I’ve snatched inspiration from its own ashes, like I got the best deal in town today; clearance shopping will be a bonus, if I do it at all. I search for my father to share the glow, then remember he had to leave mid-meeting to collect my mother and drive out to Las Vegas. It is their last small trip of the summer; for my father, it is but a break in the action. I resolve to brief the old-timer when he gets back.