Issue Twelve
Between Hope and Midnight by Thomas J. Harrison
“It squats behind New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, behind its red carpets and chandeliers, a large cube of browned steel and dull glass, as if fashioned from building scraps...”
They travel from the outer boroughs and Harlem, from the Heights and some even journey from New Jersey to this Upper West Side public school. If commitment carried a first name, it belongs to every student who arrives before the first period bell at Martin Luther King Jr. High School for Law, Advocacy & Community Justice. The school building exists in the neighborhood’s shadow. It squats behind New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, behind its red carpets and chandeliers, a large cube of browned steel and dull glass, as if fashioned from building scraps.
I journeyed north from Washington, D.C., drawn to Manhattan by the story of one woman’s improbable fight to deliver on the dream of the school’s namesake. Instead, I found a haunting truth.
On the day of my visit, senior Carmen Paulina had traveled over an hour to get to school. She spent her fourth period applying to college. With matter-of-fact exuberance she shares her desire to study psychology, sociology, philosophy, english, journalism, and romance languages. The first three subjects intertwine in her mind.
“It’s about human nature, right? The mind, people, how they are, society, culture.” There is no trace of New York City in her speech or the Dominican Republic of her youth. If dream had a first name, it would be Carmen.
All of the hallway clocks are frozen at a few minutes past 12:00 at MLK. The building is perpetually at either noon or midnight, either screaming with hopeful life or flooded with silent despair. The building spent a good portion of its life scudding through midnight. It opened in 1975 as a promising effort at racially integrated education. Such dreams soon withered and MLK became a destination for African-American and Latino students who could not gain admission to more elite schools. Graduation rates hovered between 30-40 percent. In Shame of a Nation, Jonathan Kozol described MLK as “one of the most visible and problematic symbols in the nation of an education rapidly receding and a legacy substantially betrayed.”
In 2002, the school was broken up into small learning communities as a way to reduce violence and refocus on education. But in the fall of 2004, as a fourth small school was fitted into the building, the Law, Advocacy & Community Justice School teetered towards permanent midnight. In this learning community partitioned off on the building’s fourth floor, 291 of its 400 students were classified as freshmen by the number of credits acquired. Only 38 of the 110 students entering their third year were academically qualified juniors. An appalling 55 students had been in the school for one or two years and had accumulated no credits at all. Teachers were essentially abandoned and worked without oversight or school-wide curriculum.
That fall, an assembly was convened to introduce the small school’s new principal, its third one as it entered its third year. Before her arrival, the staff had not come together for such an assembly in a year.
“I had been told that the students had a history of being rowdy during assemblies,” recalls Principal Miriam Nightengale.
She was introduced. Before she could address her audience for the first time, such reports were confirmed. She had to pause for scattered boos.
Nightengale tried to still the small tremors running through her hands. She remembered carrying the same feeling pitted in her stomach on her first day of teaching. In seconds, her Assistant Principal’s presence calmed the students. Nightengale looked out at the quiet, expectant audience and, for the first time, wondered if she could reach them.
After the assembly, Nightengale did little to improve her popularity and everything to change the story of her school. She made student fun contingent upon academic performance. Seniors were scratched from senior trips when attendance targets were not met. Dances scheduled near finals week were cancelled. She replaced staff and shed high failure rate classes. She governed with the strict, no-nonsense rule of a parent. Grades come before fun.
This short, sprite-like woman who suddenly appears at the door of the principal’s office possesses the immediacy and lack of pretense you expect from your mom. A facilities tour has dirtied her nails and may explain her baggy black sweater with its sleeves pushed up, the matching jeans, and wild wisps of brown curls nested around her pale face. Nightengale displays a strip of moods, flashes that are almost too quick for the eye. Hands and arms fling wide open, welcoming all. A frame later, her eyes flame with a preacher’s passion. She is then overcome with laughter. Her body trembles with gestures and expressions, interrupted by occasional pauses when she stares at her hands in a reflective quiet. It is not surprising that Ms. Nightengale began her professional career running a theater in Chicago, until a recurring theme of her life took hold–go where you are needed. If she is playing a role, she lost herself in it long ago.
“If you go to my high school,” she tells me, “I will guarantee that you will apply to college.”
Nightengale understands that college graduation is almost a matter of life or death for her kids. College graduates can look forward to greater earnings, longer and healthier lives, more stable marriages, more interesting careers, and more meaningful personal lives.1 Although 56% of 18-24 year olds attended college in 2004, only 31% of low-income students were enrolled in some form of post-secondary education as opposed to 79% of high-income students. Despite higher education’s ostensible commitment to meritocracy, the gap between lower-income student college matriculation and middle-to-higher income students’ matriculation has remained virtually unchanged since the 1960s.2
She selected a few seniors from MLK, including Carmen Paulina and Barry Abdoul, for peer college advisor leadership training through non-profit College Summit. They help inspire and push their classmates to apply to college. In addition, twice a week, English instruction is swapped for a curriculum that guides seniors through the college application maze. Every day, teachers and students, like Carmen and Barry, answer the call of Nightengale; “go where you are needed.”
The strategy of shared responsibility is beginning to work. In 2006, 66 MLK seniors graduated on-time, over 40% more students than were academically on track to do so the year before. According to Nightengale, 65 of these graduates went on to college.
After 5pm, the last students will exit and weave their way among the bright blue and soft gold flowerpots–urns intended to hold life–that dot the front courtyard of MLK. All the vegetation in the pots lie shriveled, killed by the February cold. They will hopefully return to life about the same time that students receive their college acceptance letters.
Despair may be ever present, but here hope has a voice. It belongs to Nightengale; it belongs to Carmen and Barry and the spirited students you meet strolling in MLK’s hallways and it belongs to the teachers at MLK who trudge in early each morning to help their students send out college applications and financial aid forms. They know that rhetoric does not pay postage and good intentions do not fill in boxes on a FAFSA. But it is in these forms, in the picayune bureaucratic details of applying to college, that the greatest social justice issue of our times is being fought.
1 (see National Center for Educational Statistics, National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988/2000; David Brooks, “The Education Gap,” The New York Times Op-Ed, 9/25/05; The Value Added of an Independent School Education, NAIS Publications; Indicators of Opportunity in Higher Education: Fall 2004 Status Report, The Pell Institute.
2 See Indicators of Opportunity in Higher Education: Fall 2004 Status Report, The Pell Institute; Ross Douthat, “Does Meritocracy Work?” The Atlantic Monthly, November, 2005, pp. 120-126.
I journeyed north from Washington, D.C., drawn to Manhattan by the story of one woman’s improbable fight to deliver on the dream of the school’s namesake. Instead, I found a haunting truth.
On the day of my visit, senior Carmen Paulina had traveled over an hour to get to school. She spent her fourth period applying to college. With matter-of-fact exuberance she shares her desire to study psychology, sociology, philosophy, english, journalism, and romance languages. The first three subjects intertwine in her mind.
“It’s about human nature, right? The mind, people, how they are, society, culture.” There is no trace of New York City in her speech or the Dominican Republic of her youth. If dream had a first name, it would be Carmen.
All of the hallway clocks are frozen at a few minutes past 12:00 at MLK. The building is perpetually at either noon or midnight, either screaming with hopeful life or flooded with silent despair. The building spent a good portion of its life scudding through midnight. It opened in 1975 as a promising effort at racially integrated education. Such dreams soon withered and MLK became a destination for African-American and Latino students who could not gain admission to more elite schools. Graduation rates hovered between 30-40 percent. In Shame of a Nation, Jonathan Kozol described MLK as “one of the most visible and problematic symbols in the nation of an education rapidly receding and a legacy substantially betrayed.”
In 2002, the school was broken up into small learning communities as a way to reduce violence and refocus on education. But in the fall of 2004, as a fourth small school was fitted into the building, the Law, Advocacy & Community Justice School teetered towards permanent midnight. In this learning community partitioned off on the building’s fourth floor, 291 of its 400 students were classified as freshmen by the number of credits acquired. Only 38 of the 110 students entering their third year were academically qualified juniors. An appalling 55 students had been in the school for one or two years and had accumulated no credits at all. Teachers were essentially abandoned and worked without oversight or school-wide curriculum.
That fall, an assembly was convened to introduce the small school’s new principal, its third one as it entered its third year. Before her arrival, the staff had not come together for such an assembly in a year.
“I had been told that the students had a history of being rowdy during assemblies,” recalls Principal Miriam Nightengale.
She was introduced. Before she could address her audience for the first time, such reports were confirmed. She had to pause for scattered boos.
Nightengale tried to still the small tremors running through her hands. She remembered carrying the same feeling pitted in her stomach on her first day of teaching. In seconds, her Assistant Principal’s presence calmed the students. Nightengale looked out at the quiet, expectant audience and, for the first time, wondered if she could reach them.
After the assembly, Nightengale did little to improve her popularity and everything to change the story of her school. She made student fun contingent upon academic performance. Seniors were scratched from senior trips when attendance targets were not met. Dances scheduled near finals week were cancelled. She replaced staff and shed high failure rate classes. She governed with the strict, no-nonsense rule of a parent. Grades come before fun.
This short, sprite-like woman who suddenly appears at the door of the principal’s office possesses the immediacy and lack of pretense you expect from your mom. A facilities tour has dirtied her nails and may explain her baggy black sweater with its sleeves pushed up, the matching jeans, and wild wisps of brown curls nested around her pale face. Nightengale displays a strip of moods, flashes that are almost too quick for the eye. Hands and arms fling wide open, welcoming all. A frame later, her eyes flame with a preacher’s passion. She is then overcome with laughter. Her body trembles with gestures and expressions, interrupted by occasional pauses when she stares at her hands in a reflective quiet. It is not surprising that Ms. Nightengale began her professional career running a theater in Chicago, until a recurring theme of her life took hold–go where you are needed. If she is playing a role, she lost herself in it long ago.
“If you go to my high school,” she tells me, “I will guarantee that you will apply to college.”
Nightengale understands that college graduation is almost a matter of life or death for her kids. College graduates can look forward to greater earnings, longer and healthier lives, more stable marriages, more interesting careers, and more meaningful personal lives.1 Although 56% of 18-24 year olds attended college in 2004, only 31% of low-income students were enrolled in some form of post-secondary education as opposed to 79% of high-income students. Despite higher education’s ostensible commitment to meritocracy, the gap between lower-income student college matriculation and middle-to-higher income students’ matriculation has remained virtually unchanged since the 1960s.2
She selected a few seniors from MLK, including Carmen Paulina and Barry Abdoul, for peer college advisor leadership training through non-profit College Summit. They help inspire and push their classmates to apply to college. In addition, twice a week, English instruction is swapped for a curriculum that guides seniors through the college application maze. Every day, teachers and students, like Carmen and Barry, answer the call of Nightengale; “go where you are needed.”
The strategy of shared responsibility is beginning to work. In 2006, 66 MLK seniors graduated on-time, over 40% more students than were academically on track to do so the year before. According to Nightengale, 65 of these graduates went on to college.
After 5pm, the last students will exit and weave their way among the bright blue and soft gold flowerpots–urns intended to hold life–that dot the front courtyard of MLK. All the vegetation in the pots lie shriveled, killed by the February cold. They will hopefully return to life about the same time that students receive their college acceptance letters.
Despair may be ever present, but here hope has a voice. It belongs to Nightengale; it belongs to Carmen and Barry and the spirited students you meet strolling in MLK’s hallways and it belongs to the teachers at MLK who trudge in early each morning to help their students send out college applications and financial aid forms. They know that rhetoric does not pay postage and good intentions do not fill in boxes on a FAFSA. But it is in these forms, in the picayune bureaucratic details of applying to college, that the greatest social justice issue of our times is being fought.
1 (see National Center for Educational Statistics, National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988/2000; David Brooks, “The Education Gap,” The New York Times Op-Ed, 9/25/05; The Value Added of an Independent School Education, NAIS Publications; Indicators of Opportunity in Higher Education: Fall 2004 Status Report, The Pell Institute.
2 See Indicators of Opportunity in Higher Education: Fall 2004 Status Report, The Pell Institute; Ross Douthat, “Does Meritocracy Work?” The Atlantic Monthly, November, 2005, pp. 120-126.