cent. Why? The teachers call home when the students are absent.... You have got to personalize and individualize. Love requires a personal touch. When teachers call parents, parents know they care. Kids know they care. The students understand there is a relationship now between this teacher and my parent.... I now understand there is an extended family relationship. Washington High School started talking about caring and sharing. A lot of people didn’t buy into that so they left the school. I am talking about the teachers. No students were kicked out of school. I take great issue with some of these pseudoheroes in America today. One of them is praised by Secretary Bennett, you know—Joe Clark, Eastside High School, Patterson, New Jersey. Black man carries a bullhorn into a black school and cleans it up by kicking out 300 kids. Item, item, read it on the news. Ridiculous to brag about the fact that you kicked 300 kids out of school. You put 300 predators on the street and everybody else becomes prey. You don’t brag about that. That’s not an educational model. That’s absolute insanity for an educator to brag about the fact that he kicked people out of school. But, you see, when you happen to be black and you walk into a black school somebody assumes that you are a good overseer. And you can get away with that for black people. That’s the way you treat black people. You take that same black face wi,th the bullhorn and go into white affluent America and you’d be hanging from a tree before nightfall. Because they don’t tolerate that kind of abuse. But we accept it. As a matter of fact we even expect it f rom ti me to t ime.... When I told the teachers I was going to give mandatory homework ...they got mad about that. “ You can’t make me give homework,” they said. Of course I can. The choice is yours how much to give and what to give, but not whether you will give it.... Homework ought to be mandatory across America. Let me give you an example. If every Monday night, across America, we gave mathematics homework, then no parent on Monday in America from kindergarten through college would ever have to ask that child, “ Do you have homework tonight?” Well it's Monday, isn’t it? And it ’s America, right? Then you have mathematics homework. The advantage of that is that every television station could tune into math exercises between the commercials. Instead of selling Miller beer we could do a math exercise and give the answer between the shows. From one show to the other. Every crossword puzzle in the newspaper, every television and radio station could tune into math exercises, solving equations and talking about the consciousness of math. You would not have to be so paranoid that the Japanese are coming, the Japanese are coming. The Japanese have a right to be excellent in their system, all we have to do is institutionalize excellence.... We have a dress code.... Young men cannot wear gang attire. No brothers get to wear earrings in their ears. I don’t care if they wear them on the streets. That’s up to them. That’s a fad. But not on campus because I know they don’t get to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court with rollers and curlers and that kind of stuff.... How are you going to keep kids from dropping out of school? Make them successful in school. (Then) they won’t leave.... Washington High School had support systems for kids. Tutoring programs, every Saturday. 1 started the tutoring program, running it for five years now, started it all by myself.... Ail the teachers don’t teach the students in a way they are going to understand. So there needs to be a secondary support system. Where does the tutor come from? Use your academically gifted kids to tutor the ones that are not too proficient. You can go out and get fraternities and You must be the catalyst who makes the social change, but you have to first understand that it is possible to change and necessary to change. sororities to...do things.... They can sing the alma mater all night long.... They can also do tutoring. Church people praying every Sunday say they want to help. After Sunday, when do they help? I built a vehicle. Now we have a school full of people on Saturday getting tutoring.... Every teacher should be teaching skills in the content areas. What skills? Speaking, writing, reading, listening, thinking, studying, and test taking.... (These) can be taught by an English teacher, a physical education teacher, an art teacher, a geography teacher, a chemistry teacher. You should not just be corrected in your writing by your English teacher, your math teacher should give you writing exercises as well.... Let me get back on another issue. We need to be teaching our young people how to care for each other.... If you are a good student, and you get your high school diploma and you left your brothers and sisters behind, you haven’t done them a favor because you got yours. If they don’t get theirs you’re in trouble. You either take care of them now or they’ll take care of you later.... Football players play football on Friday night across America. On Saturday morning those same strong young bodies get up after beating each other up over a football game and, led by their coach, go out into the neighborhood and help some old lady cut her grass, or roll the wheelchair of the crippled child, or read to the blind or help the aged in the convalescent home who can’t feed themselves. If the football players can’t do that they lost the real game.... If you don’t teach the kids to love don’t be surprised when they turn into predators and scavengers in your community and form things called gangs.... Washington High School had one of the most notorious street gangs in the world.... It was born in 1969, called the Crips. You are going to get Crips here real soon, too. Crips are everywhere. Well let me tell you about Crips. Crips are just kids who don’t have leadership. Washington High School had Crips, Brimms, Southlose, Inhoods, Raymonds, Rolling Sixties—all of that on thecampus at the same time. And the teachers are telling me, “Well, you have to cut the campus up into territories. Crips has their part of the campus and Brimms is over there.” I couldn’t believe that. I said, wait a minute. Has anybody ever told these brothers that they are all born by the same creator, that they all come from women, anybody ever told them that?... They said, “ Well you can’t bring them together.” I said that’s a lie. And today there is only one gang on the campus at Washington High School. It is called the Washington Generals, that’s the motto of the school. That’s our logo. Washington Generals. And you are looking at the gang leader. That’s real simple. That’s not heroic. That’s just common sense. Somebody’s got to be in charge. If not, the inmates will (be).... Let’s talk about the structural programs. Teachers at my schools do lesson plans...so I can see what everybody is teaching. Do you know that you can have a situation where three teachers are teaching algebra all out of the same book and they are 40 pages apart and they all call it algebra?... Good teachers shouldn’t want to be that far apart. They should be sharing with each other. When is the last time any teachers saw each other teach?... If you don’t do that you are not learning anything. If the only person you see teach is yourself, what makes you think you are so darn perfect?... If I am not a capable teacher I should either be improved or I should be moved.... You can’t allow the mediocre to pass themselves off as excellent...just tolerating it and saying “ I wish I’d get some better people.” That’s the same thing the teachers say, “ I wish I’d get some better kids.” The kids are not going to get any better. The teachers are not going to get any better. You have to be the one to improve the product or get rid of the people.... You can’t let them institutionalize inferiority within the system.... Do the good teachers in your schools all fight to teach the good, and therefore the kids who need the most help are given the teachers with the least capability? And so all of the excellent math teachers get to teach the high-level math and the kids who still can’t do long division never get to see that kind of teacher. They still get the teachers who don’t like math themselves.... Excellent teachers need to be teaching kids who need the most. They should be shared. Sure somebody’s got to teach the (advanced math) class but somebody’s got to teach the remedial math class as well, and it should be shared. You can’t institutionalize that separatism because then you have got elitism. Which is another one of those “ isms” that we have to protect ourselves against. Do you say to the academically gifted kids that they have a responsibility for reaching down to the other students? You students have to understand this.... You can’t just get yours without helping somebody else.... I (want to say a few words) about cause and symptom.... If I gave you 10 billion dollars and asked you to cure lung cancer, you’d go out and spend your money on hospitals and research and doctors and state-of- the-art technology and you’d say you were attacking lung cancer. But all you’d be dealing with is a symptom. I’d take the same 10 billion dollars and attack tobaccoism. Because that’s how to eliminate lung cancer. You want to cure the ills of society, don’t start with the symptoms on the outside. Go to the source, the public school system. That’s where the kids have to come everyday. They shouldn’t have to leave the campus to go see a probation officer. Probation officers ought to come to them on campus. You want to stop dropouts? You can spend money on counselors if you want to.... I’d take my money and put it into peer counseling. If this side of the room was about to drop out and all had the profile of a dropout...I’d take this bunch over here who loves school, who wouldn’t drop out to save (your) soul—cheerleaders and ball players and musicians and good students and just average everyday kids who like coming to school. I’d pay you a minimum wage to take some training in peer counseling. The (potential dropouts) would become your clientele. You’d call them every morning, tell them you love them, tutor them, support them, drag them to school. If you had to you would drag them to the tutoring program, bring them everyday, from September to Thanksgiving, get them from Thanksgiving to Christmas, from Christmas to January—and you’ve made a semester. That’s a lot in life. Just to hang in there one more semester, because in high school is when they start dropping out. They start thinking about it in Junior High School. But they are not strong enough to do it. So all of the kids pretty much get to high school but it ’s at the ninth and tenth grades they start giving up because they don’t have a support base. And both groups would be enriched by this because this group would be demonstrating love, which is rewarding in itself, and this group would be receiving love, which is certainly rewarding, and they would transmit it to somebody else. The revolution can take place right at the school site.... You can spend your money on teachers if you want to and more professionals if you want to, just like the war on poverty. Hire a lot of middleclass people to keep the people poor. But the poor people stay poor. The war on povertyjust got a whole bunch of jobs for some middle class people. You’d be better to talk about empowering the people to help themselves. These kids are not going to ask you for pay raises, overtime, worker’s comp—they don’t care. If the money runs out, they like helping their friends. In Los Angeles they call them their “ home tjoys” and “ home girls.” They live in the neighborhood. They don’t mind helping. (If) you want to eradicate a gang problem and you have got a little money to do that, don’t put your money into more police. Don’t put your money into more crime prevention. Don’t put your money into more jails and tougher sentences and more hardware. Put your money into community-based people and put them to work on the school site campus. If it were up to me I would find every school that’s already in gang territory...and I’d put in a communitybased person, somebody who lives in that community. A respected member of that community. Pay them a decent wage—$15,000 to $20,000 a year. They’d work on the campus just like a regular member of the staff. They’d start working with fourth grade young males.... Let us not kid ourselves. I am not talking about being inequitable to ladies.... The death rate among the males is so high nowadays that ladies are not going to have Photo by John Danicic Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 9
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