What's the best method to propel a marble across the room and land it in a small bowl? Groups of students in Robert Schafer's first-period class discuss strategy, but the exercise is no simple variation on basketball.
The honors and AP physics class built catapults to launch the marbles in order to study motion, conservation of angular momentum and velocity. Complicated mathematical formulas are used to determine where the marbles will land. Each wooden catapult is unique, designed by the students themselves.
Now it is time for the big moment - to see whether the marble will literally fly.
"I feel like Neil Armstrong," says student Brandan James, backing up while holding out a bowl to catch the marble in a predetermined spot.
"Wait, wait," admonishes Schafer, a member of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). "You need to let me know before you do it. Maybe we should have an unmanned trial flight first."
James dons goggles to avoid getting beaned by the marble, which is catapulted several meters and narrowly misses the bowl. Then it's back to the drawing board, where students excitedly discuss angles, velocity, the effects of weights, "stoppers" and other physics-related topics.
Like the marbles, the students are hurtling toward a goal - college - at high velocity. They are figuring out all the angles to reach that goal. They are trying to catapult themselves, so to speak, into success. And they are trying to avoid the "stoppers" that hold back so many inner-city youths.
Larvell Minor and Samuel Coleman are hurtling toward success at a high velocity, just like the marbles they plan to launch with their miniature catapult. They observe carefully as Crenshaw honors and AP physics teacher Robert Schafer demonstrates how to make adjustments in their device.
All of the students in Schafer's classroom are enrolled in the gifted magnet program at Crenshaw Learn Charter High School, located in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles. They aren't your typical honor students. All of the students are minorities, and most live in South Central, Watts or surrounding areas. Focused on academics, determined to pursue an education and rise above poverty, these students defy the stereotype of inner-city youth.
These students offer living proof that there are alternatives to voucher programs for academic success ... if we care enough to invest in our students and our public schools.
The voucher initiative on the November ballot has been aimed at poor and minority communities, such as South Central. Taxpayer money would be used to pay tuition for some students to attend private schools. Rather than investing in public schools, and programs like the magnet program at Crenshaw, vouchers would siphon billions of dollars away from public schools. Private schools would, in turn, take the best and brightest students. Students left behind in schools already deteriorating and lacking resources would be much worse off.
At Crenshaw, nearly all of the best and the brightest in the magnet program will go on to college, many of them on scholarships. In one senior class on the verge of graduating, the students introduce themselves and then proudly call out the name of the university they have been accepted to in the fall. Some wear T-shirts of their future alma mater. They are success stories - and at the same time success stories waiting to happen.
Students in the magnet program at Crenshaw were recently featured in And Still We Rise, a book by Los Angeles Times reporter Miles Corwin. The journalist wanted to write about "the other children of South Central, the students who avoid the temptations of the street, who strive for success, who, against all odds, in one of America's most impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods, manage to endure, to prevail, to succeed." Some of the students live in foster and group homes because they have been abandoned or abused by their parents. The program has enrolled former gang members. Other academic achievers live in homes where the only source of family income is welfare. There are also many students living in single-family homes, students whose parents are working poor, and students living with aunts, uncles and grandparents.
The magnet program, which has 200 students and eight teachers, is a school within a school at Crenshaw, a campus patrolled full time by armed police officers that are necessary keep peace between rival gang members. The movie Boyz N the Hood was filmed at Crenshaw. Despite its notorious reputation, Crenshaw is also a place where many students are overcoming the odds. Approximately 98 percent of the magnet students go on to attend college.
Corwin spent the 1997-98 school year with students in the magnet program, which was the last graduating class to reap the benefits of affirmative action. Corwin believes that despite being in a gifted program, Crenshaw students are still at a disadvantage without affirmative action.
"They don't have the resources they should have. They don't have textbooks they should have. A lot of them have to work 40 hours a week to help support their families, and they also take a full load of honors classes. There are a lot of inequalities. Many of these kids walked in to take their SAT tests completely cold, while in suburban schools, parents are spending thousands of dollars on private tutors. I admire these kids because they are really focused. Against the odds, and despite the problems they face, they are able to succeed."
While the magnet program helps gifted students succeed, Corwin worries that inner-city schools like Crenshaw don't have enough resources to help all students.
"We need mainstream classes to also have high expectations, more resources, better teachers and better programs. It's time to put resources and high expectations in all schools, so other kids will have these opportunities. There need to be more preschool programs for children. A lot of kids are already behind when they enter kindergarten."
"I'm not in favor of vouchers," says Corwin. "The kids who will get into the voucher programs are those whose parents are most savvy, those whose parents have the best education and know how to operate the system. Parents who don't speak English or who aren't motivated won't participate."
Corwin also fears that vouchers could make things harder for students left behind at schools like Crenshaw. "And these kids are already dealing with problems that kids in middle-class neighborhoods couldn't even imagine."
"If I had to deal with some of the things these kids deal with, I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school," says Schafer.
"I can't imagine steering a straight course through high school with all the things going on in some of their lives. I have one student, a good chemistry student, who was cheerful and happy. Later on I found out that she was a witness to her mother being murdered by her father. Another student of mine has a mother who is a drug addict. When she visited him at his foster home, she stole his radio to buy drugs. These kids don't come from typical households."
What motivates these students to succeed?
"High expectations are definitely a big part of it. We emphasize that from the beginning; their coursework is designed to make them capable of succeeding in college courses."
Schafer is saddened by those who dismiss inner-city schools. "We need to invest in inner-city schools and emphasize to teachers how to reach inner-city students, as opposed to telling them: 'You're going to be a teacher, serve time in the inner-city, pay your dues and then go to the suburbs where the good kids are.' I love my students and I love working with them."
Down the hall in Harold Boger's calculus class, students are solving complex equations. A student asks Boger why she received a zero on her homework assignment.
"Jessica, Jessica, Jessica," admonishes Boger. "If you were a struggling student, I'd be much more lenient. It took me 15 minutes to figure out what you were doing. I'll give you 5 points, but it won't change your grade."
Later, Boger says inner-city kids can best succeed if teachers challenge and don't underestimate them. "When you push kids to work hard, they usually meet the challenges. Most of them come here with the goal of going to college. I try to get them to see what that really means. It's not enough to say, 'Where do you want to go to college?' I ask them, 'What are you doing every day to make sure it happens?' We try to break down goals into smaller chunks and say, 'This is where I want to be at the end of the week, the end of the month and the end of the year.'"
"And they need emotional support to go along with it," he continues. "It's taken me a long time, but I have finally realized that I get students to learn by building relationships with them. They really want someone to care about them. I'm always amazed at how important that is to every one of the students I have."
Boger, a member of UTLA, is opposed to vouchers. "Kids have the opportunity to get a good education at public high schools. This program proves that they have the opportunity to do that. It doesn't make sense to take money away from my school and my students, and siphon it off to private schools."
At lunchtime, students gather in Boger's class to eat lunch and talk about themselves and their school. Unlike many high school students, they are extremely articulate, confident and thoughtful.
"I aspire to be a doctor," says Jacqulyn Lindsey, 18. "To be successful, I have to focus on academics and make myself appealing to colleges, which means extracurricular activities. Also, I like to be the best at what I do, and work very hard to accomplish my goals. I have a lot of perseverance."
Along with the many hours of homework that is part of being enrolled in honors classes and extracurricular activities, Lindsey's job demanded 30 hours a week during her entire senior year. "My mother wants very much for me to succeed. A lot of people in my family have dropped out of school and gotten pregnant. I'm trying hard to keep focused. It's a lot of pressure put on me to succeed."
Azucena Flores, a 10th-grader, plans to become a lawyer. "My parents always told me that every minority kid has the opportunity to succeed and be the best at what they do," she relates. "Some people think you can't get a good education in public schools, but it's here - for students who want to take advantage of it. Just because you live in South Central and go to school here doesn't mean you can't get a good education if you want to."
All of the students say that wherever they go, they are treated differently because they hail from Crenshaw and are students of color.
"When I go to different student leadership conferences, they'll assume that I'm the only one whose GPA is not up to par," says Greg Johnson, a 10th-grader. "But I'm the first one to have my hand up and answer the questions correctly. Then they think, 'Maybe he does know something.' They expect me to be the quiet one in the back. I like proving them wrong. That's my passion."
"Sometimes when I start speaking, I blow some people's thoughts out of the water," says Ryan Francis, a 12th-grader. "I surprise them and I guess it's because, in the back of their minds, they were underestimating me."
How do these youths think public schools can best help all inner-city students succeed?
"There is a level of dignity that you have to give students," says Francis. "In junior high school, I was in magnet classes and magnet students were treated with more dignity. Our sides of the hallways were painted, clean and very nice. On the other side, lockers were broken, etc. We were treated with dignity and decided to live up to the expectations. I didn't want to fall short. Maybe all students should be treated with the same dignity."
"You can't just put higher expectations into place without building a foundation," says Lindsey, using the comparison of a crawling baby suddenly being told it is time to walk. "We need to start building the foundation of a good education at a very early age. It may take extra work, time and money, but it will pay off."
Many magnet students will be the first in their families to attend college, says Marilyn Washington, program coordinator and a UTLA member. But the media, preferring to focus on troublemakers rather than success stories, usually overlooks them.
"Public schools give students the opportunity to get everything they need academically, but most people would rather focus on tragedy than triumph," she says. "Some people think that children cannot be educated in an inner-city school, regardless of the program, so they send children to private schools. But here at Crenshaw, students can get what they need without the pressure of being the only African American child in the class." She recalls feeling that pressure during her own childhood: "Every time I spoke, I felt that I was standing up to represent my race and speaking on behalf of black America."
Inner-city teachers sometimes need to do more than just teach. "These students need encouragement, validation and nurturing, because sometimes these things are lacking when students come from a troubled background," says Washington. "I have students who don't have anybody at home who cares if they get straight A's."
"We need to not only invest in neighborhood schools, but work on ways to improve the communities in which we live," says Washington. "Kids have changed and society has changed. Our world has changed, and schools are a microcosm of that. Our schools can work. They have worked in the past and can work again. We have to make them work for the population we now have. We have to reinvent them and find a way to make them work. We can't afford to throw our children away."
The bell rings to signal the end of lunch time, and the hallway is filled with boisterous students heading to class. One Crenshaw student makes gang hand signals into the camera lens as the Educator photographer takes pictures. The magnet students go directly to class.
In Robin Lee's magnet art class, students are making colorful "prayer cloths" and Kente cloth patterns by gluing yarn into intricate and bold designs. Art projects are tied to studies of various cultures and religions, and Lee team-teaches with a world history teacher.
"Art allows students to have something tangible to hold in their hands and say, 'This is what I've done,' says Lee, a UTLA member. "They can say, 'I'm doing something creative, imaginative and inventive.' This crosses over to other classes and allows them to feel accomplished."
She holds a special admiration for her students. "Since they are in the gifted magnet program, they feel they have to be absolutely perfect, and no one is perfect all the time. That kind of pressure can sometimes be overwhelming. These kids work after school because they have to. Some are also doing community work and a lot of them are in clubs. They don't have the resources other kids have. They don't have computers at home, or transportation to get to the library. Some may not even feel safe going out at night to get to the library.
"I tell them the things they learn in my class are equivalent to what they are learning at the best private schools, and that I hold them to as high a standard as any teacher in a private school. They may be from South Central, but, when they come out of my class, they will be able to compete with anyone. They have the capacity and potential."
Down the hallway in Lisa Harwood-Lippa's integrated science class, 9th- and 10th-graders are studying the squid. A student raises her hand for help. Lippa recites the answer in a breathy voice as though reading an action-packed novel:
"In the living squid, the mantle cavity expands with muscular action and fills with water. The collar locks tightly against its head, leaving the siphon the only exit for water. The mantle muscle then contracts and water is squeezed through the siphon. This type of motion is called ... jet propulsion."
The students clap enthusiastically at her dramatization and return to working on their written analysis of the previous day's squid dissection.
When it comes to dissecting what makes her students tick, Harwood-Lippa talks about their creativity and uniqueness. "For the most part they are very hardworking," says the UTLA member, who has taught in the program for seven years. "They are very conscientious. I am proud of them. I am really rewarded when some of them call to tell me they've become a nurse or a doctor, and that I helped them reach that goal in science class. That usually happens a couple of times a year."
When Harwood-Lippa was eight months pregnant, toward the end of the '97-98 school year, a bullet was fired into her classroom from outside her window. She had been lecturing at the front of the class. Had she been sitting at her desk, the bullet would most likely have struck her in the head. A few years before, when she was teaching at another high school in South Central, a bullet struck her classroom wall. She was not in her classroom at the time, but if she had been lecturing in front of the class, the bullet would have hit her in the chest.
In the book And Still We Rise, Harwood-Lippa tells Corwin she will look for a teaching job away from the inner city. However, she has yet to leave Crenshaw's gifted magnet program, where she feels she is truly making a difference.
The school day ends and Crenshaw students stream noisily out of the school. Like marbles catapulting through space, they head off in different directions at different velocities. Some are going home to study; others are headed to jobs. Some will look for trouble - and find it. The parting words of student Jacqulyn Lindsey leave a lasting impression:
"You can find bad stuff in every school, but you can also get a good education. If you are looking to get a good education, you can find it. If you are looking for trouble, you can also find it. Students are not going to succeed if they don't want to. Schools need to provide motivation. If you are told you can't do something so many times, then you start to believe it. If you are told you can succeed, you start to believe that. We need to believe in our schools and our students if we want them to succeed."
