Advanced Placement

I recently watched an HBO documentary entitled “Little Rock Central”. The documentary was made in 2007 to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the integration of the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957 a federal court ordered the school to allow Black children to attend, and the results became a landmark in the history of education and civil rights in the United States. The nine children that were selected to integrate the school would become known as the “Little Rock Nine”, and their initial attempt to attend the school would be met with a display of the most vicious anger and racist-fueled vitriol that can be imagined.

Not until President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched troops from the army’s 82^nd Airborne Division to escort and protect the children were they able to enter the school. The troops would continue to protect the children the entire year, escorting them in the hallways, in the cafeteria, and on the athletic fields for the entire year.

The producers of the documentary spent the entire year on the campus. The film gives intimate portrayals of many of the students and their parents. There are candid discussions with teachers, coaches, and the school’s Principal. Community activists and politicians are featured as well. I watched the documentary once, and then less than an hour later, I sat down and watched it again. It reminded me of so many things that I had to grapple with as Principal of my school, Crossland High in Maryland, and it also made me think of what might have been.

In 2007 Little Rock Central was considered one of the best high schools in the United States. It had more than 2000 students, and almost 50% of those students were minorities. Most of the white students were from excellent neighborhoods and stable, professional families, they also drove their own cars to school. They had the means to attend private schools but they chose to attend Central instead. The school is the most famous school in the country and receives tremendous support from various sources. It has a stellar academic reputation because so many of the white students take multiple advanced placement classes and are readily accepted into many of the top colleges in America.

Most of the Black students attending Central were there because it is their neighborhood school. The majority of them are depressingly poor, live in single parent homes, and come to the school reading two or three years below grade level. Most of them ride the bus to school. Ironically, the student body President was an exception to the prevailing misery in the Black community. He is a Black student that had a profile similar to the white students. He lived in a white neighborhood, and had a stable, nuclear family. He had college educated parents, had plans to go to college himself, drove his own car to school, and took multiple advanced placement classes.

Remove the white students from the picture, and you have what I had when I walked into Crossland High.

As I watched this excellent film, the frustrations of the Principal reminded me of my own. So many of the Black students reminded me of my students, and I will never be able to forget them, including the athlete whose mother threw him out of the house, that had terrible grades because he didn’t go to class, mindlessly betting his life on a career in professional sports. Or, the sweet young girl that had taken it upon herself to take an advanced placement class, conceding that she might fail but refusing to quit. I will never forget the camera following her home as she walked through a neighborhood one would expect to see in a third world country, into her cramped home where she described the sink that didn’t work and the room she shared with her brother. Or the pride she had in the fact that her mother did not have multiple men hanging around their home. Nor will I forget the young girl with the wonderful attitude that was only fifteen but had not one, but two children, and her sister that was younger than her and teased her because she only had one baby. The camera followed her as she walked to school one day as well, casually describing a crack house as she passed it, and explaining that the kids usually stayed inside because the “crack heads were crazy”. She arrived to school late, like so many of my students did.

Little Rock’s Central High School was de-segregated in 1957, but fifty years later, it was still not integrated. Black and white students rarely mixed. If they were in the same class they sat on separate sides of the room. They separated themselves in the cafeteria. There were no Blacks on the golf team. There were very, very few Black students in advanced placement classes.

At the conclusion of my first year as Principal at Crossland we had more than 2000 students enrolled but only 7 took advanced placement courses. By the time I left nine years later we had more than 700 students taking advanced placement courses. The demographics remained the same. The socioeconomic conditions of the students remained the same. But, many other things changed.

Education without literacy is impossible. If our students came to us unable to read on grade level, we had to teach them to read, so we did.

We did not ask or try to convince our students to do what was in their academic best interests, we required them to do it. Our goal was to graduate our students “college and/or career ready”. Consequently, once our students were reading on grade level, they were required to take at least one advanced placement course.

We changed expectations for students, parents, teachers, and the community. The pursuit of excellence in behavior, attendance, academics, athletics, college applications, college acceptances, and community service became the norm.

We could not have raised our academic expectations without the framework of advanced placement. These college level courses brought their own standards, their own unbiased curriculum and exams. The teachers by design expected more, and the students expected more as well.

What we did was controversial at times. I was met with reactions from skepticism to hostility. But the results were indisputable. Our student’s scores on the Maryland state exams in math improved each year from a 15% pass rate to 76%, and in English they improved each year from 22% to 78%. From 2005 through 2011, 70% of our seniors applied to 4 year colleges, with a 90% acceptance rate.

As a result of our student’s academic achievements, our school was featured by The Washington Post, the Center for American Progress, the Heritage Foundation, The University of Pennsylvania, The State of Delaware, Forbes Magazine, The American Diploma Project, The US Department of Education, and invited to visit the White House.

I can only wonder what type of school we would have had if half of Crossland’s students were the kind of white students depicted in the Little Rock Central documentary.