Breaking Out, Then and Now

By SYLVESTER MONROE CHICAGO

Do you feel that you are getting a good education at Phillips High School?" asks Leroy Lovelace, pacing the aisles of his classroom. "Yeah," booms a male voice from the back row, "because most of the teachers seem concerned if you fail or not. A whole lot of teachers up here care. Even you, Mr. Lovelace."

"How do you know whether or not I care?" the teacher challenged.

"Because you told us not to miss more than 10 days every semester or our grades would start going downhill," the student said.

"Then why is it, Russell, that we have such a serious attendance problem?" Lovelace asked.

"Some students just get tired of coming to school," said Russell. "They forget it, and just quit coming."

For the past 33 years, Lovelace's caring, demanding classroom style has helped keep countless kids in school and pushed many further than they thought they could ever go. I know. I was one of them. Lovelace was my freshman honors-English teacher and the man who first inspired me to become a writer. But even though Lovelace is still at his post, Phillips today bears little resemblance to the school I attended 25 years ago. Back then, it had 4,000 students and anchored the black Chicago community where I grew up. Today, with enrollment down to only 1,171, there is talk of closing the three-story, 88- year-old brick structure that is the alma mater of such celebrities as Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke and Dinah Washington as well as hundreds of black business and professional leaders. "Although the school is not what it was back in the '60s, it certainly does do a lot for this community," says Lovelace. "A lot of students look upon this school as a positive force."

One of them is Keri Wingo, 17. A senior at Phillips this year, Keri is a bright, motivated kid who goes to school every day. He does not use drugs and is not in a gang. A varsity football and baseball player, he is hoping a scholarship to college will help him break free of the ghetto. "I want to get out of the projects," says the 6-ft. 2-in., 240-lb. lineman and outfielder. "I want to go to college. I want to make something of myself. I don't just want to be another victim of the ghetto." But sometimes Keri finds it difficult to keep focused. The short two-block walk to school from the small, spartan apartment he shares with his mother and two younger brothers is anything but encouraging. Boarded-up windows, piles of bricks from collapsed buildings, burned-out vacant lots and bustling liquor stores are all that's left of the neighborhood he calls home.

"If you look at all the abandoned businesses and you see all the homeless people, it's very depressing," he says. "Where is the community service? Where are the kids going to play on a cold day?" In many ways, Phillips is all that stands between Keri and the mean streets of Chicago. If the school does close, he says, he might drop out rather than run the gauntlet of hostile gangs to attend school in another neighborhood. His mother's insistence and his own determination, though, will probably prevent that drastic step. Another thing that keeps Keri in school is concern for his brothers, five- year-old Quentin, who has a learning disability, and three-year-old Detwone. "I don't want them to end up victims of the streets," he says. "I want them to get their education and try to follow my footsteps so far."

- In many ways, Keri's life mirrors my own. As eldest children in single- parent families, we both lived in public housing projects with supportive mothers who drummed the value of education into us from an early age. "My mother's real strong with me," he says. "She made sure I didn't hang out with the bad groups, and she made sure I got good grades." Both of us also had the good fortune of landing in Leroy Lovelace's classroom. When Keri's grades slipped during his first semester with Lovelace, the teacher landed on him with both feet. "At some point," says Keri, "everybody needs to have a teacher like Mr. Lovelace."

But the similarities end there. When I was at Phillips, it was an asset to be young, gifted and black. Today being a young black from this desolate neighborhood is a serious liability. Not that the situation was idyllic in my day: even then, Phillips was an example of 100% de facto segregation, as was the neighborhood where I grew up and where Keri now lives. But there was hope in our world. The civil rights movement was in high gear, and most kids my age still dared to dream. And with hard work, determination and a little help from a variety of successful Great Society programs, many of those dreams came true. In my case, the road up and out was a scholarship to St. George's, a prep school in Newport, Rhode Island, via a special outreach program called A Better Chance.

Originally funded through the now defunct federal Office of Economic Opportunity, ABC still places minority kids in up-scale independent schools across the country. More than 8,100 have graduated since the program began in 1964. But the program no longer receives any government money and is completely funded by private grants and alumni contributions.

Even when government support was at its peak, the relatively small ABC reached only a limited number of students. But there were numerous other community-based programs -- a 4-H Club, student social centers and one-on-one adult mentoring sessions, for example -- that helped fill the gap. Funded by federal and state grants to the school district, such after-hours programs kept kids off the streets even while reinforcing what was learned in class. Today that kind of support has been decimated by budget cutbacks, and the community's social and economic infrastructure has all but vanished. "All those positive things to get you involved and keep you involved, we lack those today," says Lovelace. "We just don't have the funds for it. And kids are getting involved in gangs and what-have-you because they don't have anything else to do."

Today there often isn't even enough money to ensure that the schools open at all. In fact, money is the biggest difference between the Chicago school system I attended in the '50s and '60s and the one Keri Wingo attends today. In my 10 years in Chicago public schools, I never missed a single day of class because of a teachers' strike or budget deficit. But every September for the past decade, Keri has had to wait and wonder whether his school would open on time. Five times it did not.

So severe is the money crunch that next June the remaining 43 of 129 Head Start classes taught in Chicago public schools since 1965 will be phased out. School officials voted two years ago to end Chicago's 27-year relationship with the highly regarded preschool program because of concerns that federal grants for the program would not cover a 21% pay raise for teachers.

When I went to school in Chicago, even though the schools I attended were black, the school system was mostly white. Today only 11.6% of Chicago's 409,731 public school children are white. Phillips' current problems reflect the great divide that separates nearly all inner-city schools from their suburban counterparts. "The numbers are just devastating," says educator Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, a scathing comparison of America's inner-city and suburban schools. In Chicago the $5,500 a year spent on each pupil is barely half what the richest suburban school districts outside Chicago are spending. Kozol recounts that after telling audiences about public schools in Chicago, where one-quarter of all teachers are substitutes and toilet paper has to be rationed, he is constantly asked if money really matters. "It's an extraordinary question," he says, "as though it were bizarre to suggest that money is the answer to poverty."

Many argue that the problem facing blacks today is more a matter of economic class than race. Others insist that blacks simply must become more self-reliant, taking more responsibility for their own lives and depending less on government handouts. Both positions have merit. But neither fully explains why so many African-American communities, which once struggled to produce successful members of society, are now struggling just to survive.

In years past, thousands of Phillips High School graduates routinely went on to successful careers in education, medicine, law and government. Today it is much harder for students to move up while everything else is collapsing around them. While the Douglas-Grand Boulevard community in which I grew up has been overwhelmingly black for decades, the residents have grown steadily poorer. In 1970, 36.1% lived below the federal poverty line; today 57% do.

Once, 27,000 people lived in the Robert Taylor Homes housing project. Today its 19,000 residents, all of them black and poor, are warehoused there with virtually no hope of escape. The 2 1/2-mile stretch of 28 16-story buildings that make up the country's largest public housing complex has become an American equivalent of Soweto. A deliberate government policy of racial isolation and abandonment created this enclave, and government must play a large role in solving its problems.

"There's a special role for government in this particular area," argues Chicago Alderman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who is running for Congress, "because the decay and the decadence that you see, the lack of opportunity you see, are all the result of governmental policies that address the problems that we are confronted with. Governmental policies are the key. They are the lifeblood that this community needs, that umbilical cord that connects us to the overall society."

A committee from the National Research Council agreed in its 1989 report, A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. Purposeful actions and policies by governments and private institutions make a large difference in the opportunities and conditions of black Americans," the committee concluded. These polices have been "essential for past progress, and further progress is unlikely without them."

Nowhere is the damage wrought by racial discrimination and isolation more evident and painful than in the schools. "In a way, the most tragic years for African-American kids are the years from fourth to sixth grade," says Kozol. "Those are the years in which the dream dies. In many ways, poor white kids and poor black kids suffer equally. But in the inner-city schools, where the injury of caste is compounded by the injuries of race, the misery is of a different order."

That misery weighs heavily on the shoulders of even the most motivated inner-city kids. Keri is no exception. Says Lovelace: "It's the government's responsibility to educate these students equally as well as all other students." Beyond that, Keri's success or failure depends largely on himself. ( "Getting out of ((the ghetto)) depends on Keri," the teacher says. "But Keri has to realize that, unfortunately, because he's black, because he came out of this neighborhood, he's going to have to work a wee bit more, a wee bit harder."

There's nothing new about that. For every successful African American, self- help and personal responsibility have always been a part of the equation. What is new is that if people like Keri manage to make it out of their grim neighborhoods, they will do so only by clearing hurdles that many black students of my generation never faced.