West Potomac High School senior Elexander Speights was sitting at a table with a cluster of students taking Algebra 1.
“How many of you got a book bag?” he asked. When no answer was forthcoming, he singled out two friends sitting beside each other.
“I got one but I don’t carry it,” the first student answered.
“His book bag’s in my locker, but I don’t have one,” said his neighbor. Speights shook his head.
Several weeks ago, principal Rima Vesilind had called a group of seniors, all black men, into her office. She showed them a statistic: the results of the school’s SOL math tests broken down into the categories scrutinized by No Child Left Behind laws. Just 65 percent of black students passed the SOL math tests in the 2005-2006 school year. This is a lower pass rate than the school as a whole (79) and lower than students identified as white (89), Hispanic (77), learning to speak English (67) or poor (67).
The students Vesilind called into her office all have good math scores and high GPAs. “I know that I have just extraordinary kids who are African American males,” Vesilind said. “I wanted to figure out what made them different. In this community, what made them survive?”
Inspired by a mentoring program at a school in Ohio, the students gathered in the cafeteria last Thursday with about 30 black students, all of whom were earning a D+ or less in Algebra 1. They brought the same statistics Vesilind had shown them.
“How do you feel about looking at the chart, looking at the scores?” asked Jon Jordan, who like most of the other senior leaders, was wearing a crisp shirt and perfectly knotted tie.
“All of us here are here for one goal,” he continued, “first in math, then in other clusters, then the outside world.”
JORDAN AND SPEIGHTS are two of the eight seniors who lead the new student group BAM: Brothers Achieving More. While Jordan spoke, Demetryus Smith, a senior, sat in the back of the room. He didn’t have to come to the meeting, but he was sympathetic to its goals. Smith said his math grades are good right now, but that wasn’t the case until recently. “Senior year, I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere if I wasn’t doing good,” he explained.
Many at the meeting talked about parenting as an explanation for persistently bad grades. But Smith said he didn’t think they were to blame for his peers’ struggles or his own. He could find no insidious culprits for his low grades, he simply hadn’t felt like paying attention during class. “There’s other things on our minds I guess.”
Smith’s athletic ability has made him a recruiting prospect for college football and track programs. But his realization about wasted opportunity arrived when he learned that his GPA made him ineligible for the most prestigious programs that had shown interest.
“A lot of kids, it doesn't hit that you’ve got to do good until the last minute, like myself.”
Now, Smith is hoping to land an athletic scholarship at a smaller college.
Observing the eight seniors addressing their peers from the front of the room, Smith said he’d noticed how they carried themselves in class: sitting silently, “paying attention.”
Except for the ties they’d worn for the occasion, nothing would distinguish them from their peers. A few have dreadlocks or braids; most are athletes, representing the track, football, soccer, basketball and lacrosse teams.
They had various explanations for the motivations that led them to beat the statistics. William Ramsey said he’d always motivated himself. Zaid Brooks credited his mother, “she don’t play that.” Many said sports had been an influence: instilling discipline, teaching them to manage their time and requiring a minimum GPA.
None of the seniors talked about innate gifts or superior intelligence. They talked about attitude and work habits, tools for realizing the potential they saw all around them.
During a break in the 90-minute meeting, sophomore Drey Lock said he’d heard this message before — in parent-teacher conferences. “They always say the same thing: I have the potential, but I don’t do the work.”
AFTER DECIDING how the intervention would take shape, school administrators and parents called the homes of every invited student, telling them about the program and urging them to attend. Phyllis Jordan, Jon’s mother, attended the meeting and said she’d hoped other parents would as well. “Parents need to know that we need them. They’re welcome in this school.”
But the parental turnout was disappointing. Vesilind said the parents contacted by phone had been enthusiastic, but many were single and working multiple jobs, making it difficult to carve out time.
Paul Gaylord made the time to come to the meeting after learning that one of his sons, a sophomore, had been invited because of low grades. He said he’s been involved in his sons’ schoolwork, but couldn’t say exactly what parents could do to help their children succeed in class. “I guess if I knew that answer I wouldn’t be here.”
As he listened to the seniors, he was excited to hear what they were telling his son and his classmates, even though he’d used many of the same words himself. “I’m sure parents preach that to our children, but maybe when they hear it from their peers…”
School administrators have the same hope that the medium will help the message. “We’re trying to change how we approach academic achievement with this program,” said assistant principal Janice Monroe.
“I really have a lot of faith in what these young men can do,” she added later. “I really do.”
“HAVE YOU PLAYED BADMINTON YET?” Speights asked, gesturing passionately. “Badminton is the funnest game on earth.”
After watching a video about the mentoring program in Ohio, the seniors had broken the students into small groups. The discussion at Speights’ table, centered on whether attending gym class was worth the effort. “All you have to do is participate,” Speights said. “Half the battle is just going to class and putting your clothes on.”
Although Algebra 1 lacks the appeal of badminton, Speights stressed that the effort needed to meet its minimum requirements is not much greater.
“I’m just like you. I chill. I ball. I do everything I have to do. But I still get those grades in the classroom.”
Kwabena Owusu (one of the juniors with good grades in math who had been invited, at the seniors insistence, to prepare to lead the group next year) said statistics on black achievement create self-fulfilling expectations. “You kind of fall into that trap. ‘I’m not expected to do anything, so I might as well not try.’” He added that these expectations often come from other students. The challenge for the seniors was to offer a convincing alternative.
“I’m loud. I’m cracking jokes. I like talking to girls,” Jordan to the students gathered around his cafeteria table. “But that’s in the hallway. In class, I’m asking questions.”
Several of the students around Jordan said dozing off was a major impediment to the classroom focus he was calling for. Jordan told them to finish their worksheets soon after the teacher handed them out. “If you done with the work, yeah, you can put your head down for a hot minute.”
Spaight challenged his peers to ask their teachers for help. He guaranteed them an enthusiastic response. “When you go to somebody and say, ‘I want help,’ they’ll want to help you.”
“People think school is 100 percent on them,” he added. “It’s not all on you.”
Speights never addressed the difficulty of the work. He knew everyone around him was capable of it. He focused on habits: sitting down with a graphing calculator each afternoon before picking up a videogame controller. After students make that decision, he said, the “homework can do itself.”
He pulled out a piece of paper and started drawing square roots. The students would supply the answer then, he would multiply it back.
“Once you break things down,” he explained, “especially in math, everything supports itself.”