Street vs. Middle-class Culture in the DC School System

I don't have time at the moment to write a thorough exegesis linking ideas in Code of the Street, The Future Once Happened Here and books about the rise of "hip-hop" culture. In short, the arena for what Elijah Anderson calls the difference between middle-class and street cultures is no longer streets in isolated communities, but in the center cities, it is in all-too-frequently dysfunctional municipal institutions.

This week's Washington City Paper has an article, "The Education of Daniel Hudson," about the short tenure of a principal at DC's beleagured Ballou High School, which is the second biggest DC high school, with by far the largest population of low-income students (90% of the students qualify for free lunches, which is a leading poverty indicator).

Some quotes from the article:

"...he showed up anyway 10 days before classes started and looked at a computer printout of the master schedule. Work on it had barely begun. The class schedules didn't exist..."

"He had a Ballou parent arrested the first week of the school year; she’d thrown a pen at him that nearly took out his eye, he says. One parent once punched another parent in the school security office. And many parents, in defiance of school rules, told him that it was OK for their daughters to wear see-through clothing to school. The majority of Ballou parents are single mothers, and many dropped out of school. Some are still only in their 20s."

“Everybody…said the school should improve.…Then when Hudson came to make the change, they didn’t want it. They wanted the status quo,” says Sandra Seegars, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Southeast, whose godson lives with her and attends Ballou. “Ninety-eight percent of the people were working against him.”

"Before Hudson lost the students, he had already lost the teachers. A rumor had gone around among Ballou faculty that Hudson had been lying when he told them at one of their first staff meetings that he’d put together the class schedules at the last minute. They didn’t believe anyone could finish them that quickly, says one teacher, who asked not to be named, citing DCPS regulations forbidding school employees from speaking to reporters without permission. The teacher hadn’t attended the meeting but had heard about it from nearly everyone in the building.
“People got offended,” the teacher says."

... Whenever he mentioned the DCPS policy about something, they’d tell him that they’d never done things that way at Ballou. (Hudson adds that 20 to 35 of Ballou’s 95 teachers are excellent.) “In certain people’s minds, he had unreasonable standards and demands such as students and teachers should come to school on time,” says Phil Pannell, treasurer of Ballou’s Parent Teacher Student Association. “Some people’s feathers were ruffled by the fact that he would want something like that.”

Hudson had done his Ph.D. dissertation on the impact of teacher absenteeism on student performance. He’d found that excessive absences hurt student performance; students tend to mimic their teachers’ behavior. At Ballou, some teachers justified being late to class because students were late. They also used sick days as personal days; no one had ever worried about the distinction. Ten to 15 teachers were absent every day, says Hudson. Some days, as many as 25 teachers didn’t show up. With few substitute teachers willing to come to the school, students would spend whole class periods sitting in the cafeteria or the gym. Even when the teachers were at school, most only taught for half of a class period, not the full 80 minutes, he says...

The principal’s adherence to the rules was even more of a problem for Ballou’s teachers and staff than it was for its students. Seegars asked one school employee how he liked Hudson. “He said, ‘Oh, he don’t need to be over here. He need to go to a white school,’” says Seegars. “I said, ‘Why? What is he doing?’ ‘He’s trying to go by the book.’ I said, ‘Oh, Lord! We can’t have that!’” (Hudson, like 99 percent of the student body at Ballou, is African-American.)...

Hudson couldn’t even trust his top lieutenants. His main nemesis at Ballou was a particularly insubordinate assistant principal. His radio—all senior administrators are required to wear one—would often inexplicably be turned off. He and Hudson constantly battled, and, according to Hudson, the assistant principal once told one of the police officers at school that he wanted to tell some kids to beat the principal up. But the superintendent never approved Hudson’s request to transfer him...

Before the school year ended, Ballou was struck by another tragedy. A 16-year-old Ballou student, Lavelle Jones, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was leaving a nightclub early one Sunday morning in April. Hudson says he was a nice kid but that he couldn’t be induced to go to class. His mother came to the principal’s office the day after the murder and blamed Hudson, along with Mayor Anthony A. Williams and the city, for her son’s death, he says. He refused to accept any responsibility, telling her that she was the one who had allowed her son to be out partying past 2 a.m. He later heard that some people at DCPS headquarters didn’t appreciate his candor...

CREDIT: Family Photo. Lavelle Kendall Jones, 16, of Oxon Hills. (Age at time of photograph not known)from the article "Oxon Hill Teen Slain In Shooting In Southeast: Family of Ballou Junior Decries Area's Violence"

It wasn’t much easier dealing with administrators who worked under the superintendent. Turnover was one problem. In his 10 months at Ballou, Hudson had four different supervisors. The one he mainly dealt with, William Wilhoyte, the assistant superintendent for administration, wanted to send a team of administrators to the school to figure out what needed to be done. But that never happened.