International Studies in Los Angeles
Norden, Edward
Edward Norden International Studies in Los Angeles Fairfax High barely resembles the place Jack Kemp and Herb Alpert graduated from in 1953, but both would feel at home if they ever went...
...Also, her apartment has been burglarized...
...Martens boots and he handed over the item damned quick, not with a rapper scowl but a respectful, fearful half-smile...
...Tagging can end with killing, said Carlos...
...But the fact is that Smith earns the best part of his measly 28 The American Spectator March 1993 Edward Norden International Studies in Los Angeles Fairfax High barely resembles the place Jack Kemp and Herb Alpert graduated from in 1953, but both would feel at home if they ever went back...
...Vaguely she spoke of improving their economies...
...Coeducation "balances you out so you don't run wild...
...Speaking of morale, he and several representatives of his demoralized, somewhat militant faculty were now in his office going over how a planned new district-wide schedule which he had received by fax from the Board of Ed would be implemented...
...Yes, he cried when it happened, he said, this 19-year-old boy who now has experience and just enough of a macho presence to be interesting...
...Second, to escape the wars...
...Now they bent their heads over their desks, squeezing their pencils, chewing their tongues, those who knew a good deal of English and those who knew next to none, those who would go to the University of California and Princeton and those who, if they were lucky, would sell Big Macs...
...The high-fliers were no problem—they possessed something inside driving them to excel, plus their families pressuring them...
...yelled one of the musclebound clowns in the stands, a character of voting age if he was a day, at the ref...
...True, she said, there was less school spirit than in the past...
...He was wearing a Malcolm cap and 10-hole Dr...
...Which wasn't to say that the system was doing all it could...
...Once, when he taught, he belonged to the teachers' union...
...Thus, if the MOM program at Fairfax was valuable, as she agreed it is, this was thanks to the services the cadets perform for their fellow students, certainly not thanks to the guns and uniforms and saluting...
...Miller is another frank liberal...
...California was in fact broke, so the issue should be not money but the application of race-blind standards and honest grading...
...The Gardenia fans who were being taunted on the opposite side jeered and stomped and taunted back...
...Soon after Safier began teaching, however, the school's attendance boundaries were flung much wider to preempt a busing order, and years of turmoil followed, at the end of which the white flight that it was feared busing would touch off had taken place anyway—most of the white students at Fairfax today, Safier claimed, are Russian immigrants...
...By way of an answer, she brought up her own greatgrandparents, who had fled the pogroms and beggary of Russia, had been pushed out by circumstances and welcomed, more or less, in the New World—who was she, a grateful descendant who stood in awe of their heroism, to propose that the U.S...
...Service, according to Bishop, "instills a lot of discipline and citizenship...
...In her words, "This school is OK...
...Every afternoon when school:lets out, he spends an hour outdoors with several of his teaching staff, making sure the kids disperse...
...One of this neocon's manias, which amuse and scandalize his colleagues, has to do with the English language...
...Either they refused to be motivated, or their English, never mind the devotion of the ESL staff, was so poor that it was cruel to have them take the Verbal SAT...
...She and her friend Tia Burton, who was also a senior and had once not only been on the cheer-leading squad but had actually captained it, had baked some cookies and were now helping Mrs...
...Smith chose not to see it this time...
...The declaration of intent to return and contribute is generally made by the freshest of greenhorns, those bearing the heaviest load of nostalgia, and generally it's delivered in Spanish, a complex idea in English being beyond these students of Razi's...
...Yet in all the presidential elections in which he has fulfilled his duty, only in 1972 did he actually not vote Democratic—he sized McGovern up as an isolationist, and that was too much...
...Postscript: During the remedial intercession between the fall and spring semesters, Fairfax High and Los Angeles were jolted when a student fooling around with his .357 Magnum shot and killed a classmate and wounded another...
...Yes, he'd include ESL classes, especially ESL classes, though he realizes that such a law would be "hell to enforce...
...Officially, Smith is in charge of discipline for all of Fairfax's more than 2,000 kids, with their thirty-four mother-tongues, their memories and trepidations, their ambitions, hormones, and debilities...
...They went obediently to their next exams, this being the last week of semester, a special time...
...Even those who make the handsome affirmations are likely, in the next breath, to cast them in doubt...
...Miller, like the rest of her colleagues, is somewhat demoralized, somewhat tired, yet she is sweetly defiant about the difficult, unselfish, comforting faith that she has clung to despite experience...
...It must be reported in all honesty that some are nerds...
...Otherwise, there really ought to be a strike...
...We ought to have more discretion to tailor our programs and spend money...
...He would have seen how at his old school the races get along not too bad...
...was school spirit...
...Number two, more autonomy for individual schools, less power for downtown...
...Instead of putting what money there was into the schools and the kids and the teachers, into buying the audiovisual materials Miller needs to make her library more seductive, the bureaucrats downtown and the politicians in Sacramento were feathering their nests...
...Yet both she and Jin hoped that there wouldn't be a strike...
...He also answers his phone by almost barking into it, "O'Sullivan...
...The vote to strike at Fairfax had been as lopsided as at the other union chapters...
...Far as I'm concerned," he said, "a kid like that doesn't even belong in school...
...Tuna Casserole ecause it was exam week, and because exams in this B course were over, and because Shirley Cooke, the teacher, is a wise, jolly, tolerant sort of black woman, the Temptations were doing their rendition of Christmas carols at mid-volume on a tape deck someone had brought to Food & Nutrition, formerly home economics...
...The smiling, friendly, eager Jin had his future completely mapped out...
...First, the cluster of motives subsumed under the banner of workmoney-food-opportunity...
...O'Sullivan pounced on a gum wrapper lying on the grass and slam-dunked it into a trash can...
...California, 416...
...It was the money, and the principle of the thing—in fact, a visitor understood that the two were one and the same...
...he exclaimed...
...O'Sullivan...
...Only the ex-Russian Jews never offer this scenario...
...Later, Matagna would drive the bandaged boy home in her own car, to the corner of Slauson and Crenshaw in the barrio, so as to make sure he got into no more trouble that day...
...Those who have been here somewhat longer, whose English is apt though not guaranteed to be better and whose center of gravity has shifted, will lift an eyebrow, smile to themselves to hear such talk from their friends...
...And yet, he was probably not as disgusted, not as upset, as he acted...
...He stuck his head into Dr...
...Officially, Smith is in charge of discipline for all of Fairfax's more than 2,000 kids, with their thirty-four mother-tongues, their memories and trepidations, their ambitions, hormones, and debilities...
...This school," commented Earl Smith not without pride, "has a major history...
...He and his buddies exchanged high-fives...
...His father is a carpenter, his mother cleans houses...
...Would you believe it if I told you that most of the kids in my best class don't know who Cary Grant is...
...The politicians, the state and national leadership, should explain to the middle class that if you don't save the public schools, you'll have to shell out even more for private schools and security on your house and car...
...Look, when I showed them It Happened One Night, they were charmed, but I had to explain the reference to the walls of Jericho...
...They hail from too many poor, illiterate countries, and even if American-born, are liable to have grown up in homes where a book is never seen...
...He almost had it coming...
...If it did, college-bound seniors were in danger of not graduating...
...is a refuge from poverty and war, school is a refuge from the gang warfare of the barrios, and a reprieve from the sweatshops which, if the truth be told, many of these kids will have to go into, at least temporarily and possibly forever...
...JROTC allows students to handle gun and helps them to do malitary drill for the maximum leadership experience...
...He'd like to go to college but probably won't...
...It would cost, he said disgustedly, a thousand dollars to clean up that mess...
...And might The Seventh Bullet be optioned by Hollywood...
...0. likes to keep things under control and moving right along...
...Who said there was no school spirit...
...He headed for the third floor, but he didn't seem alarmed, continuing to opine that American society expresses its contempt for education by paying teachers what it does and indicating his readiness to strike when and if his colleagues did...
...This school," commented Earl Smith not without pride, "has a major history...
...X. Finale, With Excitement T he last day before winter break now rolled around...
...It depended on getting the right teachers...
...So, despite a sleep deficit, Victor was in a good—no, a fine—mood...
...He's a known gang-banger...
...Among the laws at this not completely atypical school are no smoking, no skateboards, no Walkmans, and no Edward Norden is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and Commentary...
...Like I told you—we have to take all corners, and even if we opportunity-transfer them away, we'll be getting somebody else's bad guys in return...
...Emerson had complained that too many kids in the 10th and 11th grades walked around in a fog, refusing to understand that if they wanted to get into a decent college, they had to jack up their GPAs...
...In the meantime, he and these members of his staff painstakingly and good-humoredly cobbled together a new schedule, down to the second...
...better attendance at football and basketball games, in short, more spirit...
...I'm gonna go to a community college, and then I'm gonna transfer to Spelman...
...Like many of his colleagues of both genders, Victor came on militant at first, hot to strike...
...Cooke with a tuna casserole, sort of...
...Indeed, the outgoing secretary of housing's name was listed in...
...In vain...
...This high school may have seen better days academically and physically, but it's not yet vandals' meat—the toilet bowls in the boys' room are unshattered, the plastic windows throughout are scratched but whole...
...Unlike her friend and exco-cheerleader, she had no complaints about Fairfax...
...0., a number of parents, a clot of obscenely funny, potentially violent non-students rooting for the Mighty Lions, and no more than 200 increasingly rapt sophomores, juniors, and seniors of all the races...
...In the second place, he had recently become a father for the first time...
...Mickey Rooney '37...
...In his red-and-yellow windbreaker and carrying his walkie-talkie, Smith—Dean Smith or Mr...
...T he college counselor, Ginger Emerson, is a white woman who appears somewhat more demoralized than your average Fairfax teacher...
...a pantheon of Fairfax's best-known grads: Jack Kemp, class of '53...
...Either Carlos didn't understand the question, or didn't want to...
...You'll get it back when your momma calls me and promises that you'll never come to school with it again," said Smith to the man-child, taking it and then giving him a not-so-glancing punch on the biceps...
...VI...
...He's a red-cheeked bear of a white man, a high school dropout who served in Korea and Vietnam and has been at Fairfax so long that he can remember when the worst thing that might happen was that someone would put a yarmulke on the bust of Lincoln in the rotunda...
...Lloyd, you know better than that...
...His wife, Norma Silverman, among the youngest of the teachers at Fairfax—in point of gossipy fact, she had once been his student—had presented him with a son and heir...
...There were five gold earrings in her right lobe, none in the left...
...Phil Spector '58...
...Everyone in the gym heard this, few could help laughing, and Jeff didn't miss...
...That's the great historical function of the public schools...
...Throughout the game, cartwheels, splits, and Rockette kicks from Charity and her multiracial friends in their flouncy skirts...
...and Kiva agreed that their teachers were great...
...Among the laws at this not completely atypical school are no smoking, no skateboards, no Walkmans, and no Edward Norden is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and Commentary...
...Worse, downtown refused to promise that it wouldn't shrink paychecks again next year...
...She couldn't, wouldn't buy such an illiberal idea...
...The boy with the Clint Eastwood cannon wasn't a regular Fairfax student...
...They are also appreciative, because they sense that their ESL teachers do care about them, because for all their wounded culture-pride they understand that English is the door to better things, and not least because school is a refuge...
...The native-born Kiva seemed especially concerned, almost perturbed, by this...
...I live with my momma and my grandmomma," Charity said cheerfully...
...these chicks screamed in unison whenever Gardenia had a shot from the line...
...Howard Safier has long thought of himself as a neoconservative...
...As for a possible teachers' strike, he said he had heard nothing about it...
...For example, he opined that what the "characters" downtown could use most was a good audit...
...For one thing, they know very well that their union is weak, nothing like what you still have in New York City...
...C kris, on the other hand, was brought to this country when she was so young that she knows hardly any Korean, despite the fact that she lives with both parents, who own and operate a dry-cleaning establishment and of course speak Korean together...
...A strike, or the threat of one, was totally in order...
...But it was all right...
...Now that he was alone for a short minute with his visitor, he could express his doubts as to whether the teachers' union, when it came down to it, would be "stupid enough" to strike, the real motive behind its threat being the preference of those with seniority to protect the salary increases they had won in a strike in 1989 rather than free up money for entry-level jobs...
...Jaime, from Nicaragua, interrupted—only in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps unit do all the races and nationalities and factions get along, he said...
...My job is to assimilate kids into America," Safier declared...
...This includes the Ethiopians spending nutrition time with other Ethiopians over there, the Russians with Russians over there, the Israelis with Israelis over there, the Koreans with Koreans over there—each group of refugees and immigrants had staked out its turf in the yard, where the language spoken was its own, not English...
...T he point he'd like you to grasp and retain after the teachers have left his office is that the public schools are required to take all corners...
...Jin had been accepted at the Citadel, was awaiting word on his applications to the Naval Academy and VMI—unfazed by his two female cocouncilors, he expressed admiration for VMI's sexist admission policy...
...Worse, she spread the lie around verbally, taking it out of the loop and possibly damaging Safier's reputation...
...And the instrument by which this sinister and cunning power-structure perpetuated and spread ignorance and passivity was of course money, that is, by seeing to it that the education bureaucrats were paid too much and the teachers in the trenches too little...
...Charity was going to cheerlead, the disentitled Tia was going to look on, and Jeff, who was using the Food & Nutrition classroom/kitchen to study math, was going to compete...
...And indeed, except for some KGBs on an outside wall, there were few graffiti anywhere...
...Smith to you—was making his rounds during nutrition period one morning last December...
...Reason and understanding and love, not discipline, hierarchy, and the threat of pain, will heal us, set us free...
...His mother, who raised him by herself, asked for donations to enable her to bury him...
...He would have seen how at his old school the races get along not too bad...
...Now you know it's not nice to talk so that other people don't understand," Razi admonished...
...He thought there was a genuine culture-war going on now, that Madonna and Michael Jackson are truly inferior, and that it was a teacher's duty to propagandize for the good and against the bad...
...Of course, O'Sullivan said, it remained to be seen how this went down in Sacramento...
...Take the idea of vouchers that you conservatives are so crazy about—`choice' you call it...
...They can pick and choose...
...Victor himself mentioned in passing that the '89 strike had won three straight years of 8 percent pay raises...
...O'Sullivan's solidarity with and concern for his teaching staff were laced with background knowledge...
...She's a great fan of MTV and the soaps, and very proud of her dad, a black who's an agent in the music division of William Morris and who had just moved back into her German-Irish mom's house after a period of separation...
...That was back in 1961, when the student body was composed mainly of overachieving Jews and the nearest thing to a gang was a clique...
...0. had been notified over his walkie-talkie, was, in his own words, "nothing to get shook about...
...He showed off a photograph on the wall of Danny Everett, from Watts, who found a way to attend Fairfax and went on to UCLA and a bronze medal in the 400-meters at the 1988 Olympics, and another photograph of a black girl, also a student of Safier's, who went on to get her Ph.D...
...They are also supposed to prepare them to be happy and useful citizens with a capacity to learn skills and a respect for the common good...
...Does this mean that the man, himself the product of a parochial Catholic high school, is uptight...
...Memories of one sort of an exodus or another are universally fresh...
...No, he had never seen any of them before...
...There was unanimity on why the parents had uprooted themselves and their kids to infiltrate such a weird, half-welcoming country as the United States...
...This man with his possible lawsuit seemed less demoralized than his eternally liberal and radical colleagues, and did not rule out the ability of a smart, motivated kid of any color to obtain an education...
...The others are from the Philippines and a Third World country with left-over ICBMs, Russia...
...He stays in the system, he just lands at another school, like the kids who got opportunity-transferred out of North Hollywood and ended up here...
...In the car, she'd ask him to take off his signature porkpie hat...
...But it's not just us...
...Kemp's okay...
...The government side, with U.S...
...version of Lord of the Flies was being run through the VCR didn't know, what the teacher and the two white kids who had shown up for a class on stereotyping, bigotry, and racial harmony didn't know, what the white and black teachers drinking coffee together, griping and wearily joking in the barebones lounge were unaware of, was that a student had just been attacked and beaten up on the street outside...
...She was talking about the majority of kids nowadays who through no fault of their own "just haven't got it...
...If it wasn't for my momma," she said, "I wouldn't even know how to write a book report...
...It had gotten its priorities outrageously backwards...
...IL He Cried When They Took Him Away E SL teacher Carole Razi is an Anglo and a blonde...
...You've had your warning...
...There was also the Anglo minority on its turf, speaking a form of English...
...He might be compared to Bill Cosby, if the quiz show host's salary were a fraction of a fraction of what it is, and if an aura of menace emanating from Smith didn't inspire among the kids he is in charge of equal measures of respect, affection, and fear...
...Someone had posted this on the bulletin board: "AVER"He should have come here when he came to inspect South-Central with Bush," Smith said of Kemp...
...She gets this sort of thing from time to time, yet Fairfax isn't as bad as other schools she could name, knock on wood...
...Their infrastructures, their services, above all the beloved public school system into which she has put her life, might well crack...
...Glancingly mentioned by the principal was the Board of Ed's thinking: by cutting the eight days, and labeling them a furlough, "downtown" could hand out state compensation monies to district workers, in this case public school teachers...
...Yet they pack the advanced placement classes and cart away most of the school-wide academic prizes, leaving a crumb here and there for the ex-Muscovites...
...This time, it might go on longer...
...The man she married and whose name she carries is an immigrant, an Indian, a Moslem from Hyderabad, where his co-religionists try to get through the day outnumbered by Hindus...
...He agreed with Earl Smith that back in the sixties it was still mostly Jewish beavers from the immediate neighborhood...
...I'm gonna prove it to everybody who thinks I can't...
...from Caltech...
...My momma give it to me...
...America simply may not be able to bring so many disadvantaged kids with so many absent parents and varied mother-tongues up to speed...
...Elmer and Jaime and the others assigned by him to serve in the principal's office would have preferred to target-shoot, but did as ordered...
...0. in his windbreaker saw all, heard all, made sure without appearing to do so that the school cops and JROTC monitors didn't leave...
...I live with my momma...
...An educated citizenry would be potentially revolutionary...
...Money, like it or not, symbolizes respect in America, and cutting an American's pay while refusing to promise *not to do it again not only makes it harder for him to go to the dentist, it tends to demoralize him by driving home the impression that the job he's doing isn't appreciated, not by society and not by the education bureaucrats who never have to face a student yet get paid twice or three times as much as teachers...
...Girls who go to school with other girls only, she explained, are liable to become either fast or retarded...
...In a way, she wished that she had remained at the parochial school, Immaculate Heart, where she had been enrolled before, since college is stressed there...
...Yes, if the only way to raise the money for it is through more taxes, then more taxes...
...a pantheon of Fairfax's best-known grads: Jack Kemp, class of '53...
...I really do think sometimes that there's a plot being carried out to keep the American people ignorant," Now it's important to emphasize that although Victor's politics are somewhere on the border between liberalism and radicalism, and that he voted for the Clintons fnute de mieux, the sleepy teacher and author said this with unmistakable and redeeming self-consciousness...
...He was officially the educational leader of Fairfax, but his real job, he stated, was to trouble-shoot from morning to night—that, and boost morale...
...Of course, firearms and knives are also unacceptable, yet there's no frisking at the doors, and no metal detectors either...
...Earl Smith was irritated to see a young man in the hall after the second bell...
...They were in their civvies, as were the luckier cadets practicing with air rifles down at the unit's hut between the teachers' lounge and the baseball diamond...
...Explosive cheering in the final, very tense quarter...
...beepers...
...Limburger, I call him...
...He knew that others of his countrymen in L.A...
...No girl or boy has been in this country for more than a year, some kids arrived only a couple of months ago, and as a rule homesickness is at war in young hearts with relief at having made it to the U.S...
...Yet he truly appeared to have scant respect for the bureaucrats and politicians through whose fingers the tax billions flow...
...The council had met in its room over the rotunda, and now Chris, Jin, and Kiva Stewart, senior class president without a drop of Asian blood in her veins, were alertly and readily and happily answering a visitor's questions...
...This minor beating and this tagging were small, ordinary events...
...Some people," he said, "think us Latinos make trouble...
...Now people stuck with their own kind, a trend reinforced by the riots in South-Central last spring...
...They remembered the one in '89...
...What's that...
...This seemed to be the rule in the ESL department, an ever-growing schoolwithin-a-school at Fairfax, enrolling some 650 kids and staffed by ten teachers as devoted as they are demoralized...
...For yet another thing, the pay cut and the Board of Ed's refusal to promise not to cut again may have hurt the teachers more in their feelings than their pocketbooks...
...As terrific as Miller believes the ESL department is, it can't work miracles, and shouldn't be expected to...
...Army sergeant-major (ret...
...Mugged, Remains a Liberal airfax High's library is a clean, well-lighted place...
...Charity served up the cookies...
...Razi translated and Elmer Mejia, the vet, helped with the slang, elements of which were so delicious, and so bafflingto the teacher, that the Urrutia females had to giggle behind their hands...
...She'd be ready to live with a pay cut, so long as the people downtown took an even heftier one and the resultant savings wereused at the elementary school level to buy expensive professional help for kids at risk...
...I'm gonna graduate," Tia said...
...The latter generally loved the place, according to him, because where else could they get two square meals per day free ofcost...
...If this high school, which isn't in the inner city but draws many poor and variously handicapped and difficult kids, isn't as hellish as you might expect, it's partly, according to Smith, because the teachers offer an example, partly because he and his staff "keep right on top of it...
...From your mouth to God's ear...
...In America's big cities now, this means not just kids from Sicily and Ireland and the Pale of Settlement and Harlem, as in the old days, but Cambodia, Somalia, Guam, you name it...
...Who, me...
...The JROTC is funded by the school district and the melitery...
...Don't you go calling that sissy s--t...
...Chris, Jin...
...Foreign-born or native, their illiterate parents, even if present and well-meaning, are too tired after sweating or hustling all day to take a useful interest, to do the crucial nagging and helping...
...Nutrition is what used to be known as recess...
...This waste and cynicism demoralized the younger teachers, driving some of them right out of the profession, and it made her damned mad...
...This means outlawing gang colors and articles of clothing like bandanas, also looking with particular disfavor on "tagging," that is, the spray-painting of gang graffiti such as "KGB," "Kids Gone Bad...
...he called suddenly...
...five-anda-half years ago with only his mother and not a word of English...
...after has earned himself a reputation as something of S a disciplinarian...
...I mean, he's conservative, but he's human, you know...
...It wasn't always so...
...Mickey Rooney '37...
...Unmentioned was downtown's transparent hope that the maximum of $368 in compensation to which each of the district's 21,000 teachers would be entitled might persuade them not to walk off the job on February 22, 1993, after all...
...Number one, better pay for teachers...
...Nothing less...
...It's neither hopeless nor easy...
...Safier was against a strike now...
...More: Elmer, the 19-year-old vet, the fighter, had seen FMLN graffiti in the metal shop, FMLN being the Marxists in El Salvador whom he had spent two years and three months of his life combating...
...And though he'd rather be caught dead than wax eloquent, he was not unconvincing when speaking of the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of the job that schools like his have...
...Besides taking care of discipline at the new, contemporary Fairfax High, Smith until last year coached the trophy-winning football team, something Fairfax never had when Jack Kemp, future pro quarterback, was among the few non-Jews on the Mighty Lions...
...It's not as if she thought unlimited dollars were out there, however, or that she merely felt terrible about the impending cut in her salary...
...Take Isabelle Urrutia, whose sister Veronica and cousin Rosa are also in Razi's class...
...They don' respect us...
...These are missionaries at best, not martyrs...
...The shirtsleeved Dr...
...The Urrutias, reluctantly, told of problems between Hispanic girls and black girls in school, fights during nutrition...
...The incident, about which Dr...
...Carole and her husband had been planning to fly to the other side of the globe to introduce her to his family over winter break, though with the inter-communalprob- lems there recently, they were now undecided...
...On the other hand, there's the possibility of so-called "opportunity transfers," which according to Smith, if AGE SALARY OF TEACHER IN CALIFORNIA: $37,812...
...This probably fooled no one...
...I don't hate it...
...Don Bishop is their C.O...
...It's to do a service for America...
...We'll see," he answered...
...Smith shook his head...
...You can't assume that a kid entering high school today knows anything...
...y es, after the special remedial inter-session coming up, a strike loomed...
...When you ask them whether they are here to stay, that's when these teenaged Hispanics divide...
...Timeout airfax High squeaked by Gardenia in a home-court F thriller witnessed by Dr...
...This preference aggravated the graying of the profession...
...There was something about being in the trenches that made it impossible for anyone to assent to the government washing its hands of these kids...
...The dead boy was Demetrius Rice, a sub on the Fairfax varsity football team, by all accounts a sweet kid...
...The deanship means discipline, a full-time job...
...By "this situation," he meant a teachers' union justifiably primed to strike...
...He'd be a Marine officer, then he'd go to law school, then he'd do something in government...
...Herb Alpert of the same class, who sponsors a $10,000 teacher-of-the-year award...
...Also, he doesn't appear to be the sort who takes himself too seriously anymore...
...beepers...
...help, had won the war, and that was a good thing, in his opinion...
...Working on that casserole, Shirley Cooke confirmed that exam week was special...
...It seemed that Tia had been doing so poorly with her schoolwork that she had had to give up her extracurricular activity...
...The spirited, copper-skinned Kiva may also go east, having applied to NYU as well as the University of California...
...Yes, they had also shown him a gun, either a .38 or .45...
...Lloyd is most of the way to equalling Mike Tyson in height and bulk...
...No, she said, she understood that there was a genuine crisis...
...Not a bit of it...
...We're basically in this situation because our political leaders don't want an educated citizenry," he said...
...VIII...
...The idea is to get the newcomers out of the ESL setting and into regular classes with native-born students quickly—"mainstreaming," it's called...
...Victor was happy with his life at the moment...
...Even when critical, as Riva was when she complained that school spirit had fallen off, they were basically your happy, energetic kids...
...Do you want to hear a shocker...
...An indication of how light he likes to keep things is the notice, in Gothic, posted on one of the filing cabinets in his accessible sanctum: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves...
...No less than twenty-eight years he has been teaching in the public schools of L.A., of which twenty-four years at Fairfax...
...The signal about 309 turned out to be exaggerated...
...Dutifully hammering out a new schedule, O'Sullivan tossed off zingers to show that he too understood this, that his heart and mind were with his outraged troops...
...It didn't take much probing, however, not with Victor and not with the others, to discover that these likable, self-sacrificing liberals-to-radicals didn't really have the appetite for a war in /993 and would be glad for a way out...
...V. Conspiracies your typical Fairfax teacher is female, isn't getting any younger, is devoted and demoralized, holds no more than a master's degree, and voted for Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...Victor teaches English to the high-fliers, and to celebrate they had hung a list of immortals over the blackboard: Poe, Twain, Melville, Fitzgerald, Victor...
...If the U.S...
...He referred to the plan as "one of those bright ideas they spasmodically get downtown...
...Fairfax High's catchment area stretches from West Hollywood with its ex-Soviets, through the barrio on Western Avenue, down through Koreatown and all the way to Pico, which borders South-Central...
...The parochial schools like the one I went to have always had it easier...
...She remembered that in the old days, which is to say when she was a sophomore, there was more mixing, a friendlier atmosphere at Fairfax...
...Miller was referring not to the minority of kids who, thanks to their choice of parents, love to read and learn, and who come on their own to use her facilities...
...Most of her work is arranging dental care for immigrants, distributing free condoms to those kids whose parents haven't specifically demurred, counseling pregnant girls on their educational and other choices...
...Instead of showing evidence of demoralization, the devoted Victor with his memories of the sixties couldn't help feeling high that day last December...
...Fairfax's starters were all black, but a white sub for the home team broke Gardenia's heart with a series of outstanding tip-ins...
...She had dragged out and recited last year's mean scores: nationwide, 423...
...She intends to apply to Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, then it will he on to graduate school, perhaps law, perhaps engineering...
...I'm a great conspiracy buff...
...Limburger, I call him...
...I don't even know my father...
...here...
...He should have come here when he came to inspect South-Central with Bush," Smith said of Kemp...
...He'd like to be a cop...
...So is senior Jin Kim, student body president, so are so...
...Again, there used to be more...
...These undeniably extremely unpleasant experiences have tested, perhaps tempered, not shattered, her faith...
...Among the things Safier, a teacher of American history and Fairfax's cross-country coach, fiercely believes is that the U.S...
...He thought not...
...What wasn't so great, what was, like, lacking...
...Fighting in 309," rasped Smith's walkie-talkie just as the bell for the end of nutrition sounded...
...to, my man...
...Kemp's okay...
...Sleep in heavenly peee-eace," Charity Hayes chimed in, snapping her fingers...
...Sherry Miller, the librarian, was pleased to be able to say that when it came time to decide which seventy subscriptions to cancel, she'd been fair and responsible and killed both The American Spectator and the Nation, leaving Newsweek...
...All were in that third of the student body which heads to a four-year college on graduation...
...She then wrote a letter to O'Sullivan claiming that Safier had said to her, "You blacks are always causing trouble...
...He might be compared to Bill Cosby, if the quiz show host's salary were a fraction of a fraction of what it is, and if an aura of menace emanating from Smith didn't inspire among the kids he is in charge of equal measures of respect, affection, and fear...
...Instead, they were being cut...
...A resident of the neighborhood, she walks to work and has been mugged in broad daylight...
...The sagging morale of his teachers, not the students...
...0.'s eyes were the TBC tags that had appeared overnight over the KCBs on an outside wall—the newly spray-painted letters stood for Too Busy Creating...
...So what was the solution...
...So he assigns the Gettysburg Address and parts of the Constitution for memorization and recitation, as if his classroom were in a school in New York City a century ago...
...Not that he had volunteered to do so...
...Even if they struck they wouldn't close the schools down and leave the kids to roam the streets—they'd come and show them movies, as they did in '89, as some of the best of them do even when not on strike...
...The deanship means discipline, a full-time job...
...Nutrition is what used to be known as recess...
...The less cautious, or more with-it, of these Hispanic kids made no pretense to an unannounced visitor in Razi's classroom that they and their parents were anything but "undocumented"—exposure and deportation apparently weren't regarded as dangers, not even during a bad recession...
...The latter was amused and impressed, and reminded of something he'd come across in Section 44806 of the state education code: Each teacher shall endeavor to impress upon the minds of the pupils the principles of morality, truth, justice, patriotism, and a true comprehension of the rights, duties, and dignity of American citizenship, including kindness toward domestic pets and the humane treatment of living creatures, to teach them to avoid idleness, profanity, and falsehood, and to instruct them in manners and the principles of a free government...
...now slam the golden door...
...By which she means that she believes that humans by nature are basically good or potentially good and should be given almost unlimited opportunities to prove it...
...Likely to Succeed 4 4guess I'm just competitive," reckoned Chris Paik, a member of the student council...
...Your reporter's impression was that they make up 80 percent of both ESL and JROTC, the rest of Don Bishop's troops being Russians, blacks, and Israelis...
...Final score: Fairfax 52, Gardenia 47, and no bloodshed...
...0. finds himself in the position of the managing editor of a troubled newspaper, trapped between the boss on one side and the hacks and yeomen on the other...
...S mith is popular—he was greeted repeatedly, especially by black kids...
...One of them, a "mini-Robespierre," had actually quoted Mario Savio in the meeting held before the strike vote...
...To do this, he or she must first provide a safe, disciplined classroom...
...For the truth was, untrained as they were for it, he and his colleagues had generally kept the multicultural, multiracial peace in the year of the riots...
...For another, people like Victor, whatever they might have been at Berkeley, have become softies with the passing years...
...She blamed not herself, but the faculty, especially Fairfax's college counselor...
...The prospect of half a million kids in the street with nothing to do ought to concentrate a few minds downtown, he intimated...
...Smith is a black man functioning with a slightly game leg, and as dean is responsible for keeping things nice and law-abiding, a job he was doing effectively that day...
...The four types who he said had poured out of a Toyota on Melrose Avenue and started clubbing him with a metal bar were, he thought, Salvadorans, while as for himself he was from Honduras...
...Mike O'Sullivan, principal of Fairfax, continually makes sure that all the objects on his desk are positioned at right angles...
...VII...
...He had come from another school in the city for the remedial English course, and he told police that he had started packing a gun after gang-bangers had robbed and beaten him on the way to school...
...Also disgusting in Dr...
...Not like that Rush Somebody...
...It wasn't easy, Fairfax in practice being many schools and tracks under one roof, ESL and regular, deaf and hard of hearing, Advanced Placement, Honors, and something known as Impact, a euphemism for remedial...
...An LAPD prowl car visited and departed...
...0.'s office around noon stuffing envelopes...
...There was also the Anglo minority on its turf, speaking a form of English...
...Others, like Chris and Jin, are anything but nerds, for if they were nerds, how could they have persuaded anyone to vote for them...
...One must at all times fight stereotypes, they do great harm to everyone, but there was no getting away from it—Chris, a junior, is smart and driven...
...They were only background noises that he, his teachers, and the mass of good, apathetic, heroic kids starting out in life have learned to put up with...
...Teachers facing an average of thirty-nine such youngsters per class are supposed to keep them awake and away from each others' throats...
...But you can bet that in his own classroom, where among the portraits of Washington and Lincoln and a VCR the notice concerning floggings and morale is hung, English only is the enforced rule...
...This from a kid who arrived in the U.S...
...When I graduate, maybe I'll go to San Diego and live with my grandmomma," Tia said...
...But the fact is that Smith earns the best part of his measly 28 The American Spectator March 1993 Edward Norden International Studies in Los Angeles Fairfax High barely resembles the place Jack Kemp and Herb Alpert graduasalary keeping the Hispanic kids, and especially the blacks, in line...
...has been chosen to play a starring role in this world...
...Anyway, there's not much to do together in the way of extracurricular activities, clubs, and so forth...
...Until then, these Hispanic kids are beautifully behaved because they do not yet feel at home and have not yet let go of their original if war-ravaged mother-culture...
...For as even a visitor could infer from the goatee, from the questions being asked by the school cops and from the answers being given in fair English by this kid as the nurse, wearing rubber gloves, fixed him up, he was not unacquainted with gangs...
...he explained in the same vein...
...These were happy kids—especially Charity, a very cute number in a short flouncy skirt, dredlocks, and a sequined decal in the shape of a heart pasted on her forehead...
...So's she can know where I'm at...
...All kids who take the JROTC elective, besides learning to shoot, drill, read maps, etc., train in first aid against the day when the Big One hits and in fact...
...The change had to do indirectly with parents and teachers, directly with money...
...The school has to welcome the children of all the refugees and immigrants of the world, along with the 20 percent of the student body that is black and liable to do its growing-up with one parent, and Anglos whose home environment and previous education may not be that great, either...
...I mean, he's conservative, but he's human, you know...
...He has two assistant principals under him, and there are two LAUSD cops—one male, one female, both with walkie-talkies, nightstick, and revolver—on the grounds at all times for back-up...
...That's the one...
...It was the head librarian's impression that even the right-wingers on the faculty had voted Democratic...
...To be a public school teacher is to be a patriot," he said without vanity...
...in the muckraking, ragtime era...
...0." in yellow script personalizing it, and dashed out to have a routine look at his manysplendored kingdom...
...His mother runs a coffee shop, and he works three afternoons a week in the freezer of a supermarket, just enough to pay for his clothing and sports uniforms and give him a permanent cold...
...Two other Hispanic cadets, in a short essay they had collaborated on for a mainstream English class in the semester just ended, told what JROTC is about: The JROTC started in 1916 arouned the time of the first war World...
...Including the Chinese, the Asians at Fairfax comprise about 12 percent of the student body...
...But the pleasures of duty called...
...Smith wasn't all that tough if you knew how to get on the right side of him, and except during exam week there was always considerable commotion in the halls and sometimes trash cans set afire outside in the yard...
...A crisis counseling team was dispatched by the school district to help Fairfax cope, and a state assemblyman said he was going to introduce a law appropriating to the district $30 million so it could install metal detectors at all its high schools...
...Carlos Perez was visiting in Razi's class, now that the exam was over...
...Elmer made no comment...
...332 schools have JROTC and also they have 11 events...
...many of Fairfax's Korean-Americans that when it comes to overcoming and overachieving, they make even the stereotyped ex-Soviet Jewish kids look slouchy...
...More in agreement than not, Victor quoted Jeff Horton, a member of the school board downtown: "The real enemy is Reagan-Bush corporate America...
...Eight years Smith taught and coached here, then left to pick up a law degree at UCLA, but instead of using it to get comfortable, he put in some time working for the California Bureau of Prisons and state attorney-general, then actually returned to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD...
...The district, pleading a $400 million budget shortfall at mid-year, had announced it had no choice but to cut teachers' salaries by between 6.5 and 11.5 percent, this following a cut last year of 3 percent...
...If they were lucky, no strike would keep them from continuing to put up with them, come spring semester...
...Not like that Rush Somebody...
...A black boy detached himself from the group he was hanging out with, boys and girls, all black...
...0. R fight angles, right angles...
...These events are rifle team, best platoon, best squat color gured etc...
...They say we don' respect them...
...What these good kids didn't know, what the restless kids and devotedly scolding teacher in a classroom upstairs where the movie...
...According to O'Sullivan's fact sheet, Hispanics make up 40 percent of Fairfax students...
...But there could be no doubt that he believed this analysis, and that on some primordial level it made him almost as mad as it had when he was young...
...Indeed, the outgoing secretary of housing's name was listed in...
...That's because we work at it...
...Which doesn't mean that you can let your guard down completely...
...Smith to you—was making his rounds during nutrition period one morning last December...
...In the first place, his first book had just been published—The Seventh Bullet, a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in Washington, D.C...
...generally put themselves out to serve others, as the anti-militarist Sherry Miller herself said...
...By the same token, anything which tends to weaken the public school system is a disservice...
...It's actually safer in the U.S...
...They're ignorant...
...The school day would be extended 36 minutes, until 3:41 p.m., and the spring semester cut by eight days, resulting in absolutely no loss and no gain of instructional time...
...I know that there are teachers in this building who break down their white kids, make them confess their racial prejudices in class," Safier disgustedly confided...
...Most fighting, Smith explained, is gang-related...
...Should there be limits, real ones, on immigration...
...You get what you pay for...
...Its members, like those of the above groups, occasionally create a disciplinary problem...
...As Smith exited the rotunda and cut across the grass between the athletic facilities and the huge main building, a person with a hawk-eye might have caught sight of a butt—a plain butt, not a reefer— being pinched dead...
...Among the Hispanics, of tearfully saying good-bye to the village, of hiking along rivers and over mountains, of numbing bus rides, of late-night dashes guided by "coyotes," of arrival in a Brobdignagian land of freeways, air pollution, and multiculturalism...
...For this, their salaries should have been raised by a grateful establishment...
...In his red-and-yellow windbreaker and carrying his walkie-talkie, Smith—Dean Smith or Mr...
...It's not just us blacks," Tia was saying to a visitor who had brought up the subject of broken families...
...Rush Limbaugh...
...Herb Alpert of the same class, who sponsors a $10,000 teacher-of-the-year award...
...And yet, and yet...
...It was interesting to see her writhing between her principles and her appreciation of the situation, and it was interesting to hear her say finally that something had to be done back in the immigrants' home countries to render them more habitable, to reduce the push factor...
...No,he had no idea why they should do such a thing...
...Edward Norden International Studies in Los Angeles Fairfax High barely resembles the place Jack Kemp and Herb Alpert graduated from in 1953, but both would feel at home if they ever went back...
...Nor would the principal say that, once in the country legally or illegally, anybody should be excluded, save perhaps the worst gang-bangers...
...1 t was interesting to watch the attractive Miller squirm when asked whether in light of this it wasn't time for immigration from the Third World, especially non-Asian immigration, to be seriously restricted...
...Only teacher Cathy Head, of the Afro-American history department, escaped Tia's criticisms...
...Miss it...
...They wouldn't let her take a job, insisting she concentrate on her schoolwork...
...If an individual behaves destructively, unless he's a physical danger to others, you must think less about restraining or punishing him than about rectifying "the underlying causes...
...Charity hoped to go on to Santa Monica City College...
...Unfortunately, some members of the faculty were lousy but tenured...
...But what happens if we opportunity-transfer him out of here...
...Fairfax, 364, As a result of their problems with English, most of the one-third of graduating seniors who enroll in two-year community colleges, thinking to transfer to UC, are fated to drop out...
...True, there's no more corporal punishment, as there used to be in the old days, in the sixties when Smith was the designated paddler...
...This is why, although gang membership can bestow on a kid the only identity and protection he has, the policy is to suppress insofar as possible...
...It was because of the non-supportive, non-informative, indifferent teachers and counselors that she had failed to take her schooling with enough seriousness in the 10th and llth grades and now lacked the credits to graduate with her classmates...
...And yet, and yet...
...As Smith exited the rotunda and cut across the grass between the athletic facilities and the huge main building, a person with a hawk-eye might have caught sight of a butt—a plain butt, not a reefer— being pinched dead...
...That ain't no foul...
...He was pointing at one of the names in the rotunda of Fairfax High in Los Angeles...
...The pacing Dr...
...The male LAUSD cop scribbled, scribbled...
...And made a "hand-it-over" gesture with his fingers...
...The shot would often be missed...
...On the other hand, Immaculate Heart is all girls, an unhealthy situation—she had left for that reason...
...Earlier this year, he kicked a disruptive female out of class...
...Kiva didn't exactly blame them, nor did she blame them for threatening to strike...
...Neocon your diligent reporter didn't find a single teacher at Fairfax who didn't vote for the Clintons...
...Of course, firearms and knives are also unacceptable, yet there's no frisking at the doors, and no metal detectors either...
...The government troops came to his village one day when he was 15 and took him away...
...Strikes have lives of their own, but with a little good will and budgetary sleight of hand, Jin and Kiva will probably get their diplomas on schedule.The real question is whether, in six years' time, Dan Victor, himself a Fairfax grad, will send his eldest son to public school...
...He has also earned himself some grief thereby...
...In fact, Razi doesn't have to journey to the Third World, The American Spectator March 1993 29 since every day it comes to her...
...Was his preference for jazz over rap sclerotic...
...Of course, he can't do anything about what he calls the "attractive nuisances" nearby, such as the Retail Slut clothiers and especially a comics store directly opposite the school, which as usual was drawing males with their backwards caps and dragging laces...
...Even the brightest, most nearly literate of the kids have grown up in what appears to Safier to be an MTV lumpen culture...
...A good many blacks are intelligent and motivated or motivatable, he said, while too many are intelligent but lazy as a matter of principle, their laziness sanctioned by adults who proclaim that America owes them a break for past and present mistreatment...
...A minute was spent figuring how much the Fairfax teachers stood to be compensated...
...O'Sullivan's office...
...No longer...
...It F is stocked with an autographed copy of The Seventh Bullet and thousands of other volumes, a couple of computer terminals, and thirty magazines on the rack, down from a hundred because of the money crunch...
...He believes that if this country is to survive and profit from the current immigration, schools must become English-only zones...
...They, their starting team and bench were all black...
...O'Sullivan, who cannot hide the fact that he takes pleasure in his work, did not go so far as to say that what big-city public schools are being asked to do is impossible, and would be even if more were budgeted for it...
...Among them, as among the newly arrived Ethiopian and Afghan kids in the ESL program, there are some who claim that after getting an American education, becoming doctors or lawyers, they'll go back to their native lands to help pull them out of the muck...
...This includes the Ethiopians spending nutrition time with other Ethiopians over there, the Russians with Russians over there, the Israelis with Israelis over there, the Koreans with Koreans over there—each group of refugees and immigrants had staked out its turf in the yard, where the language spoken was its own, not English...
...They were satisfied with their corner of the kingdom, they were young and hopeful despite having been conceived at the tail end of the twentieth century and condemned to bloom in a time of plague...
...Once a year, he writes to Mike O'Sullivan demanding a stop to the practice of using Spanish, etc...
...At any rate, these matters of high policy were out of his province...
...and right here in school disagreed...
...I. Discipline T 6 6 here's Jack Kemp right there," said Earl Smith...
...Phil Spector '58...
...AVERAGE SALARY OF STATE PRISON GUARD WITH THREE YEARS' EXPERIENCE: $42,552...
...The trauma aside, he is not unsatisfied with having attained the rank of corporal...
...This makes Dan Victor—with his Ph.D., wire-rimmed glasses, salt-and-pepper beard, and tweed jacket—atypical...
...for school-wide announcements over the PA system...
...This boy cultivated a goatee and was now being treated in the office of Margaret Matagna, school nurse...
...There are kids and kids, according to Safier, and there are black kids and black kids...
...It had lasted nine days, during which movies were shown to everybody...
...Chattering peacefully in English and Spanish, they were stuffing into envelopes roughly 2,000 letters concerning the new schedule of longer days and shorter semesters, 60 percent headed "Dear Parents," the rest "Estimados Padres...
...He works every day after school at a convenience store...
...O'Sullivan was steadily ironical and cheerful even when alone with a visitor...
...Now he was consulting a lawyer to see whether a minor could be sued for libel or slander...
...An obedient boy, he presumably drives straight home in his Dodge Colt, killing the rest of the day sleeping or watching TV...
...Even the faculty's most prominent heretic did it...
...So after barren negotiations, the LAUSD teachers' union had voted to go out on strike on the first day of the spring semester...
...That's the one...
...Has this place changed since I first gotnot to Mike O'Sullivan, is effective—the kids who had fought again the week before after getting their first warning had been "finalized" and were gone, he said...
...There are 107 students in JRTOC at this school...
...The graying history teacher and jazz and black-andwhite movie buff admitted that in every generation since the first pharaohs, the middle-aged have said that youth was going to hell, and often they were mistaken...
...One year in the States from El Salvador, Isabelle first said she intends to repatriate herself after getting a higher education, then remarked how small and dull her village already felt to her on a return visit she was able to pay, documents or no documents...
...By an "ignorant citizenry...
...His irritation turned to pleasure, however, when he found that this was one of last year's grads, now a freshman at Morehouse in Atlanta, wearing that black college's coat-of-arms sweatshirt...
...He was pointing at one of the names in the rotunda of Fairfax High in Los Angeles...
...A Salvadoran who has been here five years and has serious problems expressing himself in English despite having taken ESL and been mainstreamed, he said that his parents worry, that they don't want him out of the house when he's not in school...
...It's just me and her...
...Ifshe were a teacher, she wouldn't take a pay cut lying down either...
...The JROTC give you money scholarships advancement in the Armeed force...
...Well, at Fairfax there were few parents who could do that, certainly their own couldn't...
...Its members, like those of the above groups, occasionally create a disciplinary problem...
...I. Discipline T 6 6 here's Jack Kemp right there," said Earl Smith...
...Relations between students and teacher seemed easy and mutually appreciative...
...Almost all the students in her English as a Second Language class are newly arrived from Central America...
...Then there were the teachers without whose sponsorship and guidance such activities were impossible—some clubs had died recently because unhappy teachers had ceased volunteering their time...
...That's not the solution, because it would only weaken the public schools further, and the public schools are the only institution that gives Americans something in common...
...risk breaking down...
...Smith chose not to see it this time...
...than in the Third World, and safer and calmer inside the perimeter of Fairfax High than in the streets of L.A...
...the parents in their BMWs chip in to fund all sorts of clubs and trips and things...
...The second bell emptied the halls of kids...
...Their Third World vacation destination might therefore be much closer to home, i.e., Mexico, where her Spanish would come in handy...
...On the whole, therefore, she preferred Fairfax, liked it very well, was glad that she had switched despite the tidbits of gossip and information that she provided in hopes of putting a visitor's favorable impressions in perspective: a member of the student council whom she named was supposed to drop acid, there was extensive "ditching" or cutting of class, Mr...
...Which isn't to say that he wasn't acting slightly disgusted as he stood outside near Melrose...
...You miss this," one of the hoodlum non-student clowns supporting Fairfax hollered as Jeff stepped to the line, "you don't get no more c--t...
...It seemed to these high-flying kids that at public high schools in the Valley and Beverly Hills...
...This change necessitated much juggling, which O'Sullivan and the teachers now proceeded to spend an hour on...
...Smith asked, pointing to the beeper clipped to the boy's belt...
...he meant not the advanced placement and honors students who happened to make up all his workload this year, but the mass of unfortunate yet educable kids whom he had taught in previous years and would teach again, and who were being intentionally kept dumb by the powers that be...
...The game was as fast and physical as perhaps only teenagers who worship Michael Jordan's shoes can be...
...Elmer and Jaime and a number of the rest of the boy and girl cadets of the school's JROTC unit were in Dr...
...And that most of the black kids today don't know who Duke Ellington is...
...It's just about impossible to get expelled from the public school system...
...It was the others who made her job frustrating...
...Rush Limbaugh...
...There was going to be a basketball game later against Gardenia High...
...Smith is a black man functioning with a slightly game leg, and as dean is responsible for keeping things nice and law-abiding, a job he was doing effectively that day...
...She understood that if something isn't done to stem the current tide, cities like L.A...
...The gray-haired troubleshooter grabbed his walkie-talkie, pulled on his red windbreaker with the "Dr...
...I thought JFK was a great movie and told my students to go...
...I'm gonna walk that stage and get that diploma from Dr...
...Buses were no longer laid on for away games...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
