'I am Somebody!'
Page, Clarence
'I am Somebody!' by Clarence Page Jesse Jackson's staged entrances into page-one politics are small masterpieces of showmanship. In the Middle East, at Camp David, wherever cameramen gather,...
...In a way, this makes the mysterious PUSH-Excel an ideal vehicle for him...
...Collins sees no reason why not...
...The Memphis business climate did not change...
...hardline editorialists are impressed...
...a call for hard discipline, no TV, and saving it for your spouse would sound like pure country corn coming from somebody else...
...nobody does a better job of working a crowd into a frenzy just before the plate is passed...
...Her kids are frequently reminded: "You don't get something for nothing...
...But this is to beg the most important question...
...Some white liberals are especially aghast at PUSH-Excel's slogans...
...The good Lord gave you two ears and one mouth because He wants you to hear more than to talk...
...Collins must twist and turn as she makes her way through the room...
...Some regard Jackson as an ideological turncoat...
...There, stacks of dog-eared books are piled on the floor between the desks and in the aisles...
...No work, no money...
...But when you inquire about results, he sends you trekking off to find another layer of officials somewhere else, down the hall, up the stairs...
...Suppose we said to students, 'All you have to do is study hard,— he says...
...It is hard to come away from talking to Marva Collins without a nagging pull of anxiety...
...Of course, school officials have a vested interest in denying that an outsider might be able to do what they cannot...
...You only know when you fail—when another student can't read or gets pregnant...
...To help spread this gospel, PUSH-Excel encourages—but doesn't always establish— various auxiliary projects...
...There are no free rides here," she tells her kids, walking up and down the aisles of a tiny classroom that has no teacher's desk at the front...
...Checking into PUSH-Excel, you find that the very existence of the program came about indirectly, more or less by happenstance...
...S! Gimme an 0...
...And between talking and teaching, it seems safe to say, her kids can tell the difference— gonna have it in their heads, gonna have it there forever...
...The others arrive at 9:00...
...Those are the ones who need Jackson...
...Westside Prep, teaching kids from ages four to 13 in the environment of an oldtime country schoolhouse, embodies educational reform on a profoundly simple level...
...Whether such battles are genuine or media stunts is probably beside the point...
...Shouldn't he spend most of his time with the program, where he is needed...
...This fall, Collins hopes to move her school to an old bank building a few blocks away, where there will be room for 150 students...
...But for now, at least, she devotes herself exclusively to salvaging the kids Jesse Jackson likes to talk about...
...Few of those parents can afford the $80-a-month tuition Collins charges, but they pay it anyway whenever they can—a direct financial commitment to their children that the public schools of America no longer require...
...He urges that it be "enforced," although he's vague about what that means...
...She stares at each of them intently, almost ferociously...
...PUS H-Excel's finale takes place on high school graduation day...
...The lunch break, for Marva Collins: `My children don't fail...
...But Jackson falters when it comes time to put away the pulpit and cope with details...
...That's all they're good at...
...But the systems that ask for his help appear to have lost their self-respect, their ability to motivate teachers, students, and parents...
...PUSHExcel claims to have registered 10,000 seniors in Chicago and about 12,000 elsewhere...
...Jackson's philosophical argument seems reasonable enough: nobody is going to do anything about "the system" once he or she has been permanently crippled by it, and Jackson is trying to catch people in the last moments while they still can be rehabilitated...
...Then he is up and away, back to his Chicago base at Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), long enough at least to pick up his messages and check with his travel agent...
...But mostly they show up at PUSH's Saturday morning headquarters meetings in Chicago—where cameras are always rolling—instead of making unnoticed speeches in grim high school auditoriums...
...PUSH Comes to Nudge I am a reporter, not a statistician, and it may be that I'm missing some subtlety buried in the numbers...
...They didn't need Jesse Jackson...
...There are some assumptions made about the proper domain of black people," he says...
...This rudimentary rule sends shock waves through the students, many of whom are addicted to the mental wallpaper of television in ways at least as insidious as addiction to drugs...
...I would go crazy sitting in one place, talking more and more to fewer and fewer people," he told me...
...Last year, for example, he proclaimed a series of Jackson moves on, drumming into the kids the point that participation in PUS HExcel is voluntary...
...When disaffected students arrive at Westside Prep and discover they are expected to cope with Tolstoy and Thoreau, they go into shock at first...
...I can make almost any child gifted," she says flatly...
...The dialogue between teacher and students is ceaseless...
...Collins shuns all the modern teaching gimmicks (especially audio-visuals) that serve mainly to protect teachers from having to teach, and uses no class "subjects" or "periods...
...Those with working parents are dropped off at her house at 8:00 a.m...
...Soon, because of her combination of aggressiveness and patience, the force-feeding becomes unnecessary, and students discover that Jason and the Argonauts are pretty fair "impact educators," maybe even better than Ernie Banks and the Chicago Cubs or the other stars a program like PUSH-Excel recruits...
...Like so many other products of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Jesse Jackson is more comfortable moving than administering...
...Greek and Latin in the ghetto...
...PUSH's bank balance reportedly had dipped to $3,000 at a point when the organization owed $400,000, and some staffers were working without pay...
...In that time, he talked about the Middle East on "Meet the Press...
...Sure, there are hordes of white political figures wandering around tossing quotes to the networks...
...Sitting in PUSH's headquarters—a huge converted synagogue in Chicago's south-side Hyde Park—Jackson is like a government agency director...
...Wait a minute...
...All the money in the world," the girl replies, in cool confidence...
...You'll have to talk to the chief operating officers about that...
...Don't wait for a 1982 NIE report, he will tell you...
...She moves constantly among the desks, looking over shoulders, scrutinizing progress, asking questions, listening to the answers, commenting, moving on...
...and begin school immediately...
...Chrysler remained in peril...
...The Zulus were doing all right without him and the musical was already selling well...
...But we have a number of projects here to encourage excellence...
...The general view is that he is doing som ething significant, something important, and doing it well...
...With the card comes information on the election process and how to operate voting machines.After the voter registration exercise, PUSH-Excel is complete...
...Nothing, but PUSH-Excel provides no formal mechanism for rounding up these paragons and bringing them into the schools...
...Black leaders like Coretta King are disturbed by Jackson's nothing-to-fear-butus message...
...The gullibility of reporters works to Jackson's advantage...
...You have the right to fail— if that's what you want to do...
...He can't be blamed, of course, for the media's failings, and he may well be right when he thinks white platitudes are more readily accepted than black platitudes...
...The Middle East was unaffected...
...Erasable Chalk-Talks But if the media have done much of Jackson's image-building for him, it is still a compelling image...
...PUSH-Expo, an annual showcase for black businesses, was losing money...
...He can rattle off impressivesounding macro-stats about the problems of urban education...
...The smoke and mirrors themselves bother some people...
...He can give a "chalk talk" any Big Ten coach would be proud of, and the psych-up quality of his famous audience response chant (Jackson: "I may be on welfare...
...But we're not saying that...
...But direct observation seems more trustworthy to me, and over the years of watching Jackson I've found very little evidence to suggest that his careening from issue to issue improves the chances that PUSH-Excel will succeed...
...A sample week recently consisted of hopping from Chicago to Washington to Detroit to Memphis and back...
...It's hard to single out the effects of any single one...
...And somewhere in there he lectured two auditoriumsfull of high school kids...
...The code, Jackson says, offers "alternative life styles to drugs, alcohol, violence, teenage pregnancy, and other forms of decadence that detract from an educational atmosphere...
...A cacophony from the congregration...
...Jackson is unimpressed with these philosophical objections...
...But Jackson is one of the few men alive who can actually communicate with ghetto kids...
...If I gave you a billion dollars, filled this room with million--dollar bills—" Collins is interrupted by murmurs and giggles...
...With or without Jesse Jackson, PUSH-Excel relies on smoke and mirrors, but without him, there's no music...
...We challenge youngsters to turn their television sets off at night...
...As a reporter who has covered Jackson intermittently for ten years, I know that in oratorical skills he has few peers...
...The government officials who fund it speak of it in vague generalizations...
...In 1976, PUSH was in the worst financial straits of its always precarious existence...
...if they keep proclaiming that he used to be a revolutionary, the PUSH-Excel gospel seems all the more dramatic...
...He held two press conferences...
...Unlike Jackson, who is always on his way somewhere, but rarely there, Collins is out of bed before dawn each morning and in her classroom all day, every day, five days a week, drilling and inspiring her kids...
...She just teaches, without specializing or compartmentalizing...
...She waves in the direction of the streets, the empty lots, the battered playgrounds: Those are the gyms for her kids, and there is plenty of time to play in them after school...
...The rock-star side of Jackson bothers some people too—not because they envy his charisma but because it's based on a distortion of history...
...What...
...Since Jackson is friends with many sports and entertainment stars, their names often turn up in connection with PUSH...
...and "excellent...
...Theoretically, hard numbers like attendance figures should be objective...
...PUSHExcel is so elusive, so amorphous, that it is called a "program" only as a matter of semantic convenience...
...Jackson freely admits that PUSH-Excel cannot be readily evaluated—a handy sort of program to have...
...But Jackson is the beneficiary of the kind of amnesia that afflicts the media from time to time...
...No one can buy what I do here, so they can stop offering me jobs...
...Among the millions of people who saw the broadcast were Hubert Humphrey and Joseph Califano...
...I'm right there at their shoulders all the time...
...The waiting list already has 800 names...
...You get it together or you go back to that fly-bynight school...
...Collins drills them with a back-tobasics philosophy that sounds very much like Jackson's...
...They understand if I understand," she says simply...
...How much money do you think you're worth...
...Her students make such remarkable progress that outsiders usually conclude they must be gifted, or at least from intellectual homes...
...No education, no work...
...He takes the argument a notch further, seeing racist overtones in questions raised about his globetrotting showmanship...
...For example, the idea of bringing in "impact educators" to provide "positive role models"— aside from some obnoxious terminology, what could be wrong with that...
...This benevolence persists even though almost no one can explain what PUSHExcel really is...
...With the kids, he left a stack of pledge cards...
...Unfortunately, they are at best inconclusive...
...He stays just long enough to spin off a few provocative quotes, in self-contained 20-second snippets shrewdly timed to accommodate the editors in the cutting room...
...Though Jackson ministers to the poor, he was sensible enough to stuff PUSH's board of directors full of bankers and businessmen...
...That response can be programmed, but there is more: "If this room were filled with money, HEW's successor, the new Department of Education, is the largest single contributor, planning to give $3 million in the next two years...
...Collins quit teaching in the public schools six years ago, frustrated and infuriated by meaningless rules, trivial conflicts, principals without principles, and teachers without vertebrae...
...I don't let them fail.' teacher and students alike, is only 20 minutes, and it is not really a break at all...
...My philosophy is that my children don't fail," she says...
...Newspaper editorials have proposed that she take over Chicago's crippled school system...
...may owe less to revival preaching than to sidelines cheering ("Gimme an S...
...But there is another side of Jackson, one that is almost universally admired—his performance as director of PUSH for Excellence, a motivation program for ghetto kids...
...Marva Collins has been discovered, first by the Chicago press and more recently by the likes of 60 Minutes and People magazine...
...Not everyone is impressed with these spectacles...
...It seems strange, coming from a man who built his reputation on seeming to defy "the system...
...As the beneficiary of government largesse, PUSH-Excel could naturally expect sooner or later to be evaluated, and such evaluations would determine whether or not the spigot would be shut off...
...but I am somebody...
...Moreover, Collins refuses to get by on a quick gloss...
...The students at Westside are rejects from Chicago's public school system, pigeonholed and stigmatized as "slow learners...
...But if you keep what's in your head, gonna have that forever...
...No money, you starve...
...Jackson spins images of seniors marching into the sunlight with a diploma in one hand and a voter registration card in the other...
...When she's teaching arithmetic, for example, she also teaches ancient history and language roots—by discussing the life and times of Pythagoras, and by exploring the root Greek and Latin words for mathematical concepts...
...That's the obvious reaction to the man and his "program," and that's the reaction he has so successfully cultivated among people who have never taken a close look at PUSH-Excel...
...in January the Los Angeles County school board offered her $52,000 a year to become its superintendent...
...In PUSH-Excel's case, however, the evaluators have fallen back on a time-honored recommendation—the need for further study...
...Among sociologists, this is commonly called "blaming the victim for his condition," and they don't approve of it...
...As they did, Jackson took the gospel of self-help—being applied, at that instant, to PUSH itself—and made it into a useful and highly marketable social rallying cry...
...She may someday cave in or burn out, given the pressures from a press determined to sanctify her and an educational establishment interested in co-opting her...
...No, no, no...
...This anger seems baffling, even suspicious...
...They are astonished that a black leader would call black kids exactly what many of them are: sassy little thugs who never do anything useful, even for themselves...
...Jackson is generally portrayed as some sort of revolutionary— and if someone's going to give a back-tobasics speech, the best man for the job is a revolutionary...
...Why should I settle for a more limited spot...
...Her students do enjoy one important advantage over most ghetto kids...
...I'm the chief executive officer," he told me...
...Those Who Can Teach, Do Proof exists that the save-yourself slogans of Jesse Jackson's PUSH-Excel can work...
...King...
...There is less enthusiasm among the handful of people who have looked...
...Wrong assumptions...
...he now seems to endorse it, spreading a gospel which that if poor black kids would just work hard, dress smartly, and get home at a decent hour, things would be all right...
...Crowds at the Saturday morning community meetings were falling off...
...That's it: pledge cards, a rousing assembly, maybe a few clubs, and a challenge to change the world by exercising the franchise...
...Collins also uses preacher/congregation chants similar to Jackson's—but pauses to listen to the answers...
...By December 1977, Jackson had the images of PUSH-Excel well enough sketched out to attract the producers of 60 Minutes into profiling his pilot program...
...Jackson says he is angry at being stereotyped as a "black leader" convenient to quote—"Nobody calls Jane Byrne a 'white mayor' "—and the implicit message he gets, from white politicians who have been pontificating about race relations for years without discernible credentials, is that he has no claim to expertise on Middle East issues simply because he's black...
...That would be a cop-out...
...In July 1979, NW released a thick document full of page after page of technical rationalizations for why the abstract goals of the "program"—motivation, selfrespect, responsibility—are so difficult to study and quantify...
...Participating students must pledge to study two hours every night, without distraction from television, radio, or the telephone...
...Such critics are more disturbed by Jackson's admission of the obvious reality than by the question of whether he has a legitimate strategy for doing anything to change it...
...There is no recess...
...And it comes as no real surprise that they don't have the numbers either...
...Crowd...
...The proof comes, however, not from anything Jackson has done but from a 31student school called Westside Prep, in a tough black ghetto of Chicago, and from Marva Collins, the remarkable woman who is the mind and heart of the school— its owner, its principal, its sole teacher...
...The Jews were not converted...
...He has that rarest of talents—the ability to grab their attention, to break through the cycle of despair, to clear their drugged brains long enough to make them listen, long enough to tell them something about hope...
...Inspection of his record reveals that he has seldom spoken a line more radical or inflammatory than his mentor, Dr...
...We're trying to change attitudes even the school system itself doesn't work on," he explains...
...and "tres bien...
...He bristles at this...
...With NBC, he left his home number...
...The Labor Department has supplied $500,000 in career-training money to five PUSH-Excel member schools...
...Collins has no interest in administering—she wants to teach—and the money doesn't interest her, because she understands the difference between money and satisfaction...
...The school itself could certainly use more money, but Collins is not about to ask for it, and when the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare offered an unsolicited grant of $16,000, she turned it down...
...But instead of dedicating his time and effort to teaching poor black kids how to use the system for their own advantage, he uses it mainly for his own...
...I'm always in favor of encouraging excellence," said the principal of Chicago Vocational High...
...A look at even some of the more innocuous aspects of the PUSH-Excel plan suggests there's truth in this view...
...He prefers to call it a "movement" rather than a program, and the analogy fits well...
...In PUSH-Excel, he has a "program" that depends on the forcefulness of his personality to succeed, but that personality skitters back and forth, back and forth, never really advancing the ball or launching a long bomb...
...It's difficult to find anything in Jackson's menu that wouldn't be served up by any self-respecting school system...
...That's PUSHExcel, the "program" that is Jesse Jackson's current claim to fame...
...Westside Prep, which she started in 1975, is the upper floor of her home...
...Since then, HEW has given another $700,000 for the PUSH-Excel programs in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Kansas City, and more HEW money is going to PUSHExcel programs as they are set up in other cities...
...Their parents care enough about them to send them to her...
...The federal government is so impressed it gives Jackson money he hasn't even asked for...
...She is fiercely opposed to the idea that black children don't need to know about the foundations of the King's English, and she finds a moral in everything she teaches, whether it is the Little Red Hen or Paradise Lost...
...In the Middle East, at Camp David, wherever cameramen gather, he descends as if on wires, deus ex video...
...When pressed, he cites his celebrated battles with the Chicago school board and the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare to prove his sustained opposition to the status quo...
...Naturally, all of them had nice things to say about PUSHExcel's intentions, but none could point to a specific positive effect...
...For their part, parents must pledge to monitor their children's study time, exchange phone numbers with teachers, and pick up report cards personally, so that they have to face the grades...
...She plans to add five teachers, and to pay them strictly from whatever tuition is actually collected...
...the publicity could hardly have been better if Jackson had written the script himself...
...These days it is not uncommon to find reporters and television cameramen wedged in among the children in Collins's classroom...
...Eventually, NIE decided to evaluate PUSH-Excel over a three-year span, using three full-time Washington observers and part-time evaluators in six cities...
...Now—how many of you would sell your knowledge for that money...
...Local governments have provided funding for PUSH-Excel programs in Ohio, Louisiana, California, South Carolina, New York, Virginia, and Washington state...
...I don't let them fail...
...We're having an impact...
...He talked about Chrysler with Lee Iacocca...
...Magda Krance Magda Krance is a Chicago freelance reporter...
...Jackson lays out his "ethical code of conduct," a compilation of fundamentalist self-help values drawn straight from his Baptist immersion...
...Collins works with older kids in the cramped classroom...
...she says she won't teach a book unless she has recently read it herself...
...ing Jackson's global media events have any direct knowledge of Chicago's ghetto or of programs presumed to be operating there...
...Few of the political reporters coverClarence Page is an urban-affairs reporter for The Chicago Tribune...
...These include "academic Olympics," history and math clubs, "reproductive health conferences" (sex education), clubs to "foster leadership," and visits by "impact educators" athletes, businessmen, and entertainers who can provide "positive role models...
...In some cases—for example, some appearances of ex-Cubs star Ernie Banks at Chicago schools—PUSH-Excel simply attaches its name to a celebrity who was planning to visit the school anyway...
...He held a reception in his home for the chief minister of South Africa's Zulu tribe, and another for the Chicago company of the musical, Your Arms Too Short to Box with God...
...This would be good news, if only principals really said that...
...Specifics are not PUSH-Excel's strong suit...
...pals: "They'll tell you absenteeism is down, vandalism is down...
...Humphrey, stricken with the cancer that would end his life a month later, called the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and both agreed that PUSH-Excel deserved federal support...
...He spoke to a meeting of Memphis businessmen...
...liberals are impressed...
...Private money for PUSH-Excel comes from the Ford, Rockefeller, CBS, and Chicago Community Trust foundations...
...what with her classes and her reading, she often does not step outside for days in a row...
...She drives the children as hard as she drives herself...
...Jackson never even had to ask for it...
...The telling difference between Marva Collins and Jesse Jackson has more to do with engagement calendars than with philosophy...
...Collins forcefeeds them...
...She provides the key ingredients abandoned by so many schools: hard work, patience, and concern for each individual child...
...School goes straight through trying to find something about the program that wasn't vague," an NIE official says...
...There is no recreation, no gym...
...He has been markedly shrewd at exploiting the penchant of the media for grabbing the nearest plausible expert without checking to see whether he really has a constituency...
...Mothers are impressed with PUSH-Excel...
...Jackson was a successful but unnoticed quarterback in college, and if he remains a frustrated jock at heart today, that serves ghetto kids well—because they know that sport is the one career field where they have at least a remote shot at succeeding purely on their own ability...
...Figures provided for six PUSH-Excel schools showed three with slight attendance increases, three with slight declines...
...they should be doing that job themselves, but if they won't or can't, it's a good thing they can call on Jesse Jackson...
...They don't if I don't...
...Full Eclipse of the Agenda Jackson's indifference to followthrough has propelled him into situations that would have been disastrous for someone without his survival skills...
...Few human beings can remain forever indifferent to daily bouquets and offers of large sums of money—available if only she will stop doing what she does so well...
...Within a week, the first $45,000 of HEW aid was on its way to Chicago...
...between bites of a Big Mac, Collins goes right on teaching, explaining a grade, or listening to a child read aloud...
...The study will not be out until 1982, and NIE officials caution not to expect anything very conclusive even then...
...With movements, the destination is less important than the journey...
...Instead, go talk to Chicago school princiuntil 2:30...
...Teachers must pledge to give "meaningful" homework assignments, and to call parents if a PUSH-Excel student misses school for two consecutive days or falls behind...
...When you ask him gritty questions like how much money Excel takes in, how it's spent, how many students are affected, and whether academic improvements are ever confirmed, he looks slightly annoyed...
...There are some things the system ought to do, and some things you ought to do...
...This infuriates Collins, who accepts only children that the public school system couldn't or wouldn't accommodate...
...Anyone who watches Jackson in action knows that he can rivet attention, he can compel, he can motivate—but not by long distance, not when he is off somewhere commenting on SALT talks or hugging up Yassir Arafat...
...Even PUSH-Excel officials themselves are hard-pressed to provide a 25-word description of the program's function...
...Jackson's image is more radical, of course—and as long as coverage goes no deeper than the length of his Afro, the street lingo of his press conferences, and the cut of his suits, people will always be surprised to find him clothed in three-piece fundamentalism...
...The obvious analogy is a rock concert...
...she suddenly demands of one little girl...
...My interviews with principals of Chicago PUSH-Excel schools, and with members of the school board, were unsatisfying...
...It looked fabulous on the tube...
...The more important objection to PUSH-Excel--and the one that's almost never raised—involves the question of whether the "program" can produce anything of substance without the full-time participation of its superstar...
...0...
...Jackson has been working hard for years to make sure reporters remember his name and number when they want a pithy quote from a spokesman for the black community...
...I haven't sat down since I started teaching...
...He talked about ethnic issues with Jewish leaders...
...Suddenly you're in just another bureaucracy...
...She doesn't particularly object to the publicity—although it disturbs her to think that nobody seems to be able to find anyone else doing what she does—but so far she hasn't been swayed by it...
...We spent a lot of time you're gonna spend it, and it will be gone," says a little boy quietly...
...Not surprisingly, Jackson's bigname "impact educators" do most of their impacting in Los Angeles, where there is a ready pool of stars to call on...
...But the kids, fired up and enthusiastic after his speeches, walked back out to the pallid ghetto streets, littered with peeling people going nowhere, and knew they would never see him again...
...They scrambled about for loans and grants to keep PUSH from failing...
...He objects to this characterization, of course, but if there's one athletic passion Jackson lacks, it's keeping stats...
...Tie Your Own Bootstraps Nobody can seriously oppose hard studying, voting, and good health habits— and that, of course, is the basic reason why PUSH-Excel sounds so good to so many people...
...Two assistants teach fourand five-year-olds to read in the front room—a room papered with compositions marked "cum laude...
...In 1978 HEW put its subsidiary agency, the National Institute for Education, to work assessing PUSH-Excel's performance...
...She didn't want government "experts"—deskbound doctors of education who couldn't teach a Slinky to go down stairs—coming, in and harassing her with advice, regulations, evaluations...
...Thomas Todd, a lawyer and former PUSH vice president who fell out with Jackson, says PUSHExcel is "a non-program, a public-relations stunt based on rhetoric and nothing more...
...The most specific number associated with PUSH-Excel thus far is the $750,000 budgeted to study it...
Vol. 11 • February 1980 • No. 12
