Tennyson Street School: onboarding
The Fellows program was based on a model out of Boston. A Harvard researcher had taken elements of a successful local charter school – smaller class size, motivated teachers and principal, data-driven teaching strategies, and high-frequency small-group tutoring – and introduced a test program in Houston Independent School District, augmenting instruction at schools designated “chronically poor-performing.” They called the participating schools “Apollo Schools” – and they took off.
As I filled out online hiring forms, I remembered Houston Independent School District. My young husband had gotten his first teaching job out of college with Houston – over the phone. We packed up our two toddler boys and our shabby college-student furniture and our gangly spider plants into a rented Ryder truck and drove south out of Colorado for two days. When we arrived and I opened my car door in South Texas, the 99% humidity and heat of a Gulf Coast August hit me full in the face like a burning slap. At 22, I was two months pregnant with my third baby, parked next to everything I owned.
The boys and I would drop Daddy off at school most mornings so we could have the car. Everything in Houston required a car – I found no sidewalks, not downtown, not in our neighborhood off the highway. Everything was off a highway, a beltway, an expressway, so I’d take an exit to our winding streets of identical duplexes, another exit to the grocery store, another to the laundromat.
As we wound around the raised freeway exit ramps in the early morning light, we came face-to-face with towering clouds off the gulf, rosy-golden mountains of potential havoc that could pour torrents of rain by afternoon and leave the oily highways slick and terrifying. But in the mornings, all was soft and gentle, and the boys were usually content to watch this new world go by from their carseats.
Driving down into their daddy’s school neighborhood, the world turned. Instead of neat but bland brick duplexes, dilapidated clapboard shacks, most a faded gray-white, sagged alongside the road. On the porches filled with torn couches sat black men, young men, middle-aged, a few with white hair, most ignoring our passing. Some watched us go by in our small hatchback, a simmering frustration lingering like the exhaust from our old car.
At the railroad tracks, my husband slowed, then crossed, accelerating again. “Did you – see that?!” I asked, shocked, twisting in my seat to try to see behind us. My husband asked what I meant. “The man at the railroad tracks? He didn’t have any pants on!”
A black man of maybe 35, potentially in the prime of his life, had stood nonchalantly next to the railroad crossing sign, wearing a worn T-shirt – and nothing else. Naked from the waist down, his eyes had looked completely vacant, uncomprehending, uncaring. Nothing to see here.
We drove into the employee parking lot behind the elementary school just blocks from the railroad tracks. An eight-foot chainlink fence topped with coils of razor wire surrounded the teachers’ cars. The school looked like a prison, which often gave me a shiver as we said goodbye and I came around the car and got into the driver’s seat. Then I drove out of the gate, past the Good Eats sign over a boarded up cafe, back across the tracks, and took the boys home until time to pick up Daddy in the late afternoon.
Almost all of my husband’s students were black. The poverty of that segregated neighborhood brought me such a heavy sadness I felt like mourning, for the children inside the school, for the men wasting away on their broken couches, for the women working somewhere, unseen. The discrepancy stood stark and malignant between Houston’s polished, sterile downtown, where rich white men stepped from air-conditioned cars with tinted windows to enter air-conditioned towers with tinted windows, and this low-lying floodplain district filled with sweaty blocks of unemployed black men and broken-down shanties. The barbaric measures ensuring the safety of staff vehicles while children ran a gauntlet to school alongside guardrails of narrow highways or dirt tracks along crumbling neighborhood streets – or past the man at the railroad crossing – set my teeth on edge, a frustration of disbelief at such entrenched community racism; I combined all that with an uneasy fear as I recognized how out of place we were, how awkwardly naive, and how helpless I felt in the face of such a weighted, historic brokenness.
Into these schools arrived Harvard and their experimental plan to coach these kids, closing their “opportunity gaps” by first believing the kids were capable of far more than dodging cars and strung-out, hopeless junkies waiting to get hit by a train.