Khalilah Horton Goes to School

Khalilah T. Horton, age 14, likes her school. "It's the best middle school in Dorchester," she says. "We don't have violence. We don't fight, stab each other at the bus stop. We just don't think about all that stupid stuff."

Next year, many of Khalilah's classmates will have to start thinking about that stuff. Many will attend South Boston High School, where more than 200 students clashed in a race riot last Thursday, hitting each other, and Mayor Raymond Flynn, with rocks and chunks of asphalt until police in riot gear forced an end to the fighting.

Khalilah holds higher expectations of her education. She has applied to Beaver Country Day School, a private high school in Chestnut Hill. "I want to go so I can push myself to stand up to the work," she says. She wants to be on the "right path," the path to track championships and college.

So far, Khalilah thinks she has been on the right path in the public school system. Her teachers call her a "great kid," one of the ones who can "make it." In the last three years she has not missed a single day of school.

Two weeks ago I joined her there--at the John W. McCormack Middle School--to see what a day is like at one of Dorchester's junior high schools.

The school is a yellowish-tan building behind a fence, directly across the street from the apartment complex where Khalilah has lived with her grandmother for as long as she can remember. "Harbor View Apartments: Luxury Waterfront Apartments," says a sign. The buildings, which have their own swimming pool and tennis courts, look out across the Old Harbor at smokestacks in South Boston. Across the water, off to the left of the factories, rises Boston's downtown skyline, silver, clean and far away.

At 7 a.m., many of Khalilah's friends from Harbor View wait outside to be bused to other schools in Boston. Khalilah just walks across the street to McCormack each day.

We enter through a door on the side of the school into a short hallway with photocopied photographs on the walls. A picture of U.S. attorney general Janet Reno, hangs next to one of rapper Queen Latifah.

Another poster that hangs high on walls throughout the school reads, "The Future Starts When You REACH For It."

Music Class. First period, 8 a.m. "Could we sing?" asks Khalilah. But Ms. Banks, a tall woman, wearing a scarf and a draping black dress, presents the class with part of the libretto from the opera "Carmen" to read silently.

As she begins to teach, the class begins to talk. Khalilah and most others pull Social Studies homework, due next period, from their bags. Boys in the back drag their desks together to compare answers.

Erik, a wiry freckled boy, mischievous and smart, skips to the back of the room to visit Keith. "How ya doin'?" asks Erik. They chat.

Five minutes into the period, I count two of the 17 students in the class listening to the music teacher.

"Act as if I'm telling you something," she pleads. "Pretend, at least." Khalilah looks across the room at me and shrugs.

There is another teacher in the room, but he stands in the front corner, talking with a Crimson photographer. He ducks once to avoid a paper ball flying from the boys in back.

After a while Banks sits down behind the upright piano, opens a book of scores, and starts to play themes from "Carmen."

When the piano falters, Rinaldo, a stocky round-faced Italian, looks back at me with a grin. "She messed up," he tells me.

"Gloom is hanging over this opera," says Banks from behind the piano. "I want you all to know this."

Erik gets up to dance when Banks plays the opera's "Street Boys' Chorus."

At this point, no one appears to be listening to what the teacher is saying. All prepare work for next period and talk. Michelle, who sits in the front row with Khalilah, gets up to check answers with her, and Erik is still making rounds of the room. Paper airplanes fly.

"The class was out of control," Khalilah tells me later. "Some teachers don't set standard rules for the class. She cares, but...strict is better," she says. "Any class I taught would be learning, 'cause I would be all over them."

"Let me think I'm doing something here," the music teacher begs. "Pretend--be actresses here."

After a while she stops playing piano and loads a classical tape into the cassette player.

"C'mon, I wanna hear rap," says Erik.

He sits behind the piano, tinkles out a few notes, and gets up again. Khalilah, who has been doing work and helping her friend Michelle the whole time, looks at Erik and shakes her head.

"It's just music," explains Keith, a thin freckled boy with red hair tossed to one side of his forehead.

"Opera is larger than life," says Banks, her hands waving in broad strokes high above her head. Then Erik stands in front of the class and conducts the music with equally broad movements.

Finally, Banks sighs and sits behind a table in front, hands in her lap. She does nothing to stop the class from replacing the classical cassette with one of their own rap tapes. "Rap began a long time ago," she says softly, as the bass begins to boom over her voice. "It's gone through about three forms already."

James, a short boy with a raspy laugh, jumps up to compete in a paper ball throwing contest. "See what this music has done to James," cries Banks. She pushes the stop button on the tape recorder.

Rinaldo turns around to tell me to write that they like reggae.

With five minutes left in the wildest class of the day, Banks goes back behind the piano. "Let's sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic," she says. Khalilah packs her backpack for the next class. Erik leads the song: "Glory, Glory Hallelujah, the teacher hit me with a ruler..."

Social Studies, second period, is different. Mr. Goode, usually grinning, begins class by holding his left wrist above his head and looking at his watch. "Fifteen seconds," he says. The students have 15 seconds to quiet themselves and clear their desks for a test; otherwise, they lose "freebies," excuses from detention.

By the time Goode finishes counting backwards aloud, they are quiet.

Soon most are working on their tests. Michelle sucks her thumb while she thinks about what to write. A few students seem to be ignoring the tests on their desks.

"Some kids I will have very little effect on," Goode admits. "Some kids are too far gone."

But Goode spends much of his time with those who have the furthest to go. About half of Khalilah's classmates are "resource kids," who are two grades behind academically. The regular kids like Khalilah are supposed to help them catch up.

"It's tough to teach kids that don't want to learn," Goode says. "Somewhere along the line there needs to be someone pushing them."

The ones who will "make it," according to Goode, are the ones with support at home. The key to a student's success, he explains, is "Parents, parents, parents, parents."

"We're not parents--the school system should stop trying to be parents," he says.

But Goode admits that his teaching does not end at the school's doors. He has spoken with parents of every student in the class, he says, and visited many of their homes.

And when they needed to research their Social Studies Fair projects, it was Goode who took many of them to a public library.

Huge collages from the fair, about six feet by three feet each, lean along the back wall of the classroom. Topics include Black Men in Congress, Black Men of World War II, Black Indians, Rosa Parks' Impact on Black Americans, The Battle of Wounded Knee and the Statue of Liberty.

Later in the day, Khalilah shows me her report and poster on J. Edgar Hoover. "It was like college," she says, telling me how she borrowed four thick books from the library for research. "I learned about someone who made it," she says. "I think every class should have a fair."

But in order to have the Social Studies Fair, Goode took two months out of the curriculum.

The class will not get very far in American history this year, admits Goode. On April 30, they were just finishing Thomas Jefferson's election.

"You're going to measure my accomplishment by how much they learn," Goode says. "But all I can do is take a kid from where they are, as far as they can go."

When the bell rings, Khalilah tells me the test was easy.

"Am I winning with these kids? I think I am," Goode says. "With most of them--with others I'm just trying."

Third period. Instead of going to Computer Education, Khalilah heads for a Student Council meeting in the cafeteria. With about 60 others, she flips through glossy jewelry catalogues the student council is using to raise funds.

"We're gonna sell!" Khalilah tells a group huddled around her. If her group sells 125 items of jewelry, they will earn $150 from the company. She looks over her shoulders at another group and says, "They ain't gonna do it 'cause they got boys."

After the meeting, Khalilah plays Tetris and Pac-Man in Computer Education class. The rest of the class is also playing games.

When the bell rings, grinning Rinaldo tells me to write, "Everybody likes to make noise."

Between periods, the halls echo with students running between lockers and friends. Every few yards a teacher stands in the middle of the hall to keep everyone walking on the right side.

Khalilah walks confidently through the chaos, her back straight, her backpack strapped to both shoulders.

Reading class. There are only six students in this class, in a small, bright room.

They take a vocabulary quiz on words like "terrific," "church," "curious," "stair," "noisy" and "question." When Michelle asks for a hint, the teacher responds with the first letter of the answer. "I'm not supposed to do this," she says.

After this they take another test to practice for next week's Metropolitan Achievement Test.

"They didn't design this book right," Khalilah says, pointing at the test booklet. And she is right--a drawing of a "dark winter day" shows people in short sleeved t-shirts.

Math class. Ms. Jorsling, a big woman wearing a wide red cardigan and long blue skirt, says very little during the entire period.

At the beginning of class, she calls in an assistant principal. "These girls won't stop their gum-popping," she says in a clipped accent. After the assistant principal warns the students to stop, the teacher turns slowly to the blackboard to continue writing notes.

"To bisect a line it is divided into two equal parts," she writes, adding a diagram, Jorsling does not explain any of the notes she writes on the board.

Keith, the redhead, jiggles a red pencil between two fingers so it looks like it is made of rubber. Khalilah spreads the Boston Herald on her desk.

When the class does geometry problems from the textbooks, Khalilah figures the angles in her head, shouting them out before the others.

When she finishes, she starts to read the Herald again. "I always read the whole paper," Khalilah says.

"It's not called for for someone to get shot every day," she tells me in an urgent voice after math class. "It's not going to solve anything..."

English. Mr. Kaufman, with a moustache and a soft voice, has been teaching this extra class all year; the regular teacher has been out with heart problems, he says.

"It's not that easy to do, to step in and develop a curriculum for an entire year at a moment's notice," he says.

Khalilah takes another vocabulary quiz here. Fill-in-the-blanks include questions like, "The dog bit me when it got--(vexed)," and "Don't rush. Go nice and--(leisurely)."

Kaufman is torn between making the test harder, to raise students' expectations, and making the test easier, to give them self-esteem. Usually, he makes it easier, he says.

After the test, they tell a story aloud, pretending to be Guatemalan Indians from Rigober la Mencho's autobiography. They each contribute one sentence at a time, following each other's lead.

For a few minutes the class flows. Egged on by Kaufman's questions, Rinaldo describes an Indian's drunkenness; Erik says he got drunk because he was depressed, but Khalilah says he was depressed because he was drunk all the time. He should have been supporting the family, not getting drunk, Khalilah says.

For lunch she eats a bag of Lays Sour Cream and Onion potato chips and a half slice of pizza from the cafeteria. The pizza costs one dollar. Splitting it is cheaper, she says. Khalilah says that is her usual lunch and it is filling enough for her.

After school Khalilah usually goes to track practice for a few hours. Wilma Rudolph, the track star, is her hero. Then she goes home and to the Walter Denny Teen Center down the street, "so we don't get in trouble on the streets."

"I don't spend my time doing nothing," she says. "Time's too valuable to waste standing on a corner, guarding turf...that's just stupid."

Khalilah refuses to be distracted from school by the vices of society. Teachers say it's because she has a supportive home environment, while Khalilah Horton says simply that getting in trouble would be self-defeating.

"Lots of people aren't active," she says. "I tell them not to smoke and drink around me, because it's just not cool...you lose your chance."

And Khalilah, whether or she ends up at South Boston High School, does not want to lose her chance.

The music teacher does nothing to prevent the class from replacing the classical cassette with a rap tape of their own.