Learning to Excel in School

Jesse Jackson tells black teens: "Nobody can save us but us

An imposing man with the build of a football player and the command of a general strides onstage in the high school auditorium. Immediately, the audience falls silent. He captures the students expertly, first soothing them with his soft, sensuous voice, then whipping them into a frenzy with a quickening cadence. "We can be as good in academics as in athletics," he shouts, "but we've got to believe we are somebody. Repeat after me, "I am somebody.' " Hundreds of teenagers rise to their feet, chanting, "I may be poor, but I am somebody. I may be on welfare, but I am somebody. Nobody can save us, for us, but us." He calls the captain of the basketball team to the stage.

"If you're behind in the game, what do you do?" he asks. "Try harder," declares the hoopster. "Say amen!" yells the preacher. A chorus booms back.

The pep rally is in a Chicago ghetto school; the cheerleader is none other than the Rev. Jesse Jackson (he was ordained as a Baptist minister). His style is a combination of razzle-dazzle and Southern revival meeting. But the message is a very basic version of the old Protestant work ethic: work hard and aim high. In corridors where punks push dope, Jackson pushes hope. Project EXCEL, a tough self-help regimen for students and parents alike, which reached 21 schools in Chicago, Los Angeles and Kansas City during this past school year, is turning the old ghetto battle cry of "Burn, baby, burn!" into "Work, brother, work!"

Like most other civil rights leaders in the U.S., Jackson criticized last week's Supreme Court decision admitting Allan Bakke to a University of California medical school on the ground that affirmative action programs may be harmed.

Yet his message to underclass blacks is that they must learn not to rely on help from the outside, that they must take responsibility for their own upward mobility and the quality of their lives. "Too many of our schools are infested with a steady diet of violence, vandalism, drugs, intercourse without discourse, alcohol and television addiction," says he. "The result has been to breed a passive and superficial generation."

Constantly on the road speaking to teen-age groups, the National P.T.A.

Convention, the National Baptist Convention and, this week, to the National Education Association convention in Dallas, Jackson misses no opportunity to argue the need for a return to traditional values. "Only by re-establishing moral authority--that is, our believability, our trustworthiness, our caring--can we demand discipline and have it perceived as therapy and not punishment," declares Jackson.

Since Jackson blames an abdication of responsibility for the downfall of standards in U.S. schools, his strategy calls for renewed cooperation among students, teachers and parents. "We get parents to pledge four things: to meet with the child's teacher and exchange phone numbers, to pick up report cards four times a year, to pick up test scores and to make sure that their children study two hours a night without radio or television. We know that when parents' interest increases, the student's effort increases." Jackson is also advocating dress codes and student decorum to help restore school discipline and pride.

Many young apostles seem to be espousing Jackson's creed. During the 1976-77 school year in Kansas City's Central High School, an average of 500 students out of 1,300 were absent each day. Last month the absenteeism was down to 200 students a day. A student pride association raised money to carpet the auditorium, paint murals on the walls and plant trees.

EXCEL high schools in Los Angeles and Chicago are enjoying similar benefits: less graffiti, fewer fights, a reduction in thefts. In Chicago's Marshall High School, where city cops not so long ago were keeping students from knifing one another, the police are becoming counselors. Another indication of the turnaround at Marshall is a sharp increase in the number of students choosing advanced English, math and science courses as electives. In many Chicago high schools, boys have given up wearing the broad-brimmed hats that are the marks of the streetwise. At a Los Angeles EXCEL high school, the Friday absentee rate has dropped from 35% to under 12%, and there has not been a fight in four months. Not all of this is Jackson's doing, but he is helping to pass the message.

Part of the reason for Jackson's success is that he symbolizes black brotherhood. Jackson was beside Martin Luther King Jr. when he died; he fought for jobs for blacks in Chicago's Operation Breadbasket twelve years ago and, at age 36, he has smoothed some of the rougher edges of his younger years and acquired substantial authority within the civil rights movement. He is also the father of five children, ages 2 to 14, and knows about the problems they face. Few others, particularly whites, could emerge as heroes by telling ghetto kids to shape up. Jackson has credibility as well as charisma.

And critics. Some charge that Jackson's grandstanding is all that EXCEL has, at least as a "program." In Chicago, EXCEL's national headquarters, the program employs only two staffers and several secretaries. There are four staffers in Kansas City and two in Los Angeles, where EXCEL faces extinction as a result of Proposition 13. Many black community leaders feel that Jackson is making things too easy for whites by putting unfair responsibility on the deprived for their deprivation. Jackson's response: "Slave masters never freely give up their power. The slaves have to rise up and cast off their oppressors." In fact, when asked a question Jackson nearly always responds with a well-rehearsed slogan or a ministerial platitude. Debate with him is difficult. Says Alice Blair, superintendent of Chicago's District 13: "You can't knock gimmickry because it does work with kids. But you can't do anything without good principals who are motivated to change things."

Blair should know. Three years ago, before Jackson began his ministry to education, she was already requiring the teacher-parent cooperation that has been espoused by EXCEL. In other Chicago schools, principals have simply folded Jackson into their own plans, and he serves as a willing catalyst. Without the help of EXCEL, a teacher at all-black Marshall High School started an interschool academic Olympics on a small basis a year ago. This spring, 20,000 students from eight high schools competed. In Detroit, ten students at Pelham Junior High, once considered a problem school, went to Louisville to win a national math olympiad. Among the reasons for their victory: individualized student instruction and parental supervision.

If teachers and school administrators do not see Jackson as a messiah, they nonetheless praise him for his role as a kind of Moses. Away from crowds the fiery phrasemaker admits, "I think that all you can do is light a fire for change and then hope that it will keep burning."

Says Ken Van Spankeren, principal of Chicago's Orr High School: "When I speak to the students about being great, about excelling, I can refer to Jesse's speeches, to his inspiration, and that means a lot to the students."

Even better, Jackson and Project EXCEL have drawn national attention to the fact that reform of inner-city schools, often regarded as hopeless, actually can be achieved. HEW has awarded EXCEL $400,000 next year to expand into four more cities, and the National Institute of Education is funding a study to determine EXCEL'S effectiveness. Indeed students everywhere can learn a lesson from Jesse Jackson: "When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through."

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