Go Figure!

Carolina crunches the numbers
and starts over again – at 101

published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2006

Where does an old course number go to retire?

If I visit Boca Raton in the coming months, will I find Econ 10 sipping a pina colada on a chaise lounge at the timeshare he bought with Statistics 11? Is Geology 11 rock-climbing in California, skiing in Aspen?

I imagine Math 31 sitting at his computer at 8 a.m., checking his investments and snickering about all the journalism students he tortured through the years. (I also imagine him lonely and bitter, but that’s my own thing.)

French 2x, of course, is sunning herself on the Riviera and still making fun of all those Southerners trying to speak her language. Poli 41 is president of his active-living community association, looking to gerrymander tee times for himself and his buddy, PUPA 71. And I’d bet my swim test that Chem 11’s wife wishes her husband would find part-time work as a Wal-Mart greeter and just get out of her hair for a while – literally. She’s had enough already of the color treatment experiments, even if they are organic.

Great Expectations

Here’s the school you wish your kids attended.
Start with students who’ve had few chances, set high goals and watch the narrowing of the achievement gap – what Dacia Toll ‘94 calls ‘the civil rights issue of our generation.’

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, September/October 2006

On the last day of school before spring break, Kelly Clement sat on a stool in front of her faltering eighth-grade writing class at Amistad Academy, trying to break through the muck that had mired her kids in a slump. She had sensed a drop in motivation in her students, and now that it had begun to show itself in grades – A’s and B’s had turned to low B’s and high C’s – Clement, a young woman with an intense manner, was so distraught that she was awake the previous night at 1 a.m., burrowing through her bookshelves for a way to reach down to her students’ cores.

A lot of that happens here, a kind of ongoing negotiation with the gods of opportunity. This is New Haven, Conn., where public middle school students are, on average, two grade levels behind their state peers. This is where more than 79 percent of families qualify for the free or reduced school lunch program. This is where 98 percent of students are black or Latino. This is a location where sociologist James Coleman’s 1966 findings that children from impoverished families – often minorities – do not learn as well as wealthy students found fertile soil in which to spread like blight on human promise, even while minds of privilege were blooming at nearby Yale.

But this also is where, in 1999, Dacia Toll ‘94 and Doug McCurry ‘94 co-founded Amistad, a charter school that refused to give up on urban kids. This is where, in 2004, Amistad’s eighth-graders – who represent a higher percentage of poor and minority students than New Haven as a whole – outperformed their district and state counterparts in every category.

Outperforming the Suburbs? Show Me Where to Sign Up

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, September/October 2006

(Sidebar to “Great Expectations“)

When she interviewed for a teaching position at Amistad Academy in 2000, Shanta Morrison Smith ‘99 required no introduction to the educational challenges of growing up in the desperate landscape of New Haven, Conn. She lived it.

“My memories of it were that you had a lot of teachers who were working hard, but they were drained,” Smith said. “They tried to give me what I needed, but they had to deal with so many behavior issues, issues of poverty that came into play, that they didn’t have much left after that.”

So when Doug McCurry ‘94, who heads teacher recruitment for Amistad, called to talk to her about leaving her teaching position in Washington, D.C., public schools, to come back to her hometown, she couldn’t believe her ears. You insist on good behavior? You expect college-track work? You’re outperforming the suburbs? “I said, ‘Wait. Does this school actually exist in New Haven?’ It was a noticeable difference from the D.C. schools in attitude, and I could tell it just from the phone call.”

The Right Stuff: Getting in at N.C. State

A unique admissions system helps NC State balance the limited number of slots in its freshman class with its land-grant mission to serve the state. When students apply for admission, they must choose a college. Their choice could make the difference between getting in or not.

Published in NC State magazine, Summer 2005

Parents file into the Withers Hall auditorium one Saturday in February with the somber air of jurors returning from deliberation. This is just an information session for freshman applicants and their families at the College of Design. But try using the word “just” with 50 parents who know that at that moment, down the street at Brooks Hall, their 17-year-old babies are fighting for a spot in the fall freshman class.

Jackie Quick and her husband, Clyde, have come from Burlington to support their son, Brian, as he interviews for admission to the graphic design program. Clyde is cool, but Jackie is leaning forward in her chair, her knees bouncing gently.

“I’m nervous,” she says. “Brian’s nervous. I heard there were only 40 spots for graphic design this year.”

Babies on Board

Published in The New Physician, March 2005

Even Sethina Edwards was amazed when she attended the “Welcome to Medical School” gathering at the University of Bristol in England last fall. One would not expect Edwards, a mother of two and a former freelance publicist, to be surprised by the fact that a whopping 75 percent of her classmates were women. After all, for the past six years, aspiring women physicians around the world have been turning to her for support.

In 1999, when Edwards decided to seek a career in medicine, she was pregnant with her first daughter. Training to be a physician is difficult enough without the complications of motherhood. “People thought I’d gone mad,” Edwards says. “Lots of people told me it was impossible.”

Preparing for Residency

Published in The New Physician, March 2005

(sidebar to “Babies on Board“)

You could say that Dr. Rivka Stein is infinitely comfortable in her own skin. That’s because the Brooklyn pediatrician arrived for her residency interviews packing more than just an unyielding set of expectations. She was also eight months pregnant with her second child. “So [the issue of motherhood] definitely came up as I waddled in there,” says the mother of four.

Stein, an orthodox Jew, says she never questioned her ability to have both a family and a medical career; in her community, the best timing for these things isn’t planned. But Stein did approach her residency search in an open manner and took control of her own situation—something many women are afraid to do, becoming apologists for their families instead.

The Healing Place

Can a new doctor’s office breathe life back into a dying town? A visiting professor in the College of Design and a group of NC State architecture students are trying to find out.

Published in NC State magazine, Summer 2004

Around town hall in Seaboard, they’re calling it “the doctor business.” In a small town, the word “business” often has nothing to do with retail, of course. It’s just shorthand for the details of a story that everyone already knows, an asterisk for memories.

But this doctor business, this is something different altogether—at once familiar and unusual.

Last spring, 14 young people showed up at Seaboard’s door with nary a connection to the place, let alone to its stories. Their granddaddies weren’t born in Seaboard, their money wasn’t in the solitary bank and their families had never owned a single piece of farmland nearby. They had come all the way from Raleigh, driven 97 miles, just to listen to what the 695 residents of Seaboard—which is about 1 square mile in area—had to say about their hometown.

They wanted to know: What do you want more than anything else, for yourselves, for your children? What is your vision? They wanted to know: What will keep Seaboard from becoming an asterisk itself, a dot erased from the map of North Carolina’s endangered farming communities?

Now, just over from the abandoned Seaboard High School building, two doors down from the multifunctional town hall, those NC State architecture graduate students are adding a bit of new life to downtown. They’re building tiny Seaboard a doctor’s office.

Cap in the Air

Nothing is as simple as a percentage when it comes to deciding the personality of a campus

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, March/April 2004

Frenchie was a showgirl. She danced on a drum in Memorial Hall and wore the closest thing to a bikini that Jerry Marder ‘44 had ever seen. Little grass skirts lilting about beyond his imagination, right here in North Carolina, right here on this campus, right before his living eyes. Of the many things that bolted through his mind as he listened to the thrum of bongo drums, Marder thought this: Thank God for Richard Adler ‘43. Lovely place, that New York.

Sixty years later, Marder still recalls the days of Sound and Fury, a student theater group that produced quarterly musicals and entertainment on campus, as one of a handful of cultural experiences he might never have known if not for the infusion of non-North Carolinians at UNC in the 1940s. The details are a bit fuzzy – Adler, a native New Yorker who became a Broadway composer, was more of a playwright in college than the award-winning songwriter he became. But to Marder, out-of-state classmates such as Adler and Sound and Fury’s president, Atlantan Ben Hall ‘43, with their worldly views and talents and their post-collegiate success, were educators in a league with his own professors, no less formative on his life than the war that was being fought a continent away.

“I left Asheville,” Marder says, “and entered the world when I came to Chapel Hill.”

Project Success

Seeking to expand their medical school lessons, future physicians create innovative initiatives to help heal their communities.Published in The New Physician, October 2003

The building that broke ground in July at 54th and Prairie in downtown Chicago, which will house the long-awaited and first-ever headquarters for Chicago Youth Programs (CYP), is as much a monument to a former Northwestern University medical student’s ingenuity as it is functional office space. For nearly 20 years, CYP has gotten by on borrowed rooms and borrowed time to help pull the children of Chicago’s Cabrini Green, Washington Park and Uptown housing projects out of poverty, using parks and deserted college classrooms to further its cause.

“Gotten by”—that’s quite a misnomer. Through the years, the staff that has grown to 650 volunteers has helped 90 percent of the children it serves to reach age 18, having avoided gangs, criminal convictions and premature parenthood. Right now, with $50,000 in donations from former CYP volunteers, it’s helping fund the college educations of more than 40 at-risk youth, and 70 percent to 80 percent of them will graduate in the coming years. The going rate for minority college graduates overall is just 33 percent.

It seems that what Dr. Joe DiCara—just “Dr. Joe” to most—has done with the organization he and a handful of other medical students started in 1984 is nothing short of superhuman.

Or is it?

Educating Michie

On the South Side of Chicago, hope and identity are as difficult to hold onto as innocence. But a teacher and his students aren’t giving up.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, May/June 2001

Tuesday night might not happen. It should just fold silently into Wednesday, no questions asked, like all the other days in South Side Chicago. The clock drones on the wall, challenging the otherwise quiet room with doubt, and Greg Michie ‘85 sits on a cheap piece of furniture and waits. The flannel shirt on his back, the hiking boots on his feet, the pale of his complexion, the slightness of his build-what do you need to see to understand that he is not the sort of man one expects to find in this room? Do you need to see the men for whom he waits? The men who bring the dark circles under his eyes, the failure of sleep?

Joey is one. He is 16. He was sitting in his living room one evening, falling asleep while watching television. Next thing he knew, his sister was wrapping his arm with a T-shirt as the blood soaked through, as his leg stung and swelled, as police gathered around him, arguing among each other. There were four bullets in all, and it didn’t matter that Joey isn’t really in the Saints. You live in Saints territory, you’re at the mercy of their enemies.

Governer on Guard

Gaston Caperton overcame dyslexia to become a millionaire and rise to West Virginia’s highest office. Now he leads the venerable College Board into a new century – and, he hopes, a new relevancy – on the Web.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2000

 

 

 

 

He is needlessly narrow for a man of such wide ambitions. Gaston Caperton has a tall, thin frame, but he does not possess it the way most of us accept our builds and carry them with us for the lot of our days. He lives outside the boundaries of his trunk’s long, straight, economic lines, propelled by a mind restless for accomplishment. Meanwhile, his limbs are left to catch up, discombobulated and noodly – a leg crooked at the knee and propped on a table here, a stray hand probing the fleece of gray hair as though by accident. His brown eyes are stubbornly squinty. Even the ashy circles and lines on his 60-year-old face contend with his tinny voice like a haggard pugilist backed into yesterday’s corner.

Cross currents, and crosses to bear. So strong that they make it both possible and impossible to believe Caperton has been a two-term governor of West Virginia and a millionaire. Now, as president of the College Board – the nonprofit organization that has long struck fear in the hearts of high schoolers with its SAT and Advanced Placement tests – he confronts the opposing ebbs and flows of his life story most poignantly, sitting before a table of books in his Lincoln Square office in New York.

Just the thought of reading in a spotlight challenges his nerves like nothing else.

“If somebody came in here today and pulled one of these books off this table, and asked you to read it, you would do that with great confidence and it would sound great,” says Caperton, who was diagnosed with a “reversal reading” problem in the fourth grade. “But I would be scared when you gave me the book, and I’d be scared when I read it aloud. Still today.”

The disorder has been both his bane and his blessing.

“I have never thought of myself as very smart,” Caperton wrote in an essay for his high school alumni magazine in 1996. “My dad…taught me to read, word by word. We got up early every morning, and I sat at the foot of his bed and learned how to hear the words, see the words, spell the words, read the words, and understand what they mean. Ten new words every day.”

“A lot of things were very difficult for me,” Caperton says today. “But I worked very hard, and when you’re able to overcome those things, you develop traits that help you throughout life. And those are advantages to you.”

Of course, the poetic irony nearly drips from the story line. The College Board – a creation of Ivy League universities that once were populated only by graduates of New England’s boarding schools, chooses a man who battled dyslexia – attended a public university and became a popular education governor in a state that often is known solely by its economic bleak holes, to lead it into its 100th year. When you add to the scenario the recurring controversies over the SAT – pick your peccadillo: relevancy, racial discrimination, economic bias, disability unfairness – the choice of the first College Board president not to come from academia becomes even more interesting.

But Caperton’s selection in July 1999 wasn’t about poetry or poster-boys for over-achievement, or even perfecting the SAT’s mechanics. It was about the bottom line.