A Six-Year Test With High Stakes

They were children, barely 11 years old, when a man in suit and tie came to their schools looking for 50 students willing to accept his challenge: Meet a few conditions and someday win an $80,000 prize, a four-year scholarship to the University of Southern California.

Never mind that college seems unimaginably distant for any sixth-grader. In these kids’ South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods, two of six students never graduate from high school and only one makes it to college--much less to USC, to them a rich kids’ school.

Then there were the man’s conditions, laid down during special school assemblies: Attain grades and test scores rare in their schools, reject the baggy pants and bare midriffs that defined their peers, and trade in after-school playtime for hours of tutoring.

The lucky 50 would be called “scholars.” But they were singled out for their very averageness, their C grades. And average at their schools meant sixth-graders reading at third-grade level.

Each was picked after one-on-one interviews with the man in the suit, James C. Fleming, director of what would become known simply as “the USC Academy.”

Now judgment day has come. Six years later, that first wave of scholars will learn whether they met Fleming’s challenge.

Letters from the USC admissions office arrive most every day, and the size of the envelope foretells the fate. Thick, you’re in. Thin, you’re out.

Nearing the end of their journey has gotten the scholars thinking about how it began. Some remember clearly the question running through their minds during Fleming’s pitch: Why did this man think they showed promise to achieve his lofty goals?

Those he chose were all minority kids from the turbulent streets near the campus, such as Jason Bernard, whose temper and laissez-faire attitude toward school made him a student many teachers would love to hate; Trina Wilson, so frail from rheumatoid arthritis that she spent vacations in the county hospital; Tony Toledo, the son of a parking attendant, who lived blocks from USC yet never knew it existed.

And Aaron Gray, whose third-grade teacher called him stupid because he could not spell.

Aaron’s mother carried a lifetime of excuses into their 1991 interview with Fleming. Aaron had a learning barrier that made writing a chore, she said. He had asthma, which made him miss a lot of school. She herself was a single working parent, only 18 when he was born. . . .

Fleming stopped her and turned to the boy. You are entitled to a public education through high school, he said. But USC is private. Its academy is not an entitlement program. We do not have to take you if you cannot keep up.

Then came the challenge: “Do you think you can keep up?”

Even today, Aaron can recall how small and scared he felt. But no one was going to tell him he couldn’t cut it.

“Yes,” he said. “I can.”

*

From time to time, a grand scholarship offer to poor kids hits the news. A philanthropist vows to bestow millions on graduates of two New York schools and 100 wealthy Americans follow suit, spreading the offer to 16 cities. An investment firm joins with the Urban League to do the same. Squinting into the television lights, the children’s beaming parents liken it to winning the lottery.

USC’s offer of four years’ tuition, in contrast, drew little fanfare. Yet the program went further than most. Instead of merely daring students to succeed, it provided them with survival skills: rigorous classes, strict discipline (no note-passing, fidgeting, or “the dog ate my homework”) and a safety net of tutoring and counseling.

It also required parents to do more than beam, making them sign a contract promising to uphold rules such as an evening TV blackout and to attend Saturday seminars on topics from helping with homework to coping with stress.

“I wanted to change lives and that means actually changing a culture,” said Fleming. “We had to make education the most important thing, in homes where it may not have been.”

Fleming, 61, who rose from segregated schools in Kentucky to receive a doctorate in education administration from Harvard, plotted the strategy while driving to USC to be interviewed for the job of heading the university’s outreach effort, the Neighborhood Academic Initiative.

He wanted to see the college create true equal opportunity by bringing neighborhood youths through the front door, not by bending USC thresholds of a B average and 1,000-point Scholastic Assessment Test scores. At the time, Fleming ran Upward Bound at Cal State Northridge, but he began to see such motivational programs as “light touch”--light on parent involvement, light on discipline, light on payoff.

If USC really wanted to make a difference, he decided, it should start with mediocre students. “Everyone’s after the cream of the crop. Give me the average Joe or Joan, who can grasp 70-75% of what goes on in the class, I can teach them to love learning.”

*

The seventh-graders he began with in fall 1991 were drawn from two junior highs. Though the program was called an academy, it had no campus of its own. The students attended early morning classes at USC--taught by teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District--and then spent the rest of the day at their regular schools. On Saturdays they returned for more classes.

Selections had been made carefully. From hundreds of applicants, those with top grades or behavior problems were culled. Then the remaining 170 were ranked by Fleming and academic coordinator Nita Moots Kincaid on criteria ranging from appearance to perseverance. The final cut was left to a computer.

Yet within two weeks, the first scholars dropped out. None was prepared for the three hours of homework nightly. Or teachers who demanded: Why are you late? Why is your homework dogeared? Spend the rest of the period reorganizing your notebook and here’s how.

Over the years, 14 of the original 50 left or were asked to leave--always for disciplinary rather than academic problems--and seven replacements were added, bringing this year’s senior class to 43.

“They ask a lot from this program, Saturdays and everything,” said Jason Bernard, the boy who had always been a little casual about school. “Sometimes you want to go out with your friends.”

The Herculean commitment also brought many festering family problems to a head.

For Trina Wilson, home life made it tougher and tougher to keep up. She will say only that there was a lot of fighting, too many distractions and that her arthritis made her need all the relaxation time she could muster.

At a counselor’s urging, Trina moved in with her sister in Hawthorne, sharing a room with two nieces and rising at 5:30 a.m. to catch a bus to USC.

Trina once thought she might become a doctor, but lowered her sights to physician’s assistant. Her true ambition is more basic: “I just want to have my own stuff.”

Academy records show that at least one in 10 scholars has been abused and one in nine has lost a close friend or relative to gunfire. In two-thirds of the families, someone has a drug or alcohol problem, said Marcia Wilson, the academy’s full-time social worker and one of seven counselors.

“If you don’t help them deal with the problems they face, you just have a smart gangster or a smart pregnant girl or a smart kid who won’t go to college,” Wilson said.

So every scholar attends group counseling once a week. And the morning classes at USC often begin with “direct counseling,” where students disclose how they feel and what they’re going to do about it.

The idea is to bring them out of their shells of scholastic shyness, which Fleming believes is one of the largest barriers to academic success of inner-city kids.

As the many needs of the first scholars became apparent, services were added--after-school tutoring by USC students, instruction in skills as basic as note-taking, a bus to take them back to their regular schools at 9:30 a.m.

For father Juan Toledo, such measures were a rescue wagon pulling up just as he had begun to despair that his own ninth-grade education and broken English might fail his son, Tony.

“I helped him on his homework: first grade, second grade, all the way through sixth grade,” said Toledo, who came from El Salvador in 1980. “Then I said, ‘You have to fly on your own.’ I practically couldn’t understand it anymore.”

Among the initial group of scholars, Tony quickly stood out. He began earning A grades with ease and became so confident that today he sounds cocky, talking about how he was always planning to become a doctor and could have done it without all this fuss.

“I already knew I was going to college, I just didn’t know how to get there,” he insists.

His father sees it differently. No amount of overtime work at the parking lot would have enabled him to send his son to a private college.

*

As the first crew of scholars progressed from grade to grade, more 11-year-olds--between 60 and 70 a year--were recruited, bringing the current academy enrollment to 286.

That growth has made it harder to enforce all those standards. Gone are the days when Fleming could badger every parent: I expect you here Saturday. A recent tally showed that almost half the parents were failing to reach the 90% required seminar attendance,

Fleming hopes to use statistics gleaned from the first class to make a point: most of the students whose parents have not met their obligations are falling short of USC admission standards.

Ann Bernard isn’t buying that.

At a parent meeting in a USC lecture hall, she sat with arms crossed, torso twisted to one side, scorn on her face. She was angry because she came to virtually all the meetings and tried to enforce the rules at home, yet her son, Jason, began falling behind.

There was even talk that unless Jason got with it, he might not graduate from high school, much less make it to USC next fall.

“No telling where my scholar will be,” Bernard declared.

But Fleming was not about to take the blame. All the kids knew the deal. He’d warned Jason countless times to pick up the pace.

Privately, Fleming had always figured many of the 50 would not make it all the way. He guessed he’d be lucky to get 15 into USC.

*

Thursday morning at 8, two dozen scholars are in a USC classroom, taking Advanced Placement English. The lesson is about the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart of Darkness.” Teacher David Williams paces as he reads aloud the passages pulsing toward Kurtz’s death. Every teenager listens intently, except one, who is dozing.

The scholars take harder classes than their peers--both at USC and back at their home schools, where the upperclassmen carry a full plate of AP courses.

When Williams hits a difficult word, he appeals for a synonym. “Abominate,” he barks. “Hate,” comes the response from several students. He ends each paragraph with, “So, so, so?” urging the students to explain what has occurred in their own words and steering them into a discussion of Freud’s concepts of ego and id, primal drives versus the nobler self.

The reading aloud is Williams’ way of dealing with the fact that many of the kids began their schooling in Spanish or had such scant literacy that even after six intense years they struggle with the dense prose of the classics.

Though Williams rarely teaches at such a high pitch at Manual Arts High, the scholars are not necessarily his smartest students. But they’re always his best-prepared, he says, his most dogged.

When Williams assigns homework at Manual Arts, he is lucky if half the students do it. With the scholars, all but two or three will come through, knowing the punishment is an academy demerit. Five demerits can mean dismissal.

Then, too, the scholars have raised the academic level of their home schools. Principals have scrambled to add advanced placement courses. And the race to become Manual Arts’ 1997 valedictorian appears to be a competition between Tony Toledo and a fellow academy scholar, Cynthia Rios.

All of the scholars plan to go to college, whether USC pans out or not. In six years, they have raised their scores on standardized tests from well below the national average to the 56th percentile in verbal and the 74th in math.

It would seem the kind of speeding train other schools would rush to jump onto. But that’s not the case. Along the way, three academy feeders--Muir and Adams middle schools and Los Angeles High--backed out, quietly declaring the commitment too taxing.

Cost also works against wider expansion.

Annually, Fleming spends about $600,000 in USC and private donations--about $2,100 per scholar, not including the bountiful in-kind contributions: the morning teachers supplied by L.A. Unified, the classroom space at USC and, of course, the scholarships.

Los Angeles Supt. Sid Thompson described the program as the sort public schools should “grab . . . and take advantage of,” but the practical concerns can’t be overlooked.

Again, Fleming rolls his eyes.

If L.A. isn’t gung-ho, he’ll find others who are. He is talking with the Hartford, Conn., Unified School District and even traveled to South Africa, while writing a proposal to start an independent charter school in Los Angeles.

He has very little tolerance for those who quibble with the price of salvaging human potential, asking, “What would you spend on 40 kids if they were incarcerated?”

*

In his lowest moments, Aaron Gray fears he would have flunked out of school had it not been for the academy. True praise from one of the program’s earliest critics.

During the first two years, Aaron tried to drop out twice, with the backing of his mother, Valerie. Fleming stalled them. Wait until midterms are over, he said. Stay until year’s end.

Valerie Gray couldn’t swallow the program’s philosophy. As she saw it, she was in charge of her son at home and the teachers were in charge at school. But with disturbing regularity, a teacher named Cynthia Amos would call her at work to detail Aaron’s errors.

Then Valerie Gray got sick, really sick. Half her body went numb. She went to Fleming’s office to apologize for missing so many Saturdays and ran into Cynthia Amos. I heard about your troubles, the teacher said. I wanted you to know that I’ve talked to my husband. If anything happens to you, we’d be willing to adopt Aaron.

“This was the woman that was constantly on this child’s case,” Gray says today, still incredulous. “Yet she saw a future for him that I myself hadn’t yet seen.”

Another turning point for Aaron came when tests confirmed he had a learning disability--a break in the link between spoken and written language. But those tests also ranked him near genius level. Cynthia Amos gave him an electronic thesaurus to improve his spelling. Fleming gave him a tape recorder to lighten his note-taking load.

His C average rose to an A-minus. He scored 1,010 on the SAT. And Aaron, the scholar who hated to write, now can’t stop, producing four unpublished volumes of poetry and starting on two novels.

He frequents open-mike nights at coffeehouses, reading one evening at Santa Monica’s Midnight Special bookstore from a new poem about a friend, a Blood gang member:

...Ask me

Why he didn’t

Go to college

And I’ll tell you

That he thought

That college is only for

The White People...

Regular USC admission wasn’t enough for Aaron; he applied to the more demanding school of engineering.

He feigns nonchalance about the waiting game, but his mother shakes her head. Severe stomach cramps sent him running to the doctor for tests, she said. The diagnosis: nerves.

*

The letters began going out in mid-February. Tony Toledo was among the first to receive one but an abundance of mail from the university that day confused him. Three envelopes, all thick.

The first contained a campus housing application, which he thought he’d already filled out. The second held a notice that his admission application could not be processed without a $55 fee. Wasn’t that waived for academy scholars? Furious, Tony threw them both down.

Open the other, his mom urged.

Tony ripped into the third envelope to read these words: “You’re in.”

The next day, his father, Juan, carried the letter to his parking lot job, protected inside the pages of a magazine. He showed it off to his foreman, his manager, the doctor next door. Now it’s framed, hanging above the mantel in a living room so full of scholar awards that it is a virtual academy shrine.

The news has not all been so happy, of course.

Jason Bernard got a thin envelope. He is considering a community college or a state university--if he can pass his 12th-grade classes. He talks of living in a trailer behind his mom’s house, supporting himself by cutting hair.

Trina Wilson’s simple dream of having her own possessions is on hold. She too got a thin envelope. “I was shocked,” she said. She had missed admission to USC by the narrowest margin, with a 2.9 grade-point average.

Fleming would have none of it. Trina is the kind of student the program was designed for, he said, dialing the admissions office. Wait for her spring grades, he implored. Ultimately USC agreed.

The scorecard to date is: 13 in, 12 denied. Decisions on 12 more, like Trina, await final grades or test scores. Three have not completed their applications.

Aaron Gray nags his mom to check their apartment’s mailbox several times daily. His stomach continues to bother him. Soon he won’t have to fret. On Thursday, the admissions office got the word: Aaron and two others who applied to the school of engineering will be accepted, bringing the total so far to 16.

Bulletins of success and failure flash into Fleming’s office, issuing the verdict on six years’ hard work. But he’s already a step ahead--trying to make sure the first scholars survive USC.

He is scrounging up funds for tutors, more counselors, maybe a bank of computers to share. He wants to ensure as many scholars as possible live on campus, a cost not included in the scholarship, but likely to be covered by financial aid.

One moment Fleming boasts that the scholars are “going to show USC something . . . bust all the stereotypes.” The next he acknowledges that these neighborhood kids will stick out at a university where some freshmen panic if they are assigned to off-campus dormitories.

Scholars share his ambivalence.

“We’ll tell other students where we’re from,” Tony Toledo figures, “and they’ll say, ‘You lived here and you’re not dead?’ ”