Capital Offense

A FEW weeks ago I went back to see my old high school in Washington, D.C. In those days (I graduated in 1967) it was called Western High School, and was integrated de facto as well as de jure, with a roughly even balance of black and white students. The building, nearly a century old, was a little run down, and we had to scrape up money from our parents to keep the school newspaper going, but you could get an education there. We went to Harvard, Stanford, Tufts, the service academies, and other good schools. The middle-class white and black kids were in the same school activities, behaved equally badly at the same parties, and believed in the same government-issue Great Society politics. We all knew Marion Barry, then a local hustler on the rise who was just hitching a ride on the politics game.

Western is now the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Much has been added, and much taken away. The most telling sign, I decided, were the clocks in the classrooms. They’re the same clocks we had, and they’ve all stopped. The people in charge of the school have spent thousands of dollars on an elaborate closed-circuit TV system to tell the students about the week’s special events, but didn’t think some fraction of that should have been spent on teaching the kids to show up on time. And, indeed, the students wander around pretty aimlessly, I suppose waiting for the producers of Fame II to sign them up.

JD

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John Dizard

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A FEW weeks ago I went back to see my old high school in Washington, D.C. In those days (I graduated in 1967) it was called Western High School, and was integrated de facto as well as de jure, with a roughly even balance of black and white students. The building, nearly a century old, was a little run down, and we had to scrape up money from our parents to keep the school newspaper going, but you could get an education there. We went to Harvard, Stanford, Tufts, the service academies, and other good schools. The middle-class white and black kids were in the same school activities, behaved equally badly at the same parties, and believed in the same government-issue Great Society politics. We all knew Marion Barry, then a local hustler on the rise who was just hitching a ride on the politics game.

Western is now the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Much has been added, and much taken away. The most telling sign, I decided, were the clocks in the classrooms. They’re the same clocks we had, and they’ve all stopped. The people in charge of the school have spent thousands of dollars on an elaborate closed-circuit TV system to tell the students about the week’s special events, but didn’t think some fraction of that should have been spent on teaching the kids to show up on time. And, indeed, the students wander around pretty aimlessly, I suppose waiting for the producers of Fame II to sign them up.