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  One exception was made. Grandchildren of Northeast alumni still living near Eighth and Lehigh would be allowed to move to the new location. This clause allowed almost all white students still attending the Eighth and Lehigh school to transfer.

  Once again, the Northeast would be at the forefront of an educational trend. In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision had officially forbidden school segregation. However, in Northeast’s case, no one was technically forbidding black students from attending. The alumni just created all the right geographic circumstances for it to be practically impossible. Hence, they would be the leaders of de facto segregation, a movement that spread quickly throughout the city high schools and is, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the reason schools are more segregated than ever before.

  At the time of Northeast’s move, its student population was 50 percent Caucasian and 50 percent African American. By 1958, in the span of about two years, the old Northeast—Edison High School—became almost entirely African American. The new Northeast was 100 percent Caucasian. It would stay that way for the next thirty years.

  The board also approved the transfer of the “name, traditions, and specialized courses of the school” to the new location. The best teachers left, too. According to a December 1956 Sunday Bulletin article, the school took the principal, five department heads, and the athletic director.

  This “created some resentment in the community and among some of the veteran members of the faculty, the greatest number of which will stay at Eighth and Lehigh,” according to a minor mention made in a November 1956 Bulletin piece. If there was an outcry within the community, it was either not strong enough to even receive much press, or was ignored.

  The new school principal tried, however unconvincingly, to smooth over the frustrations of the students left behind. “There was some justice to the resentment of the loss of their school name and traditions, but the boys have now come to see that there is also a privilege in helping build traditions for a new school, and, in a sense, being a pioneer class,” Dr. Robert Wayne Clark, Edison’s new principal, said at the time. Shortly thereafter, he transferred out himself.

  A placard with the school’s new name went up. On the first day, in September 1957, senior Ron Ford, who is black, walked down the once familiar halls. The trophy case was gone. So were the stained-glass windows and the plaque dedicated to the three hundred Northeast graduates who’d given their lives to World War II. He peeked his head into his old classrooms. His favorite math teacher, the one who was tough but fair, had left for the new Northeast. His coach, the main reason Ford had aspired to Northeast, had left, too, and he’d taken the team’s red-and-white uniforms with him. That year they lost the basketball championship to Overbrook High and its rising star Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain.

  “I was distraught,” said Ford. “If you could wear the red and black of the Northeast, you were looked up to. It was a source of pride and wanting to belong, and that was taken away and given to someone else. The goose bumps you got from the football and basketball games were not there. We had packed houses every game. Girls from Kensington came. All that changed. They took that away. The building may be the same, but it’s not just a building that made the Northeast.”

  Meanwhile, ten miles north, little had been spared in the construction of the new Northeast school. Of the $6 million budgeted for a new school, $1 million had been spent on athletics, including three grandstands seating 6,700; fields for football, baseball, hockey, and soccer; four tennis courts; a quartermile track; and three parking areas. Several uproars made it into the local press, but none of them had anything to do with the inequality between the schools. One was over the fact that girls were being granted access to the great Northeast! Another had to do with changing a line in the school song from “the walls made of granite” to “the strong and sturdy walls.” And the alumni were in a state over sports teams changing names from the Archives to the Vikings.

  The new Northeast opened to students in February 1957 and dedication day, a few months later, brought a huge celebration and decades of alumni with it. There were open-house tours, a laying of the cornerstone, an alumni dinner, and speakers, including the board of education president. There was an alumni banquet. President Dwight Eisenhower was invited, but declined at the last minute. A plaque in his name was dedicated to the Northeast that said, “For nearly 70 years this school has played an essential part in the training of young citizens. The completion of the modern building indicates your determination that the school shall increase its splendid contribution to your community and nation in the years ahead, April 27th 1957.”

  Back in Philadelphia, businesses that once demanded that schools train boys had disappeared. In the half-century after 1925, the city lost two-thirds of its industrial jobs and virtually all its great firms. Of the twenty-five large companies operating in Philadelphia in 1925, only one remains a major player.

  The textile industry’s flight to the suburbs dealt the hardest blow to the North Philadelphia neighborhoods surrounding Eighth and Lehigh. In 1928, 350 of the city’s 850 textile firms operated in North Philadelphia, employing almost 35,000 workers. Of these businesses, 265 remained by 1940 and only seventy by the 1960s. Hardwick and Magee, across the street from Northeast, didn’t survive much past the 1950s. The Stetson Hat Company, famous for its millions of Western hats, closed its doors in the 1960s, as did the Quaker Lace Company down Lehigh Avenue on Fourth street, set back by the invention of knitting machines capable of making lace. Across North Philadelphia, hundreds of formerly proud giant factories were continually downsized until they were nothing but rotting hulks of brick, mangled wire, and chemicals.

  It was the early 1960s, and the future was dim for students at Edison High. The school board announced that a new citywide program intended for “slow learners” would be installed at Edison. The board warned principals not to use the program as a dumping ground for students with discipline problems, but that seemed inevitable. The historic U.S. Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education decision to end segregation in 1954 had created the opposite effect: Edison’s student body was almost 100 percent black. The Supreme Court decision only hastened white flight across the city. In the 1950s, the student population of Philadelphia’s Simon Gratz High School was divided evenly between whites and blacks. Ten years later it was 100 percent black. In Philadelphia, 1961 marked the last year in which there were equal numbers of whites and blacks in the city schools. After that, the population would become two-thirds black and continue to segregate. By 1971, the number of the city’s Puerto Rican students, concentrated in North Philadelphia, had grown to 3 percent of the school population. Edison was the school primarily serving them.

  As civil rights protests arose in the 1960s and 1970s, minority parents began to echo the same complaints about Edison’s deteriorating condition that their white predecessors had made prior to the 1957 move. That move had faced little protest by black parents then, but times were changing, and white flight was now held up by neighborhood activists as blatant racism. Resentment over the state of the old school building—which was dilapidated and infested with rats—boiled over.

  In October 1968, a student walkout to protest the conditions spread violence throughout the city. The students at Edison High School were active participants. An article in the Bulletin read, in part:

  200 Negro students refused to return to classes after a false fire alarm. They marched to Kensington High School for Girls, shouting for the girls to join them. The group, followed by 40 police, then marched to Dobbins High School, which was still 50 percent white. Three white boys were outside waiting for the bus, and the blacks shouted, “We want whitey,” but the police surrounded the white students until the bus arrived to escort them away. The principal held the Dobbins students inside the school until 4:00 PM as the police tried to disperse the Edison students. When a riot broke out, a white boy, 17 year old Elliot Abrams, was stabbed.

  The Vietnam War dealt another blow to the school. Hundreds of Edison boys volunteered or were drafted. By war’s end, the principal tallied the deaths and was astonished to see that sixty-six Edison students had given their lives in the war. When Northeast students died in World War II, an enormous plaque was mounted in the auditorium listing their names. Edison’s fallen heroes didn’t receive any recognition. Their “ultimate sacrifice” would go largely unnoticed by anyone outside of Edison.

  By the 1970s, parents had organized and were campaigning for a new building. The seventy-year-old high school was by far the city’s oldest. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceilings. Paint peeled. Heating systems broke down. When sections of the school became too dangerous to occupy, the city had the custodian board them up. Soon, nearly half of the school was sealed off and boarded up. Graffiti marked the transoms and white moldings. Bars went up across the windows.

  In 1972, after a long neighborhood campaign, activists came within just a few votes of winning city funding for a new school building. They’d secured a site one mile north, at Second and Luzerne. It was across the street from a graveyard, in a neighborhood that happened to be largely white. The local residents vociferously opposed moving Edison into their backyard. At the eleventh hour, Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, the notoriously racist, bat-wielding former police commissioner, blocked the plan. Years of work were defeated.

  Test scores at other high schools—Overbrook, Simon Gratz, and Ben Franklin—were falling, but Edison fell the furthest. When students took the California Achievement Tests in 1976, a whopping 80 percent of Edison students scored in the bottom percentile nationwide, indicating that they were “functionally illiterate,” according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

  In 1979, seniors from Edison and neighboring s
chools tried again. They boycotted classes. They marched on the board of education, complaining they were getting a “rotten education.” They said instruction was inadequate, and that they wouldn’t return to class until the situation had improved. Their pleas were largely ignored.

  By the 1980s, Edison was widely regarded as the city’s worst school. A September 1982 article in the Inquirer summed it up: “The way most people think of Edison, if they think of it at all, is as just another ghetto school with a legacy of racial problems and gang infestation.”

  The North Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding the school had continued to evolve and change. A wave of Puerto Rican immigration swept through North Philadelphia in the early 1980s, and the new arrivals eventually became organized and politically vocal. The neighborhood elected a Latino city councilor, Angel Ortiz. Philadelphia also had its first black mayor, Wilson Goode. The city’s population was still declining, and blacks were now in the majority. Those community groups involved in the nearly thirty-year battle for a new school building to replace the deteriorating one finally had representation in government. The dream was gaining strength.

  In 1988, a sprawling new school building opened at Second and Luzerne, the same site it had requested fifteen years earlier (the majority of the white neighbors who’d once opposed the plan had since moved to the suburbs). The new school, with grassy lawns, a pond, and a parking lot, cost upward of $50 million. At the time, it was the city’s most expensive school. It was to be bilingual, an educational idea that had become trendy in recent years.

  The teachers and principal took the new trophies and whatever stained-glass windows and historical plaques still remained. In the old building, the blinds were drawn and chains snapped shut. The parking lot emptied but for junked neighborhood cars. The school building at Eighth and Lehigh was condemned and closed.

  A year later, neighbors watched a bright blue and yellow banner go up across the front entrance. A cleaning crew came in. The city sealed off the most dangerous sections of the building, closed the auditorium completely, and slapped on a fresh layer of paint. The news spread rapidly: The neighborhood schools were overcrowded and an additional middle school was needed. The school at Eighth and Lehigh was having a “grand reopening.” To meet the specific needs of the community, it would be Philadelphia’s first bilingual middle school. It would be called the Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School.

  At the time, administrators sang the praises of bilingual education. The city said the school would offer bilingual programs in which Spanish-speaking students learned English, and English-speaking students learned Spanish. Students could apply from all over Philadelphia.

  It sounded perfect on paper. But even at a wealthy, well-run school the goals of bilingual education were challenging to meet and required years of teacher training. In a North Philadelphia school already beset by discipline issues and financial constraints, bilingual education was little more than rhetoric. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1989 story about the school described a chaotic and ill-prepared opening year: “[Principal José E. Lebron] didn’t know he’d be the principal of the district’s first bilingual middle school until July. He had to recruit a staff and oversee setting up a curriculum before school opened in September. And then there was the building. Home to two different schools over more than eighty years, the old Edison High was in need of more than a little repair.”

  “I walked in one day and said ‘No way are we going to open in September, ’” Lebron was quoted as saying to the Inquirer.

  By 1989, the school had only a handful of Spanish-speaking teachers. Implementing a bilingual curriculum was unrealistic. Into the early 1990s, research emerged showing that students learned new languages at a faster pace in elementary school, anyway. Principal Lebron transferred to Edison High School and took with him much of the energy of the new project.

  Newly immigrated students joined Spanish-speaking cliques of friends and progressed through years of school without learning any English. Cries continued against the school’s condition. In 1989 it was eighty-three years old and falling apart. This was the last building to which mothers wanted to send their ten-year-olds. The city couldn’t deny it. They agreed the building was too old and coughed up $2.3 million for rehabilitation. There were plans to construct another middle school, they promised. They wouldn’t use the structure as an educational institution for long, they promised. It would only be “temporary.”

  The school at Eighth and Lehigh would remain open for the next fourteen years. In its final years, I arrived.

  2

  They’ll Take Anyone

  A weather-beaten, gray stone edifice stood on the corner of Eighth and Lehigh in North Philadelphia. The roof had four turrets with menacing gargoyles arched forward. Surrounding the building was a moat of concrete ringed by a black iron gate. Somehow, vandals had sprayed graffiti on the slanted roofs. This could not be a school.

  I yanked open the only door that wasn’t chained shut and saw a little placard with the words MAIN OFFICE down the hall. Inside, a woman behind the counter shuffled through papers. She glanced up over the glasses perched on her nose.

  “Hi, my name is Christina Asquith,” I said. “I’d like to teach here.”

  Most schools had their staff in place by July, but the city of Philadelphia still lacked fifteen hundred teachers—more than 10 percent of the teaching staff. The district was desperate to hire anyone, or they’d have thousands of kids without a teacher that September. I was a twenty-five-year-old journalist and had recently finished a two-year internship with The Philadelphia Inquirer . I ought to have been looking for a job in journalism, but the other day I had come across an advertisement at the bus stop: “Change a Life. Be a Teacher.” The ad showed a sweet young boy with a yearning look on his face.

  Although I’d worked for newspapers since college, I was frustrated with the industry as of late. I wanted to make a difference, particularly by covering urban school systems, but from the distant perch of the newsroom I felt out of touch with the real problems inside the classroom. Teaching was always something I had a passion for, but I didn’t want to go back to school for years to get an education degree. As I’d quickly learn, I didn’t have to.

  Julia de Burgos was one of a handful of so-called Spanish-English bilingual schools in Philadelphia that I would most likely be placed at because I was fluent in Spanish. The woman behind the counter was Mrs. Jimenez, the assistant principal. She was friendly and offered to give me a tour.

  “The school used to be called the Northeast Manual Training Center, but they renamed it twice, and now it’s called Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, after the Puerto Rican poet,” she said. She told me she had taught here for a decade, but that the school was almost one hundered years old.

  The school felt like a museum filled with history. A dimly lit staircase led up to an antique stained-glass window that filled the archway with the colored light of a church. The school hallways formed a square, with a courtyard in the middle and three sets of staircases leading from the basement to the third floor. Several years had passed since I’d stood in the long, shiny hallways of a school, and I was flooded with memories of my own private school in Northern New Jersey.

  Mrs. Jimenez was unfazed when I told her I had never taught before. “Mmmm, yes. Well, we really need teachers,” she replied. Even though the school needed some serious renovation, the pretty murals of Puerto Rico and handmade signs displaying school pride gave the place a sense of spirit.

  This would be tough, but if I were going to do this, I didn’t want a school that anyone would teach at. I wanted to teach kids that no one else would take. When Mrs. Jimenez offered to write a letter requesting I be assigned here, I happily agreed. She looked slightly surprised.