Miracle School: A Child of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

Imagine a school that offers its students a safe environment, a rigorous college-prep curriculum, high expectations for student responsibility, and individualized attention. Ms. Epstein describes such a school, but it is not an elite private school for the wealthy. It is the Street Academy in Oakland, California, which serves a population of primarily low-income, urban, disenfranchised students. NOTHING IN school reform has changed the fact that most urban teachers continue to confront a huge gap between the school experience of and Latino students and that of students, a constant fear of violence on the part of many high school students, and a growing dropout rate. However, the Emiliano Zapata Street Academy in Oakland, California, which predates such recent responses as charters, increased testing, and metal detectors and police patrols on campus, has dealt with all three of these challenges using the principles and practices of the civil rights movement. Our Students Don't Like White Teachers If there had not been a surplus in California in 1976, I probably never would have found the Street Academy. But after three years of substitute teaching, I was eager to apply for a full-time job. I was interviewed along with two other finalists in front of the 10- member Street Academy staff. They started off asking the typical questions about credentials and reading instruction methods. Then Antonio, one of the social studies teachers, asked, Some of our students don't like teachers much. How are you going to handle that? Somehow I got the job. Perhaps they liked my answer to the white teacher question: Sometimes teachers are pretty racist. I guess if I'm that racist, they won't like me either. Although most schools did not ask this question, I respected Antonio for raising it because my experience in San Francisco had taught me that race was not an irrelevant subject for an interview. I had substituted, sometimes for weeks or months at a time, in junior and senior high schools when a took maternity leave or time off to work on a special project. At one school, the mostly teaching staff regularly sent the members of its mostly student body to the dean to be paddled for misbehavior. At another, more middle-class school, a revered English called his Asian students rice eaters when he encountered them in the hallway. And at a third school, in the Sunset District, most of the lunchroom conversation consisted of teachers complaining that the black kids had invaded what was once considered the country club junior high of San Francisco. At none of these schools did I see an integrated teachers' lunchroom -- often the few African American teachers in the schools ate with the custodian in his workroom. The Emiliano Zapata Street Academy, in contrast, was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, adopting its name from a Mexican revolutionary and its spirit from the activists who had filled the streets of Oakland throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the time, the notion of charter schools had not yet been conceived, but there were provisions in the state's education code for a few alternative schools. The organizers of the Street Academy campaigned for a school based on some principles that were quite unusual at the time: high schools needed to be smaller, the students needed to have personal relationships with staff members, all should be required to respect the community and its standards of behavior, and everyone should pursue enlightenment. These visionaries included the school's current executive director, Pat Williams Myrick; Betsy Schulz; several veterans of the San Francisco State University and Chicano movements, including Frank Garcia and Bernard Stringer; Oakland's first African American superintendent, Marcus Foster; and some representatives of the National Urban League and the National Institute of Education. …