There was James Chavo of the Native American Middle School; Lexington Fowler at Inspired Tech Academy; Mrs. Majesty Blanche Boudreaux at Leaders Born High School. There were others too, believe me. The time was ripe for saviors: our president was a great born-again Christian and the City of Dope, that Too $hort had told us couldn’t be saved by John the Pope, was being born again too. No, it was no longer the drug-plagued eighties, or the bullet-riddled nineties. It was a new century and saviors were everywhere in Oakland. The town was being chartered out.
By the time of the Sobrante murder, the schools were already receiving quite a bit of press for their ties to the Republican Party and their exceptional test scores. Chavo at the Native American school in the Laurel District was said to be a miracle worker — his students’ Annual Yearly Progress scores had reached 860 for two years in a row, an elite level rarely accomplished by any but the most privileged private schools. Chavo was also said to be a born-again of particular fervor and Bible-beating prowess. Fowler’s Inspired Tech Academy was, like the Native American school, situated in one of East Oakland’s diverse, borderline neighborhoods, where the announcement of an AYP above 800 was often followed by word that a police informant had been executed in an alleyway, or that SWAT was busting in someone’s door down the street. The kind of neighborhood that could go either way at any moment. Fowler, for his part, had been among Bush 41’s Thousand Points of Light back in ’90 or ’91, and he had not lost favor with the paradise-inclined mind of 43, the son.
Everything about the charters was story-worthy. Yet there was an undercurrent in every article that went uninterrogated. Each piece would mention, in passing, the schools’ high teacher turnover and militant reliance on nineteenth-century schoolhouse discipline. Chavo, it was reported, angrily ended a pep rally in mid-hoorah because some boys were sagging their pants in violation of his dress code. Fowler, meanwhile, took it upon himself to patrol the halls of Inspired Tech and volubly chastise girls if they were cuddled up with the lower-performing boys. Mrs. Majesty Blanche Boudreaux, the Tribune reported, actually went to the trouble of keeping a public tally of students whose grade-point averages statistically qualified them for acceptance to four-year colleges and universities, implying that the rest were wastrels and losers. Cash Hill bought ad space in the Tribune where he proclaimed his school would be “the lynching that Thug Life and all the other culture cancers have coming.”
Why weren’t these signs of unstable leadership investigated? I can’t say. What I do know now, but only suspected back then, is that local newspapers were experiencing the wrath of the Internet, and budgets were being slashed like a machete dropping cane. Investigative reporting was going the way of my own broken dream of being the next Woodward, Pilger, and Wells, all wrapped into one. News anchors and popular editorialists might demand high salaries, but the actual nature of their work was inexpensive. By contrast, the costs for actual investigative work could spiral stratospherically. What if the story went deeper and involved more players than originally expected? What if the saga ran longer than anyone suspected it would? A news agency couldn’t just pull out midinvestigation and act like the story had run its course. It was an all-or-nothing deal — and the media increasingly opted for nothing.
I had always imagined myself haunting the halls of the state capitol, doggedly delivering on the intentionally obscured issues of political glad-handing and corruption. Maybe if I made it out of local news, I’d one day work for CNN or CBS, and find myself holed up with Congolese rebels or unembedded in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the very least I’d end up on the Big Pharma beat, stalking CEOs from boardrooms to brunch dates with doctors on the make. But by the time I was out of college, that deeply researched reporting on local politics and events was dead. If it had to do with a war in the Middle East — fuck the Congo, Uganda, or Sri Lanka — there was always money and a few warm bodies to throw at it. But what went on in Sacramento day to day, let alone Oakland, might as well have been happening on another planet.
I was still trying my hand at freelance reporting back then, although a year clear of school I was just as broke and unpublished as I’d been on my graduation day. Oh, the pride of my parents, you can only imagine. I picked up a part-time job at a Mexican supermarket on East 14th near the Allen Temple Baptist Church, and I worked parking lot security for the church on Wednesdays and Sundays. My savings had run dangerously low before the part-time jobs and I had been forced to move into a three-bedroom duplex off 85th Avenue where I was the only tenant. This was way before gentrification so I could afford it. Nobody but a naïve college kid wanted that rattrap, which was right above a homeless encampment that doubled as an open-air drug den. Looming over the many elderly, addled homeless was a billboard advertising pet rescue and adoption: Save Fido. Rescue Kitty. Happy, smiley, white Disney cartoon people nuzzled their anthropomorphic pets right on top of rickshaw shopping carts, broken black people, syringes, and vials. The landlady was more than happy to get my six hundred dollars in rent every month. Half the faucets didn’t work, the electrical outlets were all ungrounded so powering up my PC was taking my life in my hands, and there was no heating or air-conditioning in the whole place. The building was as dangerous, really, as anything outside its walls. But I wasn’t ready to give up on myself as a journalist. I had no desire to admit defeat and fall back on my parents in suburban Sacramento, so I holed up in the hood and held tight. I drank a lot, and read books about washouts on the outskirts of Hollywood throwing their ideas down the toilet along with their liquor vomit.
I wasn’t sure if I was embarking on an article about a hero leading a great educational effort in an East Oakland ghetto, running a preparatory academy literally founded upon a murder scene and dedicated to the victim — or if what I was after was something more sinister. But I had to tell the story everyone else was slighting, even if my only means of publication was a blog that no one but its author ever read.
I started schooling myself on the inner workings of Sobrante. Eventually, I wanted to talk to the principal himself, but first I needed to know more about his operation from people around the fringes. I couldn’t interview students who were minors without complications arising, so I settled for janitorial staff, clerical workers, and former employees who were already making their presence known on Glassdoor.com.
“A Trump-like figure,” one post read, “a mannerless Wall Street lout.” It was the language of a teacher or HR staffer from the hills, maybe even from Marin, who was trying to compute the existence of a man so connected and yet so uncouth.
“The educational equivalent of a prosperity preacher,” another post read.
“Like the Eddie Longs and T.D. Jakes of the world, he’s receiving the largesse of the Bush administration — except instead of faith-based initiatives it’s No Child Left Behind federal funding,” another writer noted.
Others were more opinionated: “What a black cracker! Not to play the ‘race card,’ but is there any chance in hell that white kids would get guinea-pigged like this by an education fascist?”
Glassdoor disrobed the town and had a million stories to share about its birthday suit, but it was still just a website. For all the Internet could reveal and make accessible, it couldn’t replace the intimately felt reality of genuine reporting. There was no flesh to grasp onto online, no facial cues, hushed tones, or eyes that would rather wander a million miles than meet your own. No viscera. Everything was cloaked in keyboards and anonymity. I had to get on the campus (through the plaza mall, past the Wells Fargo and the dance studio) and talk to real people, on the record.