“The dress code is selective,” said one staff member who declined to be identified. “For the record, remember what a charter is and isn’t. There are private schools in Oakland’s enclaves with bigger endowments than state universities. These schools serve two, three hundred children at most. We are not private, kids actually go to school here. Our endowment is the overtime wages Hill shorts us on. If we didn’t receive public monies, we wouldn’t exist. But at the same time we’re not true public schools because we’re not union or school board regulated. There’s no unions, no boards — just Hill. Hill regulates us and himself. As far as this school is concerned, he is the state. Only the federal government has any say over him, and you know the feds don’t come to Oakland unless it’s a drug bust. Plus, he’s got friends in the White House.”
“Friends?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Duly noted.” I moved us back to firmer ground: “The dress code is selective, how?”
“Selective like this: If your GPA is above a 3.0, your standardized test scores are above proficiency, and you’re a girl, you can wear a cropped halter top and high heels. Your blouses can expose back and shoulders. If you’re a boy with those same credentials, you still can’t sag your pants, because Hill thinks that’s coded communication between gang members. But you can wear your hat at any angle you like, you can wear jewelry, and you can curse without facing reprimand. These privileges are not open to the low-performing student.”
I remember pausing to take stock of a few of the class photographs that adorned this woman’s office walls. The children wore an array of outfits, some with pants sagging ludicrously low, evidently in open rebellion to the rules. Others wore their shorts high-water, like old men, Urkel, and wary boxers. Several of the girls wore “stunner shades,” huge block-shaped goggle-like sunglasses that seemed to only come in hot pink, flame orange, or neon blue. These young ladies were also bursting out of their tiny shirts emblazoned with provocative insignias, which drew my attention that much more shamefully to their taut teenage breasts. “These must be the straight-A students,” I cracked.
“No,” she shrugged, “not even close. This crew isn’t exactly headed to Harvard Yard.”
“But I thought only the smart kids could dress like they want.”
“In theory, that’s the rule. But Hill can’t patrol the halls every morning and afternoon inspecting each student’s clothes. He has a school to run, and day-trading to do,” the woman reminded me. “That would be unrealistic, even for a demagogue. The dress code mostly comes into effect the day before standardized tests, and everybody knows it. I think he learned it from Chavo over there at the Indian school. Baggy jeans, exposed boxer briefs, halter tops, and visible bra straps will get you suspended on test day, if you’re bad at taking tests.”
“Is that legal?” I asked ignorantly. Was the place where I lived legal under any compliance code? Was the homeless encampment on the street outside legal? Where were their permits? What about the police who curb-crawled the neighborhood nightly, extorting the prostitutes and shoestring pimps? Where was running a protection racket out of a police station endorsed under the law?
“I asked the same question when I first showed up here.” She nodded at me somberly. “I don’t anymore.”
AYP scores came in: Sobrante rated a 650, hardly in the elite category that the Native American Middle School consistently claimed, but it was at least a hundred points higher than the public high schools deep in East Oakland.
According to my inside sources, Principal Hill was unsatisfied. He blamed the mediocre score on race and culture. One source had surreptitiously recorded Hill’s rant on her phone: “If these Negroes would consent to an eleven-month school year for their children, we could social engineer our way to a 900 AYP in no time flat. I promise that on my brother’s grave. We could create a black Bill Gates. We could make us a Mexican Stephen Hawking, minus his ALS. You know, you can’t get that shit if you learn to salsa at three years old. Think about it, you ever known a Mexican falling out of his wheelchair with ALS? Mexicans are a healthy people with a healthy culture, but Negroes are a lost people. They require some inhumanity. They need to be reeducated by any means necessary, and the eleven-month school year is the nicest way of doing it. It could be twelve months. If it were really up to me, I’d do like Mao and send them all back to the land, beat it into them. The Marxists had a good idea — they just applied it to the wrong people. The rich don’t need reeducation. Whites and Asians do not need reeducation, and if they did, they wouldn’t bitch about it like blacks do. They would do whatever was necessary not to become a subservient class.”
The recording exposed everything that was wrong with Mr. Cash Hill. The guy was sounding more fascistic by the moment. Whatever his business acumen, whatever his connections to born-again Bush, his guidance of children was taking a dark turn. There was no way such a man would have been allowed to lead affluent white children, and no telling what such a man would do to the poor and powerless.
Unfortunately, I knew I couldn’t print any of this, or even post it to my blog. It’s against California law to record or publish people without their permission. I know FOX News all but destroyed ACORN using it as a tactic, but I’m just a small-time citizen journalist. Hill would be up my ass with lawsuits and countercharges; my underwear would be up for auction if I tempted fate like that. Even now I wonder what will come of it, if he is out there somewhere reading my words, plotting to put me before a judge. All for exposing his mad love.
I located a janitor who had moved on from the high school for reasons he wouldn’t discuss. But he admitted on the record that he’d more than once wandered into Principal Hill’s motivational sessions while fetching things from the janitorial supply closet. Inside he’d find some banished child wearing a dunce cap that read, DEPORT THIS LATINO, or, CRACK BABY BRAIN, or, DANGER: LAZY NEGRO HAPPY SLAVE. Then there was the tiara, always given vengefully to the boys that bucked against rule and order — BITCH, it read in bright white sequins.
“It’s not right to teach children that way,” the janitor said, “even if they is in high school and they did somethin’ wrong.”
Add to the alleged wrongs an oft-used method one HR employee explained to me: “You lock the unruly student inside one of the windowless classrooms or a storage closet. All they miscreant asses need is a tablet of some kind and a writing instrument. You turn off the lights and you leave ’em there, go about teaching those who want to learn, then come get he or she who was actin’ out from the lock-up at three p.m. when school is out. Now that’s a policy that ain’t on paper, but one that is practiced here without apology. Shit, if Principal Hill ran East Oakland like he runs this school, these streets wouldn’t be lookin’ the way they look, I can tell you that much.”
I was not looking forward to Hill entering local politics, though perhaps that was where all this was headed. With him at its helm, East Oakland would either transform into a sprawling, chocolate-city suburb, or it would be overtaken with roving bands of disgruntled ex-employees and students who’d been kicked out of the school system.
If Principal Hill would have been a lightning rod as a mayor, Principal Chavo at the Native American school would have been the thunder, plus a few downed power lines. In a turn of events that made local news, Chavo pulled his own card by cursing out a contingent of Berkeley School of Education students who were touring his campus. Apparently they disagreed with the principal patrolling the halls on standardized test day and suspending kids on the spot for the merest of infractions. One kid (who might not have been the sharpest of students) just looked at him wrong and was gone. In another instance, Chavo swooped straight into a classroom, asked everyone if the test was too hard, and then kicked out all those who raised their hands. Several dozen students ended up on the curb, waiting to be picked up by parents, guardians, or whoever scooped them up. Some of the graduate students were concerned by the haphazard pickup situation, others by the initial disposal. Chavo didn’t give a damn and had them put out of doors as well.