Schools are like turtles. Their shells change so slowly that it's hard to notice except over decades. Inside, they're living organisms that adapt gradually to an ever-changing environment. They move slowly.
Consider Brehms Lane Elementary School in Northeast Baltimore.
In 1938, a Sun reporter, Lee McCardell, visited every level from kindergarten through 12th grade in the city school system, "graduating" from Western High School and writing a long series on the experience. He spent the sixth grade in Room 202 at Brehms Lane.
The nation was trying to emerge from the Depression, but war clouds were on the horizon. Citywide enrollment was 127,000. The budget was $18 million. Brehms Lane, of course, was white. McCardell, who was to cover World War II and become Rome bureau chief, never stopped on his tour at one of the city's "colored" schools.
Thirty-three autumns later, in 1971, I followed in McCardell's footsteps (where I could; some of the schools had closed). I visited Bernard Hagan's sixth-grade class in the same Room 202. The United States was about to bow out of a long and bitter war in Southeast Asia. Citywide enrollment was 193,000, almost at its peak of the century. The budget was $200 million. There were a few black pupils at Brehms Lane.
Last Friday, I returned to Room 202 in the company of Claudia Brown, the principal. Room 202 is now a third-grade classroom, the school having lost its sixth grade to Northeast Middle School. Citywide enrollment is 113,000. The budget is $632 million. The principal, and the teacher in Room 202, Frieda Brown, and 25 of her 30 children are African-American.
These are the most obvious changes at Brehms Lane over 56 years. The school is also a more modern and cheerful place, having been refurbished (and had its asbestos removed) in the early '90s.
There were no TV sets or computers in 1938 and 1971. Today the school has a closed-circuit TV system and a computer lab where students work on a program from IBM called "Writing to Read." It's based on the proposition that youngsters learn to read by composing their own sentences and, eventually, essays on a computer.
The principal has a computer in her office, and she's arranged for all 24 teachers to have one. She uses hers to work on the Brehms Lane budget, a function now delegated to local school principals, working with their "school improvement teams."
Friday was "school spirit day" at Brehms Lane, so students were excused from wearing uniforms. Ms. Brown and many of the teachers were wearing outfits of the school's colors, gold and blue. "Latch-key" children, those whose parents (or parent) work after school, were accommodated in an after-school program so that they would not have to return to an empty house. Special education children (to whom McCardell referred as "mentally deficient and backward") were taught in small classes, their size dictated by federal regulations. The school's lone student using a wheelchair rode between floors on the school's lone elevator.
None of this could be seen in 1971 and 1938.
But in so many ways little has changed at Brehms Lane, and in some ways the school resembles '38 more than '71.
Room 202 in '38: colorfully decorated, bookcases containing shells and minerals, a microscope for science class. "Filling three blackboards are 22 propositions: air is made up mostly of oxygen," McCardell wrote. The students memorized multiplication tables.
Room 202 in '71: Mr. Hagan handed out a study sheet including such questions as: What are two invertebrates which existed during the Paleozoic age? But no multiplication tables. The "new math" of the 1960s had come to Brehms Lane. It was supposed to explain to the student what had once been learned by rote.
For example, subtracting 56 from 72, the "old" student "borrowed" 1 from the 7, made the 2 a 12 and came up with the answer 16. The new student was supposed to learn that 72 is a "set" of seven 10's plus 2 that could just as easily be six 10's plus 12. Get it? They didn't in 1971, either, and the new math, one of education's major lemons, was discarded not long after I visited Brehms Lane.
Room 202 in '94: A live pet turtle and a goldfish bowl were in one corner of the carpeted room. Science is taught in a more "hands-on" fashion than before, in a "resource room" set up with a theme (currently rain forests), said Ms. Brown, "but it hasn't changed that much." Frieda Brown, the teacher, was working with the whole class on a lesson on abbreviations. Later, the class would break into groups for reading.
And, comfortingly, on Room 202's chalkboard: the "5 times" multiplication table.
Downstairs, first-grade teacher Geraldine Hisle said reading is taught "pretty much the way it has been for my 30 years." The basal readers are multicultural and multiracial. They contain real literature -- A. A. Milne's Pooh stories, for example. Dick and Jane, those staples of 50 years ago, are long gone, but "cat" and "hat" are still among the first words learned by first-graders in Baltimore, as they have been for six decades.
What really hasn't changed at all, except for their color, are the children. They still chew gum, make faces behind the teacher's back and are gap-toothed in the first grade. The view from Brehms Lane, across blocks of rowhouses to the north, down Gay Street to the city center on the south, is largely unchanged. The brick shell is still there. Beneath it, the heart of Brehms Lane beats on.
NUMBERS TO PONDER
Ponder these demographics for Prince George's Community College: While the student body became more and more African-American, reflecting the changes in Prince George's County, the college faculty changed hardly at all, reflecting a tight job market in academia.
The result: This fall, the Prince George's teaching faculty is more than 90 percent white, while the school's enrollment is 70 percent minority. The fact that 65 percent of the staff is eligible for retirement within five years might be helpful to college planners, except for one thing: There is no longer a cap on the retirement age of college professors.