Not all ABC stories have such happy endings. In 1976, Tony Ashby left the South Bronx for the Groton School in Massachusetts. He did well there, and he, too, went on to Harvard. But, along the way, things fell apart: Ashby lost his drive to “get out” of the ghetto. Since he finished Harvard in 1986 he has bounced from job to job. He lived in a cramped tenement in Harlem until his landlord recently kicked him out.
Founded in 1963 by a group of Ivy League administrators and prep-school headmasters, ABC epitomized the idealism of the times: by sending poor kids to elite private schools, they would adopt the mannerisms and mind-sets of their white preppie peers and thus be lifted from poverty. It hasn’t always worked out that way. Making the transition from one world to the other was difficult for most students, impossible for some. The most famous failure was Edmund Perry, the Exeter alumnus who was killed in 1985 while allegedly mugging an undercover New York City policeman.
The program has prospered-growing and spawning imitators. Wealthy benefactors from Manhattan’s Perfumed Stockade to the Hollywood Hills have embraced whole classrooms of inner-city kids, guaranteeing them college educations if only they’ll finish high school. But like ABC before them, they’ve found that helping kids to succeed is more complicated than giving well-intentioned grants. Poor kids–like rich kids–need guidance; they need adults who can muffle their culture shocks and hear their frustrations. The help can take many forms–counselors, summer-long retreats, an autumn walk in the woods–but it’s as essential as the tuition check itself. Poor kids–like privileged kids–need a chance to fall, a break from being the best little person their neighborhood ever produced. Poor kids–like rich kids–need space to be themselves; the process of absorbing the refined values of elite prep schools and colleges must not come at the cost of feverish self-hatred. And rich benefactors must understand that some kids are still going to fail.
To its enduring credit, ABC made mistakes and learned from them. By the mid-’70s, the program was reaching out to find kids from ever more abject circumstances. Those youngsters needed the most support, but as funding dried up ABC had to abandon its summer-long residential pre-prep program. As a result, admittees lacked mentors like Clair’s, and more kids had trouble in school. Unable to reinstitute the summer orientation, ABC adjusted its recruiting, shifting toward kids from lower-middle-class and poor but stable families.
Despite the changes, ABC administrators insist that the program’s goal remains the same. “Sometimes people come to us who can afford to send their children to school,” says Judith Griffin, president of ABC. “But we look in the Bronx and on the South Side of Chicago. We look for these kids and there they are and they are poor.” Griffin says that a third of ABC children still come from welfare families. This year about 1,100 students are scattered among 160 schools. More than two thirds are African-American; most of the rest are Latino.
Over the years, more than 7,000 students have graduated from ABC. NEWSWEEK has chosen three–Clair (‘74), Ashby (‘81) and Lisa Partin (‘89)–to illustrate ABC’s slow and sometimes painful evolution and the inevitable collision of idealism with the realities of race and class:
During his first year at St. Mark’s, Clair received some rude lessons in the peculiar code of the prep school. He was relieved to hear that at some meals he could ditch his coat and tie for “casual” clothes. He made the mistake of wearing his crisp new blue jeans, freshly pressed white T shirt and gleaming white Converse All-Stars sneakers to his first casual meal; he was turned away by a teacher. No jeans, even fresh ones, in the dining hall. Meanwhile, he recalls, his shabby genteel classmates were free to wear “Topsiders so ragged that they had to be held together by hockey tape, tennis shirts with holes and corduroy pants so worn that the seat was smooth.”
Clair may have been unprepared for the cultural niceties of prep life, but he learned more important lessons at ABC’s summer-orientation program before he was sent off to St. Mark’s. For six weeks at beautiful Williams College, ABC admittees got a dose of discipline; they ate, slept, studied and played sports on a strict schedule. The ABC mentors instilled a sense of pride in Clair. “They reminded us that we were special kids and that any individual failure was a failure of the program,” he says. “That was the feeling that kept me going at St. Mark’s.”
His first year was harrowing academically. He almost failed English. And even in classes where he did well, he encountered prejudice. Once, he yawned in Latin class without covering his mouth: “The teacher slapped me. He said, ‘That’s why we bring you kids here, to teach you some manners’.” Still, Clair says the experience was positive. Despite low faculty expectations of African-American kids, his grades improved. And, through sports and extracurricular activities he formed strong friendships. He says, “As I adjusted to St. Mark’s socially and did well academically, people viewed me as another Anglo-American who just had black skin.”
That is, until it came time to apply to college. A classmate dubbed senior year “the year of the nigger,” for the preference the black kids would get in college admissions. Most of his St. Mark’s classmates assumed that “their social standing meant they would never have to compete with [blacks],” says Clair. “It was only when our blackness became an advantage that it was a problem. Even living as intimately as one could, as the stakes got higher, people’s intolerance and their own feelings of being threatened got harder to hide. I saw it in college and again in medical school.”
Clair is grateful for his St. Mark’s education, and he says he might even send his own sons, ages 4 and 8, there someday. But he’s a realist. Whatever advantages their school ties give them, the disadvantage of having two black parents in America “will have a larger influence on their lives.”
The first thing Tony Ashby noticed when he stepped onto the Groton campus was the sprawling playing fields. The campus was awash in deep greens late that New England summer; the concrete of the South Bronx was far away. The fields were the focal point of Ashby’s years at Groton; he played football, lacrosse and basketball. The plaques in the field house that list team captains for football and lacrosse will “forever bear my name,” he says proudly. “[Groton] challenged me to be my best.” Unfortunately, for Ashby, prep school turned out to be preparation for nothing so much as prep school. The larger world, as he would find, did not play by the rules he learned at Groton.
Ashby and other ABC students of his time weren’t sure if they were storming the barricades of the privileged or were being co-opted by the white establishment. ABC itself did little to help Ashby sort through his conflicts; during his five years at Groton, he says he never met an ABC representative. “ABC just puts you there and forgets you,” he said.
But if ABC stumbled-grants were disappearing even as kids admitted into the program came from ever more difficult backgrounds-Groton became a haven. If anything, the school was perhaps too protective, too paternalistic, too good at making Ashby feel at home. “At Groton we were taught fair play,” he says. When he got to Harvard “it was kill the next guy at any cost.” To make things worse, Harvard was racially divided as well: blacks and whites usually did not mix. Ashby felt a tension between his allegiance to African-American peers and his comfort with his largely white group of friends. That tension finally drove him from many of his white friends after graduation. “Living with white people got to be too much after 10 years,” he says. Ashby drifted between New York and Boston and worked as, among other things, a teacher, a paralegal and a youth counselor.
In his last interview, he sat in his cramped Harlem apartment and spoke with some defiance and some self-pity. “The one thing that no one can take away from me is my years at Groton,” he said. “Groton gave me a lot of cultural refinement.” When his landlord kicked him out, he left no forwarding address.
Beginning in 1983, Lisa Partin commuted daily from Harlem to The Spence School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was from a stable, two-parent, working-class household. “There was always an emphasis on education in my house,” she says. “My experience is very different from most kids’ in Harlem because of my parents.” For ABC, Partin was an ideal candidate.
Not only had ABC changed by the 1980s, but attitudes at prep school had changed as well. “My best friends were white and we’re still in touch,” she says. By the ’80s blacks were a part of most prep schools. Few people questioned their qualifications to be there; most teachers searched for ways to make the curriculum and the faculty more inclusive. In fact, class, not race, was the most important difference for Partin. After vacation “girls came back from Europe and I had only gone to Florida,” she says. The irony, she says, is that “a lot of them envied me. They were raised by nannies and they envied me for my parents.”
After Spence, Partin went to Harvard. “My close friends were almost all black. We had a lot more in common, the parties we went to, the music we liked. We all went to the same place to get our hair done,” she says. Still, she got along better with whites than some other blacks did, thanks to her prep-school experience. “I couldn’t imagine going in as a (black) freshman and having to adapt.” She earned her bachelor’s degree in three years and then joined the Bank of Boston as a management trainee. Along the way, she has run into the other “smart girls” from her Harlem junior-high-school class. “During an internship at an investment bank in New York I ran into a girlfriend who competed with me for grades; she was a secretary there. Another is a cashier and another one has a baby. The only difference is that I was given a chance.”
