What makes some kids who face enormous problems fail and a few, like Camara Barrett, succeed?
Camara Barrett sounds like a classic high-achiever. Valedictorian and fist in his class when he graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn this spring, he was also class president, editor of the school paper, a peer tutor, and an award-winning public speaker. And he worked 15 hours a week at a Brooklyn medical center, getting experience in one of the fields he is interested in pursuing. So it's no surprise that he got admitted to eight universities and is going to Cornell with a scholarship from the university and another from the United Federation of Teachers. The surprise is that he achieved all this while living in a homeless shelter.
Everything seemed fine for Camara when he came to this country from Kingston, Jamaica, several years ago. He was living with his mother and stepfather, taking tough courses and getting top grades at Thomas Jefferson. But after a bitter fight with his parents, he found himself out on the street. For four days, he lived and studied on the subway at night, getting off to go to school during the day.
This would throw most kids for a loop. Even if they're not getting on well with their mothers and fathers, young people depend on parents to provide food and shelter and a certain degree of emotional support and stability. But after people at Thomas Jefferson helped Camara get settled in a homeless shelter, he pulled his grades back up, studied for his SATs, and applied for college admission. Rather than devastating him, the experience of being alone, with nowhere to spend the night but a subway car, seems to have strengthened Camara's resolve to study and make something of himself. Speaking to a New York Post reporter about being homeless ("Subway Scholar is on an Honor Roll," May 21, 1996), Camara said that he "was depressed [and] filled with melancholy ... [but] what doesn't kill you ... makes you stronger and that definitely made me stronger."
How was he able to pull this off? What makes some kids who face enormous problems fail and a few, like Camara Barrett, succeed? Christopher Armstrong, one of the counselors at Independence Inn, the homeless shelter for boys 16 to 21 where Camara spend last year, says that Camara sees a challenge where other people might see obstacles. But this doesn't really explain how he found the guts to meet the challenge. If he hadn't been able to get off the subway and step into the world of school, would he have made it? I'm not just talking about the people at Thomas Jefferson who helped him through the crisis -- though they were important. We always used to think of education as the salvation of poor kids who wanted to rise above their poverty. It prepared them to make a better living than their parents. But, more than that, going to school and studying math, learning about American history, reading books by Dickens and Shakespeare, and perhaps even seeing some Shakespeare plays -- all these experiences took you out of your immediate circumstances and connected you with a world that was much larger. That seems to be what Camara is talking about in the scholarship essay he submitted to the United Federation of Teachers. He says that, even when he was a boy growing up on the streets of Kingston, surrounded by ugliness and poverty, he was able to lose himself in television and books.
Americans have always believed that somebody can start with little, overcome terrific odds, and succeed. So Camara' s is an American story. It's also a story that poor, minority kids especially need to hear -- the ones who look at the difficulties in their lives and say, "Why bother?" I wonder what would happen if those sporting-goods and soft-drink companies whose ads feature huge color photos of movie stars and sports heroes started using heroes like Camara Barrett as their poster boys. What would the effect be if every day poor, minority kids could see a three-story-high photograph of Camara Barrett? Now there's a real role model.
In my recent discussion of an article on student turnover in Chicago ("Caught in a Revolving Door," June 23, 1996), I should have noted that the article was an adaptation. The original article appeared in Catalyst, a news magazine that often covers education issues in Chicago. Readers wanting a copy of the original article, together with the package of articles on student turnover of which it was a part, should contact Catalyst at 332 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 500, Chicago, IL 60604; phone 312-427-4830.