The Time of Our Lives by Tom Brokaw Page A

Britt has paid off. The gap between white students and their African American and Latino counterparts has narrowed to under 5 percent.
    In the end, it comes down to what Jack Cassidy in Cincinnati calls “the moral responsibility of all of us to leave the country and its institutions better than what we found.”
    In Cincinnati that moral responsibility is embodied in a school that is going from worst to first. Taft’s graduation rate in ten years went from 21 percent to more than 95 percent. Proficiency in math and reading jumped to 95 percent in the same period.
    PS 109, Jack Britt High, East Lake, and Taft are striking examples of what author and businessman Wes Moore calls “environment versus expectations.” Moore, an African American, was raised in minority neighborhoods in Baltimore by a single mother after his father died when he was three. He was a bright but indifferent student, more interested in scoring points in playground basketball games than on classroom tests.
    When he was in the eighth grade his mother arranged to send him to a military school. He rebelled against the discipline and tried repeatedly to run away in the first month, but his mother kept sending him back.
    Slowly he learned something about himself. “I liked being a leader,” he told me. “I was responsible for my squadron and that gave me pride.” That pride began to show up in the classroom and soon he began making his mark in academics as well as on the parade ground, basketball court, and football field.
    Moore came up against another reality. “I learned it’s a much larger world than my old Baltimore neighborhood,” he told me with a laugh. “I thought I was pretty hot in basketball, that I could dunk on anyone, but I quickly learned there were others who could dunk on me.”
    It never occurred to Moore than he might be a candidate for a Baltimore school he barely knew about: Johns Hopkins University, one of the elite academic institutions in the world. “No one in my old neighborhood thought about going to Johns Hopkins,” he said. “We all thought we were going to the NBA.”
    Moore’s military school record was so impressive he made it to Johns Hopkins, and there the new expectations for his life carried him even higher. He became the school’s first African American Rhodes scholar, then an officer in the elite U.S. Army Rangers and served in Afghanistan. He returned to the United States and became a White House fellow, working alongside Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the State Department.
    All this he documented in detail in his New York Times bestselling book The Other Wes Moore , a model for understanding and addressing the issues of education and expectation in the inner cities of America. It is the story of two young men, both named Wes Moore, raised a few blocks from each other, each by a single mother. One’s life was defined by the temptations and perils of the drug trade, a violent, lucrative, and lawless society in almost every big-city minority neighborhood.
    The errant young man tried once to get loose of the hold drugs had on him by applying to Job Corps, but he failed and returned to a life of crime. He was eventually involved in a robbery in which an off-duty policeman was killed. The “other Wes Moore” went to prison, and when the author’s mother told him of the coincidence of their names and childhoods, a lesson began to take shape.
    The Rhodes scholar Wes Moore asked to see the felon Wes Moore in prison, and a visit was arranged. They met more than a dozen times, exploring why one had found such a rewarding life while the other ended up in a penitentiary. When Moore asked the inmate if he thought the environment in which he grew up was the cause of his fate, the answer was, “No, it was expectations. No one expected anything of me,” adding that when he began to develop a police record, his troubles multiplied. He dropped out of school and moved deeper into the underworld of his