New York Voices; 809; Leadership Academy Update / Junot Diaz

Why. If I'd known how difficult year one would be, I probably would never have done the job. You always try to do your story instead of the story that's coming to you. You can have a lot of problems. [siren] New York one voice at a time [voices] New York Voices. New York Voices is made possible by the members of 13 additional funding by Michael T. Martin And Elise

JAFFE And Jeffrey Brown. Welcome to New York VOICES. I'm Rafael Pi Roman later in the program, we'll rebroadcast my interview with the brilliant young writer Junot Díaz who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But we begin tonight with a look at the leadership academy. New York City's experimental training program for school principals. You know, not long after the leadership academy first opened, we began to follow three aspiring principals through their training in their first year on the job. Recently we checked back with one of those principals to see what kind of impact his training had had on his ability to transform his school and to get a better idea of the overall success of the academy. Here's what we found. [school bell and voices] [host] When the bell rings between classes, Larry Wilson likes to stand in the hall and watch. [Wilson] I'm well. How are you, sir? [student] Good. [Wilson] Good, good, good... ouch! [Wilson] Hello! Where were you yesterday? [student] I was out sick. We started shooting at Bread and Roses high school in the spring of 2004. Larry Wilson had

just been appointed principal after his predecessor was fired in the middle of the school year. I'm not blocking it out from everybody but it's... You gotta control the slow the library students. huh huh. If I'd known how difficult year one would be, I probably would never have done the job. [Wilson] That group came to pick up a couple of our girls. [host] When Larry arrived the school was at the brink of chaos. There were violent confrontations outside the building. [student] no! [Wilson] Did you have them girls [student] no! no! [Wilson] come over here for the express purpose of fighting? [student] no, I did not. [host] The hallways and many classrooms were out of control. [voices] [student] they gettin' ready to fight; that's why everybody keeps jumpin up ?[inaudible]? the corridor [Wilson] Sargent Neville, pick up [Wilson] Sh! sh! Too noisy! [host] And though Larry didn't know it at the time, Bread and Roses was slated to be shut down by the state. [Wilson] There's no way that anyone could be prepared for their freshman year as a principal. [host] Four years later, Bread and Roses is remarkably calm by comparison. And Larry is more in control than ever.

[Wilson] I believe in a place where kids are cared for or feel cared for and where they have that kind of trust. Then they will keep the faith that education is the right path for them. [host] Larry Wilson was a member of the first class of The New York City leadership academy a nonprofit group that trains public school principals. [applause] It was founded in 2003 with 69 million dollars in private funding. The first class consisted of 90 aspiring principals who went through a rigorous 14 months training program. The aim was to prepare them to transform some of the city's most troubled schools. Today at its headquarters in Long Island City the leadership academy is training its fifth class of aspiring principals. The class is made up primarily of former teachers and assistant principals. And they're each paid an average annual salary of about eighty two thousand dollars. Initially the leadership academy spend about 20 million dollars per year in private funds. But in 2006 its cash reserves were dwindling so the Department of Education

agreed to start paying the salaries and benefits of the aspiring principals. This cost taxpayers about seven and a half million dollars a year. When we spoke to Sandra Stein, chief executive of the Leadership Academy, in January she was optimistic that the city would continue public funding of the program. [Stein] I think the Department of Education is interested in investing in its own pipeline and that the intention was that the private sector and corporate and foundation philanthropy would help launch this program but that, the, in order for it to be sustainable there needs to be public support. [host] But Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum thinks that public financing should come with increased scrutiny. [Gotbaum] given the amount of money that it cost and now that it's going to picked up by taxpayer money we need to look at that. We need to see is there a more effective way, a more efficient way, a more cost effective ways, a better way of saying it, of training principals if it in fact cost one hundred fifty thousand dollars a

year to train a principal. We need to see exactly what we're getting for that 150,000, uh, to train that particular principal or all the principals; we see what are we getting. [host] The Department of Education maintains that generally, schools run by Leadership Academy trained principals have made more progress than those with principals who did not attend the Academy. This year the city launched a controversial new system of giving every school a letter grade. Bread and Roses received a B. [Wilson] I thought it was a fair assessment. It was accurate in terms of the number of credits that students are earning. [host] The New Year Post has reported that 12 of the schools that received an F citywide were led by graduates of the academy. The first class of leadership academy graduates get an average grade of B minus [background voice] which one. [Stein] The leadership academy graduates from the aspiring principals programs, by design, go into very hard-to-staff schools that have historical low performance, um, and historical trends of not

serving students well. And their job is to go in and make improvements and make change and so forth. Um, the graduates of the program have done remarkable work and we're actually seeing that if they've been in the same school for three consecutive years they get more growth than their counterparts who have been in their same school for three consecutive years. [host] Recently Betsy Gotbaum reiterated her concerns about the leadership academy saying that the city should look not only at the Academy successes but also at its failures before using public funds. Although the leadership academy is the program currently in place, the Department of Education says it will consider bids by other training programs. It has until July 1st to make a final decision. And turning now to our second story, earlier this month, Junot Diaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Well as it happens last fall I sat down with Mr. Diaz and spoke to him

about this funny, sad, and wondrous tale of a nerdy Dominican immigrant and his family and about his life and work in general. Here once again is that conversation in full. Junot, you published your book of short stories Drown back in 1996; now you just published your first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao last September. Why this 11 year gap? [Diaz] The truth is I have no idea. [host laughs] uh, but I probably have more useful answers like comes in a number of parts. I'm slow. It was a very difficult book and there was two other books that I was trying to write that kind of dive- bombed... they just like collapsed on me. So I was like you know 11 years and thousands of pages to show for it but only one book. [host] How did that breakthrough come? How did Oscar come into your life? [Diaz] Oh Oscar was, uh... It was sort of an accident. It was like, he was just a side job.

You know... I was trying to write this novel about the destruction of New York City. And, um, its aftermath 20 years later and I was having a terrible time with it, I couldn't really get my mind wrapped around it, this was in around 1998, 99 and 2000. And then one day I was living in Mexico City and I was at a party and this character just. Sprang to my mind completely almost full. I mean just him, who he was, his family, his relationships; it just jumped into my head and I didn't think nothin' of it. I started writing it and then I said you know what. This is distracting me from my real novel. Which was hilarious because that was my real novel. But in my mind I was so willful and so prideful that I couldn't acknowledge a gift when I saw one and I was so busy trying to like, be controlling and be the person who, you know, I wanted to be the person who ran the train instead of realizing that you're just in the caboose, you know?

[host] Now what did you learn about writing in writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. [Diaz] You can't say it enough, uh, But, what I learned is that I didn't know Jack, [host laughs], you know, and that, uh, [host] well, I think the readers of Drown would, uh, differ with you about, uh [Diaz] Oh, they're very nice, you know, but I think, it's incre- it's an incredibly difficult process. I think that, uh, every time you jump into that tank there's a new shark in there. But you know to be, answer more directly and probably more frankly what I, you have to discover and you rediscover you really learn is that if you don't trust your unconscious if you don't trust your story, if you're always trying to do your story instead of the story that's coming to you, you're going to have a lot of problems. [host] How do you tell the difference when you're doing your thing instead of letting it do its its own thing. [Diaz] Control. You know when you're controlling, you know when you're going through life with both feet on the brakes. It's like hard to describe it to another person. You know there's a difference when you're in a moment and you're really in a moment, an open and sort of free to the experience and versus

when you're in a moment and you're trying to mediate it through your intelligence to your aloofness to your control. You're creating a barrier between you and what's happening. [host] yeah [Diaz] And I think the same sort of insight that you have, that expere- rential instance is occurring in the pages. I mean every time that I wasn't playing. Like literally just playing. I knew that there was a problem. [host] yeah [Diaz] You know, what I really thought that I was in control. Bad move, very bad. But it's nothing that you learn forever, I'm going to have to re-learn that. [host] Yeah, that was my question. So you're probably going to do the same thing again. [Diaz] Well you re-learn it ?we're?; you know, we can't help it. I mean, part of the hubris of being human is the thought that our brains, uh, will give us a hedge against the world. But it's not true. The world is random in ways that our brains and our subjectivities can never... control. And I think that, you know we have to keep fighting our desire to be in control of this universe with the awareness or the

realization that in fact we're just, bro, we're in the driver's seat. I mean we're in the passenger seat barely. Usually we're just tied up in the truck. And something else is driving completely. But we like to pretend we're the driver. [host] yeah, yeah Now you also said that you had to learn to be more compassionate in your writing. What do you mean with that? Well I mean it's again it's like it's worth thinking about. I mean when people write characters, usually, your success in writing characters you can define it in a couple ways. You could say it's because of your craft, your control of your craft, you know, I have enough craft I can sketch a really wonderful character. What I discovered was that your craft can never increase larger than your humanity. I discovered that the smaller my humanity was that was the, as big as my characters would get. What I had to do was learn how to be a better person. And it was only at that, only by growing internally in some sort of weird you know, uh, you know some mystical way was I able to grasp some of the texture of the human experience that I needed to grasp. But you know it sounds corny

but it was for me it felt very true. [host] Well I mean,it doesn't sound corny in and in fact again I hope you don't think that I'm just flattering you but I am not alone in saying that in this book and in Drown one of the things that comes across more than anything is compassion is the understated empathy that you feel for the characters. um You know, there's love there. [Diaz] Yeah, it's a process. So I mean, I wish I could say it's like a naturally occurring element but this is something that has to be manufactured in this smithy of self. I mean I find myself struggling with that. I think that when I write and what I write is my best self. That's when I'm like at least approximate the human. The rest of the time I'm just like a fallen mortal like the rest of us. But when I write I come very, very close to being that kind of numinous dream. You know that numinous dream of a true human self.

[host] You've written that you discovered that your mother was a real person when you first learned as an adult that she had lost her first child. Suddenly you saw her as a person with a real world inside hers, not the person who cooked your meals or washed your underwear. In Oscar Wao, you know we have that kind of same sense when we begin to learn about Beli at the beginning. We kind of look at her through Oscar Lola's eyes as a very stern mother. As the story begins to develop, we begin to understand that yeah she's a real person. She's somebody with the world inside of her Was this your intention? [Diaz] yeah Yeah, definitely, I mean I always love that idea of the kind of the Wizard of Oz that at the front you get this mass, this kind of like, you know sensational thing, but if you push beyond the mask, there's like a real thing there, a real person like a little [inaudible] ?gnarl? the body in some ways, something vulnerable. You know it's sort of important to think about that in some ways most of us have no access to our

parents' real histories. Most of what our parents sell their kids is to protect them. At least in my world my parents, didn't sing those songs about anything that happened to them. And you know there's a saying that like you've only become an adult when you inherit your parents' secrets. [host] umhm And there was this sense in me that the person who gets humanized in this book the way I became humanized, by really understanding and coming to grips with my mother is in some ways the reader. None of the real characters in the book, none of the characters in the book have as much access to all the information as the readers do. And the only person who can put this family together in a way that makes sense is the reader. Whoever reads this book, Yunior saying - this, read this and maybe it will help you become more human. It helped me. That's what in some ways what he's saying. [host] This is the book where you where you, uh, you know, make no compromises. It's got Spanish in almost every page and it's got that nerd what you call that fanboy nerd [Diaz] nerdish [host] nerdish. uh, Yeah, uh.

in almost every page too. You don't explain it, you don't translate it, uh, why? [Diaz] I was talking to someone earlier about this. It's like you go to a fancy restaurant and you're in that restaurant and you're like, they're eating dinner and the waiters are talking to you in the language you need to be spoken to. But every now and then the doors of the kitchen open and through it you hear all those voices, all those different languages and all those bodies that you would never see serving you. You know they can't be the waiters, they can't be the bartenders, they can't be the captains but they're back there making it happen. And there's a part of me that thinks that you know there is the fake America; there's the America that we like to sell and we like to dream with that we hold. My god the myth of America which is us out in that restaurant but if you like the real America. It's what's going on in the kitchen. You know, the future is being made by the people who are really making it, people who are back there making that food, talking to each other across languages, across continents, across histories and dealing with each other with bodies that look nothing alike and yet working together. You know and

often unrecognized to make the myth of America possible. And I think that paradigm as an artist is irresistible. [host] right, right. At the beginning of Drown, you have this quote from the Cuban writer Gustavo Perez Firmat goes like this. The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I want to tell you. My subject, how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else now. I was I was born in a Spanish speaking country, I grew up here just like you. I think I understand exactly what that means. But why do you start? On the first page of your first book, Why is this quote there? And how has the message of that quote influenced your body of work. [Diaz] I mean I just. That for me. I just think this, for me as a writer, that will always be the first words. I felt like recognizing the very fact that I am already a creature stitched together from things that were me and are not me and parts of myself

that used to be able to speak to me directly but now I have to speak to me through other additions that came much later. That felt very real and very human. I feel like that's, that's truer for more people than anything else. I mean I think most of us are like not speaking in the tongues that are ours. Whether they're beaten out of us, taught out of us, disciplined out of us, seduced out of us, you know, uh, ?Airflighted? out of us or whatever it is. I think that that's, that's a very real thing. And. The difficulty in communicating I mean, you wouldn't be writing, I wouldn't be an artist if this wasn't in some way true at a most profound level. [host] Now, you know, Junot, at one point in the novel, Oscar returns to the Dominican Republic and you write that quote, "he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long term immigrants carry inside themselves.

The whisper that says you don't belong." Did you hear that whisper when you returned. [Diaz] Yeah but I mean what was really interesting is that I heard that whisper, um, all along while I was in the United States. I think what it's like you the advantage and the disadvantage of being an immigrant to any place is that it brings into like very stark relief, questions of authenticity. If you're born in a country and you don't really have to think about it too much you can sort of fully embrace the myth of authenticity,[host] yeah [Diaz] that you really belong here. You know you're like our normal product, you know, like a naturally occurring element. But that's not true for anybody. [host] Right. [Diaz] I think that all of us wrestle with the question of authentic what is an authentic self? And we're trying to find equilibrium between who we think we are, um, who we really are, how people see us. And I just I always felt like that was what... I would hear clearly in my head, you don't belong in the US, Go to Santa Domingo. You don't belong, um, in Santo Domingo. And then the discovery that

that's a whisper that just haunts everybody. [both inaudible] [host] But as you say it haunts some people more than others. I mean there's this [Diaz] We just hear it [host] yeah, we hear it. But isn't it kind of like comfortable not to hear it every once in a while. [Diaz] Sure! [host] the constant hearing of, you don't belong anywhere, kind of going back to that quote. You have no real language anymore. You don't belong anywhere. That's sometimes just tough to take. [Diaz] but I guess what is easier, like ignorance like a blindness? [host] Sometimes it is, eh [Diaz] really? We won't know because you don't have a self who is ignorant and a self was knowledgeable and simultaneous so you can compare. I mean I just feel like I honestly think the burden of not knowing can be just as strong can be just as problematic as knowing. Because look it's you know it's called negative hallucination, willingly forcing yourself not to see something that's really obvious,' I guess it's really the question of - do you want to be in The Matrix or do you want to be in the world?

and I think for most people sure it's must be real comfortable to be in, the in the Matrix but I prefer the world any day. Don't matter how cold and how terrible the food is, just give me that. That's easier, you know, for me. [host] You know, Junot, if anything The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has gotten even more critical acclaim, even more praise than Drown did. How are you responding to it this time? Are you more accepting of the accolades? [Diaz] No [host] More at ease with it? [Diaz] Oh no, I, me and at ease, they, uh, those two words just don't go along with [host laughing] that's two ?states? I think. Yeah I don't know I think that I'm just the same Spanish inquieto and suspicious of anything else things. I really don't know, I think that that's the real question is the real question will be answered when the next project is done. [host] But are you allowing yourself to at least be, uh, for a short while happy? [Diaz] Oh, I'm shellshocked, see I'm

like a happy person as long as I don't think about my work. [host laughing] I mean that's the bizarre thing, as soon as I have to [host laughing] think about writing, writing is difficult, man. I always seem to end up in a very dark place when I write. So when I'm not writing I'm like, whew! I'm a happy cat! So I again, again I think that maybe with the next project I'll have myself a margin and I really do think, I think the third one, I'll give myself time to relax. You know it takes 10 years. [host] Well you know one of the reasons that as you said one of the reasons that it took you so long to finish or to publish Oscar Wao was because you were working on the apocalyptic novel about New York City. First of all, as hard as Oscar Wao was writing about something completely alien from your daily personal experience was that even harder? You know what was just, you know when I just, I don't think I just was at every level it just wasn't working right. And sometimes like I said, sometimes it just meshes and you're ready to roll and other times it doesn't come together. And this one didn't come together. [host] This is the

book that you intend to be your next. [Diaz] Yeah [host] published book? [Diaz] No, I would. I, I, it's been my dream is a part of me who thinks if I can write this book that, uh, and it comes out any good, because usually the dreams can lead to like Heaven's Gate type disaster [host laughs] you know you know, the hubris of a dream is a terrible thing. And so part of me is thinking I, if it comes out any good I'll feel like damn. In some ways I'll be free from all my childhood. uh, my childhood my, my childhood imaginary will have worked itself out and I'll have to seek new topics. [host] We close now with an excerpt from a series that covers the best cultural offerings in the city. It's called Sunday arts and it airs every Sunday afternoon. Take a look. [Chu] Hello I'm Melissa Chu, director of the museum here at Asia Society in New York. And we're standing in a wonderful show that we have on display right now called designs for pleasure. It's an exhibition that brings together Japanese work from the

17th through the 19th century. About 150 works drawn from public and private collections. We've selected it with the Japanese Art Society of America. And we've worked with a handful of curators to really choose the best pieces here in America. Many of you know the work of Ukiyo-e or pictures from the floating world. This is an exhibition that draws the very best of these works in paintings, prints and books. And now we're going to see one of the most important works in this exhibition. It's by an artist considered the father of Ukiyo-e, Moronobu This hand scroll painting which actually spans nearly 55 feet in total. It's shown here in only three of the very 15 chapters. In fact the hand scroll painting was created in ink with color and of course gold. The painting's

title is visit to ?yoshuara?. Now ?yoshuara? was the pleasure district of Tokyo at the time. This painting was created in the late 1860s. We can see many different elements in this painting from women in their kimono dressed very beautifully to men observing them. And now we look at the second of this hand scroll. Pictured here we see women, courtesans, enjoying themselves, playing musical instruments and games. And the ??. Has. ?? or folding screens This was an important luxury item for many Japanese at this time. And here in the third section of this hand scroll, we see Women enclosed in their room with a folding screen in the background. Some of the women are reading which gives un an indication also that they're learned and one of the women is applying make-up and she sees her reflection in the mirror. So this is a really good indication of some of the daily activities of these

women. We also see another woman paying an itinerant priest who might even be an exorcist. This hand scroll painting gives us a wonderful glimpse into the daily activities of the pleasure district of Tokyo in the 1860s. Thank you for joining me on this brief tour to Asia Society Museum. I hope you have a chance to visit this collection of Ukiyo-e masters. [host] And that's it for this edition of New York Voices. For more on this or any other New York Voices program, log on to our website at thirteen.org Org.