I had planned to write something about President Barack Obama or about some other pressing issue. Like, is President Obama really operating as a Vulcan when it comes to his policy decisions, all logical with repressed emotions? Or can a computer virus ever become a real world one, and start a pandemic that will destroy our civilizations? Or if we ever created the Star Trek equivalent of a holodeck program, will our birthrate drop to the point where humanity would be in danger of extinction because we engaged in sex with virtual people? Or is it possible to impregnate a nine-dimensional hologram? Sadly, I decided against all of these topics because of an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the efficacy of test preparation programs for the SAT and other national standardized ETS and College Board exams.

The article goes on to say that there isn’t much bang for the buck from the Kaplan’s and Princeton Review’s of our world. For the $1,000 or $1,500 folks plop down to make their scores a couple of hundred of points higher, they really only raise their scores by a handful, maybe even 50 or 70 points. True that. Yet is this really news to anyone who has ever taken the SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, Praxis I and II, GMAT, PSAT, AP and other exams? Books like Nick Lemann’s The Big Test and Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen have shown over the years that family income as it relates to race, gender, neighborhood and public schools is the single biggest factor in the scores that students earn on these exams. In other words, if you didn’t grow up with parents who read to you as a toddler and young child, have immediate access to information through physical or online encyclopedia, dictionaries and thesauruses, or traveled to various parts of the world, oh well! That’s a disadvantage that can’t be made up by taking a six or ten-week class in test strategies and cramming words like “acerbic” and “esoteric” and “etymological” into your brain.

I should know. Even with years of accelerated classes, of being around kids who traveled and lived the boring lives of the upper middle class and the affluent, I wasn’t as well prepared for standardized tests as them. Of course, some of them took test prep classes even with their built-in socioeconomic advantages. October ’85 was the first time I took the SAT, when it still stood for the “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” I scored a 1050: 480 Verbal, 570 Math. That’s well above the national average even now, and was about 200 points above it back then. For African Americans, whose average scores in the mid-80s was a 736, it made me seem genius-like by comparison. I knew those kind of statistics even then. But I also knew if I wanted a scholarship or to get into a school like Columbia or Yale, I would need a score closer to 1200.

The following October was when I faced the SAT again. I prepared dutifully at the end of the summer of ’86 and into September. I went through the entire Barron’s SAT prep book. With all of that, my score went up, but only by another 70 points. I scored an 1120 this time: 540 Verbal, 580 Math. My classmates scored 1360, 1350, a couple of them 1280s, one a 1220 and a bunch of them 1200s. One of them had the nerve to say, “only an idiot would score under 1200.” I assumed that the comment was directed at me, since the asshole looked directly at me when he said it. I know for a fact that some of them took a Kaplan or some other course to help them prepare. The reality was, though, that most of them would’ve scored at least my score without any test prep at all.

A new standardized test cycle began for me during my junior and senior years at Pitt. Luckily, I did learn a thing or two about taking these kinds of tests during my undergraduate years. I hadn’t learned nearly enough, though, and I still didn’t have the funds to pay for a test-prep course. I took the GRE for the first time in February ’90, with next to no preparation. My total score was a 1680 out of a possible 2400: 530 Verbal, 580 Math and 570 Analytical. The Analytical section was new, having just been added to the exam that year or the year before. Based on my SAT experience, I knew I’d have to take this exam again.

But there were a couple of interesting wrinkles in my standardized test plans. One was that I was learning how to drive that spring and summer, and for me, that was tougher than the GRE. Especially since no one in my family owned a car, and I split my time between Mount Vernon and the ‘Burgh between May and September. I also wasn’t certain whether I should go to grad school for a master’s in history, or to law school for something a bit more sensible. So I bought two Barron’s books, one for the LSAT and one for the GRE in August, and hoped for the best.

I ended up taking the LSAT the week before I took the GRE for a second time. I’m not sure what the LSAT is like now, but back in ’90, it was virtually two-thirds Analytical and one-third Verbal Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. I spend about two weeks off and on preparing for it. I scored a 31 (out of a possible 47) on the exam, which put me at the 50th percentile. Pretty average, obviously! But it also helped me prep for the GREs. The one area my score improved was the Analytical section. My total score was a 1720: 530 Verbal, 570 Math and 620 Analytical.

In a twist of irony, because the section was so new, not one of the admissions people I talked with even knew what to do with my Analytical section score. I was rejected by UC-Berkeley and the University of Virginia because my verbal and math scores didn’t put me in the 70th or 80th percentile (I was only in the 64th and 51st percentiles for those scores). Mind you, my Analytical score — the one that involves critical reasoning, a key component for being a brilliant historian — put me in the 74th percentile. Even Pitt, NYU and the University of Maryland — all schools that accepted me into their programs — didn’t account for that particular score.

I say all of this because standardized testing, test-prep and other related work is really a crock when it comes to evaluating students for college or advanced degree/professional programs. At best, they can be used to show how students with a certain level of life knowledge can perform under the pressures of a timed bubble exam (of course, now they use essay writing too). These tests, regardless of what the psychometricians at ETS and The College Board say, don’t correlate well to how students actually perform while in postsecondary, graduate or professional education. They tend to weed out folks who otherwise would do all right, but not great, in college or graduate school more than they help others who would likely get into an undergrad or grad program even without taking these exams. Two friends of mine from Pitt both took the LSAT at least three times. Between the two of them, their highest score was a 17 (back in the day when the point-scale for the LSAT was between a 12 and a 47).

Anthony Carnevale, a former vice president at ETS (and someone the folks I used to work for full-time should’ve hired for our education reform work back in ’02), let it be known a decade ago that ETS had been doing some promising research into understanding the correlation being SAT scores and family income as it related to race, gender and neighborhood. It snowballed into a controversy over what many in the press called the “Strivers Report,” where it was suggested that someone with my upbringing could have my SAT score of a 1120 weighted to reflect my relatively high score. In other words, an affluent White male from Scarsdale with a 1280 SAT score and my 1120 score would be seen as the same under the circumstances. The mere suggestion led to many a conniption fit among policy makers, educators, and affluent parents.

I respectfully submit that any education system or policy that doesn’t account for relative circumstance is an inequitable one, and that not all standardized test scores are created equal. If the elite schools like UC-Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton can recognize this, why can’t the rest of us?

I plan to see the new Star Trek movie in the next couple of weeks, even if I have to go to a matinee showing of it minus my wife and son. I’ve heard so many good things about the film. So many that I’ve been catching the other Star Trek movies on cable over the past couple of weeks. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Nemesis, as well as the TV series Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Enterprise. The day that the new movie opened, AMC, Cinemax and SciFi were all showing different Star Trek movies at the same time! With all of the talk of warp drive and the use of antimatter as fuel, using electroplasma energy as electricity, and protein resequencing machines to turn normal human waste into kobe beef, we’ll still apparently have an education problem in the 22nd, 23rd and 24th centuries as a world.

For so many high-potential high school students, this week represents an interesting, if excruciating privilege. This is traditionally AP Exams Week for this group of students. By the hundreds of thousands, these sophomores, juniors and seniors will sit for three hours at a time to take college-equivalent exams in well over thirty subjects. Theoretically, a student could come out of this week having achieved sophomore standing, with at least 24 credits of college taken care of before throwing their caps in the air at their high school graduation ceremony.

This isn’t about me, at least not directly. It’s about my younger brother Maurice. It was twenty years ago yesterday that he didn’t come home from William H. Holmes Elementary School. It was the beginning of the final month of my mother’s so-called marriage to my now ex-stepfather Maurice. And it was the beginning of a bumpy ride, to say the least.

It happened right after I returned from my second year at Pitt, flush with money but with only about three weeks to look for a summer job. In the meantime, I came home to a pigsty. It was the filthiest I’d ever seen our apartment at 616, not that there was that much to dirty. The entire hallway and foyer had bags full of dirty clothes piled up to wash. Some of the bags had overflowed. There was an endless amount of dust along the washboards of the hallway walls, as if they were in bomber formation. Trash and food were all over the kitchen, and the once-brown carpet in the living room was literally black and gray from Eri’s spills and my stepfather’s feet and oily body. I had steeled myself for the disconnect between my life at Pitt versus 616, but almost nothing could’ve prepared me for that. Boxes of my stuff from Welsford were coming in at the beginning of the week, so I knew it would be impossible to walk into the house if they were stacked in the foyer too. So I did what I always had done, only with some righteous indignation. I sorted two or three bags of clothes, made Darren get our siblings dressed, and went down to Pelham to wash clothes.

Over the next two weeks, that was mostly what I did it seemed, wash pile after pile of dirty clothes. I figured that there were about six weeks of clothes sitting in the hallway and foyer the day I came home. I also cleaned up as much as I could, got my siblings out of the apartment. I didn’t have much help. My mother was taking three courses at Westchester Business Institute that quarter. Darren had taken a job as a courier down in the city with a company that had a weird name, something with Blake in it. He was a foot courier. Darren had neither a license nor a bike. On weekends Darren would just lie around on his bed, or worse, he’d spontaneously jump up and down in his room with a big grin on his face, about what I didn’t know. My stepfather Maurice had gotten a job with the Mount Vernon Sanitation Department in February. He was a garbage man, an irony too delicious for my mother to leave alone. “Of all the jobs out there, ‘garbage’ goes and become’s a garbage man,” she laughed sarcastically on a couple dozen occasions. Their fights were every day now, with constant and open name-calling to boot. It was the worst I’d seen it since before my mother had been beaten up by Maurice seven years before.

So it was that on the tenth of May, with everything going on between my mother and my stepfather, Darren in his own world and my own hands full with my younger siblings that no one noticed that my brother Maurice hadn’t made it home from school. He was almost ten, but he still didn’t have friends he hung out with. I started worrying about an hour after he should’ve been home. I asked Yiscoc, Sarai and Eri if they’d seen him at Holmes during the day. Of course none of them knew anything, a sign that my mother and their father’s willful ignorance of the world around them had penetrated all of their heads. By 7 pm, I was really worried, to the point where I told my stepfather that I thought his son was missing. “Whatcha want me to do about it, look for him?,” he laughed. I was so horrified that I immediately called the cops to report my brother missing.

Just before my mother came home from class, the police called back to report that Maurice had been found, safe and somewhat sound. He was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and having soiled his clothes from the long and unending walk. I went downstairs to wait for my mother, bumping into our neighbor Helene along the way. She had this “What’s wrong?” look on her face, so I told her what was going on. My mother had made it to the front steps of 616 by then. Within a few minutes, Helene was giving us a ride in one of the Milton limos to pick up Maurice from the police station in Fort Lee. “He must’ve have walked twenty or twenty-five miles,” I said as we merged on the Bronx River Parkway. It turned out it was only somewhere between fifteen and twenty miles. My younger brother somehow figured his way through the Bronx and into Manhattan, taking Route 9 and Broadway through the Bronx, crossed the Broadway Bridge into Manhattan, and followed the signs to the George Washington Bridge. From there Maurice found his way onto the pedestrian path on the upper deck of the mile-long bridge across the Hudson and meandered his way to nearby Fort Lee before the police picked him up. When we finally arrived and saw him, I was really happy that he wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t angry at him, I just wanted to know why. My mother hardly said anything herself. When I asked Maurice, “What were you thinking?,” he said “I don’t want to go home!” That was all he said the whole ride back in Helene’s car. When we got back, we both thanked Helene, and my mother attempted to give her money for the ride, which she didn’t accept.

But it was more than enough, at least for my mother. She laid into my stepfather after we cleaned my brother up, fed him, and sent him to bed. For big Maurice’s part, he just left the house, presumably to carouse with another one of his victims.

My brother Maurice was in fourth-grade Special Ed at the time, labeled as mildly mentally retarded with an IQ of 78. And he was in a way. Holmes and the Mount Vernon Board of Education had no idea that my brother had been physically abused at the ripe old age of six months, beaten by my stepfather because “he was cryin’ too much.” Neglected often while I was in sixth and seventh grade, as my idiot stepfather rarely changed his diapers or fed him during the school day. My brother Maurice’s childhood was a disaster, and with the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, he might’ve been better off homeless. Years of chaos, poverty, and abuse and lack of food must’ve had some impact on my younger siblings, especially Maurice, as he lived through the worst of it all. Putting him and Yiscoc in Special Ed at five or six years old seemed rash, a cruel punishment for kids barely old enough to understand what was happening. I refused to believe that either of them were actually retarded. Certainly life at 616 had stunted their mental development. Retarded? Sure, if by that they meant that my mother and stepfather never read stories to them, took them places to learn about the world, or even took them to the park to play. That role usually fell on my shoulders.

So I didn’t blame Maurice for running away. He had many reasons to run. It was a watershed moment in a eight-year period of drama and grinding impoverished boredom. Within two months, my stepfather and my mother would be well on their way to divorce, my older brother Darren on his way to moving out. And I would begin my journey away from seeing myself as the surrogate parent to my siblings and surrogate husband to my mother.

Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace in Finding Forrester (2000) Screen Shot. (http://filmdope.com).

This week I was reminded of why Boy At The Window was necessary for me to write, and for others to read. I watched, probably for about the fifteenth or sixteenth time, Finding Forrester. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a coming-of-age movie about finding your own path, even in the midst of racial stereotypes and arrogant affluence, the blending of multiple worlds. With Rob Brown and Sean Connery as the lead actors, it actually is one of the better movies of this decade. But if you’re asking me, it’s among my top five movies since 2000.

What takes Finding Forrester from the vaguely plausible to the real in my book starts with Rob Brown. He played a character in Jamal Wallace that had to have so much more depth to him than most people would think possible. An incredibly smart and withdrawn teenager who hides all of those things when he’s with his friends or in public school somewhere in the Bronx, presumably in or near the South Bronx. A well-developed basketball player who spends at least an equal amount of time keeping a journal of his writings, reading Coleridge and Tolstoy and numerous other literary giants. All of this, and his face for most of the movie is as blank as a clean chalkboard at the beginning of a new school year.

That face. That’s the first thing that I responded to when watching Finding Forrester for the first time in February ’01. It reminded me of my face when I was in high school, especially my last two years at MVHS. I’ve discussed it before. Brown’s character might’ve concealed intelligence and an intellectualism that most academicians would envy with his face. It may have hidden the emotional scars of a father who abandoned him and his family. It certainly kept under wraps the hardships that the character lived with every day at home and in a New York City public school. But that where the similarities end. My face also hid my contempt for the politics — racial, socioeconomic, academic and athletic — that I saw play out every day for the six years I was in Humanities and the four years I was in MVHS. My late teacher and mentor Harold Meltzer said as much to me one day about how he could see the “laughter in my eyes” about all the hypocrisy that was MVHS for me in eleventh and twelve grade.

That wasn’t my only takeaway from Finding Forrester. Sean Connery — who has a tendency to be a bit over the top, and has done more than his share of God-awful movies — really does a great job playing the reclusive writer William Forrester. Having written a bestselling, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel about life and death and loss and suffering didn’t seem to help Connery’s character, who had spent the better part of five decades scared to experience life again. His life, his world, had gone cold after his brother and parents died within months of each other in the 1950s. His agoraphobia had kept him from recovering from this grand-scale tragedy until Brown’s character shows up in his life.

For most people, the likelihood that a depressed and hermetic White guy would become friends with a sixteen-year-old Black male who guarded his every facial expression and kept his writing and other non-athletic talents a state secret borders on the impossible. Yet I know all too well how the impossible become real. Whether the person’s name is Meltzer, or Lazarus, or Lacey, or any number of unlikely friendships I’ve had over the past quarter century, I’ve learned that age, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion are only barriers if we make them such. The most important component of any friendship, or any mentoring relationship, is an intellectual bond that allows folks in the friendship to learn lessons from each other. Without this, all friendships are superficial.

Just as important as the lesson of friendships and difference is the lesson of finding one’s own path. Finding Forrester from the very beginning isn’t a movie about how an elderly White guy helps out a poor and worthless African American boy. Nor is it simply about a Black kid shunning his world for a White one. It’s about finding balance between two worlds that rarely meet outside of sports, entertainment and crime. After Brown’s character is “outed” by high test scores, he’s accepted by one of NYC’s private academies for the destined-to-go-to-an-Ivy-League crowd. Of course, the fact that he’s an excellent basketball player helps him as well. The character Jamal Wallace finds himself very quickly negotiating multiple worlds, all of which he’s in, but not necessarily of.

Obviously I didn’t go to a prep school that I could barely afford to send Noah to now. But being in Humanities classes full of folks from middle class and affluent families within a working-class, working poor and welfare poor school district, and coming home to 616 — the land of ignorance, poverty, abuse and younger siblings — would cause most people’s heads to spin. I could’ve, with some work, used basketball as a vehicle to traverse these worlds, I guess. That wasn’t my way. I became an academic achiever and knew I could write well — but didn’t quite see myself as a writer — long before I realized I had the height and athletic skills necessary to knock down a seventeen-foot jumper. As my so-called MVHS counselor Sylvia Fasulo said about me, “There goes Donald, always daring to be different,” a sarcastic refrain she used more than once.

Finding William Forrester did help Brown’s character find his own way in life. As a writer. As a person with integrity and intelligence. As a whole human being. Still, the character Jamal Wallace possessed all of these traits and used them long before meeting Forrester at the age of sixteen. Brown’s character and his friendship with Forrester gave him access to the career choice he wanted, confidence in the abilities he possessed, and a sense that he had more control over his life than he had dared imagine before. It took me a bit longer to begin to find myself, to make my own way and follow my own path. It’s hard to break away from a past of pain and betrayal with little to guide you. But I did. I had to. And I used every experience and every lesson I could to do so. It helps that a few others were there along the way to help, and for me to help them as well.