Just another black championship team? This one's a championship academic team.

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Wall Street Journal Aug 3, 2001

It's Academic Forget Regis. Here's a real quiz contest, with more than money at stake.

BY PETER SCOTT

It's almost 4 p.m. on a recent spring day, and Douglas Tyson, a teacher and a successful coach in Washington, D.C.'s public schools, is late for practice. The 36-year-old Tyson has spent countless hours preparing his championship teams. But unlike most coaches, he's never blown a whistle. He has no interest in wind sprints and warm-ups. As coach of Benjamin Banneker High School's "It's Academic" quiz-bowl team, he just wants answers--and he wants them fast.

Named for a TV quiz show now in its 41st year on a local Washington affiliate, "It's Academic" is a demanding extracurricular activity. Top high-school teams travel the East Coast to play in up to 30 "College Bowl"-style tournaments a year.

Over the past decade, Mr. Tyson has defied long odds to build Banneker into a powerhouse. The 1996 squad established an "It's Academic" record for points scored in a single televised game, and in 2001 a Tyson-coached, Banneker-led team representing the District of Columbia beat the best from 40 other states and territories to win the Panasonic Academic Challenge, the Super Bowl of scholastic quizzes held each year in Orlando, Fla.

The victories over prep schools and science academies are even more impressive when one considers that Banneker is a crumbling inner-city school where Mr. Tyson estimates that "30% to 40% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch" and 99% are minorities.

Mr. Tyson, himself African-American, uses "It's Academic" to expand his students' limited curriculum and expose them to subjects like existentialism and expressionism. Another goal is to teach black students that they can compete, in school and in life.

Barging into his science classroom with an armful of snacks and a collection of brain-busting questions, Mr. Tyson wastes little time. Because of a concurrent Advanced Placement exam, today's turnout is low, but the foghorn-voiced Mr. Tyson keeps the energy level high.

The students, mostly African-American males, race to ring in on a multi-user buzzer system. As he munches cookies, Mr. Tyson's reactions swing from mock exasperation to real euphoria, with a little conspiratorial scheming thrown in to remind the students that he's on their side.

"See the problem, then solve it systematically—do you follow me?" he asks a young math whiz. "Remember," he tells another player, "use speed to ring in. Then take your time to answer the question." Mr. Tyson's admonitions are as relentless as his questions about math, science and the arts. "Go with the obvious. Socialist presidential candidate has to be Eugene Debs. Do you follow me?"

A graduate of Dartmouth and Yale, where he earned a masters in biochemistry, Mr. Tyson had not spent one second as a teacher or student in a public school before arriving at Banneker in 1990. His only teaching experience was in a summer program at Phillips Academy, the noted private school in Andover, Mass.

After deciding against further study, he moved to Washington in search of a job at another private school. But before he could stock up on blue blazers a friend encouraged him to contact Banneker, which he visited "on a lark." That visit evolved into an 11-year classroom career that has earned Mr. Tyson national education awards in science and math from the likes of Tandy, GTE and Sallie Mae.

It was in Mr. Tyson's first semester at Banneker that he was asked to supervise the "It's Academic" team. "I had no idea what I was doing," he says. The team had no practice materials and their buzzer "system" consisted of a wooden stick with an old doorbell that constantly shorted out. And though Mr. Tyson never received any overt pressure, the message from the top was clear--as the only D.C. public school participating in "It's Academic," Banneker needed to be a success.

At his first tournament, Mr. Tyson and his fledgling team experienced double disappointment. "We had our heads handed to us, " he remembers. But he was less discouraged by the results than by the chilly reception from the other coaches and students. At the time, "It's Ac" was mostly confined to suburban schools, and the competitors "weren't used to seeing children who looked like ours or coaches who looked like me," he recalls.

But Gerald Greenbaum, a coach from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Beltsville, Md., reached out to Mr. Tyson and clued him into the realities of competition--summer camps, reference materials, tactics and strategies. He scrounged up a buzzer system and advised Mr. Tyson to seek counsel from Sue Ikenberry, a coach and history teacher from Georgetown Day, a private school in Washington with a largely Jewish student body.

"I've never seen anything like the attitude of those early kids," recalls Ms. Ikenberry. "They would lose and lose, but they never whined. They just said, 'We'll get better.'" And they did. Mr. Tyson's program began a steady climb to respectability and excellence.

Once they'd cemented their friendship, Mr. Tyson and Ms. Ikenberry began to combine the all-white Georgetown Day and all-black Banneker squads for joint practices and scrimmages. The two teams traveled to tournaments together and attended each other's matches. Mr. Tyson says that "you see very quickly a nice public-private partnership among the children with both sides benefiting. . . . It shows that it can be done without force or coercion." It was two Jewish GDS students who combined with four African-Americans from Banneker to lead the D.C. team to a first-place finish over the nation's top teams in the 2001 Panasonic tournament.

Another milestone occurred in 1999, the first year that an all-male Banneker team appeared on TV. Mr. Tyson notes that only 5,000 African-American males score over 1000 on the SAT each year, "an incredibly sad fact." Think, he adds, "how important 'It's Academic' is in relation to that . . . to put three African-American boys on television and have them win!"

In addition to drilling his teams and preparing students for Advanced Placement exams, Mr. Tyson tirelessly raises funds. Donations now ensure that his teams can travel and buy what they need to stay competitive.

As the long practice concludes--"Who discovered streptomycin?" "What is 216 to the two-thirds power?"--Mr. Tyson reviews some details with his students. "Hey, guys, sit down and study. . . . If we play scared, we're not going to win--do you follow me?"

Indeed they do.

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Mr. Scott is a writer in Washington.



-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), August 03, 2001

Answers

This is racist tripe. These kids are praised only because they are "acting white".

-- (Leon Trotsky @ May.Day), August 03, 2001.

No, the praise is for their determination to excel, and said praise appears to be entirely warranted.

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), August 03, 2001.

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