Mission Impossible

By David Ruenzel

At 8:45 a.m. on a frigid Monday morning, Charles Mingo, Whitman Scholar, Thompson Fellow, and Milken award-winning principal of DuSable High School on Chicago's South Side, begins the second semester in a closed-door conference-room meeting with 20 assistant principals, school directors, counselors, and curriculum specialists. In a way, the meeting, as edgy as it occasionally becomes, is for Mingo a kind of extended respite. For outside of the principal's door, from morning until night, there is a perpetual parade of petitioners. An agitated parent wants her son, expelled from his last school for stealing, to get another chance at DuSable (he does); security wants cars blocking the school's delivery zone removed (Mingo summons a Chicago police officer to issue tickets); a substitute teacher shows up in a brand-new suit looking for work (come back tomorrow, he's told). All approach the principal with great deference, sometimes bowing slightly and backing out of his office as they express their gratitude. Once, in between petitioners, I tell Mingo, a soft-spoken man of imposing bulk--he's as thick as a tree trunk--that he reminds me of Don Corleone in The Godfather. He laughs and then waves for the next person in his doorway to come in.

At the morning meeting, Mingo covers a wide range of topics. He tells those gathered that they need to do a better job of tracking down students who have not submitted their free-lunch applications. He also urges them to use the allure of DuSable's state-of-the-art technology to recruit better quality students from the city's middle schools. (DuSable has a home page on the Internet, and each student has an e-mail address.) But what seems foremost on Mingo's mind is the just-published "academic watch list,'' on which DuSable appears with another 131 of Chicago's 560 public schools. Schools on the watch list, Mingo tells his staff, have not met minimum test-score requirements. All kinds of bad things can happen to these schools; their local governing councils, even their principals, can be dismissed.

"We can do better than we're doing,'' Mingo says. "We can't use excuses anymore. We're on the list, but we have a fighting...