Crowded House

Ignoring Miller's advice, I left my hotel in Coral Gables at about 6:45 a.m. and headed west on Bird Road, a busy east-west artery littered with convenience stores and strip malls. (It eventually turns into Bird Drive.) The sun was just coming up, and a light rain was falling. A half-hour later, I turned right on S.W. 144th Ave. and suddenly found myself caught in one of Braddock's infamous traffic jams. Actually, it wasn't that bad; cars were moving, albeit slowly. I pulled into the enormous student parking lot, which already held several hundred cars, but I decided to keep on driving to the other entrance, on S.W. 147th Ave., where I turned right, away from the school. Coming toward me was a long line of cars in stop-and-go traffic, all destined for Braddock. After about a mile, I turned around and joined the flow. There were open fields on either side of the two-lane road. A sign nailed to a tree said, "Vacant lots for sale, from $8,500 each." I knew that one day, these parcels of land would be filled with three-bedroom houses, but at the moment, it seemed as if I were on the edge of civilization.

At 7:25 a.m., when I returned to the student parking lot, the traffic jam was coming to an end, and only a handful of students were still walking from their cars to the school. Buses were still unloading kids on the south side of the building. When the bell rang at 7:30, there was an eerie silence. Somehow, 5,000 students--not to mention several hundred teachers and administrators--had managed to get to school on time. Did things go this smoothly every day?

I parked my car and walked toward the main office. The school itself--a two-story, beige stucco building that resembles a shopping mall--was big, although not quite the behemoth I expected. The campus, however, was dotted with portable classrooms--faded white clapboard boxes arranged in rows, which made them seem like army barracks. They looked anything but temporary. The largest group, about 30 of them, butted up against...