With just three weeks left of school, everybody in Room 205 lines up. They march downstairs to a basement computer lab to take the highest stakes test of the year, in a pale yellow, cinderblock room. The kids’ scores will help determine Ms. Hathorne’s rating as a teacher and Penn’s rating as a school. Nearly all the kids are carrying their class planners, which have a whole reference section inside, with multiplication tables, shapes, money and decimals. Ms. Hathorne had instructed the kids to bring them, which is weird, since no reference materials are allowed during testing. When I wandered back, testing was wrapping up and Ms. Hathorne asks me to wait. As they were lining up to go, planners in hand, little Kelsey came up to me quietly and whispered right into my microphone: “They don’t like you.” These things I saw — teachers looking at the test ahead of time, kids using reference materials during a test — they’re wrong. Of course they’re wrong. They’re also the only things I’ve said in this story that would ever make a news headline. You can probably imagine that news story, too. The principal on the hot seat. The teacher. All the fingers pointed.

But now, imagine all the things I’ve told you about that would never get a headline.

That would never get attention. All you wouldn’t know about Penn. You wouldn’t know that the fourth graders learned the word ripe from a dictionary. You wouldn’t know about the killing of Chelsee’s cousin or about Kelsey missing breakfast and lunch. That’s not news. You wouldn’t learn that no one in Room 205 gets time with a social worker. A week after Room 205’s big test I ran into Ms. Hathorne in the hallway. She brought up what I had seen with the class planners, saying she had struggled over what was right. “I’m sorry I did [it]. It didn’t help the scores,” she says. “My kids have always achieved. This is the first time that I’ve ever put myself in a situation like this, so that makes people wonder, ‘Has she been credible for the last 20 years?’ “I know Penn is so close to being closed,” she continues. “And I think I let my emotions get in my way... So much is dependent on achievement, in terms of whether your school doors stay open, whether people maintain jobs...There’s so many things in a school like this that should be in place, in terms of helping children to be successful.” I tell Ms. Hathorne that is the whole point of me being here — to see what Penn is up against.

“Don’t nobody care,” she says. "That's the bottom line, Ms. Linda. Nobody cares."

Maybe you’re thinking that the whole problem here is not poverty. It’s Penn. Maybe you’re thinking that a good school could overcome all this. Just down 16th Street is a charter high school. Many Penn students come here after eighth grade.

The halls of North Lawndale College Prep

(AP Photo/Paul Beaty)