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factoid every chance he got.
    Wells brought a lot to the table. He was an African American male with a commanding presence. As the only son of a single mother, he could relate to all the kids at Locke whose fathers were MIA. And he knew what it was like to grow up living week-to-week on government assistance. Most important, he had a reputation for raising test scores. As principal of a low-performing elementary school in northern California a few years before, he had made news with “soaring” scores under his leadership. His framed press clippings were hanging on the wood-paneled walls of the principal’s conference room.
    Wells made his mark at Locke immediately: trouble started on the second day of school. It was during lunch, and he was on the quad, the large grassy interior courtyard where kids naturally gathered during breaks. As the new principal stood there surveying the student body, two groups of rival gangbangers squared off in a furious scrum in the middle of the quad. It didn’t last long. Campus security moved in, and the ringleaders were nabbed. When Wells asked for a list of the other kids involved—and anybody else known to associate with them—security presented him with some eighty names. Satisfied that he had identified the few kids responsible for the most trouble on campus, Wells kicked them out of Locke. Most, he suspected, would end up back in juvenile hall; some would be offered “opportunity transfers” to other schools. He called Superintendent Rousseau to let her know what he had done.
    â€œI need to know if you will support me on this or if I should pack my bag,” he said.
    Rousseau told him to clean the school up; the district didn’t need any more bad publicity coming out of Locke. Few on campus complained about what seemed to be a lack of due process for the alleged perpetrators; most were happy with Wells’s housecleaning. But not everyone. Some higher-ups in the district questioned the legality of the expulsions. And the ejected students had their own way of registering their dissatisfaction. They carved a big
C
on the hood of the beautiful black Cadillac truck parked in the spot marked “Principal.” The
C,
of course, stood for the Crips, the predominant gang at Locke.
    Frank Wells was no stranger to violence. Like many of his childhood friends from the projects in Hunters Point, outside San Francisco, he had flirted with gang life. But he was lucky. Though he was a special ed student who didn’t learn to read until he was thirteen, he graduated from high school, joined the army, and went on to college. Many of his friends were not as fortunate. Some ended up in jail. Two were shot dead.
    Wells fell in love with Locke at first sight. He saw the barred windows, and he stood before the sliding steel gates while beefy Themus, the sad-eyed security guard, opened the iron door just wide enough for him to enter. He strode down the cement breezeway that separates the instructional wings from the strip of administrative offices where Superintendent Rousseau had set up camp. And he saw the corner principal’s office with its revolving door. He climbed the stairs and noticed kids roaming the halls when they should have been in classrooms. And he noted the graffiti, the ragtag fields, the littered campus, and the cement walkways polka-dotted with blackened chewing gum. Across the street from the back of the bungalows was the run-down housing on Avalon Boulevard, rumored to be a Crips hideout. He certainly saw the on-site police station, the full-time parole officer’s desk, the derelict student garden, and the child-care center for student mothers. The “tardy room,” a holding pen for kids caught in the daily floor-by-floor truancy sweeps, was in plain sight—it took up a corner of the open-air cafeteria.
    The test scores and school stats, of course, were another matter. Locke’s 2004 API was 450—the lowest result