‘Whether Or Not You Want To Be In A Gang, You’re In One’
‘This American Life’ Harper High School Feature:
‘Whether Or Not You Want To Be In A Gang, You’re In One’
by Lisa Belkin
If it had been any other high school, you would know this story by now. Had some other “kind of school” logged a year that saw 29 current and recent students shot, eight fatally, “we would all know the name of that school,” says radio show host Ira Glass in a new episode of “This American Life” on NPR. “If you grafted those facts onto another high school — in a wealthier place, maybe a suburb … it would be national news.”
But it wasn’t another school. It was Harper High, in Chicago, during a year when the murder rate in that city climbed to 506 while it plateaued or fell in New York and Los Angeles. Three “This American Life ” reporters spent five months in that school last fall, and beginning this weekend, Glass hosts the remarkable two-part program that results from their immersion.
One early section of the first hour finds reporter Linda Lutton laying out of “the rules” of Harper High. It is a
‘Whether Or Not You Want To Be In A Gang, You’re In One’
by Lisa Belkin
If it had been any other high school, you would know this story by now. Had some other “kind of school” logged a year that saw 29 current and recent students shot, eight fatally, “we would all know the name of that school,” says radio show host Ira Glass in a new episode of “This American Life” on NPR. “If you grafted those facts onto another high school — in a wealthier place, maybe a suburb … it would be national news.”But it wasn’t another school. It was Harper High, in Chicago, during a year when the murder rate in that city climbed to 506 while it plateaued or fell in New York and Los Angeles. Three “This American Life ” reporters spent five months in that school last fall, and beginning this weekend, Glass hosts the remarkable two-part program that results from their immersion.
One early section of the first hour finds reporter Linda Lutton laying out of “the rules” of Harper High. It is a