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All is connected … no one thing can change by itself.

Paul Hawken, environmentalist

They call it the ghetto limp. You’ve seen it in episodes of The Wire, in a million hip-hop videos, maybe even on the streets of your own city. It’s that lolloping, loping gait favoured by young men in tough neighbourhoods. It hints at an old gunshot wound, or at packing heat somewhere in those baggy trousers. It’s a gang thing, an affectation of the street, another pose designed to send the same message to everyone around: ‘Don’t mess with me because I am one mean motherfucker.’

When I meet Lewis Price, he is working the ghetto limp like a pro. Hair pulled back in cornrows; trousers on the baggy side; black and red Air Jordans ostentatiously untied; MOB (Money over Bitches) tattooed on his wrist. At 17, he is compact and muscled, with the coiled energy of an athlete on the starting line, or a cat waiting to pounce.

When Price starts talking, however, you realise he is not a mean motherfucker at all. His easy smile and gentle manner belie his appearance. He loves to talk and grabs hold of any conversation, eyes darting round the room as if searching for the next reason to laugh. Unlike many youths caught up in the gang violence that blights South Central Los Angeles, he is not feigning the limp for effect. When he was 14, a rival gang member took a pot-shot at him while he was hanging out on the sidewalk. The bullet sliced through his right leg and wedged so deeply in his left that doctors chose to leave it there. He can no longer play football or basketball and the limp now draws the wrong sort of attention on the street. ‘People think I’m walking like that on purpose, that I’m walking like a gangbanger to make a statement or something,’ he says. ‘But that’s the only way I can walk after I got shot. You know, the way I see it, I’m lucky I can walk at all.’

Price tends to look on the bright side these days. He has turned his back on the street, earned a place on the honour roll and plans to go to university – no mean feat for a kid born and raised in Watts.

This corner of Los Angeles has long been on the front line of black struggle. In 1965 the Watts Riots turned 50 square miles of the city into a war zone of charred buildings and pitched battles with the National Guard. Later, the gangs took hold, with the storied Bloods and Crips carving out violent fiefdoms. Over the last decade Latinos have moved in en masse, yet Watts remains plagued by the same old list of urban despair: poverty, crime, failing schools, ill health, unemployment, broken homes, drugs, teenage pregnancy, malnutrition, deadbeat dads, domestic violence. With gang members numbering in the thousands, fistfights, stabbings and shootings like the one that crippled Price are a part of life. Not many kids from Watts make it to college.

Price is not the first gangbanger to turn over a new leaf. But instead of crediting church, family or a heroic social worker, he puts his conversion down to his alma mater. To the delight, and surprise, of many Watts residents, the local high school now known as Ánimo Locke has gone from basket case to beacon of hope.

‘If it weren’t for Locke I wouldn’t be the person I am today,’ says Price. ‘Before I came here, I felt like, man, the only way I’m gonna make it is just survive on the street, but I got here and they just woke me up.’ He falls silent for a moment, as if pondering the road not taken, before adding, ‘If it weren’t for Locke, I’d be like all my old friends, I’d be dead or in jail. But now, you know, I got a future. I’m a good student now and I’m gonna make it somewhere.’

Many countries continue to grapple with how to break the cycle of poor children stumbling through lousy schools en route to a life at the bottom of the barrel. The problem is especially acute in the US, where 10 per cent of the nation’s high schools, most of them in tough, urban neighbourhoods, produce nearly half its drop-outs. One solution is to build new and better academies in the same areas. This is the approach taken by the non-profit Charter Management Organisations (CMOs), which have used public money to open and manage hundreds of free schools across the US since the 1990s. The Obama administration took a different tack, sending in star principals with the money and the mandate to rebuild failing schools from the ground up. The two strategies have delivered mixed results. Locke stands out because it blends both approaches to good effect.

In 2007 the Los Angeles Unified School District invited a CMO called Green Dot to engineer a turnaround at Locke. It was the first time a US charter group agreed to take on a failing school, and Locke was failing on a grand scale. Opened in 1967 as a symbol of renewal after the Watts Riots, the school was named after Alain Leroy Locke, the first African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. But over the years, as jobs and middle-class families drained out of the neighbourhood, the school’s fortunes drained away with them. By the time Green Dot stepped in, Locke, which sprawls over six city blocks and houses 3,100 students, was the sort of drop-out factory you see in the movies: buildings riddled with graffiti, smashed windows and broken lights; paint peeling off the walls in every classroom; litter blowing like tumbleweed across the scruffy campus; cars parked all over the place, even on the handball courts.

Students routinely missed class to wander the halls or sit outside in large groups shooting dice or smoking weed. They set fires inside the school and held parties on the roof. Gang members sold drugs outside the gymnasium. Campus security guards spent most of their time breaking up fights and keeping rival gangs apart. Several pupils were shot in front of the school’s gates.

Some teachers toiled heroically to give proper instruction to the few students willing or able to receive it, but the tide was against them. Many just gave up. Staff screened movies so often that parents dubbed Locke the ‘ghetto cineplex’. Many read newspapers or novels in class while the children horsed around and played cards. Even the Life Skills teacher turned up to class drunk. Locke hit rock bottom in 2007, when the city sent in helicopters and riot police to break up a brawl involving hundreds of students. But while the shootings, rapes and beatings grabbed headlines, the most damning statistic of all was this: of the 1,451 children who started ninth grade in 2004, less than 6 per cent graduated four years later with enough credentials to apply to a California state university.

It is not as if officialdom gave up on Locke. On the contrary, the city hurled initiative after initiative at the school: a new attendance policy here, a fresh reading programme there, a revamped code of discipline some time after that, and so on. The trouble was, the authorities never took the time to look at the big picture. Instead, they churned through one-off initiatives as I churned through cures for back pain. Stephen Minix, the director of athletics, had a front-row seat on this kaleidoscope of quick fixes. ‘Year after year, we had people in suits and ties showing up and sprinkling some of this or some of that on the school, and saying “This’ll fix it,” and then just walking away,’ he says. ‘They were always sweeping policies handed down by District with no thought for what they would really mean for Locke, so they never made a dent. They were just band-aid solutions to much deeper problems.’

Green Dot therefore faced a lot of scepticism from the start. Teachers at Locke, including Minix, suspected the newcomers of being just another band of quick-fix merchants. Many Watts residents distrusted the smooth-talking outsiders. As one parent puts it: ‘For a lot of people, it was like “Here come these white folks, these pilgrims, putting up their tents, their fences, and they’re promising to fix our school and our kids but we don’t have no say in it, and when it don’t work out they’ll ride off into the sunset and leave us with an even bigger mess than before.”’