Home > Resources > Leadership > The Change Process

'Clean, Cool and Calm': A Haven in the Inner City

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Focusing the Snapshot
• The Context of Forest Park
• A Brief History of Restructuring Affecting Forest Park
• Events in the District, 1993-94
• Putting the Context in Perspective
• Events at Forest Park: Fall 1993
• Administrative Transitions
• Progress in Safety
• An Overview of the Instructional Programs
• Instruction: Classroom Close-Ups
• Instruction: Questions for Consideration
• Problems with District Support
• The Unclear Future of Governance
• Governance: Questions for Consideration
• Events at Forest Park: Spring 1994
• Transitions in Leadership
• Instruction
• Insufficient District and Central Support
• Governance: Problems Achieving Progress
• Reflections on the Snapshot
• Why Continue?
• Concluding Thoughts
• Conclusion: Questions for Consideration
• Notes

Introduction

Entering Forest Park High School, with its light and airy hallways filled with plants, one seems to have left the urban poverty and decay of the school's neighborhood behind. One student told us, "I feel safe here; it's just when I go outside that I'm afraid." The entire student population receives free breakfast and lunch at the school, with two seatings for breakfast.

Located in the large, eastern city of Jefferson, Forest Park serves approximately one thousand students in grades nine through twelve. A middle school in the same building, under the leadership of the same principal, serves students in grades six through eight. The regional superintendent is also housed here. An elementary school, with separate administration, is housed next door.

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Focusing the Snapshot

In the fall of 1993, we returned to Forest Park as part of the School Change Study. From the observations we made and the conversations we had during our visit, we created the following "snapshot." This snapshot attempts to depict life at Forest Park at one point in its process of whole-school change. In addition to giving the researchers and the reader a deeper understanding of school change, the purpose of this snapshot, like that of the previous ones, is to provide a mirror which teachers and administrators at Forest Park can use to help them understand and address the challenges they face.

Unlike the two previous snapshots of the school, this one is based on two data-gathering efforts by Neill Wenger and Barbara S. Powell at Forest Park during the 1993-94 school year--the first in November 1993 and the second in May 1994. During their visits, they observed classes and interviewed students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Documents describing classroom and school-level reform efforts were also collected from the school. In addition, the snapshot also reflects the author's continuing interaction with the city school system.

The snapshot begins with a brief review of the restructuring efforts and district-wide events that have helped define the context of Forest Park High School. The second part of the snapshot focuses on Forest Park--its classrooms, challenges, achievements--in the fall of 1993. The third part focuses on events and instruction at the school the following spring. The snapshot concludes with reflections and questions on central issues facing Forest Park during the spring of 1994. To encourage and guide discussion about the issues raised by these visits, suggested questions, originally provided for the Forest Park staff as well as for the reader, appear after various sections of the snapshot.

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The Context of Forest Park

The work of teaching and learning at Forest Park High School takes place within a complex, particularly challenging environment. This environment consists, in part, of a large, urban school system and its accompanying bureaucratic problems, and in part, of a community beset by the monumental burdens of poverty, violence, racism, and other social ills that make educating children monumentally difficult.

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A Brief History of Restructuring Affecting Forest Park

A brief overview of the recent district-wide restructuring efforts that preceded our visits to Forest Park provides a foundation for understanding what it is like to learn and to teach at the school today.

MSRC Restructuring Initiatives

For four years, Forest Park has been participating in a district-wide, foundation-funded restructuring effort. This effort is overseen by a collaborative we will call the Metropolitan School Restructuring Collaborative (MSRC), which is designed to include district and union leadership. Since 1992, the MSRC has also functioned as a Center for the Coalition and a link with Re:Learning in the state.1

Throughout the city, the main thrust of the MSRC has been to break down schools into smaller units, called charters, which enable the teachers to know and instruct students better. These charters include ninth- to twelfth-graders, heterogeneously grouped, with a career interest as part of the defining characteristics.

By the fall of 1992, Forest Park claimed to be a fully "charterized" school. This meant that all high school students were included in one of the three charters: a Business Academy, a Motivation Program, and a Metropolitan Schools Program. Built around pre-existing ability groups, these charters also provide continuity with existing ability-grouped "houses" that serve grades six to eight.

In some ways, these charters function like sub-schools within Forest Park High School. Each charter has a teacher who acts as charter coordinator.

Connections with the Coalition

Forest Park's recent efforts at reform have been influenced in part by the school's affiliation with the Coalition of Essential Schools, whose reform efforts are guided by the nine Common Principles. (See Appendix B for a listing of the nine Common Principles.) Forest Park's connection with the Coalition has been limited, however; it has consisted mainly of contacts by a few of its staff at Coalition training sessions at Brown, attendance at the Coalition Fall Forum sessions, and participation in Re:Learning meetings.

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Events in the District, 1993-94

In the Jefferson school district, the 1993-94 school year was dominated by many problems, as well as several developments related to reform.

Challenges Facing the District

The resignation of the superintendent in August created a situation that led to conflicts in the extended process of appointing his successor. After the superintendent's resignation, an acting superintendent served the district throughout the year. While the board conducted a national search for a new leader, the board president and other members became increasingly outspoken on day-to-day matters within the district.

In May 1994, as the board narrowed its selection field to a pool of three, conflict erupted between various local officials regarding the selection of a new superintendent. When the mayor and a group of local citizens supported one candidate, while the teachers' union and the administrators' union supported a different one, the board objected that people were interfering with their conduct of an orderly search.

In mid-June, the candidate favored by the mayor was selected by the board to be the next superintendent, ending a dispute that was beginning to have racial overtones.

During the school year, a judge ruled on a long-standing desegregation suit and found that Jefferson's schools had failed to provide education of a satisfactory quality, particularly for its students of color. As she announced the panel to address academic quality in Jefferson, the judge said,

[I tried to] put together a team of experts that I think can come into Jefferson and do what has to be done to develop a plan which will, once and for all, eliminate the disparities in academic achievement and bring about academic quality in the city.2

Financial woes continued for the district, as new cuts of $29 million were called for, on top of the major reductions from the previous year. Credibility of financial projections continued to be a problem for the district when, after projecting a $30 million deficit for 1992-93, the district ended its fiscal year with a $12 million surplus.3

In addition, violence in and around the schools continued to be a major concern in Jefferson, as in other communities around the country.

Reform Efforts in the District

There were several major actions taken regarding education reform during 1993-94.

The acting superintendent secured school board approval of a twelve-point strategic plan based on work by a community/school task force. She and the board expressed pride in the inclusiveness of the group that developed the recommendations. Among other things, the plan continued work on high school reform, and called for the initiation of collaboration by clusters of schools and the development of full-service schools. People working in schools throughout the city demonstrated little interest in, or awareness of, this plan. In the spring, in efforts to equalize financial support for leaders of charters, the superintendent also announced a controversial reallocation of the money paid for charter coordinators.

Several reform efforts emerged from the office of the assistant superintendent for high schools. The assistant superintendent announced a requirement that all students be enrolled in schools-within-schools by the fall of 1995, and she described those sub-schools using a set of criteria slightly different from that previously used in the district.

For the second year in a row, her office audited existing implementation--an act seen by some as indicating her support for the reform, and by others as an indication that all the central administration can do is check on compliance with rules. Along with the MSRC, her office also took the lead in providing assistance to schools on implementation problems around matters such as rostering classes.

Many changes also occurred within the MSRC. The founding leaders of the MSRC resigned in August 1993, and an acting director was not appointed until midway through the year. A new Teaching and Learning Collaborative was created within the MSRC, and efforts were begun to staff centers that would provide support to schools seeking to implement reforms. One of these centers was located at Forest Park. The MSRC funded a large team from Forest Park and other schools in the district to attend the Coalition of Essential Schools' Fall Forum in Louisville, Kentucky, and continued to work with the Coalition and the state's Re:Learning offices. The MSRC also sponsored several workshops during the year, including a large Celebration of Charters in early spring. Teachers College Press published a book edited by one of the former leaders of the MSRC, which included chapters by teachers and others engaged in reform work in Jefferson.

An independent evaluation agency released a report in March 1994 which noted that the charters being promoted by the MSRC had a positive effect on student attendance and promotion from grade to grade. While the report emphasized continuing implementation problems, it was a big boost for advocates of breaking the high schools into smaller units.

Meanwhile, the union had raised questions about the legitimacy of the board of the MSRC and expressed its continuing resistance to certain elements of the reform plan. The local AFT affiliate objected particularly to the notion of semi-autonomous charters within the schools that might possibly engage in practices that upset long-standing practices, such as seniority rights for teachers and established roles of department heads in high schools. The AFT's objection arose as the MSRC and some of the people working in the schools, in interpreting provisions of the union contract, advocated treating charters as if they were schools. Treating them as such meant that seniority for transfer would be determined by charter rather than by building.

As the year progressed, the acting director of the MSRC had some success in mediating the conflict which had arisen between his organization, administrators in the district, the union, other reform organizations in Jefferson, and the primary funding agency. With the help of the funders, he also made progress in reconstructing the MSRC's board. The district and collaborative had to pay a high price for the time spent resolving (or at least calming) their differences.

Eight ethnographers working in Forest Park and other high schools reported in May 1994 that at each school where they had been, the perception was that there was no support forthcoming from central sources for school-based reform work. Much of this perception may have been created by the extent to which central figures (the MSRC, union, and school district) were concentrating on their own issues rather than on the needs of the school. In any event, progress in reform, which had been stalled the previous year by the inability of the bureaucracy to adapt to a supportive role, continued to be inhibited rather than assisted by many district and school-level administrators.

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Putting the Context in Perspective

As we turn our attention to Forest Park High School, we emphasize that the scenes described here occur as part of the broader ecology of the Jefferson school district. They also occur in a city and in neighborhoods faced with the many, serious social and economic problems confronting urban settings throughout the country.

While organizational and leadership issues dominate the larger school system, teaching, learning, conflict, and survival are the matters of immediate concern to the people in the Forest Park community. While the new leader of the school district will have a potentially significant effect on the direction the system takes, the problems of whether students will attend school and how they will behave when they are at the school are of much more immediate concern to the teachers and administrators of Forest Park. Grand designs about providing social services occupy city planners, but such questions as, How can we help students learn? and, Who will take care of the children of the children who are attending the school? are real ones for those at Forest Park.

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Events at Forest Park: Fall 1993

In the fall of 1993, Forest Park High School was marked by several serious challenges, as well as by signs of progress. In addition to coping with the loss of many teachers and administrators through early retirement, the school faced the ongoing problems of assuring safety for its students. Amidst these challenges were signs of progress in instruction in the charters. Still, reform efforts at Forest Park were hindered by a lack of the necessary support from the district and by problems within the school itself in moving ahead with reforms in decision-making practices.

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Administrative Transitions

Two thousand educators responded throughout the state school system to a state-sponsored, early-retirement incentive program. At Forest Park, fifteen of the 110 teachers who served students in grades six through twelve retired. While the new principal, Patti Snow, expressed her concerns about the loss of institutional memory created by the departure of so many senior educators, Forest Park seemed less affected by the retirements than did some of the other schools in the system.

One reason why the transition at Forest Park may have been smoother than at some of the other schools was that the principal and her assistants had both been at the school during previous years. Patti had finished 1992-93 as the acting principal, after the principal had taken a career-ending, midyear sabbatical. One assistant principal continued in her role from the previous year, while the other had been promoted from a teacher-leadership position within the school.

One of the faculty members described the leadership transition as follows:

Patti was acting principal; now she's the principal. So, we know who our principal is. We know that we were going to be going through some changes. We joked about retiring together. So I'm planning to have at least three to five years of the same person. Which is good. It kind of gives us a sense of knowing where we are headed.4

And the vice principal is Andy Washington. He's "acting" or "interim" because everybody's "interim" for a year. But we all know Andy. Andy's been in the school for I don't know how many years--six years, whatever. So we all know Andy. So that's a sense of, "Good--we know the person, so we know who we're dealing with." So in that sense, I feel secure.

Also, even though we seem to have our fingers in twenty pots, I'm more comfortable with the pots now because I know what they are. And I feel like I'm having a chance to deal with what we started.

This continuity was advanced by an inclusive process of selecting the new principal. Among those taking part in the screening for the position was the president of the Forest Park Alumni Association, who participated in interviews and interacted with parents of current students.

Because she knew her school, Patti was able to begin the year with three definite goals in mind. She described her first priority as follows:

Number one: School safety and security. We had a lot of problems in the beginning of the year. They were out on the street, not so much with our kids, but with the bums and thugs who either I had transferred or who had just dropped out of school before. We're talking about guns and shootings and robberies and all that. I mean, I must be up to my fifty-fifth serious incident report to the central office.

Her second goal was to influence instruction. Even though many people participate in workshops and read materials, she sees "too much of the old stuff with the reading of a chapter and answering the questions at the end of the book."

Patti's third goal was to learn to delegate, and learn to plan and organize meetings more effectively so she could deal with the problems of keeping up with everything she was expected to do. Two school-district offices supervise Forest Park because it is both a high school and a middle school. This dual reporting relationship expands the paperwork for the principal.

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Progress in Safety

As in other urban centers, safety issues were foremost in the minds of leaders in many of Jefferson's high schools. Leadership continuity and clear focus on the issue of safety seem to have had a positive influence on this problem at Forest Park. In a comment one frequently hears in urban high schools, the principal, Patti Snow, told us, "Well for a lot of our kids, this is the only safe place for them. And, they want to keep it that way. This is a haven. That's something that has to be worked on daily."

The students do seem to appreciate the concerted attention on safety. Consider the following comments when a group was asked what they would tell students who don't come to Forest Park about their school:

Deidre:

There are a lot of stereotypes.

Hillary (and others):

Yeah.

Alicia:

I know a girl who goes to Rhodes [another school], and she was, like, "I'm scared to come down. I'm scared to go to Forest Park because I might be beat up."

Hillary:

I heard a student beat up a teacher at Rhodes.

Alicia:

But when she came down here, she was shocked because it was nothing like she thought it was.

Interviewer:

What was it like?

Alicia:

Calm and cool.

Terry:

It's like more of a family. You get to know more of your teachers and they care about you.

Edie:

My girl friend, she came from City Learning Center [another school], and she was, like, "Your school is so clean!" Some schools look all dark and dull, and, like, the Learning Center, some of them just look like a jail cell.

Interviewer:

Some schools I've been in, there have been gangs of people who come in off the street, get into the school, and roam the halls.

Alicia:

No, not here.

Deidre:

Every year our security gets tighter and tighter.

Alicia:

A lot of the reputation that Forest Park has earned--it wasn't in general the school itself, but it was the neighborhood of the school because a lot of the kids around here were in trouble because they weren't attending school.

Edie:

And most of the violence that happens, happens outside school.

In short, the students see their school as clean, calm, and cool, while acknowledging that the common view in the city of Jefferson would be different from theirs.

The principal's cabinet met during our visit in November 1993. The discipline issues they discussed reinforced our notion that progress was being made on the principal's first goal. Some worried that teachers were allowing students to eat in their rooms, while others were concerned about student traffic patterns in hallways during lunch. An assistant principal worried that some teachers were sending students to the office for such infractions as chewing gum or failing to have a pencil.

Most of these problems sound more like those typical of a suburban high school in the 1950s than the issues of personal safety commonly talked about in contemporary urban high schools.

This apparent progress on safety did not happen accidentally. The principal and some of the teachers told us about various steps that had been taken, ranging from two metal-detector searches of all students (during which no significant weapons were found) to tight controls over entrances and exits to the school.

Each day, the principal made sure any signs of graffiti were eliminated early in the morning, and she encouraged teachers to make their presence known by standing in their hallways. Patti also devoted much attention to building a sense of community around the school. This included generating attendance at parent meetings, and then working enthusiastically with those parents present.

At a parents' night on November 15, 1993, Patti greeted the parents with assurances that Forest Park was one of the safest schools in the city. She then turned the floor over to a police captain, who described his efforts to build a safe corridor through the neighborhoods for the students to use on their way to and from school. As Patti had asked teachers to help in the hallways, the police captain asked parents to support police in this effort.

As of November, it was clear that no one believed the issue of student safety could be ignored. However, at the same time, there were definite signs that a reasonable level of control had been achieved that permitted staff and students alike to focus on other issues affecting education at Forest Park.

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An Overview of the Instructional Programs

The relatively safe environment has permitted more attention to instruction, Patti's second priority. Forest Park takes advantage of many different programs that are available from the outside to help improve instruction.

As we observed in the 1992-93 snapshots of the school, there may be so many different programs that schoolwide or even charter-wide focus is harmed.5 In the fall, we received a five-page "Glossary of Programs and Terms" that had been prepared to inform the faculty as well as visitors about the various projects under way at Forest Park. While some of the change efforts relate to governance or to structural aspects of the school, many are directly tied to instruction.

Forest Park takes advantage of two local nonprofit groups--MSRC and Humanities/Sciences. Besides helping to create the charters, the MSRC also created a center at Forest Park to help teachers there and at other schools in Jefferson learn to use "family groups." These groups provide a weekly advisory program in which approximately fifteen students are assigned to work with staff members, who become an advocate for the students in the group. Every Thursday, meetings of these small groups are provided for all students. A number of the other programs at Forest Park are available to teachers and students, because of the school's affiliation with one or the other of these nonprofit agencies.

Subject-area Programs

A number of the programs at the school concentrate on subject areas.

There are two externally supported projects in math, for example. The math department chair leads both efforts. One is an algebra project, which is connected with the MSRC for funding purposes, and which has been under way for several years. The other project, the Interactive Mathematics Program, is tied with a national office in California, and involves several Jefferson schools through funding given to the other nonprofit school reform group in the city.

Several projects focus on science. The one which receives the most attention is Science Force 2000--an upper-level science class designed to help students prepare for science careers through science fair competitions. Students from this class have won many scholarships and produced a great deal of favorable attention for Forest Park.

One external support system, the Comprehensive Regional Center for Minorities, gives attention to students in math and science. One of its projects supports minorities from universities and industry who teach in tandem with science teachers at Forest Park. This group receives its funding through the same nonprofit reform agency in Jefferson that supports the Interactive Mathematics Program--an agency which, on occasion, seems to compete with the MSRC for resources and faculty attention.

Interdisciplinary and Social Service Programs

Several of the initiatives at Forest Park emphasize interdisciplinary studies. For example, an ecology/environmental science team for ninth-graders combines attention to English, world culture, and environmental science.

Other Forest Park programs aim at improving the transition of students from school to college or work by creating specially designed instruction and other activities. Several of the programs emphasize preparation for prospective scientists, technicians, and engineers. Some have a career focus, such as the Business Academy, which is linked with office work, and an architect project, which links seventh- and ninth-graders with a local firm. A full-time aide at the school is funded through a program initiated by the MSRC to help students with college access planning. The Education for Employment Program, supported with federal Perkins funds, helps prepare students for employment through apprenticeships it arranges with community businesses.

A number of the initiatives at Forest Park, such as the Student Assistance Program (SAP), School Support Team (SST), and the conflict resolution project, attempt to help student learning by providing access to social services. Some of these initiatives engage students in learning by having the students give service themselves. One program, known as Community Service, allows student to receive credit for services such as tutoring or working in nursing homes, hospitals, and other agencies. Another, known as the Literacy Corps, gives students service-learning credits for helping elementary students and working with "life-skills" students. Still another program, Reachback, links the school and community through a basketball league and tutoring.

Continuing Work on Instructional Development

The school identifies itself as affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools and with Re:Learning in the state. It is also a target school in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's High School Futures Consortium. Through this connection, Forest Park High School is one of twenty-four schools throughout the country that work on a five-year plan to improve organization, staff development, curriculum, and technology.

Reflections on the Instructional Programs

As should be evident from the preceding recitation of programs, not all of the initiatives complement each other. With outside assistance, focus on a specific subject may interfere with the development of interdisciplinary curriculum. Attention to the most able students in selective classes in math and science and in charters aimed at prospective college students may take resources away from truly heterogeneous efforts within the school or in other settings.

Developmental efforts seem to be associated more with supporting services for students or with progress in various disciplines than with the development of more comprehensive reforms, such as those envisioned by the MSRC, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, or the Coalition of Essential Schools and Re:Learning.

The presence of multiple, centrally administered programs at Forest Park complicates change efforts. Teachers working with externally funded projects in math, science, and other fields get their direction from the central leaders of these projects and frequently seem to identify more closely with the project than with the school. As project and program leaders from the central administration and various nonprofit agencies contact teachers directly to involve them in in-service activities, provide instructional materials, or make suggestions concerning teaching approaches, they create a dual supervision condition for teachers that has some similarity with the problem faced by the principal.

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Instruction: Classroom Close-ups

During our fall visit we saw some lively classes in a variety of subject areas, including science, math, English, business, and information processing.

Science Force 2,000

Students were using data from a previous year's student project to study the scientific method. As students read off data, Mr. Butler entered it on a table displayed on the overhead projector. He then asked the students what kind of charts--line or graph--they would use to display such information most effectively. The fifteen boys and eight girls in the class discussed ways to report data. They addressed such questions as which form would best allow interpolation, what scale would be best for graphs, and which of the variables was independent and which was dependent.

On the surface, this was a fairly conventional class. The teacher was in front with an overhead projector, and the students were responding to his questions. However, more careful examination reveals that there was more here than is frequently seen in classes. Students were working intently to understand the material. They were initiating questions, as well as responding to inquiry from the teacher. For example, one asked, "Can we interpolate now, even if we don't have a value we can interpolate?" Another caught a mistake that Mr. Butler made in a calculation. With hints from the teacher, the students worked out among themselves the best way to label the axis in the graph.

Repeated observations of this class indicate that Mr. Butler establishes a comfortable, yet demanding, climate. Students know they are expected to complete their homework, to engage in discussions, and to raise questions--and they do.

Math

Twenty-seven of the thirty-five students enrolled were present when we visited Sarah Kemp's class. On the surface, this also was a conventional class. However, in the middle of a linear approach--review homework, present lesson related to new idea, assign student work, assignment of new homework--there was a different relationship between teacher and student and more variations in student activities than are found in the typical classroom. The students flipped coins and rolled dice as they collected data and tested their own predictions. The activities helped the students understand statistical concepts. Their text asked them to consider some questions beyond computation or recall of facts. One question, for example, was, "Evaluate this experiment. Does it test what it is supposed to test? How should it be changed?"

The students in this class are responsible for maintaining portfolios which include their best work. They work in randomly assigned groups intended to facilitate cooperative learning. Students listen carefully when Ms. Kemp speaks. She refers to herself as "Mother," a name students are apt to use also. She has clear expectations for the students. Students know their assignments. As observers, we did not get as many clues from the students in this class as from the science class.

Algebra

Charlie Mitchell has a class of twenty students, about a dozen of whom show up on any single day. Although this is supposed to be an algebra class, he said he has to concentrate on the basic skills, because students shouldn't get into algebra until they can at least add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

Mr. Mitchell told how he works with the students who have trouble in algebra:

Basic skills, how to multiply, how to divide, number facts. By constantly drilling and drilling, some of the students now are beginning to get the process. It's sort of like one of those nine things [nine Common Principles] where you teach a skill and you teach it until they get it. Finally some of them are starting to get it, and it flows over into our [study of] percent, and we're always referring back to it. Now they are more proficient.

Math

In Ms. Simmons' math class we observed nineteen ninth- and tenth-grade students in a math enrichment program for the Motivation Charter. These students were using worksheets with algebraic equations, ratios, and proportions. Ms. Simmons encouraged students to work in groups, but they didn't. As the students worked, she moved around the room, checking answers and helping those who were off track. She told us that the enrichment class helps prepare students to deal with math in the format they can expect to see on the SAT. According to Ms. Simmons, the school's SAT scores have risen; however, students are not offered trigonometry or calculus courses.

English, Business Academy

Helen O'Conner told us she went out on a limb by assigning Waiting to Exhale, by Terry MacMillan, to her seniors. She said only one girl was not permitted to read the book, after the parents were informed of the reading selection. Ms. O'Connor's juniors read A Time to Kill by John Grisham. She likes to have the students study contemporary novels.

She described a class in which the students did an "Oprah Winfrey show with a set of panelists, who were the characters in the novel, with the rest of the class acting as the studio audience, asking questions of the panelists." We had the opportunity to watch that class. We saw the student depicting Oprah, clad in a white, embroidered blouse and black pants, use a ball-point pen for a mike as she moved swiftly about the room, taking questions from the audience and probing characters on the panel for their motivations and true feelings.

Oprah [thrusting her pen-mike under the chin of a panelist]:

Russell, you have a baby and another on the way. Do you feel more responsible?

Russell:

That's nature.

Oprah:

Does your wife know you are having a baby--with Robin?

Student:

My question is for Robin. Do you think if you kept the baby you'd be closer to Russell?

[Robin equivocates.] Student:

Why don't you use protection?

Russell:

I use protection, just not with Robin.

And so the show continues, with the student panelists, Oprah, and the class alternately revealing their knowledge of the text and interest in the topics it treats.

Ms. O'Connor also told us that she has used a red packet of materials developed by a university professor retained as a consultant by the MSRC. She told the class about several African-American authors, including Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs, and the students listed similarities and differences between them. For homework, she had asked students to pick one of the authors and tell why they might like to be that person. Helen told us what one girl wrote about Harriet Jacobs, a slave who lived in secret in the attic of a shed for seven years so she could be near her children.

This little girl wrote the most glowing paragraph on Harriet Jacobs. I was just caught. She really caught the essence of what Harriet endured. This girl captured it. She wrote, "I understand why she slept with Mr. Sands. Part of it was right and part of it was wrong. She did it deliberately so she wouldn't have to sleep with her master, so that she would annoy him; he wouldn't be the first." I'm sold, because this is a difficult piece of writing.

Ms. O'Connor was not sure the students would understand why Harriet chose to sleep with one white man as opposed to the other white man. Ms. O'Connor also explained to us how she, the social studies teacher, and the teacher within their charter who teaches word processing have worked together on various assignments. While some of the math and science instruction seems disconnected from charters, this instance showed some progress at Forest Park in developing curriculum for specific charters.

Information-processing

Ms. Cutter, who teaches information-processing in the same academy, began her class by having students write in their journals. She then switched to the main class activity, an exercise on centering and underlining, using an IBM word-processing package. The class was well organized and students were held to definite standards of correctness in their word-processing exercise. Throughout the period they stayed on task, helped and encouraged by the teacher, who circulated among the students as they worked.

The class meets early because many of the students in the business charter have jobs for part of the day. The student with the highest grades in the school was enrolled in this 7:40 a.m. class. He arrived dressed in a white shirt, dark pants, and tie, ready for his afternoon job in a bank.

Another teacher in this charter worked with a student who had use of only one arm to help the student make effective use of a keyboard. In essence, a new system was devised to permit the student to "touch-type" with his single hand.

English, Motivation Charter

In Motivation, a charter identified as being for "the college-prep students," we talked with Rhonda Stark, an English teacher. She told us she had asked her students to compare the role of a leader and the code of conduct in Beowulf's time and in today's school. She stressed her love for taking "canonical pieces" and helping students to see their relevancy.

In one of her classes we watched while thirty students studied Chaucer's Wife of Bath. A fair amount of the teacher's yelling seemed necessary to maintain the attention of the students who, in variously color-coded groups, had been assigned to interpret selected passages from the text.

Ms. Stark shared some examples of assignments she asked her English 4 students from the Motivation charter to complete.

Due Thursday, November 4:

In response to Lorene Cary's Black Ice, describe the significance of the sports metaphor at the end of the excerpt. One-page minimum, more is always welcomed for those who are not faint of heart. Option #2 is to describe the social, cultural, and economic differences Lorene observes concerning teenagers of privilege and those denied access to privilege.

Due Tuesday, November 9:

In response to Bebe Moore Campbell's Sweet Summer, describe an incident from your youth when either you, a friend, or a classmate defied a rule or custom in order to assert pride in your culture. More is better, minimum is a page.

Due Friday, November 12:

In response to John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (one of my favorite books), describe the way the resolution of family conflicts may permanently influence and/or impair children. Begin your essay by analyzing the events in the excerpt, then comment on practices you have observed in your own life. Finally, make some recommendations about effective ways to handle anger and frustration that will resolve conflicts rather than exacerbate them. Two- to three-page minimum.

Due Wednesday, November 24:

You are writing an excerpt from your own life which will be included in the next publication of Growing Up Black. Describe a pivotal, illuminating, or powerful experience that you think should be included in the proposed, new volume. The publisher has requested no less than a four-page minimum.

Other Classes

A social studies teacher in the Motivation Charter jousted with her students throughout the period as she tried to get them to correct a test, show interest in some issues of race relations, consider rough drafts of essays that were due soon, and read from a large anthology.

In the library, we had a chance to watch as some local architects helped student participants in the architecture project understand how design variations can affect the look and feel of something, such as the pocket park they were working on. Students showed interest in the project and expressed concern over the recent appearance of graffiti on the wall at their site. After a brief lecture from the architects, the students, using standard design symbols for trees, bushes, and other objects, worked in pairs to fill in an outline of their park. During our observation, we could not see how this work was tied to other aspects of the schooling for these students. Eventually, as these ninth-graders build the park they are designing, the connections between classes may become more evident.

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Problems with District Support

In spite of relatively smooth leadership transition at Forest Park, there were numerous signs of the need for improvements in district support of the reform effort at the school.

In the middle of November, three months into the school year, teachers still experienced adjustments in classes because of a district practice of saving money by underestimating enrollment and then balancing classes in accordance with district and union contract requirements over a several-month period. Both teachers and students were moved around during this period. One teacher told us how difficult it is in this situation for the kids to make sense of what is happening in class:

When I get a kid today, and a kid tomorrow, and I'm still getting kids--like, today, you know, it's been a bad day for me because I'm going from place to place [topic to topic] and it's not the kid's fault because the kids are all starting out, so they don't know themselves.

Other teachers saw problems stemming from the district's and union's inability to develop contract provisions that give schools more control over personnel decisions and place less reliance on seniority.

Some people at Forest Park expressed their belief that the district administrators do not fully understand the school's condition. For example, one person at Forest Park told us,

They don't talk to us. They sat downtown, the bureaucrats did. They sat downtown and made some of the rules and decisions instead of coming out to the school to talk to the people in the school about "How do you think this should be done?" And I think that is the problem. They work from the outside and make decisions, instead of getting it from the people that are right here at the grass roots of the situation.

One problem with district support at Forest Park emerges from the dual reporting relationship the principal faces as the head of a high school and a middle school located in the same building. Sometimes, when resources can be obtained from both offices, this works to the advantage of the school. Often it simply adds to the complexity of the decision-making process for the school.

Some problems with the support mechanisms of the district are mundane, but frustrating for teachers. For example, a teacher from the Business Academy told about difficulties getting the proper equipment. She described to us what had happened when she had ordered switch boxes to facilitate the sharing of her twelve printers with the twenty-four computers in her classroom:

But what happened is the ordering people downtown sent me the wrong cables, male-to-male; they won't take them back. I have thirty male-to-male cables for Macs. I have been calling. I have been talking. The people in charge will not help me. The people downtown will not take them back. Nobody will take them back. So this year I have no money to reorder. So I'm stuck with them.

Such problems with obtaining supplies seem to have been exacerbated by the early retirements in Jefferson. In some instances, people at Forest Park High School don't know who has what specific responsibilities in the central office; in other cases, people in the central administration don't know their new jobs as well as the people they have replaced.

Other stories were told of district policies that do not permit students to be bused on local expressways. Such policies make it more difficult for teachers to gain the most from field trips or to share efficiently with schools at other sites. Such policies posed particular problems for Forest Park teachers' efforts to take advantage of vocational offerings.

From teachers and administrators at Forest Park, as well as from staff at other schools, come complaints about paperwork and other interruptions that interfere with their ability to work together to develop improvements. One said,

We have paperwork--paperwork that needs to go downtown. Someone comes to talk with us about this or that project, to talk about AIDS, to talk about the staff organization. But they still do not give me time as a teacher to talk to someone I need to talk to.

Another teacher commented, "Our team meetings were devoted to discipline problems, this paperwork, that paperwork. We haven't really had time to sit down and say, 'Here are the nine Common Principles.'"

An administrator responded to paperwork burdens by noting,

I spend hours just trying to do the paperwork. We are sometimes under constraints--very short constraints. Sometimes we'll get--I don't know what happens--the mail; they say we have to have something downtown tomorrow.

People at Forest Park do have ideas about how the central officials can be more supportive of their work. For example, one person suggested that central officials should come and visit their school and the classrooms, as the principals and assistant principals at Forest Park do.

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The Unclear Future of Governance

Like many school districts in the country, Jefferson wants to develop school-based management. In the fall, Forest Park continued its efforts to become a school-based management site within Jefferson. The MSRC had provided some assistance to the school in this effort. Some district leaders have viewed school-based management and shared decision-making as a means of strengthening the commitment of school people to the changes which need to be made.

In order to promote change, the district and the union agreed that schools which approve a plan for future innovation by a 75 percent vote will be allowed to follow certain decision-making practices and, supposedly, have more autonomy. Forest Park's faculty failed to achieve the 75 percent approval needed to implement the educational plan developed by the planning team to become one such "letter-of-intent" school.

In the report we wrote following our second visit to the school in spring 1993, we asked, "What will the decision-making processes be, and who will have the power? Will shared decision making become the real mechanism for determining direction, or will direction be sent by the administration?"6 In November 1993 the questions were still not answered.

The school makes much use of informal networks for decision making. These networks are built in part on the relationships between people working on many different projects in the building with colleagues in other buildings and in support agencies. These networks serve as a vehicle for decision making about a number of important instructional and student-service questions. Similarly, within the building, colleagues who are members of teaching teams, departments, houses, and charters carry out conversations through which they resolve many other questions. Still, the nature of formal governance processes remains unclear.

While he was working as a teacher, assistant principal Andy Washington headed the school's interim Governing Council. During our visit, he was visibly impatient with ongoing conversations which seemed to replicate earlier deliberations. Some teacher-leaders were openly hostile toward the notion of shared decision making. Influenced by a union which was raising doubts, and by the experiences of other schools that had voted successfully to make decisions "school-based," only to find little benefit, faculty were beginning to question the value to the school of this step. One opponent explained his position:

The people who have decided we should go the route of school-based management haven't given us the wherewithal to carry it out. When are we going to have time to meet with the principal, to hash out things, to do the work needed for making a decision or writing up a program?

Several staff members seemed concerned that pursuing consensus on decisions was impractical. They sensed that they were simply being required to perform additional work without compensation. Others on the staff expressed support, but raised reservations such as the following: "I still believe in shared-decision, school-based management. But I think what decisions are to be made has to be defined. What can be done?"

Beyond the question of what decisions the Governing Council should make, the issue which seemed to be uppermost for the interim Council in the fall of 1993 was, "Who is responsible for the ultimate decision making at the school?"

The principal, who makes extensive use of consultation in her decision-making processes, clearly believed the ultimate responsibility belonged to her. She cited as an example the "allotments." She displayed a two-inch-thick document given to her on Friday and required by the district on Monday. To make her point, she asked, rhetorically, "Is the Governing Council going to meet with me over the weekend to work on it? I am responsible for getting it in, not the Council." Of course, another question that could be asked is whether anyone should be responsible for a request made in such an untimely manner.

Timeliness of decision making joined with authority for decision making as a key issue at Forest Park. For example, at the end of a Governing Council meeting, Patti asked the members what they had planned for their faculty meeting later in the week. All seemed to have forgotten that they had demanded a whole faculty meeting to lay out the Council's position on the school-based management issue. For those members who wanted to make sure the Council was the last point in the chain of command, this simple question about what planning they had done seemed to be a devastating blow to their arguments. As one person put it, "Somebody has put us in an impossible position"--to which another replied, "I think it is us."

By the end of our visit in the fall of 1993, the future form of governance in the school was still not clear. The new principal was engaging her cabinet and other groups in providing advice to a greater degree than they had before. Some of the functions of the Governing Council seemed to be capably performed by an after-school cabinet meeting. The letter of intent to become a school-based management school, which had been filed by Forest Park with the joint district and union committee, was to expire in December, and it appeared that there might never be a vote by the faculty at large.

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Events at Forest Park: Spring 1994

When we returned to Forest Park, in May 1994, both progress and continuing problems were evident in regard to the issues we had examined the previous fall. These issues concerned transitions in leadership, safety, classroom instruction, district support for reform, and governance.

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Transitions in Leadership

For the most part, the leadership transition that began with promise in the fall of 1993 continued successfully in the spring of 1994. One veteran teacher shared her positive feelings about Forest Park:

Keep in mind that we are a hidden secret here at Forest Park. People are not aware of the talent of our young people, our teachers. It's beauty in the school and a lot of warmth. That message needs to be gotten across. We have students with great minds. They just need to be tapped. We have a very innovative and creative principal. I can go to her with various ideas, and she gives me the latitude and support to go ahead.

During our spring visit, we received additional testimony that the smoothness of the transition at Forest Park was related to the long tenure of some key people. Not only the administrators and charter leaders had prior experience; the lead security guard had been at the school for more than ten years, and the dean of discipline also had long tenure. In all cases, one of the relevant consequences of this tenure was that the people at the school knew the students.

As is inevitably the case in a school of this size, the new administration had its detractors and supporters by the end of the year. Some still thought an African-American should have been appointed principal. Some teachers felt that the administrators intruded too much into their classroom life, and others applauded them for their interest in the classroom. Some students felt the administration was too strict, but others vehemently disagreed.

All in all, the new team at Forest Park was well in place and thinking about its priorities for the future.

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A Place of "Reasonable" Safety

One teacher, who had recently returned from taking her students to a play only to find all her car windows broken in the school parking lot, said she felt "reasonably safe" at Forest Park. She attributed much of this feeling to being well-known in the neighborhood.

Students also testified that they continued to see Forest Park as a safer school than others. One contrasted Forest Park with Hamilton, her former school:

It's totally different. At Hamilton people were competing to see who could fight the best. It was a predominantly white school. Here it's friends help friends. We're competing for grades.

Another student who had come directly from elementary school said, "Contrary to its reputation, I think Forest Park doesn't have that much violence." A third student added, "I feel safe in this school. It's like a home away from home. Everybody knows each other. Sometimes I would rather be at school than at home." [Emphasis added.] One senior, who had *spent four years at Forest Park, told us,

I think my first year at Park, it was kind of bad, as far as the violence and stuff. But after that, eighth grade or whatever, it wasn't violent. And now there's no violence in here; there are better programs.

It may not be entirely a coincidence that the principal reform efforts in Jefferson have spanned this same four-year period. One of the school's administrators echoed these positive comments:

The students feel pretty safe here. We don't have real complaints about the kids being harassed by anyone, so they're pretty safe coming to school. They're pretty safe when they're in school.

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Instruction

The most important question that remains is whether this school, with its recent successful leadership transition and its relative safety, provides a rich learning environment for students.

The Science Force 2,000 Program

During our brief spring visit, we gathered evidence of exemplary student learning through the Science Force 2,000 program. As a result of the dedicated work of the teacher in this interdisciplinary program, only two magnet schools in Jefferson have produced more winners in regional science fair competitions. Evaluated by alternative forms of assessment, students in the program receive credits in English, health, mathematics, keyboarding, and information processing, as well as in science. During the summer of 1994, high school students from the program will mentor middle school students who will be doing research, writing papers, designing experiments, organizing data with computers, and constructing display boards. Using strategies likely unforeseen by the originators of the Coalition's aphorism of "teacher-as-coach," the teacher in this program is using his star students to reach down and help prepare the science scholars of tomorrow.

The College Prep Charter's Quilt Project

The College Prep Charter, in the middle school at Forest Park, engaged students in a quilt project modeled after a project described by Judy Logan.7 The eighth-graders assigned to this team sewed quilt squares to help them tell the story of important black women. Other boys and girls sewed squares that helped tell the stories of contemporary local figures, such as a popular newscaster, neighbors and relatives, and, in some instances, of historical figures they had researched in the library. Eventually, women from the community were to help them combine the patches into a full quilt.

During an early phase of the project, students visited a local museum to see an exhibit of quilts. As they sewed, they continued to work on companion oral and written reports about the subject of their research. Rosa Parks was represented by several bright squares featuring buses and roses. Many students had chosen grandmothers or other relatives, and one patch was being sewn in honor of one of the teachers within the team. One student, who had selected Madame C. J. Walker, was appliquÚing a dollar sign on her square, commemorating her accomplishment as the first black woman millionaire.

As the students worked, the teachers were busy helping them with their research, working on their own patches, and documenting the project through slides, videotape, and photographs. While all students seemed deeply engaged in the projects, some boys were still sensitive about their peers' reactions to their newfound skills in sewing, and urged teachers who displayed pictures of the project to omit the scenes in which they were busy with their stitchery. Describing the students at work, one member of the team said,

What I've seen is a community of learners within that room. Students, for example, who maybe usually don't come in and do a lot of communicating, they're there, they're sewing. And they're talking. You know? Like those old-fashioned sewing bees?

The Challenge of Finding a Focus

As we had the prior year, we observed in the fall that the school was having difficulty keeping a clear focus, given the rather large number of different programs in which faculty and administration were participating. In the spring, one teacher-leader commented, "I would recommend not too many changes at one time. That was our mistake. We had a finger in every pie. Every program that was coming down the pike, we'd say, 'We'll try that.'" Such comments pose dilemmas for leaders, because sometimes they are legitimate warnings that only so many things can be taken on at once. Other times they are excuses used by people who want to do nothing.

The Forest Park principal, Patti Snow, was aware of this issue when she identified instruction as a main goal in the fall. By spring, she could report progress in this area, in which she had turned a problem into an opportunity. Also, she could report what for her was an important revelation about her own role in relation to the instructional program.

Changing the Focus of Charters

In the fall, all students had been assigned to one of four charters: Motivation, Metropolitan, Business Academy, or Tech/prep. However, since the district failed to provide the vocational programming in the way that had been counted on for continuation of the Tech/prep Charter, Patti determined that each of the three remaining charters would include a technology emphasis. Also, she concentrated on developing a career emphasis within each of the charters.

Several factors contributed to the decision to add the career focus. First, the existing charters were derivatives of long-standing tracking policies. By introducing engineering and technology to the Motivation Charter, the pre-college track, Patti hoped to encourage a broader range of students, including those headed for technical careers that do not require a four-year college.

Similarly, by emphasizing the Coalition Principles and including law and justice career preparation in the Metropolitan Charter, Patti planned to upgrade the charter so that it would be attractive to students making a range of post-secondary plans, from law school to the armed forces. In addition, the district provided a $50,000 planning grant from federal Perkins funds to enable the school to plan this integrated vocational program.

In conjunction with this shift in the focus of the charters in the high school, Patti and her assistants were working to de-track the middle school, build more comprehensive houses, and encourage closer working relationships between the high school and the middle school faculty.

Patti said she enjoys working on charter development, classroom observations, and other instructionally related activities. As the year progressed, however, she reported that much of her time had been taken up with the kinds of activities that had engaged her predecessor. Then, one spring day, talking with another Jefferson principal who was actively engaged with the MSRC and Coalition reform efforts helped her see the need to refocus her work. She described this realization:

I've been spending 50 percent of my day on building and facilities. I hate building and facilities. That's not why I became a principal. Here I'm looking at this boiler and figuring out how to get the water to stop coming in from the yard. We had this big flood in one of the electrical rooms during one of the snowstorms. And the guy who's in charge of all this is telling me I need a sump pump and I'm saying, "No. It's leaking from the yard. A sump pump is not going to help; it's not coming up, it's coming down." And I went out and I got the thing--and made them go up and fix it and it's been working ever since. And that gives me a certain amount of satisfaction. But, that's not my perception of what I should be doing.

That's not why I became a principal. I like curriculum. I like instruction. I like kids. I like staff development. I like to say, "All right; this is where we are and this is where we want to be." You can't do that with a boiler. It's there.

And I finally realized, after talking with this other principal, and after going through all this stuff, that the reason I do facilities, and building, and security, is because my predecessor did. That was my ah-ha moment. And somehow, in my mind, it had never occurred to me that I'm the principal now and I can do whatever I want. I don't have to do building and facilities.

By the time we left, one of the assistant principals was about to obtain the opportunity to worry about boilers and related matters. As Patti began looking forward to next year, she started to think of ways to realize her desire to emphasize technology, so she planned to place a computer on her own desk and invite others to help learn how to use it with her. She also began to think about new ways to increase the unification of the middle and high schools, including taking steps to make the assistants' roles encompass the entire building, rather than having one of them assigned as the middle school assistant and the other as the assistant for the high school program. Success in this action was dependent on her securing permission from the district to broaden such responsibilities (permission that had been denied as of the end of the 1993-94 year).

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Insufficient District and Central Support

One of the most telling comments about central support for Forest Park in the spring of 1993, one that was not made by anyone at the school, is that the experience that helped the principal to clarify her role occurred as a result of an accidental conversation with a peer.8 The office with responsibility for central support of high schools is stretched so thin that it does not have the personnel that are needed to help the large number of new principals and assistants in Jefferson.

Generally, teachers and administrators testified that little assistance was forthcoming from central sources. Although Forest Park has more external connections (and resources) than most of the comprehensive high schools in Jefferson, the union and central administration are largely viewed as rule makers and enforcers rather than as supporters. Even though the MSRC has a center for family-group programs in the school, the collaborative was not viewed as having been actively engaged with the school during the year. Some of this perception stems from Forest Park staff viewing projects on their own, rather than as affiliates with the MSRC. Thus they noted their engagement with the Coalition when thinking about the revision of the Metropolitan Charter to incorporate the study of law and justice, but they did not identify the MSRC as the local connection with Re:Learning and the Coalition. Other projects in math and science with external connections were treated similarly. One exception to this tendency was the testimony of the benefits that had been obtained for a teacher when the MSRC established connections for her with three local universities and provided funding that enabled her to involve her students with these colleges and with books and transportation to cultural events.

Frustration with the lack of central support was particularly high during our spring visit, because the school had just learned of district plans to reallocate money used for charter coordination. There was confusion as to whether this had been decided by the funding foundation, the district, the MSRC, or some combination of these agencies. There was also confusion about whether the funds being reallocated were district or foundation funds. There was agreement that, once again, the school was being jerked around by a structure that was supposed to be helping them.

In thinking about institutionalizing change, attention is often given to the work performed by the proponents of the change. It may be that at least equal attention has to be given to whether the host institution is healthy enough to be a good medium in which to plant the new approach. Such seemed not to be the case in Jefferson.

During the 1993-94 school year, the MSRC dedicated its energy to institutionalizing some of the changes it had helped initiate. Besides difficulties with transitions in its own leadership, the collaborative faced the challenge of trying to make its fairly radical reforms a part of a system that did not fully understand or support them.

One means by which the central administration believed it was helping the schools was through its requirement of an educational plan. The following comments by a teacher-leader, which seem typical, suggest that the school people did not see it to be as valuable as did the central staff:

When they have us doing things that have no relation to the students we work with, such as hours writing an education plan, I don't see it will benefit students. We wrote it over and over. They kept asking for the same thing over and over. I would rather have spent the time tutoring for the SATs or writing recommendations for scholarships. I'm on the right track if I can see direct benefit to students.

At Forest Park and at other schools in Jefferson, teachers told us the same story about being required to prepare detailed strategic plans, which, as far as they could tell, were not useful to them and which were not used by anyone else. To say the least, such purposeless effort adversely affects trust between schools and the central administration.

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Governance: Problems Achieving Progress

Frequently, school-based staff expressed their frustrations about central agencies by speaking of their lack of trust for them: lack of trust between the teachers and the central office, and lack of trust between the school and the MSRC.

Distrust within the school, as well as confused messages from central officials, contributed to lack of progress on site-based management. The faculty vote we were told would be taken in December 1993 had not been taken by our May 1994 visit.

One incentive to becoming a school-based management school was the opportunity to gain waivers from limiting contract provisions. In the spring, however, school staff reported that union officials had told them that no waivers were being given.

As the school developed plans for making the middle school and high school schedules more compatible, to allow teams more freedom in controlling their time, the union reportedly intervened to say that the plan was a violation of the contract and could not be implemented. According to staff at the school, this rejection of the plan occurred even though school-based union leaders were supportive of the new schedule.

Moreover, attempts to fill leadership positions in the middle school by involving teachers within the school led to a grievance. The central administration informed the school that it would not support them in the grievance, and a union official asked the principal why she had involved teachers in her decision making. But lack of external support was not the only reason school-based management seemed to be fading from sight. Questions of which decisions were the principal's to make and which should be made by some form of governing council were still up in the air.

The administration's continued belief that it was being held personally accountable left little room for teachers at Forest Park to engage in final decisions.

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Reflections on the Snapshot

Although Forest Park has created a safe environment for its students, and although it has evidenced some examples of exciting student learning, the work of the administration and staff at the school seems terribly difficult and largely unappreciated by the outside world. Why, then, do people persist in the effort?

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Why Continue?

Reasons vary. A slight few actually receive recognition for their efforts. For example, one of the teachers in the school was selected as the high school "Teacher of the Year" for the large Jefferson system. Others have been used as lead teachers in professional development sessions. Some, like the new principal and assistant principal, have seen their work pay off in terms of promotions that provide more status and pay.

For the most part, however, people at the school said that it is relationships that sustain them. And, again most frequently, these relationships are with students. When asked "Why are you doing this?" Teachers gave us various reasons:

I'm crazy. I love this more than anything on the face of the earth. It defines me. I love these kids. I love their lives. This is not missionary work. I don't view them as exotic. I feel very honored to spend my life with them. This makes my life. They do more for me than I could ever do for them.

The children. The young people. You saw my students today; they were hugging me. I see instant gratification. It's like a cake coming out of the oven. It's so rewarding. This has become my extended family. Plus I love mathematics. I love teaching it. It's fun. It's not like a poem where we have to read it; mathematics just flows. .æ.æ. Maybe it is like a poem.

I get a charge every day from the kids. I would go anywhere with them. They are warm, bright, humorous. The graduates are wonderful and come back and make me feel it is so worthwhile. I keep on going. I was told many years ago that kids keep you young, and they do.

The teachers on my team sustain me. They're very supportive. For example, if I was sitting here and I had to get some papers out right away and they know that I was leaving for a funeral, the lady that's out there would say, "I'm all set. Can I do something for you?" And then we had testing this morning. One gentleman was not going to get his prep. Someone said, "Well if he does that, I'll use my prep to cover his classes--his wife's in the hospital. If I take over, he can go check up on her and come right back."

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Concluding Thoughts

At Forest Park the administration and staff have created an environment that is reasonably safe for students and faculty. There are many creative, challenging programs for the students in grades six through twelve. The previous leadership worked with the staff to begin a process of innovation, in conjunction with external support groups. One reason the new leadership has been able to sustain progress in the school is that individuals promoted to leadership roles have been involved with the reform in the school for several years. Staff attributed their willingness to continue the reform work to their love for the students and to the support they perceive from their peers.

Notwithstanding these positive conditions at the school, problems persist. Local school governance processes are still unsettled. District, union, and other external agency supports are viewed as somewhere between having no effect and being in the way. In spite of some exciting classes here and there, much instruction falls short of the ideals espoused by teaching and administrative leadership in the school, in that it fails to engage students actively and does not demand high levels of performance from students. The school is still searching for that clear vision that will enable the people within it to concentrate their energy for the good of the students, whom most people at the school value so highly. Few urban high schools serving non-selective student populations are better. Yet, as most of the leaders at Forest Park seem to realize, there is still a long way to go before all the students are learning as well as they can.

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Notes

1. Through the Centers project, the Coalition of Essential Schools has created several centers around the country to serve as permanent local resources for Essential school reform. The "MSRC" serves as one of these centers. These centers are politically and financially independent, and they are closely allied with Re:Learning. Re:Learning is a partnership established by the Coalition with the Education Commission of the States that offers support for schools undergoing Essential school reform, and seeks to allow school-based reform to influence district and state policy reform.
2. Dale Mezzacappa, "Judge Names 7 to School Reform Panel," City newspaper, March 26, 1994, p. A19.
3. Dale Mazzacappa, "City Schools Ending Year with Surplus," City newspaper, October 26, 1993, p. B1.
4. No comprehensive high school in the city has had the same principal for the past five years, so such a tenure would be much more stability than schools are used to.
5. See Richard W. Clark, "Revitalization in an Urban Setting," Studies on School Change (Forest Park No. 1), Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence, June 1993; and Richard W. Clark, "Many Paths to Reform," Studies on School Change (Forest Park No. 2), Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence, November 1993.
6. See Richard W. Clark, "Many Paths to Reform."
7. Judy Logan, "The Story of Two Quilts," Teaching Stories, Inclusiveness Program, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1993.
8. One of our interviewers described the principal's clarifying experience to another high school principal on the day following the interview with the Forest Park principal. The second principal also found it helpful to her and determined to get in touch with Patti. Mentoring new principals should not be left to such accidental events.

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The Forest Park research team was headed by Richard W. Clark, senior associate at the University of Washington Center for Educational Renewal and the former deputy superintendent of the Bellevue (WA) School District. The other members of the Forest Park team were Janet Miller, professor at the National-Louis University (formerly National Teachers College) at the Beloit (WI) Academic Center and author of Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment (1990); and Neill Wenger, a cognitive psychologist who has taught in elementary school, consulted for the Pew Foundation, and is currently co-authoring a multimedia textbook.

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This resource last updated: June 11, 2002

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