The Superintendent Who Listens, part six:
Bookless in Seattle
High expectations for all is a mantra in education circles these days. For Canada, it’s a sacred calling. It took root in Tallulah and deepened when — with his first-grade sweetheart Doris as his bride — he settled in Seattle near his brother’s Navy base. At Hawthorne Elementary, a troubled school on Seattle’s struggling south end, Canada saw powerful evidence that even the most at-risk kids at the most at-risk school could attain lofty goals. Soon after taking the principal’s job, he discovered what a very steep climb it would be. Stashed in the school library were boxes and boxes of never-opened books.
"Why aren’t these books on the shelves?" he asked the elderly librarian.
"Oh," she said, "because the children will get them dirty."
The librarian may have been stingy with books. But just down the hall, there was a teacher who was sharing books with zeal. Carol Postell’s attitude impressed and inspired Canada. "She was the ideal professional who truly says, ‘High expectations make the difference,’" he says. "Carol would say to every second-grader when they walked in the door, ‘You’re a great reader,’ or ‘You’re going to be a great reader when you leave.’" And they were.
During Canada’s tenure there, from 1973 to 1975, reading scores rose dramatically. The school reaped high honors for what it had accomplished. But Canada doesn’t claim all the credit. "It was because of the staff," he says. "If you really work with your staff as a team, it’ll make a difference — rather than coming in with ‘I said...’ and ‘You’d better...’ A great principal is a person who learns to lead in collaboration."
Just as Canada did in Seattle, Portland Public Schools spotlighted reading as its Number One priority even before the new superintendent arrived. The board is betting that keeping a laserlike focus on reading, especially in the early years, will dislodge the rock-bottom scores that have plagued certain schools serving poor, minority students. Some stubborn scores have already bobbed upward. "The entire city ought to cheer the impressive gains at Marysville Elementary," wrote The Oregonian in a July editorial, "where 88 percent of third-graders reached the state reading benchmark this year, compared with only 49 percent a year ago."
Marysville and other newly successful schools are winning because they’re zeroing in on literacy, Canada says.
"You can walk in any classroom, any time of the day, and there’s a clear focus on reading," he says. "Everybody is focused on reading. They’re constantly saying, ‘You must read, you must read better, you’re going to read.’ They’re celebrating reading, reading, reading."
But not everyone is celebrating. The same Oregonian editorial bemoans the "disturbingly low" scores at schools like Humboldt Elementary and Jefferson High, which have been radically overhauled in recent years, with disappointing results. "There remains an uncomfortably strong correlation between the socioeconomic status of Portland schools and their test results," the newspaper charges. "While schools situated in some affluent areas report that 90 percent of their students reached the state benchmarks (last year), schools in the city’s poorest neighborhoods struggled to put 20 percent of their students above the benchmarks."
This glaring gap has caused intense friction between the district and the African American community over the years. Canada is painfully aware of the heat it has generated. Canada’s very first budget, in fact, pumped extra dollars into 25 chronically low-performing schools.
"We’re actively working to turn it around," he says. "Those groups have had concerns with the district, and I’ll say that they are right. As a system, we weren’t listening well. Or let’s turn it around and say we were listening, but we weren’t hearing."
For decades, Ron Herndon has been the most visible and vocal local leader lambasting the district for its achievement gap. Despite promises of better scores from Canada and the school board, the longtime Director of Albina Head Start sees little to cheer about.
"I’ve heard 20-plus years of excuses for why they haven’t educated low-income children," he says.
Herndon charges that top district jobs should go only to people with a proven record of success in the classroom. And he dislikes the district’s new language arts program, which allows schools to choose from among three literacy packages.
"A school should not have the autonomy to choose a curriculum if they have failed for the last 100 years," he asserts. "If I’m an engineer and my last three bridges fall down, am I going to be given the option on how to mix the cement? No. But if kids fall down, it’s their fault and it’s their family’s fault."
Herndon believes the district should unify its curriculum so that kids who move a lot — as they typically do in poor neighborhoods — can stay on the same page from school to school.
The trouble with that idea, school board members say, is that for every school where few children are achieving at even basic levels, you have other schools where most kids are succeeding. In a district like Portland, which has poor and middle-class neighborhoods "all mixed up," as Saxton observes, a one-size-fits-all curriculum isn’t the answer.
Says Hagmeier: "A school where you’re doing a lot of catching up is different from a school where most kids are coming to first grade already reading. We have both of those in the district. The same off-the-shelf program isn’t going to be appropriate both places."
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