The Principal's Office: A Social History of the American School Principal

Chapter Five: Bearing the Burden: The School Principal and Civil Rights

Chapter five Bearing the Burden The School Principal and Civil Rights In the winter of 1971, when Alton Rison began his job as the first African American principal of Francis Scott Key Junior High School 117 in the Bedford Stuyvesant District of Brooklyn, New York, he faced an angry group of parents, a divided teaching force, and a school that had by all accounts become an “educational disaster area.” The school was located in a notorious urban ghetto fraught with crime, persistent underemployment, and fractured families; the students in the local school district were 90 percent black and Latino, and over 75 percent of their families lived below the poverty line. As principal, Rison was caught in the middle of a newly reorganized, community-controlled school district that was still recovering from a massive teacher strike. Community control was a victory accomplished by black and Latino activists who had argued that the long-standing New York City centralized school district was a racist, top-down bureaucracy that abandoned minority children. Parents of Junior High School 117 knew this only too well from Rison’s predecessor, a white male principal who had allowed the school to deteriorate to a chaotic condition with students trafficking drugs in the hallways and teachers’ high absentee rates and abuse of students. Under community control, new principals were expected to change everything. Hired as the first African American principal of the school, by the first African American superintendent of the district, Rison was seen as both an answer to community problems and a representative of the community that he served. Yet unlike earlier generations of community-minded principals, Rison came to school with virtually no resources, a divided and rebellious teacher staff, and a suspicious community, in a climate that was 111 112 THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE electric with racial and class conflict. And the school was literally crumbling. Rison described what he saw: There were piles of papers everywhere, strewn and tattered textbooks, pieces of desks, broken bottles, papers and shards of metals, and utter slop up and down the sidewalks and walls. There were shattered windows and boards. . . . and the building looked smoky, and it was sooted and singed, as were the boards, some blackened, cracking and peeling. . . . The guys of the school were hanging and falling all over the place. And there were shrieks and screams of children gone wild, shivering in the already frigid air and flattening the tunes of the constant false alarms clanging through windowless frames.1 Principal Rison set to work, surprising many by, instead of instituting radical race-based initiatives, enforcing traditional bureaucratic systems: for teachers, he monitored attendance, set a dress code and a regular contact schedule with parents, and required lesson plans, monthly tests of student content knowledge, and a biweekly report on students called “teacher predictions and projections.” He conducted and documented supervision of teachers three times a year from which he developed a “Statistical Array Rank Order of Teacher Productivity Levels.” In a public space in his office, he posted a nine-foot wall chart that ranked teachers, indicated in code, alongside student scores. He instituted an annual “Accountability Day” each spring when parents and community leaders were invited to “inspect” and “examine” classroom work. Rison’s traditional accountability practices were balanced with the adoption of progressive curriculum revisions. He supported teachers’ development of new coursework, encouraged teachers to make classrooms more attractive, and offered demonstration teaching lessons and links to community agencies for enrichment programs. Rison also applauded students’ creative work and encouraged the incorporation of black and Puerto Rican culture into the school. Rison’s strategy of documenting and making public student and teacher performance data echoed some of the traditional practices of earlier educators like Ellwood P. Cubberley, a comparison that was not lost on Rison’s detractors who accused him of being a “paper pusher” just like the white bureaucrats that community activists had fought to replace. Albert Shanker, president of the United Teachers Federation, described Rison’s actions as a “return to the worst practices of the nineteenth century.”2 But it was not the nineteenth century. Alton Rison’s challenges as a school principal encapsulate many of the conditions facing late twentiethcentury school leaders. And of all the educational changes in the decades 113 BEARING THE BURDEN after the Second World War, none was more explosive in public education than the racial desegregation of schools and...