My worries over
being named president of the John Eaton Elementary School parents
association in the mid 1970s were aggravated by reminders that
I would be the first man to hold the post. I recalled a Howard
University professor telling me how he had integrated a bowling
league in the 1950s only to find that he subsequently felt obligated
to bowl every week whether he wanted to or not. "I realized
what I really wanted," he said, "was the right to be
as bad a bowler as everyone else."
The problem with
this recollection was that, as far as I could determine, there
had been no bad presidents of the Eaton Home & School Association
and there had been some fairly extraordinary ones including -
I was also reminded - Joan Mondale, soon to find herself an even
harder job.
Fortunately I was
surrounded by a fine board, a wonderful principal, and a community
that regarded the school as a favored garden, a place to plant
children and happily watch them grow.
In between, that
is, fund-raisers, meetings, crises, anger, desperate phone calls
and so forth. Such as the distressed call I got from a member
of the board who had started the school's first Christmas tree
sale. Even before Christmas, a priest had shown up on the lot
with a brown paper bag filled with needles he claimed had descended
from his tree.
There were periodic
fiscal crises and their consequences such as the inability to
get any play blocks for the kindergarten. The downtown administration
- which swallowed up three of every four dollars spent on our
students before it even got to the school - was so bad at paying
bills that the only play block company that would deal with it
had sent blocks with splinters in them. In the end, the parents
association bought the blocks from a neighborhood store.
There was also the highly visible - and similarly irate - journalist
whose son's paper on Egypt had been failed by the teacher because
it was 50 pages long instead of the required 15. And the substitute
teacher who dozed at her desk, even through the students pasted
a "Do No Disturb" sign on her back. And the teacher
who sprayed smelly students with Lemon Zest and checked their
armpits.
Most embarrassing
of all, however, was our entrance into the citywide school safety
patrol parade. The children had proudly chosen the slogan for
the banner - WATCH OUT FOR CARS OR YOU'LL END UP ON MARS - and
students and parents worked hard and long to create a fifteen
foot high missile out of chicken wire stuffed with pink Kleenex
to be mounted on a pickup truck. But as the Eaton safety patrol
marched down Constitution Avenue with their badges, red shirts,
and Sam Brown belts, what should have been applause became instead
laughter and guffaws and pointing. I took another look at our
entry and immediately realized the error. The Eaton contingent
consisted of one extremely pregnant faculty advisor marching
in front of her young troops and a truck carrying what seemed
to many onlookers to be a fifteen foot high phallus. We won no
prizes that day.
Because there were
not enough parents in Cleveland Park who sent their kids to John
Eaton and because the school had a good reputation, its excess
desks were filled by children from around the city, most of them
black, thus integrating an otherwise nearly all-white neighborhood
between rush hours.
There were also
a number of latinos and children of diplomats who lived nearby,
including the son of a Yugoslavian official who, as far as I
could tell, only learned two English phrases the entire year:
"WWDC 1260 AM" and "Channel 20." A parents
bulletin around that time reported 20% of the students to be
native Spanish speakers. There were children whose families came
from 34 countries and Puerto Rico and about 20% of the school
was African American. Despite the linguistic and cultural variety,
the school scored above national norms in reading and math in
all but 6th and 7th grades (where a large number of the immigrant
children were concentrated.) Even then, the scores slipped only
slightly under the national average.
The ethnic mix was
rounded out by a commune of born-again Sikhs who lived nearby.
One of the boys would regularly stop at our house to join my
son on the final four-block trudge to school. One day I opened
the door to find Habajin in his blue turban, blue outfit, and
blue running shoes complemented by a fish net on a pole precariously
balanced on his headpiece. My immediate reaction at 8 am was
that I was all for religious tolerance but this was pushing things
too far. Habajin, perhaps sensing my antipathy towards blue Sikhs
with precariously balanced fishnets early in the morning, quickly
explained that he had found the icon in a trash can along the
way.
Pat Greer, the newly
appointed principal, would not have been fazed. If all our governmental
institutions were run by people as pragmatic, sensitive, intelligent
and imaginative as she, we would live in a much happier country.
For example, when the potentially difficult issue of religious
celebration arose, Pat adopted the principle laid down by the
theologian Reinhold Niehbur, who said once that you don't solve
the conflict between church and state by doing away with the
church. And so the assembly before the year-end vacation included
a traditional American Christian segment, a latino Christian
portion, a Jewish presentation and, as a climax, Habajin, decked
in full blue uniform but without the fishnet, telling the Legend
of the Sword. Everyone had a good time and Pat and I agreed not
to let the ACLU know what we were up to.
Similarly, I once
got a call from Pat saying that she had caught two 8th graders
using pot. (The school at the time, among its other innovations,
went from kindergarten through 8th grade). She explained that
she had called the 2nd District and asked them to send over an
officer but that he was to do nothing but scare the hell out
of the kids and then leave. Sounds good to me, I said, but of
course those were the 1970s when we still naively thought teachers
and principals knew more about teaching kids than cops, judges,
and the President.
I gained even more
respect for Pat's ability to maintain order after substituting
in a first grade class for an ill teacher, the dimmest moment
coming when - after trying every organizational stratagem I could
imagine - a girl in a pretty dress walked sternly to the front
of the room, put her hands on her hips, looked straight up at
me, and announced without equivocation, "I hate you."
Twenty years later,
in a speech to a global cultural diversity conference in Australia,
Pat Greer, who is black, explained her approach:
"While
the 1970s can be characterized as a decade where shared decision-making
was not evident in schools, John Eaton school was different .
. . Parent involvement and shared decision-making is alive and
thriving at John Eaton School. And our students are thriving,
too. Why? Because together with our staff, parents, community
and students we have created a community of learners where students
and staff alike are secure enough to take risks and dare to do
things they never imagined they could . . .
"John
Eaton School is child-centered. That means that we value and
build on the strengths that each and every child brings to our
school and to our classrooms. That is especially important to
us in our multicultural environment. Our learning environment
builds on the heritage and background of all of our children.
The result is that our students are eager, curious students,
students who are focused on learning and are responsible for
their own learning. Long before children put pencil to paper,
or fingers to computer keys, they are encouraged to think about
what they are learning. Our emphasis is learning by doing, not
rote memorization. We also stress relevancy; what students learn
is relevant to their daily lives.
"Our
parents, teachers and staff are caring, talented, resourceful
and positive role models for our students. And I am a highly
visible school principal. I know each student by name and I greet
them each morning when they arrive at school, and again when
they go home at the end of the day. I talk to my students; I
visit their classrooms; and I sometimes work with them in their
classrooms. And I welcome them into my office when they want
to talk to me. . .
"If
John Eaton were displayed as a jigsaw puzzle and you removed
all the pieces that represented our parents, called the Home
& School Association, there would be a large empty space
in the centre of the puzzle."
The curriculum at
the school was colored by two impressive biases. One was a prejudice
towards writing. The kids were always writing something: diaries,
plays, stories, speeches, advertisements. The school clearly
understood the shortest route to good writing: do it. The other
emphasis was the arts, particularly drama and music. With excellent
teachers and adequate time, the kids threw themselves into their
projects as though Broadway rather than high school was the next
step. The encouragement came right from the top - not only from
the principal but from Mr. Urqhart, her administrative assistant,
who - dressed in his most colorful suit - would sing a single
applause-stirring number in his mellow bass voice in each of
the big shows - the only adult permitted to thus intrude.
I became conscious
of how serious the dramatic side of Eaton was one day as I was
taking a group of 4th graders home from an event. One kid stepped
carelessly into the street and a companion called her back, saying,
"Be careful, you could ruin your whole life that way.' Another
added, "yeah, or even your career." Once safely in
the car, there commenced the sort of surreal debate that only
the young can withstand. The topic (clearly involving the stage
rather than the lesser trades) was: what is more important -
your life or your career?
By that time I was
ready from anything from the kids. One boy had appeared on the
McNeil Lehrer Show with his father to discuss child finances.
I asked him afterwards how it went. He said, "Well, they
seemed kind of nervous. I don't think they ever had a kid on
the show before." The same young man once left us the following
note concerning our hamster, Charmin II, whom I had thus named
to discourage the young from squeezing him:
Charmin
II died. I came in and found him dead in the cage. He is in the
sandwich bag by cage so you can give him a proper burial. We
went biking.
My greatest triumph
came as the executive committee of the parent's association sat
in the office of the regional superintendent of schools, a post
we all thought had been created for the sole purpose of making
our lives more difficult. The superintendent began the meeting
by bragging about her office's new paint job, accomplished, she
explained, with the aid of the whole staff volunteering over
a weekend.
I listened respectfully
and then asked one of the most important questions of my life:
"That's wonderful.
Where did you get the paint?"
I could tell from
her face that I had hit home. Indeed, the regional superintendent
had raided the paint supply at the school warehouse and once
having admitted done so, she could not refuse us similar access.
Which is how, one
weekend, all of John Eaton was repainted by faculty, parents,
and students without a hitch save for a gallon of white being
up-dumped in the girl's bathroom.
One of the things
you learn as a president of a parent's association is how differently
the young see the world. This was reflected in a memo I wrote
a few years later while serving on a committee planning a major
capital expansion of the school. I wrote the committee chair
about my interview with a focus group of two - an eight year
old and a six year old. The results were humbling:
ME - They're
going to fix up John Eaton. What would you like to see changed?
8 YEAR OLD - Nothing.
ME - What
about replacing the play equipment with something new?
8 YEAR OLD - What's the matter with it?
ME - How
about bright colored play equipment?
8 YEAR OLD - It wouldn't match the school.
I pressed the six
year old in hope of getting amore favorable response to progress.
His goals: "I wish they would chip off the paint and put
the colors red, white and blue . . . I would like the sinks in
the boys room unplugged 'cause it goes too slow . . . And could
there be more soap? . . . Would like the water to stay on so
you don't have to hold it . . . I want bigger cubbyholes. They're
just about this small."
8 YEAR
OLD - Bigger coat rooms
ME - How about the auditorium?
6 YEAR OLD - I want the floor painted brown again
8 YEAR OLD - They need a better gate. There's a hole in it and
the ball goes through it and into the street all the time.
6 YEAR OLD - Can the kickball places be painted over so you can
see where the bases are?
I wrote our committee
chair: "The rather terrifying thought occurred to me that
we might be embarking on a multimillion dollar project that the
kids would do for a few thousand. Tough. They'll just have to
suffer. I mean, where would the economy be if we grownups were
as easy to please?"
At another DC public
school a teacher asked the question, "What do people need
to get along?" A student had written, "cooperation"
and the teacher had crossed it out and written, "rules."
In a few decades, the whole nation would try to run education
that way, with lots of tests to make sure the instructions were
being obeyed.
But it didn't work
because it lacked the combination that on most days had made
John Eaton work: competence, to be sure, but - just as important
- cooperation, enthusiasm, and love.