"Of surpassing worth" Transcript (046)

MIRIAM LUCIA ROTH MEISTER: Dr. Marcus Foster was the first black superintendent of a large city school district in the United States, Oakland, California. And he was murdered 50 years ago this month. At that time in 1973, my mom, Dr. Gail Roth Meister, was working as a consultant in Dr. Foster's district. She was 25—at the start of her five-decade career in education. That fall, Dr. Foster gave a back-to-school address to district faculty and staff. You will hear audio of that speech in today's episode. My mom died last year. Her death led to the discovery of this audio in her professional records: a legacy within a legacy. Thanks to that, and the gracious permission of Dr. Foster's family, you're about to hear an inspiring vision of education. It feels just as important today as when he spoke these words a half century ago. May the memory of both these educators be for blessing. My name is Miriam Lucia Roth Meister, and you are at the Point of Learning with my cousin Peter Horn.

[01:43] 

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, Oakland superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, in his address to district faculty and staff, from 1973:

DR. MARCUS A. FOSTER: You see, what you believe about yourself transfers to children in terms of your attitude: they absorb it, they catch it, the nonverbal communication, they pick it up. So I want all of you to be aware of your personal potency. You’re powerful people! You’re teachers! You’re powerful in the lives of children—at least, potentially you are. Whether you exercise that power or not is up to you.

[VO]: Including so much we could still stand to learn 50 years later—

FOSTER: You see, that’s where we are going to win. We’ll have differences, but as long as we don’t let those differences separate us and pull us apart and tear us apart in a kind of disruptive confrontation—if we can believe in each other and stand on the common ground that children are what we are all about, and that we will do nothing to rob children of an opportunity to learn—that whatever our adult differences are, we’ll work them out as professionals and adults working together. But we will not cause children to suffer while we solve our problems …

[VO]: Plus a special conversation with Foster's biographer, Dr. John P. Spencer.

DR. JOHN P. SPENCER: He inspired people. He was somebody who was capable of really motivating and inspiring making people feel that there was hope.

[03:30]

[VO]: As my cousin Miriam laid out at the top of the show, I wouldn't have access to this recording of Marcus Foster if it weren't for my aunt Gail, and the kind permission of Dr. Foster's family to share it with you. But it's also true that if this tape hadn't been discovered among my aunt's professional records, I probably wouldn't have embarked upon my journey this year of learning as much as I could about Marcus Foster, whose name I had only encountered once or twice during my doctoral studies in Philadelphia—the city where he grew up and spent the lion's share of his professional career.

As a way to set the table for Dr. Foster's remarkable speech, I want to share just a few details that made me add exclamation points to the margins of John P. Spencer's biography, entitled In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform. This brief intro will be about equal parts biography and list of things I wish educators would do today.

Marcus Foster would have turned 100 this year. Born on March 31st, 1923 in Athens, Georgia, Foster moved when he was very young to Philadelphia with his mother, Alice Johnson Foster, who was a schoolteacher, and his older siblings (Spencer, p. 22). Alice's father had been a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, who had studied Greek and Latin. [*CORRECTION (courtesy of Dr. Marsha Foster): There were two prominent AME ministers named William Decker Johnson who made important contributions in the late 19th and early 20th century. Because they shared the same name, they are sometimes confused. Although the other William Decker Johnson (1869-1936) did serve as the 42nd Bishop of the AME Church, Alice Johnson Foster's father—Marcus Foster's grandfather—William Decker Johnson was born free in Maryland in 1842. A graduate of Lincoln University who earned his A.B. in 1868, his A.M. in 1871 and his D.D. in 1880, he held appointments in Washington, D.C., Florida, and Georgia, serving as a Methodist minister for more than 33 years. From 1884 to 1896, Dr. Johnson served as Commissioner and Education Secretary for the AME Church. In 1904 he became president of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, serving until 1908. He and his family returned to Athens, Georgia, where he died in 1909.] Perhaps this is why Alice gave Marcus the middle name "Aurelius" (p. 28), after the Stoic philosopher and last emperor of the Pax Romana. The value of education and the life of the mind ran deep in Foster's family, and Alice did whatever she could to encourage her children's intellectual development, from supervising their homework to enrolling young Marcus in elocution lessons (p. 30). But also, Marcus was apparently as comfortable in the streets of South Philly as he was competent in its public school classrooms (p. 30). He loved dancing, zoot suits, and big band music—Billy Strayhorn's hit song "Take the A-Train" was a favorite, according to one of Foster's high school friends [email from Spencer to Horn]—and more than once in his youth Marcus settled neighborhood turf battles by winning fistfights (p. 31).

Later, as a teacher and administrator, he earned a reputation as a superb negotiator who took the time to understand where kids, teachers, parents, school board members, business leaders, and other community members, to name a few constituencies, were coming from. In the late 1950s and 1960s at schools like Dunbar Elementary School in North Philadelphia, Foster and other educators developed pilot projects that sought to reverse a legacy of racial discrimination.

[They believed that] student achievement was shaped both by the social and cultural capital that parents pass on to their children and by the attitudes, instructional approaches, and resources the children encounter in school (pp. 12-13).

For example, while Foster was principal of Dunbar Elementary, money from the Ford Foundation enabled parent activist Eloise Holmes to work on a full-time basis as school-community coordinator. In the fall of 1960, Holmes organized the neighborhood one block at a time, setting up a network of 56 block captains who served as liaisons between the school and the Dunbar families who resided there (p. 77). Foster believed that if academic improvement was going to happen in struggling schools, he needed  to work on relationships, not only within the school, but between the school and its parents and surrounding community (p. 114).

In 1963, when Foster was 40, he was assigned to the Catto School, one of two special schools in Philadelphia where the district concentrated its male disciplinary cases. Most of the students were emotionally disturbed and/or had serious family problems. All of the students were black (p. 95). Described by some in the district as a "cesspool," the school was in dire need of a turnaround, so Foster hit the ground learning. He initiated genuine dialogue at Catto about big issues like philosophy, curriculum, and the approach to discipline. He joked that he could not change teacher attitudes and expectations "simply by printing memos and telling everybody to 'Please be loving and have high expectations'"—so he instituted weekly staff meetings to talk it out. He welcomed, even demanded, input and participation from all parties. He tried to create a climate "where disagreements could be aired and positions and assumptions challenged." (p. 114) Foster knew that habits were "stronger than rational arguments," but he successfully challenged the staff to take greater responsibility for the quality of education at the school: together they produced a four-page checklist for evaluating and improving their own performance. (p. 115) Once again, he focused on school-community relations, for example, recruiting University of Pennsylvania students to do five-week stints as language arts tutors as he focused on literacy (p. 120). When he met with new parents for an intake interview, he didn't stress rules or make threats; rather he used the first meeting to "learn as much as possible about the boy, the parents, the community, the home, and the perception of the family regarding the reason for the assignment. Considerable time was spent in listening." (p. 121) He wanted to show parents that the staff cared about their child's development, and to give them a way to participate in the school without feeling stigmatized. To get the ball rolling, he took a five-dollar contribution and signed them up for a new organization called Friends of Catto! (p. 121) Later, as superintendent of Oakland, he would found the Oakland Education Institute: same purpose, on a larger scale, to raise auxiliary funds to support students. That organization turns 50 this year as the Marcus Foster Education Institute.

When he was appointed in 1966 to serve as principal of Simon Gratz HS in North Philadelphia, the school had a reputation as perhaps the most troubled in the district. As Foster pushed for higher academic expectations and achievement, he allowed parents and students to join teachers in writing a more relevant curriculum, and most dramatically, he responded to parents' anger about overcrowding by leading a successful confrontation with the school board and the city over expansion of the school's facilities. After a frustrating failure to achieve their goals through negotiation, Foster and some six thousand citizens descended on a school board meeting by the busload, peacefully forcing the board and the city to seize fourteen white-owned homes under eminent domain so that thousands of black students might enjoy adequate school facilities (p. 137).

Foster received the prestigious Philadelphia Award in 1969 as someone who had made formidable contributions to the city, one of the first African Americans to be so recognized. I could go on for a while—we haven't even gotten to Foster's historic superintendency in Oakland, California, which began in 1970—but by this point, I think you've got the sense that this man was someone  phenomenal, and you're likely quite eager to hear from him. And so, from the archives of Dr. Gail Roth Meister, and with permission from Dr. Marsha Foster, here is one of the last public speeches by Dr. Marcus A. Foster, the superintendent's Back-to-School Address for Oakland faculty and staff from the fall of 1973!

[11:04]

SUPERINTENDENT MARCUS A. FOSTER: We are facing a year of challenge. And today, I would like to touch on three major themes. The first: I would like to talk to you a little bit about the events of this summer. While you were away, some of you others stayed on and never did take a break all summer. I’d like to bring you up to date on those events and what transpired. And then I would like to talk to you about the factors in, and the aspects of the momentum we have achieved over the three years. Then the third point I’d like to make deals with the ingredients that will go into making the 1973-74 school year a pivotal one in our history.

All of you are aware that because of [California State Senate Bill] 90, we were able to mount an outstanding summer program. Some of these schools were looking at the opportunities that are inherent in the primary unit/middle school/upper school concept, the “K triple four.” And I was glad that some of you spent time looking at those possibilities, because in the primary unit, the K-4 situation, we can specialize in dealing with children at that end of the educational spectrum, where teachers can become expert in working with little ones in the initial phases of reading skills and quantitative thinking. There’s much to be said  about working with that one facet of the primary end of the educational spectrum. I know that I’ve taught right through the grades, starting with Grade 3 and right through up until high school and into college. And I know that even in elementary school, there’s a difference when you’re dealing with youngsters in Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, and when you get them in 5 and 6. And if children who are grouped together at the lower end are housed together, those teachers become specialists, and give them a good start that points them in a direction that we don’t spend millions of dollars for remediation, but we deal with preventive measures in the very beginning. In the primary unit, you see, we conceive of that as continuous progress. And we don’t talk about “grades,” we talk about “years.” And each youngster has to complete a set of operational skills. And when he is to do what was expected at the end of four, whether he takes four years, or whether he takes five or six, that is conceived of as progress for each of those youngsters, because they progress at a different rate.

And we won’t see the spectacle of children emerging at the secondary level as, for all practical purposes, non-readers. We’ll have these multiple checkpoints at the primary unit. And then when they get into the middle school, instead of having what we have in many places today around the country—a kind of watered-down high school for the junior high school—we will have a middle school that addresses the needs of pre-adolescents. And there we can deal with those problems of growing and understanding self, and [students’] relationship to each other and to the community. All of that has to be sorted out. And the middle school offers that opportunity. And then every high school principal knows that he prefers to have his ninth grade with him in a four-year high school rather than coming from a number of feeder schools, where you have to begin there to build for the sophomore year. So I think that that configuration offers some hope.

I was glad that people spent time this summer, looking at the inherent possibility in the “K triple 4” arrangement. We won’t plunge into it all at once, but I do know that we need to have these operational skills that we talk about that children should master before they move on. Because the accumulative effect of not achieving and not mastering a skill is damaging down the line. When a youngster is unable to cope, then he does what anyone would do in a failing situation: He walks away from it, [so] he doesn’t see himself daily confronted with a situation that proves that he’s inadequate. So what I’m talking about here is we have a heavy challenge to give them a good start and then sustain that all the way along the line.

[15:51]

[At the Catto Disciplinary School in Philadelphia] I had a youngster there who had seen his father shoot his mother to death. And he was a little boy about nine years old. And he started beating up the other kids. And they sent him to me. And he came there—he was so fragile—and I had these big youngsters, and they’re 18. And he was just a baby compared to them. I noticed that he liked to hang around the cafeteria. And I said to that very understanding cafeteria person, the dietician, “I wonder if you’ll let this little fella stay in the kitchen and give him something useful to do.” And she did that. And that went on for a couple of days. And one day, I got to school early. And there was this little fella, standing at the subway, 7:30 in the morning, waiting for this cafeteria worker to come out, so he could take her pocketbook and walk to school with her. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know what was happening. And then after she worked with him a while I said, “How about pushing him out of the nest, just for one period a day, and let him run right back in?” She said, “Okay.” She pushed him out, he ran right back, then we extended the period. Out three or four months, he was back in school, doing well. We never heard from him again. Now it wasn’t the counselor who got through that boy, it wasn’t the principal that got through—it was a perceptive cafeteria worker who understood children and cared about them. And I say this is so critical, because you know the importance of the teacher in the life of a child.

The teacher has a critical role in the life of the child. You remember [William W.] Purkey’s book on Self Concept and School Achievement [1970]. Purkey points out that the child’s self-concept begins to form in the home setting, where the parent picks the little one up and coddles him and talks to him and makes him feel wanted as a part of the family. But when he moves out from the family, the next most important person in his life is a teacher in helping to shape his self-concept. And Purkey indicates that these little children come to us after having their experience at home, and a family. Some have loved them and supported them; others have rejected them. But whatever they’ve done, every child comes to us with a kind of invisible tag attached to his sleeve. And one tag may say damaged goods—reduced in value. Another tag may say of surpassing worth—priceless. And whatever we do, we write on those tags. What you do as a teacher, what I do as superintendent, what everyone does out here, as cafeteria workers and secretaries and all the rest, you are writing another line on that tag! And it might say further damaged—further reduced in value—discarded. It might say increased in value—priceless. See, what we write on that tag is important. In relation to the self-concept, before you can help children build a positive self-concept, you yourself have to have a pretty good self-concept of your own capability. [Applause]

And the challenge is to operate our schools and school system so that they are ego-supporting for everybody in the institution. Teachers have to feel that they’re doing a good job, and principals have to say to them, “Hey, baby, that was great!” (You may not say it quite that way!) [Laughter.] But somehow it has to be conveyed to teachers that You’re doing fine! You took that little fella who was there and you stretched him! Sometimes you have to say to the principal—and watch him faint—“Wow, that was a good faculty meeting!” And he’ll faint dead away, feeling too he needs approbation! To that parent that wanders in off the street: “My, I’m glad you came! Glad to see you, dear! Sit down. Tell me about Johnny. I want to learn something from you.” Everybody associated with the institution has to feel better for having been a member of that institution. But you have to have a positive image of yourself as Teacher, because that’s reflected in your attitude. If you don’t feel you’re somebody [it’s hard to] stand in front of a class and say, “Boys and girls, here it is! I’m gonna lay it on you! Get ready! I’m gonna make you glad you came to school today!” and then whip out a good lesson, and Wow! Did we do it? It has to be at that level of enthusiasm. And if it doesn’t get to that level— Teachers who come to school tired when they get there, it’s a lost day. It’s a lost day.

Teaching is something you’ve got to work at. If at the very moment that you’re teaching, if what you are saying and doing is not the most important thing in your life at that time, it won’t be important for children! So I’m saying that we have to work at that, friends. And you are here. There are many of our brothers and sisters who have elected to be elsewhere, but you—those in this auditorium, who could get this concept that I’m talking about—can revolutionize this system, can turn it around! You who are in this audience, and the other brothers and sisters out there in the street, doing something else, they will come along. Because you will be getting results. You see, what you believe about yourself transfers to children in terms of your attitude: they absorb it, they catch it, the nonverbal communication, they pick it up. So I want all of you to be aware of your personal potency. You’re powerful people! You’re teachers, you’re secretaries—whatever your role is, you’re powerful in the lives of children—at least, potentially you are. Whether you exercise that power or not is up to you. See, your attitude, and then the atmosphere that you develop around you is tied up with your self-concept and the concept of those children sitting in front of you.

[22:33]

And I’d just like to give you six points that you ought to think about as they relate to the climate or the atmosphere for building a strong self-concept on the part of those children sitting in front of you. Now what do they need?

1.) They need an atmosphere that’s challenging. I put that first. You see, some people hear me talking about love, and the role of success in education and finding opportunities for children to have success—and they think that I’m talking about watering down the program! One of the first things that’s needed if you’re going to build a strong self-concept is a challenge for the children, with high academic expectations. But closely related to a challenge is the word relevance. See, the challenge works if what you’re doing is relevant to the lives of the children and they see sense in it, and they want to do it and they’ll work at it hard, if you can relate it to their lives in a meaningful way. But: challenge and relevance, right together, those two. Speaking of challenge, let me take you back to a school where I was principal. I had a department head who was one of the brightest fellows I’ve ever known. His degree was in physics—science department. And he used to put in his book requisition and always have a 50% overrun. So I went to him one day, and I put my finger in his tie. I said, “Mr. So-and-So, you don’t love my children!” And he almost fainted. He said, “What do you mean, Marc? What do you mean?” I said, “You don’t love my children, because you are assuming they can’t be taught to take care of their books! You’re building in 50% extra so that you don’t have to teach the children how to take care of things and hold them accountable. You don’t love them! I’m talking about challenging them to be accountable for those books. And I’m not going to give you 50% more. You get those books back. I’m saying that’s the challenge. And once you challenge children, they understand it, and they respond to it. It contributes to their self-concept. They walk taller. They feel prouder of what they’ve done.” Of course, after saying that, he said, “Well, Marc, I guess maybe I shouldn’t stay here.” I said, “I think you may be right,” and we helped him move on to another school. He was happier and we were happier. But the challenge has to be there. And it’s part of the self-concept. So we’re talking about academic achievement. But relevance. That’s [point] one.

2.) If you’re going to build an atmosphere, supportive of the ego of little children, big children, wherever you’re dealing with them, it has to be an atmosphere of freedom. There must be some opportunity to make a choice. How can you build your own strength and confidence in your ability to decide and do things, if you never get a chance to make a real decision? There has to be opportunity for choice—some freedom—because if one accepts the standards, goals and objectives of another and substitutes them for his own, he will never evolve into a strong personality, able to set goals and standards for himself. So you’ve got to have freedom there.

3.) You have to have respect. Respect permeates the whole atmosphere—respect for each other. I go to a school and I see teachers walk down the hall and not even speak to each other. And then when they get in, they tell the children, “Always say ‘Good morning!’” [Laughter and applause.] Respect is something that’s caught in the atmosphere of a school. And children catch it from teachers: the way you relate to each other, the way you relate to those little ones. There has to be an atmosphere where the worth and dignity of each student is paramount. We have to be aware of the student’s personal feelings. I remember reading in the little book[i] dealing with self-concept: A fellow was telling the psychiatrist why he couldn’t relate to an English teacher—couldn’t relate to her. He said, “Because my name is Cribbage. When came to my name, she called me ‘cabbage’ and laughed.” People do that to children. It’s funny. And his name is the most precious thing he owns! It goes on his checks; it will be with him all his life. And she thought it was cute to call Cribbage “cabbage.” And this kid was in graduate school and still remembered that with some distaste and displeasure. Respect!

4.) Another ingredient that has to be there: if the climate is going to be ego-supporting, it has to be one of warmth: a psychologically safe and supportive situation. Psychologically safe. I’ve told some of you about that story: One of my excellent first-grade teachers—some of the principals know how you do this; you take your best teachers and put them right next to the office, so if you get visitors, you just duck in that room and then out, see! [Laughter.] But [here was this excellent teacher] next door to my office. And I walk into her room one day. And there she is with a bulletin board, beautiful bulletin board, blue background with little white waves going this way. And on the crest of each wave was a little ship with a child’s name on it. And the first row said we are sailing. The second row said we are drifting. And the third row said we are sinking! And when I walked into that classroom, I said, “Listen”—I won’t use her name; you might know her—“Listen, dear! What are you doing to my precious little ones? This is the first grade! How do you think they feel coming in every day seeing it publicly proclaimed that their little ship has capsized? How do you think they feel about that? And she drew herself to her full height and said, “Well, Dr. Foster, these children have an appraisal of their capabilities. They have to know that they can’t do everything. In life, they have to face failure.” I said, “Well, wait a minute. I’ll tell you what, dear. You take the bulletin board down, because I’m the principal and I said so. And later on, you may understand why, but take it down.” Now I was there six years in that school and before I left, she came to me and said, “Marc, I want to thank you for the lesson you taught me.” See, unwittingly, we injure children! I’m saying that the warmth includes a psychologically safe environment where you don’t do violence to a child by proclaiming his little ship has sunk. [Another example:] Reading things that they have where each time a child reads a book, you put a little back of a book with his name, and the little shelf comes out like that [to a certain distance]. And then here’s a little boy who has read his first whole book, the first whole book he has read in his life! There should be rejoicing in heaven, dancing in the street! He’s read a book! He’s read a book! But his little book goes up there next this other kid [with many books], his one book on the shelf. And there he is psychologically crippled, not proud of having read, but ashamed that his bookshelf didn’t go out as far. I’m saying, these are the kinds of things that good teachers do to children—I’m not talking about bad teachers! Good teachers hurt children unwittingly. In everything we do, when we establish an atmosphere of warmth, we have to examine it to see that it’s ego-supporting.

5.) The next one I would go to is control. Control. If you’re going to have an ego-supporting environment, it has to be one that you exercise some control in. Firm guidance produces more self-esteem than permissiveness. Studies have shown that—the literature is replete with children who have been allowed to drift. You see, when you set limits on behavior, and you have cooperatively worked on those limits, that’s another way of saying to the child, I care about you. I care enough about you to help you in a social situation. I care about you as a person. I care about what you do. I care enough if you’re wrong to correct you. Control has to be present. In every classroom, there’s got to be an ego-supporting environment. Control is related to the way one teaches. When you come into the room, you’ve got to be prepared to teach! I come in [some] rooms, I see the teacher fumbling around. Five, ten minutes of the period have gone by—she’s getting her game together. And before you know it, the period’s over and she still hasn’t got her game together! Now I say “she”; could be “he”—but you gotta be ready! That’s what control is all about. I remember when I taught, I used to have a five-minute exercise those children had to do when they hit the door. And they got five minutes to do it. And if they didn’t get it: “See me later!” But you had some way of getting them in there in a hurry to do useful work, and hold them accountable. But you’ve got to be ready to teach. Control is lost when one is fumbling for what to do next. Children draw strength from your ability to move from one subject to the other with assurance. So when I talk about control, I’m not talking only about suppressing bad behavior that tends to disrupt the class and interferes with other people’s opportunity to learn. I’m talking about teaching in such a way that it doesn’t escalate to that! And the control is tied up in what is being taught and the way it’s being taught.

6.) And the last one I would mention: any ego-supporting environment has to be one that affords chances for success. Now, if I had to pick out one, I guess that would be it. [If you don’t help] children have a successful experience—who learns anything about improving his ego through failure? I don’t know that failure has ever helped anyone. And certainly if when you’re teaching, you’ve ever reached the point where over 50% of your folks are failing, you’re doing something wrong! It has to be an environment where children can succeed. If I had the time, I would cite a series of studies that were done around blame and praise to see what got the best results. “Work harder! You’re not working as hard as you should!” Or saying, “You did that fine, Johnny. Now let’s go to the next—” Every study I’ve ever looked at indicates that praise accomplishes more than blame. And we have to know how to use it appropriately: you don’t praise him for sloppy work. It’s better to praise for a minute, significant accomplishment rather than use “It’s nice.” “That’s good, that's nice.” But to pick out [something specific]: “You learned how to find a common denominator by inspection. That was beautiful!” Be specific. And then the other thing they said—just mundane stuff that all you good teachers know about—they said that even writing comments on the child’s written work, comments of encouragement, produced a significant improvement in self-concept and achievement. And some of us take the papers and [toss them] right in the round file. And everybody’s done it. When you don’t have a chance to mark the papers, you come in one day and say, “Oh, these papers were so poor this week that I’m gonna give you a break. I’m not even gonna mark them!” [Laughter.] I’m not gonna ask you to raise your hand how many of you have done this! [Laughter.] And what I’ve been doing for the last few minutes is review some of the conditions that have to exist in your classroom, in your school building, and yes, in the school system if people are going to feel supported. I believe that we have in Oakland some of the finest teachers you can find anywhere. I believe that sincerely. I do. I know that we have instructional assistants who have been invaluable in helping us do our job more effectively. All I’m saying: the challenge to us is to make sure we communicate to the students and to their parents that we care. And we do that by the way we teach them.

[36:39]

Our test scores, just a word about it. In Grade 1, we’ve held our above-grade-level reading average that we achieved in ‘71-‘72. In addition, you the primary teachers, have succeeded in reducing the percentage of pupils scoring at the bottom quartile [based] on national norms. You reduced that by 5%. So you held [the score] in the primary [level], but you also reached back and got those children that were way below and brought them up out of that last quartile. At the 6th -grade level, city-wide reading and arithmetic scores were up by one month, at both median and first-quartile level. And this shows effective teaching and programs, because across the state, the 6th-grade [scores] went down. But in Oakland, they didn’t go down. They held their own, and in some cases went up. That’s an accomplishment! In the 12th grade, while the state was going down at the 12th-grade level, Oakland held its own. So I’m saying that all along the line, you as teachers who are out there battling, attempting new programs, trying new strategies, can take a sense of justifiable pride in your accomplishments. Because the scores prove that the movement is in the right direction. We’re not where we want to be, not by a long shot. But we’re moving in the direction we want to go. And it’s because of you and your efforts. Now, finally, we have a year before us that should be encouraging to all of us. Because we have some resources at our disposal that we haven’t had before, to help us in our gigantic effort to swim upstream, to swim against the current. And some of those things we have right at our fingertips now. We’ve learned how to harness the community energy and concern. We proved that in the quake-safe bond election. So we can build on that, as we begin to bring the community even more into the arena of the school. We’re learning a better utilization of our resources. And we have more resources. We’re going to be able to lower class sizes, modestly. We going to improve the money set aside for books and supplies, improve the counseling and nursing ratios. We’re restructuring the whole early childhood education program. Every high school now has a full-time activity coordinator. And of course, we have a Board of Education that is courageous, [seeking] to undertake new ways of approaching learning problems. We have more dollars for manpower and equipment, for maintenance—almost half a million dollars, we are ready to put into trying to refurbish our buildings. One third of our buildings that are not quake safe, we have a chance now to build anew and get fresh curriculum input in the new facility. We have half of our schools receiving extra money to help children who have learning disabilities. And our number of alternative programs are growing steadily. From one or two, now we have almost a dozen in operation. And one of the groups that’s in the forefront of helping us plan these as a group named Choice that looks for alternative ways of learning. But the secret ingredient—and it’s not too secret—that we have that’s going to do it for us is the professional skill and the dedication of each member of our staff, certificated and classified. You see, that’s where we are going to win. We’ll have differences, but as long as we don’t let those differences separate us and pull us apart and tear us apart in a kind of disruptive confrontation—if we can believe in each other and stand on the common ground that children are what we are all about, and that we will do nothing to rob children of an opportunity to learn—that whatever our adult differences are, we’ll work them out as professionals and adults and as classified folks working together. But we will not cause children to suffer while we solve our problems, because we are determined that those little tags that they brought to us will never have written on them reduced in value—cheap, cheap—reduced in value, that our little children, because they’ve come to Oakland public school, because they’ve met you, and have dealt with the schools across the city, will have on their little tags of surpassing worth—increased in value. Thank you.

[41:35] 

[VO]: Two days before Thanksgiving 2023, I spoke over Zoom with historian John P. Spencer, who published in 2012 the definitive Foster biography In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform. Professor Spencer, who serves as Chair of the Department of Education at Ursinus College, said that his growing interest in Foster transformed the doctoral dissertation on the history of Oakland schools that he was writing when he was in graduate school in the 1990s. This was a moment when scholars were doing a lot of work on the history of how U.S. cities had changed in mid-20th century.

SPENCER: A lot of it was focused on economic issues, jobs, and housing. There really wasn't much focus on schools. So I had an idea to write a dissertation and then turn it into a book about the transformation of Oakland from the ‘40s through the ‘70s, with the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and into cities in the North and the West Coast, and the movement of jobs out of cities, to suburbs and elsewhere, and all the forces that created what came to be called the “urban crisis.” I was focusing on Oakland and I encountered Foster as part of that research, and the chapter about Foster was going to be the last chapter in my imagined book about Oakland. And then I was interviewing people along the way, doing oral history interviews, and people were so compelled by Foster and spoke so movingly about him and the impact that he had that I just shifted the focus to make it a more of a biographical project that would follow him from Philadelphia to Oakland. And so now most of the story would be set in Philadelphia, with him as the the focus of it. And I was both interested in him as a figure and the specifics of his career and the work he did, but also how that work showed challenges and developments in American education more generally. I kept finding him really dealing with all the big issues along the way in different capacities as a principal, and eventually, as a superintendent.

[43:58] 

[VO]: The night before we spoke, Spencer had listened to the speech you just heard, so I asked what stood out to him.

SPENCER: Well, in a very simple way, one thing that stood out to me after not having listened to any speech of his for quite some time—because you know, the book was published over 10 years ago—it's just the passion and the the intensity of that speech. It really doesn't let up, you know? He's just incredibly passionate from start to finish of that recording. This is really someone that you would would be paying attention to in a powerful way.

HORN: Passionate, and also funny, you know, that was the thing. I mean, that's an aspect of his charisma, of his charm as well that you can just feel, and you can hear it. You can hear people responding. At one point there's an audible “Right on!” after one of the things that he says, but the laughter and that kind of cadence, the cadence of his speaking, of what points he chooses to make when—there's a there's a real sense of the rapport that's literally audible!

SPENCER: Yeah, I think the other thing is just the really powerful attention to and concern for children: their perspective, the way they experience school, the way that something that might seem like a joke or a small thing to an adult, to a teacher, could really have damaging impact on on a child's sense of well-being or confidence. And I think that was just a signature trait of his, the feeling that he had for the students. They were the focus; they were the center. And, you know, a key theme in the research I did, and that I argue and emphasize in the book, is: that period and his career and also the period in which it really kind of developed—the ‘60s, the Civil Rights era—this rise of an insistence that the schools needed to do better for the students, that there was this tendency to shrug shoulders and throw up your hands and say, “Well, what can you do? Look at these neighborhoods, look at these families, look at these kids, look at all the problems!” The focus on holding schools accountable since No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002 and the publishing of test scores, and the the school report cards for schools—not for students, but for schools—and the declaration of schools as failing and so forth: that impulse to hold schools and educators accountable, I argue in the book that it in some ways took on a kind of one-sided focus on only the schools, and I think one lesson of Foster's career is that the schools can't do it alone and shouldn't be expected to do it alone. And to single them out in that way is counterproductive. But the other side of the coin is this insistence that schools need to do better by children; they need to take responsibility for ensuring that children have a positive experience and successful experience. And I think you really hear that in the speech, that he's urging the teachers to be responsible for those things, for ensuring that they're helping their students and not inadvertently harming them in ways that they may not even be aware of.

[48:21] 

SPENCER: I found Foster's story to have to have two kind of intertwined themes that are somewhat in tension with each other. One is this rise of an insistence on accountability and on schools serving their families and their students and not making excuses for low achievement. And really treating the students well, believing in them, holding high expectations of them. It's striking in the speech that he mentioned that it needs to be challenging; we need high academic expectations. So there's that thread that I suggest in the book anticipated later emphases in policy on accountability. And I argue that it wasn't just George W. Bush and Texas and the forces that led immediately to No Child Left Behind around the turn of the 21st century. But it really went back further to the ‘60s and the Civil Rights era and the work of Black educators like Foster who pushed schools to take responsibility for the learning of the students. But then the other thread is that he also took a step back and had a very broad view of what needed to happen in order for the schools to improve. It wasn't just holding teachers and educators accountable. It was also providing more resources. It was political leaders. It was taxpayers. It was national policy and state policy. And I think that part got lost in the reform era, you know, from around well, from the No Child Left Behind, arguably toward the present, especially around 2010-2012, when I was finishing the book, that—

HORN: Race to the Top—

SPENCER: Yeah, Race to the Top and the documentary Waiting for Superman, which I discussed in the epilogue [of In the Crossfire]. There really was this focus on teachers and teacher unions and schools that were failing and dropout factories. And while all of that has truth to it, and there is that thread of schools needing to take more responsibility, they're embedded in a larger system of inequality and economic dislocation. [Schools] are powerful, important institutions. But as shapers of people's opportunities and economic situation, they are one of many forces and they cannot transcend the economic trends in which they're embedded. And so if the cities are struggling, and the neighborhoods are struggling, and there's high unemployment, and all kinds of problems outside of the schools, that's going to affect what happens in the schools. And so it's important to take a well-rounded view of those things. And so I really appreciated that Foster was always attuned to the complexity and never oversimplified the problem. He managed to make people feel hope and inspire them and push them, without it seeming that he was scapegoating them, or turning them into the villain. And that's what I hear in the speech, I hear him really pushing the teachers to be positive agents of change for students and for education, without vilifying them, without chastising them. It's more of a quality of trying to lift everybody up. And I that was something very special and valuable, I think, that I was thinking about as I listened to that speech.

[52:07]

HORN: Going back to your idea of really valuing students in the mix, here's somebody speaking who has role competence as a principal himself, as a teacher himself, as a district administrator himself who is not the superintendent. I mean, he understands how hard this is, and what roles people need to play, because he's played those roles at different levels in the system. And so listening to somebody who really understands that from the inside, as opposed to—this is one of the things that you mentioned in your epilogue—the moment where it was very popular to bring people in from other fields who had no experience in education to be the “CEO” of a district and say, “We're gonna run this like a business and get ‘er done and do all these things!” But these are people who don't have an insight or understanding of what's involved at each of these places. It's a remarkable font of experience that he brings to the words and what he's suggesting, and how he's able to sell it for people who know that he's been there that he's been in those shoes.

SPENCER: Yeah, absolutely. He had lived the experiences that the students that he was serving were living; he had a visceral feel for their lives, for their situation. He had been an elementary school teacher, he had taught kids to read, he had been a principal of an elementary school, principal of a high school. He had worked every day in schools and recognized the complexity of the job. And that really, I think, was something that shaped his very rounded, complex view of of the issues that he refused to oversimplify them.

[54:09]

Toward the end of our conversation, Professor Spencer said he's often asked about what Dr. Foster might think about U.S. education today.

SPENCER: I felt it when I was writing it, and I feel that it's kind of the answer to what Foster would think now or what the legacy is: On the one hand, I do think it's an uplifting and inspiring story in terms of the impacts he was able to make, what one person was able to do in education, the power that the people felt from him—and I think you hear that in the speech. And in particular, I think as an historian, one of the things that I am struck by is that there really is change over time. It's a different conversation now than it was in 1962 or 1968—times in his career. I think he and others of his generation of educators, especially Black education leaders, changed the conversation about public education in this country. And it no longer was acceptable to do and say things that were very common in that in that earlier era. The racism was just blatant and palpable! And the conversation around high expectations and believing that all children can learn, and holding schools accountable for that: I think that that is a real contribution of Foster and in his era, and it's important not to forget that. And then there's the depressing side, which is that so many of the problems are so familiar. There's so much that is still not right about public education and inequities. And that part of it would be, I'm sure, distressing to Foster, if he knew how deep those problems remained. But I think it's always important to remember that even though those problems are still so serious that there has been change and evolution in the picture of education, and he was part of that.

[56:35] 

Marcus Foster's life was cut tragically short 50 years ago, on November 6th, 1973, by a hail of shotgun pellets and cyanide-filled bullets fired by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a leftist group that became infamous several months later for kidnapping publishing heiress Patty Hearst. The SLA had tragically misjudged Foster's role as the first African American leader of the Oakland Schools, believing that he must be a puppet of the white power structure and that by killing him, they could recruit more people to their cause. Instead, Foster was deeply mourned on both coasts, with thousands attending memorial services in Philadelphia as well as Oakland.

A challenge for any memorial, for any eulogy, is paying tribute to a whole life in relatively few words. With respect to my late aunt, Gail Roth Meister, I want to say that I'm profoundly grateful for the ways she continues to teach me. We never discussed her work with Dr. Foster during the many conversations she and I had about schools and effective approaches to education—which is probably not so odd, given that she finished working for the Oakland district two years before I was born—but I'm so glad to have this particular fire kindled now. She worked for dozens of other districts, schools of all kinds, and other education organizations in the decades that followed, but one project more than any other has come to mind in these weeks of new strife in the mid-East, an area of the world she visited many times and felt deeply connected to as a devout Jew. This was about 6 years ago, and the project was a collaboration she was helping to support for kids at three middle schools in the Philadelphia area: one Catholic, one Jewish, and one Muslim day school. It used writing as a means for youth development and interfaith learning, and Aunt Gail would just light up when she talked about its possibilities.

[58:42]

That's it for today's special episode! Thanks so much to Professor Spencer, and to Mr. Sam Davis and Dr. Denise Saddler of the Oakland Unified School District. Special thanks to the family of Dr. Foster, including Dr. Marsha Foster, who is working to republish her father's 1971 book Making Schools Work, which will be back in print next year with a new foreword that includes the legacy of her mother Albertine, who was also an educator. Much gratitude to my big brother John Horn, whose "Take the A-Train" was recorded expressly and lovingly for this episode. Intro and outro music provided as always by Shayfer James. Thanks finally to you, for listening, rating, reviewing, and supporting Point of Learning any way you can. I'm guessing you know a teacher or school leader who would be deeply moved by Dr. Foster's words—please go ahead and share it up!

Except for the words about Marcus Foster's life and career that I borrowed from Professor Spencer—see transcript for citation details—this episode of Point of Learning was written, edited, mixed, and mastered by me, here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I'm Peter Horn, and I'll be back as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!