A Private School With a Public Commitment

Wade Graham squinted in frustration. The 17-year-old Crossroads School student with rings on six or eight fingers and pointy black shoes couldn’t quite get his teacher to grasp his definition of art.

“It is a mental decision; why does something have to have physical shape to be art?” Graham asked Jeff Cooper, who sat under a poster of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.”

Cooper shook his head and wiped his hands on his jeans.

“I’m not getting what you mean,” he said.

So Graham went to the blackboard and diagrammed his aesthetic theory.

They used lots of four- and five-syllable words to agree to disagree--and Graham was asked to write a second draft of his thesis.

The exchange would not have been out of place on a college campus, but this was a school for seventh- through 12th-grade students, and the same kind of one-on-one teacher-student and student-student conversations were going on all over the campus.

Over here, they discussed Karl Marx. Over there, it was the merits of Rachmaninoff’s piano preludes.

Overall, it was just another day at Santa Monica’s private Crossroads School.

At a ceremony earlier this winter, the Department of Education joined the Washington-based Council for American Private Education in naming Crossroads as one of 60 “exemplary” private schools in the nation. No other secular private school in Southern California was named. Council Executive Director Robert Smith said federal evaluators singled out Crossroads’ “splendid” capacity to set lofty goals in diverse areas--the arts, academics, community service and sports--and to meet them.

That sort of accolade should have been enough to set the heads of Crossroads School’s trustees swelling. But they know what really sets Crossroads apart: its ability to work within the limits of its physical plant. In the words of one observer, the school--located on a small, trapezoidal block of industrial Santa Monica near the Santa Monica Freeway--has all the ambiance of a tire warehouse.

Although parents pay $5,500 per year to send their children to Crossroads, the student cafeteria is a lunch truck in a back alley. The concert hall-art gallery is a converted maternity clothes warehouse. A new library annex will rest in an apartment building recently gutted by a suspicious fire. Bougainvillea blossoms only partly cover barbed-wire atop the playground fence. And, while the school was CIF basketball champion in its division the last two years, there is no basketball gym or playing field.

“This is the weirdest campus you’ll ever see,” admitted school headmaster Paul Cummins, 47.

“But that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” said his wife, music teacher Maryann Cummins.

“If you have an ugly campus, you have to have good teachers,” she said. “And you have to have students who want to come for the teachers and curricula rather than for campus beauty or prestige.”

Teacher and curricula combine neatly in Jeff Cooper’s classroom. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Cooper was hired to teach students like Wade Graham in a course modeled after St. John’s College in Maryland. Students study 120 “great books” over four years there to earn a baccalaureate.

At Crossroads, students in grades seven through 12 compete to enter Cooper’s seminar and may stay in it four years. The 16 who are successful each year meet to discuss one book for four hours each week, and have a one-on-one tutorial with Cooper one hour a week.

Graham, a senior who said he wants to study Latin American literature at either Harvard, Berkeley or Columbia next year, explained the course’s appeal.

“We deal with the books, not grades,” he said. “And we have really good discussions because you don’t get into the class unless you really want to.”

Amo, Amas, Amat

Whether they want to or not, all 600 students must study two years of Latin at Crossroads, four years of English, three of math and two each of history, laboratory science and foreign language.

Classical Greek I, II, III (and next year, IV) are not required--and few students are registered to take them. Yet, while listening to five students in the first-year class read from Plato, Cummins said he did not think courses in the ancient language should be dropped.

“Is a class like this cost-effective?” the headmaster asked. “The answer is no, but I think we have to keep it in our curriculum. Someone has to.”

The overall student-teacher ratio is 15 to 1, but that varies, depending on the specific class: The Greek III class has two students and a general English class may have 40 students.

That the school has any sort of high-level academic curriculum at all is a surprise to many educational observers, Cummins said, because Crossroads is primarily known for its performing arts program.

That view was echoed by Leonard Richardson, an educational consultant who reported on Crossroads for the government study.

“The quality of their programs in the arts in my experience has no peer,” said Richardson, who has headed private schools on both coasts during the last 23 years.

“I’ve never seen anything like their orchestra, for instance. . . . This is one of the few schools where a young musician can develop his art to a legitimately professional level.”

Indeed, former Crossroads students fill the first three violin chairs in the Yale University orchestra. Of the 20 current members of the Crossroads orchestra, eight have soloed with major symphonies and two--violinists Robert Chen and Maya Iwabuchi--have soloed with both the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics.

Their conductor, Los Angeles Philharmonic principal violist Heiichiro Ohyama, has invited star cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Emmanuel Ax to give seminars.

High Performance Level

According to Richardson, the orchestra’s level of performance is as much an achievement of the school’s atmosphere of mutual respect as of recruitment.

“A youngster who plays an instrument as capably as those in the orchestra has to be in an educational environment where there is the understanding about the time that has to go into that kind of work,” Richardson said. “It’s like an athlete that has to have time to train.”

In a brief conversation with another teacher, Maryann Cummins unwittingly gave a lesson in such understanding.

Speaking candidly about her mild disappointment in the lunch-hour recital of a 15-year-old pianist, Maryann Cummins said:

“I told her to stop trying to be an ‘A’ student (in all subjects). ‘If you want to be a top music student,’ I said, ‘you have to settle for an A-minus or B-plus.’ ”

Richardson said that that kind of “intelligent but necessary prioritizing” does not take place in most private or public schools.

The school evolved from an October, 1970, meeting among the parents of sixth-grade students at an elementary school attached to St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Santa Monica. (The school, with 179 students, is now Crossroads’ K-6 campus.)

According to Cummins, who was headmaster at the school, the parents wanted their children to attend seventh grade at a place “that would have a genuine economic and social mix of students--not an elitist private private school, but one that would reach out to the community.”

Cummins said he, assistant headmaster Rhoda Makoff and six other “good old-fashioned idealists” founded Crossroads the following September. To reach out to the community, they decided to require each student to take part in a civic project--such as working with the homeless or with elderly nursing home patients--in their junior and senior years. To achieve the racial mix, he said, they decided to put 10% of their budget aside each year for financial aid. That amounts to $400,000 this year.

Many of the aid students are budding talents in the arts.

Students like En Sik Choi, who was found practicing his viola in a tiny rehearsal room. The 17-year-old musician was one of two violists discovered by then-Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra associate conductor Myung-Whun Chung in Korea two years ago and was given a full scholarship.

Choi, who is living at Cummins’ Santa Monica Canyon home, explained why he left his family.

“If I had stayed in Seoul,” he said, “I would not have been able to play with better students and teachers. This is a terrific school because they are measuring you for the future.”

A walk over the campus with Cummins reveals another Crossroads attribute: It is a casual, comfortable place. No uniforms, no ivy-covered walls, little rowdiness.

Richardson, the educational consultant, said the school’s informality startled him.

“Sometimes informality leads to sloppiness,” he said. “But at Crossroads it seems to balance the tension that any kind of excellence creates.

“The school is really quite at ease with itself. I felt the students and faculty respected each other, and I find that very healthy.”

Richardson said he thought the school’s physical limitation is its only drawback. But, he said, “there is a lot less concern about the neatness of the room,” he said, “than there is about what takes place in it.”