Hard Reality Ends High Hopes for Principal : Education: Ruby Cremaschi- Schwimmer set out to turn around troubled Lincoln High School. She resigned after achieving some of her goals, but also had some bitter disappointments.

What a difference four years can make.

In September, 1986, when Ruby Cremaschi-Schwimmer roared into Lincoln High School as its dynamic new principal, expectations ran unlimited as to what she could accomplish in turning around the school’s long-tarnished role in educating students from a predominantly black Southeast San Diego neighborhood.

Her enthusiasm, augmented by a large group of new, committed teachers, a major infusion of special money for new curricula and a spruced-up campus, all promised strong improvements at Lincoln. The school was saddled with the county’s lowest high-school test scores and daily average attendance, the highest dropout rates, sagging teacher morale, and a refusal by many neighborhood parents to consider the school for their children.

Cremaschi-Schwimmer resigned her principal post effective last week, concluding 22 years as a teacher and administrator in San Diego city schools. The bubbling rhetoric of 1986 has become a quiet, sober accounting of the pluses and minuses of her tenure in what Board of Education President Kay Davis, echoing educators throughout the city, called “one tough, tough job.”

Cremaschi-Schwimmer is leaving both because of health fears stemming from the accumulated stress and criticism associated with an inner-city school, and because of frustration that the excitement and attention from 1986 have dissipated, resulting in less visible support from top schools administrators, at a time when the problems of minority education still show few signs of going away.

Cremaschi-Schwimmer can point to sustained improvements during her tenure: significantly higher daily student attendance; significantly lower dropout rates; a college-preparatory curriculum and elimination of low-level math and English courses; a clean, graffiti-free campus; an administration free of crisis management and racial tension; and a greater number of students who believe learning is not something only for white students to pursue.

Last week’s graduating class of 188 students was the largest ever at the school, and all 188 were fully qualified to graduate, in contrast with recent years when up to half the total number of students allowed to march in ceremonies were deficient in one or more graduation requirements.

But Cremaschi-Schwimmer also faces the fact that standardized achievement test scores have barely changed during her four years--in fact, some California Assesment Program (CAP) results for grade 12 have declined. Lincoln ranks last among all county schools in its 12th-grade CAP math and reading scores, the major annual measurement of the state’s educational pulse, and it ranks in the lowest 1% among all schools statewide with similar socioeconomic student factors.

The low test scores, in spite of all efforts so far, have been a source of embarrassment and tension, eating up an inordinate amount of staff time as teachers brainstorm over what additional things they can do, from changing teaching styles to emphasizing parent education, to boost the numbers.

In addition, Cremaschi-Schwimmer continues to burn over the decision by trustees two years ago to make the troubled, nearby Gompers Secondary School an all-magnet 7th-through-12th-grade facility, meaning that no longer must Gompers 8th-grade graduates automatically move to Lincoln for the 9th grade. The plan eliminated Lincoln’s only feeder school, and has cut the numbers of its freshmen and sophomore classes by almost two-thirds during the past two years.

Cremaschi-Schwimmer also bears the pain of personal attacks last fall by some members of the black community, as expressed anonymously in the community publication “Voice and Viewpoint.” They castigated her for having a white husband and for wearing colored contact lenses, linking aspects of her personal life to her ability to relate to black students--58.4% of the student body.

(While traditionally one of the most heavily black schools in the city, Lincoln has steadily become more diverse during the past four years, with Latino enrollment growing from 16% to 21% and Indochinese enrollment from 2% to 13% after Cremaschi-Schwimmer encouraged neighborhood Lao students not to bus to out-of-area schools. White enrollment, almost all of them students voluntarily busing under an integration program to a medical technology magnet program at the school, has dropped from 8% to 3.4%).

“I’d say my leaving is 50% my worrying about my health, the amount of stamina I can continue to bring to the job, and 50% my feeling that maybe the district has different goals and objectives than I do about (Lincoln’s) future,” Cremaschi-Schwimmer said in an interview.

The veteran educator, who turned 50 this year, said many members of her family have died in their 50s. “I was sicker this year than ever before in my entire teaching career and I got worried,” she said.

“Maybe I’d still be here next year if there hadn’t been the Gompers situation and some other things, but this is also a very demanding job and if I can’t give it everything I’ve got, then it’s time to move on.

“I know some will question my leaving and some will rejoice, but I don’t want anyone upset.”

Schools Supt. Tom Payzant praised Cremaschi-Schwimmer for her dedication, but also gently chastised her for letting the frustrations from the job color some of her judgments. Payzant selected her for the top post at Lincoln after a much-ballyhooed nationwide solicitation for the position turned up no outstanding candidates from outside the district.

“She didn’t hold back anything at all, and I think a number of students at Lincoln have made it (academically) and are better off today because of what Ruby, her teachers and a lot of parents have tried to do,” Payzant said.

Despite the low test scores, which Payzant also finds disappointing, he credited Lincoln’s staff with setting a positive academic tone that should gradually result in improved achievement numbers if the new principal--yet to be selected--builds upon the base established by Cremaschi-Schwimmer.

“I think Ruby realized over time that you can’t get everything done on commitment, will and charisma alone, and that is frustrating. But while there are all kinds of institutional and societal constraints, you can’t let them get in the way of chipping away at problems and coming up with some small victories, even if the final goal still seems to elude you.

“She found just how tough it is to sustain enthusiasm and commitment in the third or fourth year, after something is no longer new and getting all the attention.”

Payzant defended the district’s decision concerning Gompers, and said he believes the numbers of students will even out between Gompers and Lincoln. Many Gompers students will not want six years at that school’s specialized computer-math-science magnet but will choose Lincoln with its more comprehensive academic offerings and extracurricular activities, he said.

“It goes back to my point about sustaining things,” Payzant said. “At some point, after you have been given a lot of help and support and the benefit of the doubt, you must start to take on more of the responsibility for carrying out things at the local school, rather than relying on a continuing infusion of additional resources and over-and-above support from the outside.”

Patricia Harris, a Lincoln vice principal until this year, said Cremaschi-Schwimmer built attendance from less than 800 students, when the new program began, to more than 1,100 until the Gompers plan began reducing it to the present low 900s.

“It’s certainly disappointing when you know that better things are happening in the classroom, that you’ve attracted some really good teachers and kept some really good teachers from leaving, but don’t see the results with test scores,” Harris said.

“Ruby took the Gompers action personally, she took the test scores personally, that’s the way she is,” Harris said. That personality trait more than occasionally irritated Cremaschi-Schwimmer’s supervisors at the central administration when she badgered them for extra help for academics, educators said.

Social studies teacher Don Crawford, the former president of the San Diego Teachers Assn., said Cremaschi-Schwimmer handled personnel disputes and problems within the school, so that “no one had to run to the (school) board and complain all the time.”

“She has a strong personal leadership style you don’t find at a lot of schools,” he said, “and she would deal with students and teachers directly, not issuing orders from afar, and would frequently send notes telling us she saw something good and appreciated it.

“Ruby has the respect of the great majority of staff and we are very upset she is leaving, and it is particularly poignant because she’s not leaving under the best of circumstances.”

Crawford said the test-score situation bedevils teachers, especially since “we see students doing better in writing, in oral presentations.”

Crawford believes students in Southeast San Diego may approach standardized tests with little interest, in part because they do not see them as relevant to their future, and in part because their importance pales in comparison to gang or family troubles that interfere with a tight focus on academics.

“Frankly, maybe the level of our advanced courses do not reach the level of some yuppie suburban schools, but a big effort is being made to get to that point . . . and we do have a safe and positive learning environment. . . . The changes have not just been cosmetic.”

Board Vice President Shirley Weber said that Lincoln graduates showing up in her classes at San Diego State University show a more positive approach toward academics and a willingness to learn that is different from that in the past.

“They may not be at the top of the heap academically but they accept constructive criticism, and they know that they can make a difference if they work hard,” Weber said. “That has been a excellent result.”

Weber said that no one should have expected “total success” at Lincoln yet, given the need to change the defeatist attitudes Cremaschi-Schwimmer found when she took over and given “the fact that Lincoln is just one key component” in a total picture that includes improving academics at the elementary schools.

“It’s a total system thing, especially since you have students who haven’t had a good academic experience for nine long years. You can’t turn them around in a year. I know Ruby hasn’t accomplished everything she would have liked to, but I think what she has done has been tremendous.”

Weber, an outspoken advocate of more African-American cultural offerings within the San Diego city schools curriculum, said the criticism of Cremaschi-Schwimmer’s personal life by some black activists was misplaced.

“If you get into a black nationalist philosophy, then such a person sees statements of green eyes or weaved hair or a white husband as a statement of being an Oreo, of being black but saying that he or she would really love to be a white,” Weber said.

The statements against the principal came while she was working out a problem with some student cheerleaders and their parents over how attachments in braided hair--popular among black girls--could be worn during competitions without flying off and causing eye injuries to colleagues.

“It was resolved,” Weber said. “And I don’t see how (Cremaschi-Schwimmer’s) own hair style has any connection to the level of commitment to the kids at Lincoln.”

Community activist Walter Kudumu credits Cremaschi-Schwimmer not only with making parents feel welcome at Lincoln--by setting up a parent reception room next to her office and training them in how to make classroom observations--but in encouraging Kudumu to go forward with his Campaign for Parent Involvement in Education (CPIE).

“She has attempted, sometimes against great odds, to get students to view education as a viable way to a future, to put it on a par with athletics, which has traditionally been seen as all that is excellent at Lincoln.”

Kudumu said he stands by Cremaschi-Schwimmer 100%. “There are always shortcomings but I say to those who have criticized her for her own personal life, they have been nowhere near that campus to help her, to help do any work for the school.”

While she says that no one should feel sorry for her--”I know I’ve moved Lincoln from point A to at least point C or point D”--Cremaschi-Schwimmer admitted to personal pain over being criticized about how she relates to black students.

“For years I lived less than 10 minutes from Lincoln at 8th and Euclid, I’ve been part of the community, I know a lot of the people in the community,” she said. “How dare people say I’m not black? I’ve given everything I’ve got, now I’ve got to continue the fight for education in less stressful ways, but I’ve got my integrity intact.”