American Dream Just That at Inner-City Philadelphia School : Education: There are 14.6 million children living below the poverty line in U.S., including 90% of those at Stanton Elementary. School has made progress, but its students still lag behind, and its innovative principal has resigned.

Nadia, 8 years old, showed up on the old man’s front steps every afternoon like a stray cat wanting to be fed.

Both of her parents were crack addicts and, except for the abandoned house they used as a shooting gallery, she was homeless.

“It was like she said, ‘I’m not leaving,’ ” James Spruill explained with a laugh.

Three years later, the man Nadia refers to as her “grandfather” still sees her off to school each morning, gives her money for the movies on weekends and gloats over her honor-roll report cards.

“She’s a survivor,” said Deanna Burney, former principal of Stanton Elementary School.

Educators say there are 14.6 million children like Nadia in the United States living below the poverty line, and there are thousands of elementary schools like Stanton.

Nadia is one of the students featured in this year’s Academy Award-winning documentary, “I Am A Promise: The Children Of Stanton Elementary School.”

“We looked at this school as a microcosm,” said Alan Raymond, who made the movie with his wife, Susan. “Philadelphia is the seat of American democracy and freedom. We thought these children’s lives and how they have to grow up had symbolic meaning. They are growing up in another America. They are outside the American dream.”

The only grass a child at Stanton will see for blocks in any direction is painted on a wall in the schoolyard. Above the lush green is a blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. Children skip and play and turn cartwheels.

The mural almost mocks the real children as they turn out at recess. Although the shattered glass is swept to the edge of the 12-foot fence and the crack vials and hypodermic needles are picked up by security guards every morning, the children play penned in by streets of boarded-up row houses, a corner store with bars on the windows and adults idling on the corners.

These children bring to school with them the problems of two, sometimes three, generations, educators say.

“All of the problems of the community are dropped at the doorstep of the school,” Burney said.

Rotan Lee, president of the Philadelphia School Board, said inner-city schools are trying to do too much, and are doing too little of it well.

“The school district has become almost a surrogate parent,” Lee said. “We have to get back to reading, writing and arithmetic.”

Many inner-city teachers agree. Given the choice, they say, they’d much rather teach than parent the students. But, increasingly, they have no choice.

“You can’t overlook a hungry child, a cold child, a child who’s been awake all night, a child in dirty clothes,” said former Stanton teacher Dina Davis. “You can’t just say, ‘Teach him math.’ ”

Anthony, a second-grader at Stanton, pretends not to know his crack addict mother as she works her way up and down a nearby street. She smiles and waves to her son as he passes on his way home.

Like a third of all children in North Philadelphia, Anthony is being reared by someone other than a parent. Unlike Nadia, he did not pick out a kind-looking face in the neighborhood and attach himself. He is being reared by his paternal grandmother, Alberta Whitfield.

Whitfield, who has three grown children, didn’t want to rear another. But she felt she had little choice but to take her troubled grandchild out of foster care and try to give him family roots.

“I tell the teachers, ‘If you don’t work with me, if we don’t do something with this kid now, when he’s 16 he’ll be breaking into your car and busting your head,’ ” Whitfield said.

Ninety percent of the students at Stanton are being reared below the poverty line and by a single person, according to school district statistics. Last year, 75% of the students tested below the city average in reading; 67% tested below average in comprehension.

Five first-graders finished the year unable to identify one letter of the alphabet.

The results are worse than the national results for inner-city black children in grades K through 6. According to a 1992 report by the Council of the Great City Schools, 67% of black children in inner-city elementary schools scored below average in reading tests.

As poor as they were, the results showed improvement over the scores recorded before Burney arrived. Still, the frustration helped lead her to resign.

Burney’s departure was a blow to the school, several teachers say. Reared in foster homes herself, Burney said she understands inner-city students. In return for her understanding, she was loved by students and teachers.

Burney’s reputation as an innovative, dedicated leader was the deciding reason Stanton was chosen for the film, Raymond said. She not only boosted morale by cleaning up a leaking, rotting school building, she got parents into the classrooms and won districtwide awards for academic progress three consecutive years.

Burney became dispirited after a bureaucratic funding formula prevented her from getting an administrative assistant to take over mundane tasks. Only schools with 740 students could have an assistant, the rules said. Burney was 15 students short.

Stanton teacher John Coates worked with Burney to develop a pilot program for boys identified as problem learners. As a boy, Coates had encountered a similar experience and credits it with his success.

The two agreed they would admit girls as well if any parent challenged the program. None did, and parents worked to get their sons into the class, which was limited to 20.

Coates got nine of his boys on the honor roll.

When the American Civil Liberties Union asked why there were no girls in the program, the new principal canceled it.

The Clinton Administration proposes to increase funding to poor schools by $700 million--from $6.3 billion to $7 billion. The “Goals 2000” bill that the President recently signed outlines national educational standards for the first time.

Marshall Smith, undersecretary of education, said the Administration wants school-based management and community-oriented programs in inner-city schools.

“What we want to do is release the restraints, cut out a lot of rules and stimulate reform,” Smith said.