COLUMN ONE : Boardroom Traded for Classroom : Bill Crowfoot gave up his corporate law career to teach. His rewards so far are unruly students, broken air-conditioning and, occasionally, a sign that he is making a difference.

It was right around Easter when he decided to chuck it all--the big salary, the skyscraper view. Bill Crowfoot, corporate lawyer and Pasadena city councilman, remembers he was drafting a boring legal document when he found himself muttering: “This is ridiculous.”

When word got out, of course, people talked. Some said he was grandstanding; some wondered if it was a mid-life thing. No matter. The idea he had mulled for eight years hardened into a resolve: to do something that would make a difference, something closer to home, something like . . . teaching school.

“I had a desire to do something deeply satisfying at a personal level,” the 39-year-old would later say of his choice. In less guarded moments, he would speak of a longing to connect: “Underneath it all, you know, you look for the tender hearts.”

And so last Monday, Bill Crowfoot, councilman and attorney at law, became Mr. Crowfoot in Room 133--a bespectacled rookie teacher in a sweltering, dun-colored annex on the backside of Pasadena’s Blair High School.

There, with five rooms full of high school kids and an emergency teaching permit provided because of his language skills, Crowfoot has begun a singular journey through the lofty aspirations and harsh realities of today’s urban public schools.

In short order, he has gotten a front-line look at what teachers mean when they talk about education reform: The bilingual programs that thrust youngsters from Bosnia and El Salvador into a one-room schoolhouse of a class; the gangbangers who throw signs when they raise their hands; the immigrants who know well the roots of political conflict but need a refresher course when the subject of sexual harassment comes up; the teen-agers who would rather flunk than risk being called “schoolboy” by carrying a notebook to class; the youngsters who can’t write except to sign their names; the outdated books, the miserable pay--and, yes, the “tender hearts.”

This is the story of Crowfoot’s first week at Blair High--the odyssey of a man who, like most people, has dreamed of making a difference, and who, unlike most, has acted on his fantasy. But it is also a story about the uphill battle that is public education today, and the daily struggle to turn good intentions into good schools.

‘Buenos Dias!’

About 100 teen-agers a day file in and out of Room 133, split into five groups that look nothing like schoolchildren on TV. First period is English I for students in the school’s bilingual education program, technically known as English Language Development or ELD.

Thirty-one years ago, when it opened, Blair High was a predominantly white school. Kids walked there from the affluent homes surrounding it. But the kids grew up, the homeowners aged, busing set off a wave of white flight, and now just about everyone who can afford to live in the bungalows and mansions within walking distance of Blair is either retired or has their children in private school.

Today, about 90% of Blair’s 1,226 students come from a mile or more away, and a substantial number of them live in the poorer parts of town. Nearly half the students are on welfare; 59% eat free or reduced-price school lunches. About half--48%--are Latino, 37% are African American and the remainder are split evenly between Asian American and white. One in five is in ELD.

Technically, Crowfoot was hired to teach ELD social studies, but that plan changed about a week before school began. When he showed up for the in-service days that teachers use to prepare for the start of the year, he was told that, by the way, his schedule would include beginning and intermediate English. And he was asked if he might not like a senior economics class for mainstream students as well.

At first, he panicked. Besides never having taught a day in his life, he had no idea how a second language might be conferred. He himself had nearly flunked high school French, and was fluent in Spanish mainly because he had lived in Puerto Rico when he was a child.

Don’t worry, his colleagues told him. All first-year teachers have to learn on the fly. Just follow the textbook. We’ll help you out.

And so, there he stood as his first students filed in on the first day, giggling and chattering in Spanish.

“Buenos dias!” he announced.

“Buenos dias!” the class replied in unison. It was the sort of response, he later learned, that you get only from first-year ELD students, who tend not to know that they can get by with far less courtesy.

But these were new immigrants, that most conscientious of high school castes. No one was rapping. No one was lipping off. The only baseball cap was facing forward--until Crowfoot informed the wearer of the school’s no-hats rule. Then the cap was quickly stashed under one of the chipped wood-and-metal desks.

It was hard to imagine a teacher looking more out of place in this class of 21 Latinos: Blond hair, round glasses, broad pink face, the white Oxford-cloth shirt and khakis he wore on “casual Fridays” at his old law firm.

But then he opened his mouth and out came the one weapon he could wield in the face of inexperience and long odds--a stream of impeccable Spanish, professional, courtly, erudite. He called the roll, and to the palpable amazement of every kid in the room, had each come to the front and shake his outstretched hand, making the sort of eye contact that had worked so well in the last election year.

“Bienvenido, Alfaro!” he said respectfully. The boy shifted his weight and smiled at the floor. “Buenos dias, Omar . . . Bienvenida, Ana . . . Ricardo . . . Pedro . . . Julio . . . “

The first day was supposed to be procedural--there were class rules to be explained, attendance cards to be filled out. Even so, a subtle sizing-up was taking place on both sides. The scrutiny was exhausting. At the end of the period, Crowfoot sank into his chair and exhaled.

“God, this is one tough business,” he said. And this was his easiest group. Only once had a kid tried to push him, striding in late, a pimply class clown with a friendly grin and gangbanger pants four sizes too big.

A Teacher Is Born

Except for the Spanish, there wasn’t much in his background that could have prepared him for Blair High. His father, an American, worked for a sugar company in Puerto Rico. His Yugoslavian mother spoke several languages.

His own education had been at Catholic schools. He could read as a toddler and skipped first grade. Still, there were traumas. In high school, for instance, when his family’s fortunes turned, he became the poorest child in his class.

Had it not been for a special teacher, he now says, adolescence might have been unbearable. But Dona Minin, who would invite groups of her best students home with her for Coca-Cola and seminars on politics and literature, saw to it that he ended up with a scholarship to a prestigious college, Haverford, in Pennsylvania.

He majored in political science and went on to George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. And because it was the era of the lawyer, of venture capitalism and international deals, he became an attorney specializing in Latin American affairs, first with the Inter-American Development Bank and then with the Los Angeles firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker.

But as time passed, he said, he began to feel that something was missing in his work.

Always interested in politics, he had become active first in his neighborhood association in Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven district of historic homes. Then, when a new City Council district was carved out in his largely Latino sector of the city, he launched a door-to-door campaign, and--with the aid of his Spanish--won the seat in 1993.

The race created a small furor at the time among the community’s local political types, in part because Crowfoot’s opponent was a Latino backed by the Pasadena Establishment. Crowfoot was accused of condescension; on election night, an African American councilman who had endorsed his opponent threw a lighted cigarette at him and vowed to make him rue the day he had decided to run.

Instead, Crowfoot said, “being a city councilman was far more than I expected it to be,” he said. “It was interesting and exciting and wearying and thrilling and emotionally captivating in a way I don’t think I was fully prepared for.”

Among other things, he said, his public service got him deeply involved with one particular family of Latino immigrants. When one of the children, a 13-year-old boy, befriended him and began asking for advice, he found himself thinking about every aspect of his community in terms of that one child.

Crowfoot, who has no children of his own, said his wife gently urged him not to get carried away. “She said, ‘Don’t be a hero--let’s have a reality check,’ ” he said. “But it just took hold of my imagination.”

He thought back to his old teachers and how the best had enthralled him. He remembered a point between jobs when he had toyed with the idea of teaching, but rejected it because the pay seemed so low.

Now, however, the money seemed less important.

“I didn’t want to have two lives so wholly apart from each other--one corporate, bill-’em-$250-an-hour life, where to be really at the service of the firm and clients, you really had to be there all the time, and then this other life that was very local, very rooted,” he said.

California schools have relied increasingly in recent years on internship programs and emergency credentialed teachers to helm burgeoning bilingual classrooms. Under a 14-year-old state policy, school districts with large numbers of non-English-speaking students are required to teach those children in their native language wherever possible until the students attain English proficiency.

That policy has meant, among other more controversial things, a rising demand for bilingual teachers statewide. While the population of non-English-speaking students grew by 150% in the past decade, the number of fully credentialed bilingual teachers has increased by only 30%.

So schools like Blair have scrambled. According to the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the number of long-term emergency teaching permits issued for bilingual high school teachers has more than doubled in the past five years.

Consequently, when Crowfoot put out the word he might be interested in teaching social studies--in Spanish, no less--the district welcomed him with open arms.

The job, he was told, would pay more than the standard $26,000 starting salary for first-year teachers because he had an advanced degree, but the increase was nothing to shout about. He had no teaching experience, after all, and even at the top of the pay scale, according to union figures, the most a Pasadena public school teacher can make--with 20 years experience--is $53,570 a year.

He didn’t care. He figured he and his wife, who is a UCLA doctoral student, could maintain their modest lifestyle on his City Council salary and his paycheck from Blair. He called his boss and gave notice.

“He was a well-respected lawyer here,” said Rey Rodriguez, an attorney who had worked closely with Crowfoot for three years. “Everybody was kind of shocked.”

Critics would soon be accusing him of ulterior motives. Some wondered whether the job change was really such a sacrifice. Why didn’t he just do it for free? Local conservatives worried that he might use his job as a platform to foist his liberal views on young minds. Even a few of his new colleagues questioned his sincerity.

“I wonder if he has political aspirations,” said one teacher, who requested anonymity. “Maybe he wants to run for state Assembly--who knows?”

Let them think what they will, Crowfoot said. “This was not intended to boost my profile as a politician,” he said. “If it does, so be it. I did this because it seemed compelling to do right now.”

Welcome to School

As urban schools go, Blair High is not as battered and crime-plagued as, say, some schools in the inner city. But neither is it a shining example of higher learning at its best. The tree-dotted campus, with its view of the San Gabriel Mountains, has some lovely spots. Room 133 isn’t one of them.

The classroom is a plain brown box in a plain brown building that is euphemistically known as “The Bungalow.” In truth, it looks like a barracks, and Crowfoot’s classroom is on its backside, which fronts the Pasadena Freeway.

Carrying on a conversation in that room with the door propped open is exactly like conversing next to an overpass. But throughout the first week of school, the door remained ajar because the air-conditioning had broken.

When Crowfoot complained, he was told that there were only two air-conditioning repairmen in the entire district, and one had called in sick because of the heat. So, as temperatures soared, he and his students relied on a single fan.

By mid-morning, the room was as suffocating as a sauna. Kids were panting at their desks. “This could be an OSHA violation,” he said at midday, appalled.

Eventually, he borrowed cooler rooms from other teachers for his afternoon classes, but it was a disorienting compromise and late morning remained stifling. The lunchtime bell sent everyone dashing for the white ceramic hall fountains, where the water was lukewarm but better than none.

No one had told him, he said, how many obstacles there would be. For example, there are no lockers. Like many schools, Blair had them removed so that students would have no place to stash guns and drugs. However, that also meant they would have no place for school supplies unless they carried backpacks, which in certain circles are deemed uncool.

In every one of Crowfoot’s classes there were kids who arrived without pencils or paper. In one class, there was only one sheet of notebook paper, and that was on the desk of a boy who spent the period filling it with an exquisitely-rendered illustration of a flower bursting into bloom.

Veteran teachers said it is common for the tough guys in school to coerce the weaker ones into loaning them paper and taking notes for them. In fact, they said, there was a time when the school kept extra supplies to head off that sort of thing, but it got too costly.

And that was just the beginning. When Crowfoot assigned a one-page essay in intermediate English, he made an alarming discovery: “Two of my kids basically told me they couldn’t write anything but their names.” It is a common theme among bilingual teachers, he later learned. An increasing number of ELD students have been arriving from the Third World, where schooling is minimal at best.

Then there were the logistic problems.

His afternoon social studies classes for ELD kids were a daunting jumble of grade levels and languages: In one class, he was supposed to teach U.S. History to half the class and World History to the other from a set of textbooks with no relationship to the state-mandated framework for social studies and that had been written and published in Spain.

And in the other class, his assignment was to teach government to an 18-year-old Bosnian refugee while delving into U.S. History with eight Mexican and Central American youngsters. At one point there was also a Thai teen-ager who needed social studies instruction, but he got his schedule changed and dropped the class.

No one knew much English, although the Bosnian girl said she did.

“Where are you from?” Crowfoot asked.

“I speak Italia?” the tall, blonde girl guessed.

Each of his classes was fraught with social problems.

Take intermediate English, where most of the kids had been U.S. residents for a year or more. There, a thin boy with a shaved head and flapping clothes wrote his gang moniker on his attendance card. When he raised his hand, he used his neighborhood gang sign.

In fourth-period history, a suave-looking boy with an earring pulled the hair of the pert Salvadoran girl in front of him until she batted her hand at him to stop. In rapid Spanish, Crowfoot firmly explained the concept of sexual harassment. The moment Crowfoot turned his back, the boy yanked another strand of hair from her head.

In a writing assignment, student after student wrote of ambitions to get into high-tech, but none could spell “computer.” They wrote “conpuror,” or “compurer,” spelling it the way it sounds to a Spanish ear.

Then there was the perennial issue of control. The third-period economics class, his only class of mainstream students, was like a pack of lions in captivity.

“Damn! It’s hot in here!” they shrieked as they stomped to their desks. When he tried to address them, they talked right over him, shouting over each other and across the room. “Oooh, man, didn’ you hear? He crashed his car , man, no lie. . . . “ “Hey, girl! You know that ain’t true, get outta here. . . .”

When a desk didn’t suit them, they shoved it away and dragged another one into place. One boy spent an entire period Wednesday sketching an elaborate portrait of Goro, the muscle-bound Mortal Kombat hulk, while Crowfoot tried to discuss the components of macroeconomic theory.

Crowfoot worked to keep his sense of humor.

When he asked whether any had part-time jobs, a kid in sagging pants and a T-shirt yelled, “Gangsta!”

“Ah,” said Crowfoot, “the informal economy.”

From the beginning, Crowfoot realized that he needed to establish control. Some kids were rooting for him. A football player who sat in the front hung around after class and invited him to come watch him play. A girl named Naomi watched him struggle awhile with the elaborate paperwork involved in handing out books and then finally taught him a short cut all the other teachers used.

But it was clear they weren’t going to go out of their way to make it easy. And outside class, Crowfoot got mixed reviews.

“He’s a good teacher, but I think he needs more experience,” said Sady Berlioz, a 17-year-old son of a taxi driver who aspires to an engineering career. “It seems like he can’t really control the class.”

“I just feel bored,” added the Goro doodler, Jonathan Lazara, 18.

Learning to Teach

Despite the obstacles, Crowfoot knows these kids can be reached. Other teachers do it every day. Many Blair students excel. A few even get into the Ivy League.

At one point on Friday in Crowfoot’s economics class (after a brief visit from the assistant principal tamped down the pandemonium) there was a lively discussion on free-market competition. A student named Sharhonda wondered why there were so many phone companies. Kimberly and Naomi asked why the same big supermarket would call itself Ralphs in one place and Viva somewhere else.

For inspiration, he turns to teachers like Rich Miyagawa, the chairman of the ELD department, who has been at Blair nearly 30 years. His program to teach high-tech skills to ELD students has been lauded statewide. Last year, his students’ essays on Prop. 187 were posted on the Internet.

And then there’s Tony Navarro, Crowfoot’s mentor teacher in the classroom next door. Navarro’s classroom is orderly, runs like a clock. Navarro has maps and posters. His air-conditioning even works. Then again, he has been teaching for 25 years.

“I told [Crowfoot] my advice was to get out--now,” Navarro joked. “But he didn’t listen to me.”

Both men acknowledge that Crowfoot’s first few years will be difficult. Typically, it takes three to five years for a new teacher to feel comfortable in the job.

“The one thing he has going for him,” Miyagawa said, “is that he’s not a 24-year-old kid fresh out of UCLA who thinks he’s gonna wow the world. He’s an adult with tremendous people skills, and a lot of the kids in this school are children of his [council] constituents.”

Crowfoot’s weakness, he said, would be that of all new teachers--a lack of familiarity with teaching techniques. “You can’t just lecture to a group of 15-year-olds,” he said. “You’ll have them sleeping and putting on lipstick and reading comic books.

“It’s such a demanding profession,” Miyagawa said. “And yet, kids are great. They surprise you. And when they blossom? Wow. It’s awesome, it really is.”

So every night last week, Crowfoot was up past midnight, reading textbooks and drafting lesson plans. He wondered if it might help his English classes to learn vocabulary words that would expand their career horizons, words like dentist, technician, commercial district, hard drive.

In class, he improvised.

From Jenita, the Bosnian student, he scored the discovery that she felt the U.S. policy toward her country should have been more interventionist. Voila! He had her project for government class: Pretend that she is the Bosnian ambassador. How can she lobby U.S. institutions to sway foreign policy?

On Thursday, he tried a so-called “sponge activity,” used by teachers to soak up excess energy. When the kids in intermediate English walked in rowdy, he greeted them with an order to write in English the name of every place they had visited the day before. If they didn’t have paper, borrow it.

Despite all the hardships of the week, Crowfoot said after his classes Friday, there were some rewarding moments, enough to bring him back today. One he’ll carry with him if he were to never teach again.

It came on his very first day when he asked his students to speak in English so he could gauge their fluency.

“What is your name?” he asked one girl, the daughter of a Mexican car-wash worker.

“Maria Arroyo,” she replied, the English way, without rolling her Rs. Crowfoot paused. He looked into her eyes and softly said, “No.” He then pronounced her name as it had been given to her, with lilt and power and dignity.

“Just because you are speaking English,” he firmly said, “does not mean you have to mispronounce your own name.”

She looked up at him and smiled.

“Mah-rheee-a Ah-rhrrr-oyo,” she said, just listening to the sound of it, sitting up straight.

On her face, something flickered, like an awakening.