General’s Mission: Shape Up the Schools

The general arrives to review his troops, and they are giggling behind their fists. The corridors of power are lined with wall lockers, and John Stanford strides by like a stiff breeze, grabbing outstretched adolescent hands and stooping to pick up potato chip bags along the way. There’s one question he has for many of these young soldiers: “Do you have a hall pass?”

This is the retired major general, a friend of Colin L. Powell and former aide to the secretary of defense who helped oversee logistics for deploying 450,000 American troops in the Persian Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. His new chief of staff on the battlefields of academia is a retired brigadier general who served two tours in Vietnam, one as a Special Forces commander.

As superintendent of Seattle public schools, Stanford has a new mission: to lure middle-class parents back to the public schools; to raise test scores out of the doldrums; to figure out why minorities still score 30 points lower on tests than whites; to fix the financial mess that has cut $35 million out of the school budget--in short, to pick up where the professional educators have failed and turn around a big-city school system.

“There’s only one answer. That’s for guys like me to make this system work, and people like you to kick my rear end until I make it work,” said Stanford, who is perhaps the nation’s only school superintendent to arrive at an elementary school assembly in an Army Reserve helicopter.

“It’s not hopeless,” he said to a constituency accustomed to hearing that it is precisely that. “You know, we are not powerless. We have all these people who’ve been nibbling on the edges. You’ve gotta use the principle of mass. The principle of mass is a tool of war, where you amass all your resources in one place in order to have an effect.”

In the year since he launched his assault on the public schools, Stanford has ridden over the 47,000-student system like a tank: Principals are now called CEOs, and will be given unprecedented authority to hire staff and select the curriculum at their schools; the entire collective-bargaining agreement with teachers has been superseded with a model “trust agreement,” the first of its kind in the country; mandatory busing is being phased out, and schools will have to compete with one another for students and money; pupils must take pass-or-fail exit exams in the third, fifth, eighth and 11th grades; several schools opened this year with a mandatory uniform policy, and all schools must decide by year’s end whether to adopt uniforms; one-quarter of the schools have been threatened with closure; teenage smokers may be offered nicotine patches to help them quit.

The old motto hanging at school district headquarters, “All Children Can Learn,” has been pulled down and a new one put up: “All Children Will Learn.”

“You can pay a military person no greater honor than to give them direct responsibility for the lives of others,” said Stanford, 58, who ran Fulton County, Ga., as a bureaucracy-busting county executive before signing on with the Seattle schools last year.

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“We have an interesting challenge with our children,” he said. “Only 10% of their time is spent in school, but we have 100% of the responsibility, in conjunction with their parents, to turn these children into productive citizens in 13 years. And I must tell you, it takes rocket science to do it.”

It is a message Americans seem to want to hear. In his appearance on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in August, Stanford “outperformed” actor Christopher Reeve and gun-control advocate Sarah Brady in swing-voter audience reaction, ABC News pollster Frank Luntz said, “because Stanford talked about policy, in addition to emotion.”

Seattle, with its prosperous middle class and stellar book-reading rates, has far to go to match the woes of America’s most troubled inner-city schools. But a city that prides itself on its quality of life has been struggling to prop up a school system whose bottom seemed ready to fall out.

Unstable funding has produced a fiscal crisis almost every year; middle-class parents have flocked to private schools, sending enrollment plummeting by half in the last 30 years; test scores have been mediocre, with a widening gap for minority students.

The last superintendent, William Kendrick, retired before the end of his contract amid growing community impatience for change in the schools. Minority parents were demanding an increase in their children’s test scores; the school board was pushing for a more decentralized administration.

Even more troubling, students in a recent survey complained that teachers weren’t doing anything about students smoking and taking drugs at school. Some 88% of high school students, and 86% of eighth-graders, said they had tried drugs; 16% of the girls said they had been the victims of forced sexual intercourse; and 40% said they or a friend or family member had been shot at.

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“If you actually cared,” wrote one student, “you wouldn’t sit there and give us condoms and wipe our tears when our friend gets shot and killed, you would tell us what is right and wrong and that there are consequences to our actions. DO SOMETHING!!!”

So somebody did, or tried to. Stanford was hired.

“The public is saying, ‘You [the school system] need to be run more efficiently, and you need to be accountable,’ ” said school board president Linda Harris. “We had a whole system of educators who were trained in administration, and what we needed to be looking for was someone who knows how to run systems, manage and lead.”

Stanford came, she said, and it turned out he had opinions about how to educate students too. They weren’t anything he had learned from an educational-administration text, he admitted. They were things he wondered about as a citizen, an employer, a parent.

“I don’t think we expected to have a non-educator ask questions to educators: Why are you doing this? Why aren’t you focusing on this? Suddenly, the educators had to justify what they were doing,” Harris said. “Why isn’t reading your primary focus, and why aren’t families your primary focus? Educators were so busy inside the trees looking at all their little programs, they hadn’t really asked some of those very basic questions that somebody who knows nothing is going to ask.”

A districtwide reading campaign was a first effort, exhorting every adult in the city to spend 30 minutes a day reading to a child: their own child, if they had one, somebody else’s if they didn’t. Corporate and merchant partnership agreements were set up to restock the schools’ aging libraries, and one wealthy grocery executive agreed to sponsor a school with a $1-million grant.

Then Stanford set about giving the schools a mission, making sure everybody was working on the same mission, and making them accountable for getting it done.

Every teacher has to develop a syllabus and contact every parent at the beginning of the year to make sure they know what the student has to learn each week--and when he or she will be tested on it. Systemwide “alignment” makes sure students in the same grade are learning the same skills, and quarterly progress reports ascertain how students are measuring up.

A “customer service center” is set up at the district office, and when a parent calls, the phone is answered by the third ring. CEOs will have the authority to determine, in consultation with parent and staff committees, what teachers they want at their schools and what programs best fit the students in their neighborhoods--a policy that undermines a long-standing policy of allowing senior teachers to pick their assignments.

Indeed, some teachers--and parents--have worried that Stanford’s push for stricter standards and exit exams fails to take into account the needs of some low-achieving students who need special consideration. “One parent came in and said, ‘Do you know what that will do to my child’s self-esteem, if you give him that exam and he fails?’ ” recalled Susan Llewellyn, Stanford’s executive assistant. “He told them, ‘What will happen to his self-esteem when he’s 23 years old and still living at home with you and can’t find a job?’ ”

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Stanford has taken hits from parents and students alike about school uniforms. The school board abruptly reined him in last year when he unilaterally proposed closing a quarter of the district’s schools. Proposals for things like parent report cards landed with resounding thuds.

“Sometimes it just seems like things are moving too fast, and there’s not adequate input,” said PTA council president Lisa Bond, who has nonetheless been an enthusiastic supporter of the new superintendent. “Sometimes, I worry that he’s surrounded by yes men, and the professional educators who are supposed to be tempering his enthusiasms could maybe work a little harder to bring it back to how children learn.”

For Stanford, all he has to do is walk out the front door. One recent morning, a group of workers across the street began hooting and whistling as Stanford strode out of a central-city junior high school. When Stanford glanced up, they held their thumbs aloft.

“I have so much public support that it’s difficult to resist me,” he said. “I wanted every teacher to call every parent in class before school started. I was told, ‘You can’t do that. The unions will really complain about that.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ This isn’t a union issue; it’s a leadership issue. I said, ‘Do it.’ Hey, what happens if we go to the public and tell the public that the teachers do not want to call the parents in those classrooms?”

Taking a cue from the landmark agreement signed recently between the United Auto Workers and General Motors’ Saturn plant, Seattle teachers became the first school employees in the nation to supersede their contracts with a seven-page “trust agreement.” Under it, teachers are guaranteed an “authentic role” in all decision-making, in exchange for which they agree to submit employment issues to mediation, with Stanford and the union chief in charge.

“It is a radical departure from the way management and unions function,” said Roger Erskine, executive director of the Seattle Education Assn., the teachers union. “It’s a bold step that moves away from the old adversarial relations that exist between unions and management.”

While he has been wooing the teachers, Stanford has been strong-arming the principals. An unprecedented one-third of all principals were transferred for this school year, and some of them were told they wouldn’t be asked back if they did not make good in their second-chance postings.

Next, he laid down the law. “I told them I have three unrecoverables for principals. No. 1 is to follow a policy that would lead to the catastrophic injury or death of a student. Unrecoverable No. 2 is the failure to plan for the academic achievement of every student. Unrecoverable No. 3 is the failure to lead.”

At Meany Middle School--a troubled central Seattle junior high where test scores were lagging up to 18 points below the district average, minority enrollment was 76% and overall enrollment was plummeting because nobody wanted to go there--Stanford established a magnet school focusing on the arts, math and science.

An integrated curriculum blends all three categories in an attempt to give learning more real-life meaning. Students stay together as a small class for much of their learning, study in longer, 80-minute blocks and stay with the same teachers for at least two years. Students wear uniforms of blue skirts or trousers and white shirts. In a controversial move, teachers who could, in the old style, teach only a single subject were moved out and replaced with instructors comfortable in multiple disciplines.

CEO Marella Francois-Griffin said she had to butt heads with some of the old staff at the school. “What I said to them was, ‘Is this the best we can do for students? Is this the best way of teaching? And if so, why aren’t we getting results? If so, please explain to me the declining enrollment.’ ”

Meany opened last month with a waiting list.

When several football players at Nathan Hale High School were threatened recently by a group of students with a gun, Stanford responded swiftly with a policy rewarding students with cash for avoiding violence. Under the new system, classes will earn $100 for each incident-free month, with up to $1,000 per class available at the end of the year for field trips, class parties or other projects.

“If you can harness peer pressure, then you can harness student behavior,” said Stanford, despite reservations from parents who say the policy--paying kids to behave--sends the wrong message.

The focus of controversy during the last few weeks has been the district’s announcement that it will phase out its 20-year-old desegregation busing policy and allow parents to send their children to their neighborhood school, or any other school in the district. The decision mirrors a number of other school districts across the country abandoning their busing programs.

The reason is simple, says Stanford, who is black: Bus rides, some of them as long as 45 minutes, integrated the schools but did not succeed in raising the level of academic achievement for minorities. White students make up 41% of enrollment in Seattle schools.

“Maybe in ‘75, ‘54, this kind of dispersal pattern may have made sense. But today, a child is not necessarily motivated by riding through somebody else’s neighborhood, going to sit down next to some other child, with the presumption that sitting down next to that child will cause that child to learn,” he said.

“We’ve gone out in the public and asked them, ‘What is it that you want in your school system?’ And what they have said to us is a very simple statement: high-quality schools, close to home.”

Under the new plan, middle-class north-end schools will get whiter, poorer south-end schools darker, but Stanford is proposing a radical financing plan that will assure that schools with high percentages of low-income students get more money--in some cases, a lot more, funding smaller class sizes and expensive enrichment programs.

Schools throughout the district will be thrown open to competition, with funding based on enrollment and enrollment based on which school is able to offer the most attractive programs.

“Every school is going to create their own academic plan, and as an outcome of their plan they’re going to have to figure out what they want to buy, what their staff is going to look like,” said Joseph Olchefske, an investment banker recruited by Stanford as the district’s new chief financial officer.

“My punch line on this is right now we’re in the school business, and really we should be in the student business,” Olchefske said. “Ultimately, resources are going to follow the students. If we find a school that is not drawing well, I think that says something about the nature of that school, and that we’d better intervene. Will they be put in the position of competing with each other? Absolutely.”

Stanford’s own report card has yet to be issued. With only a year at the helm, educators say, it is too early to say whether his reforms will work. One early indication was test scores for the first year; although the district shifted to a much more difficult standardized test, overall scores were about the same, an outcome most district officials see as a net gain.

“I tell them, ‘Focus on children,’ ” Stanford said. “Let me go fix the financial problems. Let me go fix the respect for teachers. I’ll go out and do that. You all go out and focus on the children.”

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Profile: John Henry Stanford

* Age: 58

* Hometown: Native of Yeadon, Pa.

* Education: Graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Received master’s degree in personnel management and administration from Central Michigan University.

* Career highlights: 30-year career as an officer in the U.S. Army. Retired with the rank of major general. Served in several Pentagon jobs, including executive assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, 1981-84. County manager in Fulton County, Ga. Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, Sept. 1, 1995, to present.

* Salary: $140,000 plus $35,000 retirement annuity plus $10,000 potential merit pay based on evaluation (still underway for last year.)

* Family: Married to Patricia Corley, two children, Steven and Scott.