The Education of Patrick McCabe

On Monday, July 2, 2001, 45-year-old Patrick S. McCabe took up the post of Head of School and CEO at the elementary and middle school campus of Newbridge School, a private educational institution. Newbridge’s K-8 facility is located primarily in four wooden bungalows rented from the Good Shepherd Baptist Church at 16th and Pearl, cater-corner from Santa Monica College.

That morning McCabe discovered that Newbridge School had debts of nearly $250,000 and a total of $900 in cash. That week he met a polite IRS employee named Lester, who presented McCabe with an overdue payroll tax bill for $130,000. McCabe also learned that Newbridge was being sued by a former administrator, represented by Gloria Allred’s law firm, who claimed her firing had been the result of sexual discrimination.

Three weeks later McCabe came to work and found that during the weekend someone had broken into Newbridge and stolen the computers and office equipment. Also, the school’s pet puffer fish, Mr. Fugu, was dead. When two Santa Monica cops arrived, one mentioned that school thefts were common in the neighborhood. McCabe, outraged at the very notion, became agitated and had to be told firmly to calm down.

It might be timely to mention here that Pat McCabe is (a) 6-foot-4 and weighs 290 pounds; (b) a child of privilege, a devoted husband and father, and affluent by any conceivable definition of the word; (c) a person who had neither taught at nor administered any private or public school before July 2, 2001; and (d) was exactly 21 days into the most challenging, frustrating and personally fulfilling year of his life.

Last month, to not-quite-unanimous acclaim, McCabe started another school year at the helm of Newbridge--and another turn in his corkscrew journey through the American Dream. He hasn’t exactly taken a scholastic vow of poverty. And unlike former Colorado politico-turned-Los Angeles Unified School District honcho Roy Romer, he hasn’t taken on the challenge of turning around a 750,000-student urban school system. But let’s face it: These days, when everyone from W on down has his own pet theory on how to solve the nation’s educational woes, McCabe has gotten his hands dirtier and gotten closer to the solution than any think-tank theorist.

Even before Pat McCabe became only the second head of School in the 30-year history of Newbridge--after walking away from a sports/television/marketing career for which millions of middle-aged men would have traded every remaining hair on their heads--a persistent buzz had developed about him in certain upper-income sectors of Los Angeles. Other observers who knew a good story line when they heard one were also intrigued:

Was McCabe a saint? A dilettante? A point of light? A bull in a China shop? A dose of corrective medicine for an outmoded institution mired in the 1960s? Or maybe just a rich guy working through a midlife crisis?

At 8:45 a.m. on a Friday last fall, an invited guest perched on a metal folding chair at Newbridge’s weekly All-School Meeting. In a long, narrow loft located directly over the church’s pews sat 85 students. They ranged from giggling kindergartners in the first row to determinedly blase 11th graders in the rear. Their diverse mix of races, nationalities, sizes and shapes would have warmed the heart of many a TV sitcom casting director.

During a brisk 30 minutes, the student body heard, among other things, Juliet Biederman, Newbridge’s 32-year-old school director, read a letter from the director of a local theater company praising the contributions of a blushing sixth grader to the theater’s special post-Sept. 11 performance. A seventh grader played a tuneful rendition of a Bach prelude on his cello. Two guitar-playing teachers led a sing-along of one of the school’s favorites, “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love?”

During those proceedings, Pat McCabe, wearing khakis and a polo shirt, stood off to one side, arms crossed and working hard to look headmasterly. McCabe’s main contribution to the program was to step front and center and announce, in his capacity as head coach of two of the three athletic teams at Newbridge, a nugget of good news: the middle school boys basketball team, which because of enrollment limitations has only seven players (including a guard and a forward who, technically, are girls) had that week defeated Willows School, a rival so big and strong that it even has its own rooftop court.

“What are our priorities when we play sports?” he said.

“Have fun,” came the ragged response.

“And?” said McCabe.

“Try your hardest,” chanted the students.

“And the third and most important?”

A slight delay.

“Sportsmanship?” ventured one or two brave souls.

“That’s right,” said McCabe. “Now, everyone!”

“Sports! Man! Ship!” said the students and adults, in unison.

“When i told my family i was going to take this job,” McCabe said a few minutes later from behind his desk, “my son started crying. He said, ‘Are we going to lose our Lakers tickets?’ ”

A good question. McCabe won’t disclose his Newbridge salary--there are rumors he donates all of it, whatever it is, back to the school--but he does concede that it’s less than his annual expense account at a previous job. But no, he told 12-year-old Will McCabe, their pair of $150-a-game season seats were safe. So was the family’s north-of-Montana house in Santa Monica; Will and his younger sister Katie’s then-enrollment at John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air; his family’s membership in The Beach Club, an exclusive enclave on PCH; and his mother Nancy’s own 2-year-old midlife career change from TV movie development executive to freelance “life coach.”

On the other hand, as McCabe says during the course of numerous conversations during his first school year, there have been major lifestyle changes for him and his family.

“I’m working harder than I ever have,” he says. “I used to be able to walk out of my office and forget my job immediately. My time at home was strictly family time. Now I think about my job all the time. It’s like I have 75 families and 85 kids. I wake up at 3:05 in the morning like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got 85 kids and how am I going to keep the school going, where is the money going to come from? How are we going to do this? The lease is up next July. What happens then?’ ”

Although he likes his office at Newbridge (a small first-floor room with a great view of a sandbox) better than his previous one (in a Century City high-rise looking out over the neighborhood in which he grew up), and he treasures the daily contact with “his” kids, any Mr. Chipsian fantasies McCabe might have harbored evaporated his first day on the job. Since then, he says, he’s gotten support from friends and peers, although he suspects some wonder if he’s gone nuts. He also has made several other major discoveries and decisions since his arrival at Newbridge. One is that the school needs about 25 more students paying the average full fee of $11,500 per year to be financially viable. Another is that the vast majority of its teachers, who make a guilt-inducing $40,000 a year, are so talented and dedicated that he has no business whatsoever meddling in their classrooms. Most important, perhaps, is his certainty that without drastic changes the school he’s trying to rescue is doomed.

“To survive,” McCabe says, “Newbridge School has to be primarily for kids who are middle-to-upper income and middle-to-upper learning. But the middle kid who’s got a few problems, not totally disruptive, I want that kid.”

That means, he explains, that the percentage of students on financial assistance must be reduced from 40% to 15%. And that kids with special behavioral or learning problems who take up more than their share of class time--even a class that holds only 10 or 12 students--should attend a public or more specialized (probably more expensive) private school tailored to their needs.

“Schools aren’t businesses, but they have to be run like a business or they’re not going to succeed,” he says. Thereby, as they say in the made-for-TV movie world, hangs our “B Story.”

A K-12 private school founded in 1972, Newbridge was the brainchild--practically a real child, friends say--of the late Dr. Myron “Mike” Jacobson, who received his doctorate in education at NYU and was a Ford Foundation fellow. How people recall Jacobson these days is a Rorschach test of how they relate to pre-Reagan educational theory.

In the 1970s and 1980s, say alumni and former teachers, Newbridge contained a heady mixture of scholarship students from the inner city; middle-class kids battling (or not) their learning problems; and celebrity offspring, including, according to former Newbridge teacher Irwin Russo, the children of Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton, and Britt Ekland and Lou Adler.

Newbridge and another “alternative” school, Crossroads, were founded at about the same time. Jacobson was a friend of Paul Cummins, the former headmaster and recently retired president of Crossroads, now a prosperous and highly regarded institution with a partly unfair reputation for attracting overachieving children of rich and famous Westside liberals.

“The kids who Mike took in,” says Cummins, “were kids who, in some cases, were just on the verge of giving up on education as a viable means of preparing for their future, kids who were kind of mavericks, kids who were just not making it in their current school. And Mike would take them and give them affection, a reasonably demanding academic program--but make them feel like they could do it. And so he turned around a lot of lives.”

Scott Hunter, who has taught at Newbridge since the mid-’90s, remembers “Dr. Mike” giving him special instructions. “Mike took me aside and said: ‘One of your classes this year is going to be one-on-one with this kid who is very bright and has had a nervous breakdown. He’s spent many months out of the loop. He loves computers, hates books and reading. You’re going to be his English teacher.’ ”

Hunter fondly recalls having him read Douglas Adams’ “The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy,” then segueing successfully into Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” That year he helped the student overcome his fear of school and set him on the path to college. He also remembers that Jacobson never groomed a successor. Others remember another quirk: He would talk for hours about teaching but never about administration or finance.

Adds Cummins, “Mike was a pioneer who never got settled. He didn’t keep up with what was happening in the independent school world. He didn’t join the California Assn. of Independent Schools, which cuts down on the number of foundations you can go to [for money]. If you don’t have that Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, then the major foundations are going to say, ‘Well, that’s pleasant what you’re doing, but it’s not really substantial enough for us to invest in you.’

“And because Mike kept control of the school pretty close to himself, he never developed a strong board of trustees who could provide him with the financial support and the contacts to help him. He didn’t really do much fund-raising--except within his own little community.”

You might say the same thing about Pat McCabe, except that McCabe is perhaps one of the most well-connected men in Los Angeles. Among the individuals in his community, assembled during a hyper-gregarious life, are: Steve Kerr, the former Chicago Bull now with the San Antonio Spurs; exercise guru Kathy Smith; actor Chris O’Donnell; Michael Segal, CEO of FS Fred Segal; Scott Powell, an orthopedic surgeon and former member of the retro-rock group Sha Na Na; Ed Wilson, president of NBC enterprises and syndication; Thomas Hudnut, headmaster of Harvard-Westlake School; Joe Fitzgerald, executive vice president of investor relations and corporate communication for Metro Goldwyn Meyer Inc.; jazz bassist Marcus Miller; and Chris Lewis, Richard Riordan’s business partner.

McCabe is the son of the late Ted McCabe, a physically imposing, well-known attorney who taught a class for 13 years at USC Law School. Pat McCabe was raised in Cheviot Hills. He went to Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake School), where he was captain of the basketball team. He graduated from Wesleyan University, where he was president of his fraternity.

Says McCabe, “When I got out of Wesleyan, I was at a fork in the road and I could have walked right into Columbia grad school of education. I thought, OK, I am a coach. I see myself as a teacher. [But] I really wanted financial independence from my dad. Everyone always told me, ‘You’re big, you’re a good athlete, you’re funny, people like you, you should be in sales.’ I got a job as a textile salesman.”

McCabe says he hated selling, but because he was big and funny he managed to fall upward into sales management. “My real success,” he says, “came on the management side. When you are in management you are a teacher, a coach. A motivator.”

McCabe moved back to Los Angeles, married Nancy Kendall, the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer, and entered the ad business. He also became active in coaching youth sports teams and in fund-raising for Harvard-Westlake and Wesleyan.

In 1989 McCabe hit ex-jock pay dirt: he became national advertising manager for Cablevision’s SportsChannel regional networks. A big part of his job was wooing clients by taking them to major sports events. Sometimes he just went; taking clients wasn’t mandatory.

“I remember one time we had this great trip,” says Steve Berger, a top L.A.-based adman and a longtime McCabe friend. “We flew to Chicago and actually saw three sporting events in less than two days. We saw the last hockey game of the year that night, then the next day took the train to Wrigley Field, scalped a couple of Cubs tickets, sat a few rows over the dugout. Afterward [we] saw the Bulls play. With Jordan.”

In 1997, however, Fox Sports bought into Cablevision in a complicated transaction valued at $850 million. McCabe’s stock options had vested, and he came away a short time later with a lot of cash but didn’t see himself as “one of those guys at The Beach Club who drink mai tais for the rest of their lives.” Instead he “sat on a park bench for about six months,” then bought into a boutique sports management firm.

His new job included, in one instance, taking a phone call from a professional basketball player who reported that his sprinkler system wasn’t working. The player wanted to know what McCabe intended doing about it. During that same period, McCabe’s father died.

One day McCabe met with Hudnut at Harvard-Westlake. “I said, ‘You know what, Tom, I am done. I’m 43. I have my own little company. I don’t like it. I want to be a coach and a teacher. I want to coach the seventh-grade basketball team and I want to teach eighth-grade English.’

“And Tom said, ‘That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Because that is a job you get right out of college--and middle-aged guys like you who go teach school make that mistake every time. Why would you go back to something you could do when you were 23? You have all this managerial experience. You have to wait for a school you can run.’ ”

In 1988, a group of Newbridge teachers, at odds with founder Jacobson, broke away from the school and started their own. The split cost Newbridge nearly half its staff and student body. Jacobson uprooted Newbridge from its longtime home on Robertson Boulevard and started a peripatetic trek through several temporary locations. By the late ‘90s the school was divided into K-8 in the Baptist church and high school in another church in Culver City. Enrollment never recovered.

In March 2000, about the time that McCabe had his meltdown, Jacobson died of complications related to heart surgery. Afterward the school was run by two of his lieutenants, a man and a woman. According to several accounts, they ran Newbridge with Jacobson’s paternalism and secrecy but little of his vision or charisma. Enrollment dropped even more. By 2001, a number of concerned Newbridge parents had wrested control from the “old” school board, which consisted of Jacobson’s widow and several of his friends, and formed a search committee to find a new Head of School.

The new board consulted with Cummins--yet another Harvard School alum to whom Michael Segal, a prep school classmate, had introduced McCabe a few months earlier. Cummins submitted a list of five potential Heads of School. Pat McCabe’s name was on it.

According to McCabe, he began his job interview with the admission that he didn’t know the difference between a curriculum and a cucumber. According to members of the search committee, the parents sensed McCabe’s love for children and respect for the value of private education. More to the point, they liked his extensive business and fund-raising experience. One week before McCabe’s arrival, the board fired the two administrators. Hence the rocket from Gloria Allred’s office and the “restatement” of the school’s deficit.

“After that first day,” he says, “I went home and said, ‘This is not good.’ I knew I was in way over my head--that I’d taken a giant leap into a big hole.”

McCabe’s first decision was to appoint as school director Juliet Biederman, who before moving to Los Angeles and Newbridge spent two years teaching in Louisiana. In her new role she was in charge of managing teachers and curriculum. McCabe’s second move was to close the high school.

“There were too few students in grades nine through 12 to support it,” says McCabe. However, the 18 students in 11th grade, with support from their parents, petitioned to stay affiliated with Newbridge. McCabe arranged for them to attend classes in a room rented from a nearby YWCA and take courses at Santa Monica College. In June they’ll graduate, then turn off the lights behind them.

After making those tough decisions during his first weeks, McCabe recalls his relief at finally coming to work to a school filled with children. His first day of classes? Sept. 10, 2001.

“So the next day I come to work and an 8-year-old asks me, ‘Mr. McCabe, is a plane going to hit our building?’ ”

For the next few days teachers in all grades included discussions of the terrorist attacks in their lessons. Also, everybody absorbed some changes instituted by McCabe and Biederman: Heads of School would not be addressed by their first names. Tardiness would be changed from an encounter group topic to a parent-administrator meeting. In short, the disciplinary system would leave much less to the imagination.

The final step in that disciplinary system leads directly to McCabe’s office, where, more often than not, he’s doing his best to raise cash, stall creditors and scare up new tuition-paying students. He started negotiations with the IRS agent, hoping to reduce and/or stretch out the tax bill.

He also settled what he calls the “nuisance lawsuit” filed by the former female administrator. (Neither fired employee responded to requests for an interview; however, in a letter one wrote: “Mike Jacobson was a wonderful mentor who gave me the latitude to create, build, nurture and lead the lower school at Newbridge. I am grateful for his encouragement and the autonomy that allowed me to create the excellent program that I hope still exists today.”)

McCabe began visiting preschools to recruit kindergarten students. He requisitioned a dozen PCs from a friend whose company was buying new ones. A 1995 Infiniti, which another friend was going to donate to charity, was turned into $5,000 for Newbridge. He put the bite on 10 of his well-heeled friends, then invited them to a school tour and thank you donor lunch at Valentino.

McCabe restored the middle school’s sports programs, which had withered away over the years. At a basketball road game against a private school, a woman rooting for the opposing team approached McCabe and said, “You look exactly like someone who goes to our private beach club.” She figured McCabe wasn’t the guy, though, since there was no way that a middle school basketball coach could afford to belong.

During his first semester McCabe also met with angry parents whose children had been disciplined. “The parents are shocked,” he said in his office one fall afternoon. “They’re like, ‘It never was like that with Dr. Mike.’ ‘Well, it is now,’ I told them.”

He added, “Now, you want to help people. [There are] five kids who don’t pay anything. And you’ve got to have that. You’ve got to have economic diversity.”

And, he said, paying full tuition doesn’t excuse lapses in discipline. “[I’ve expelled ] two so far and there are two on the horizon. I don’t think they’re going to make it. So somebody says, ‘Well, they pay full tuition. You can’t kick them out.’ Well, you know what? I don’t care.”

On the positive side, McCabe said he had taken special interest in two athletically gifted eighth graders whose behavior was borderline at best. “They remind me of myself at that age. Real smartasses. So I sat them both down and gave them The Talk: ‘As far as your lives are concerned, you’re at a fork in the road. Which way are you going to go? The right way? Or the wrong way?’ ”

During an April interview McCabe reported that friends were crossing to the other side of the street when they saw him coming. The school’s coffers already held $150,000 in donations from Friends of Pat, though, and negotiations with the IRS were going well. The basketball team had made it through two rounds of its league playoffs. One of its female stars seemed a lock for a full scholarship to New Roads School, an experimental offshoot of Crossroads.

McCabe also had noticed that many of the parents in arrears on their kids’ tuition were picking them up and dropping them off in shiny new Explorers, Durangos and Cherokees. “I have a great idea,” he growled one afternoon, glaring at the SUV caravan. “Why don’t we ask everyone to switch their monthly lease payments with their tuition payments? I think we’d make out pretty good on that deal.”

McCabe actually put that policy in effect, saying that if a parent’s car payment is more than the monthly tuition payment, he or she will no longer receive aid. Perhaps out of embarrassment, not many off-road capable parents bought $100-a-seat tickets to The Newbridge School’s First Annual Fund-Raising Dinner and Auction, held at The Beach Club on May 4. Except for three tables of slightly uncomfortable-looking teachers, the dining room was filled predominantly with Friends of Pat. They ate and drank and “gave back” liberally. There was a silent auction. Then a very noisy auction. And plenty of mai tais for everyone.

At one point in the proceedings, McCabe stood up and declared happily, “It’s a wonderful life. And I’m George Bailey--I think! This has been the best year of my life. The best job I’ve ever had.”

With four weeks to go in the school term, and a net of $60,000 from the dinner, McCabe was able to declare the budget balanced--pending, of course, final agreement from the IRS.

One of the problematic students had gotten into a public high school, where his athletic talents were eagerly anticipated. The other was on the waiting list for a private high school--there were doubts about his self-control and attitude. Late in May he insulted a teacher in graphic sexual terms. The next day the school called McCabe to tell him that the boy had been admitted. McCabe, who had previously fought hard to get him in, told them sadly to forget it, that he’d been expelled. He was the fourth student McCabe expelled during his first year, and two were not invited back.

Still, the incoming K-1 class looked good. And McCabe spent the summer working the phones--reducing the school’s remaining debts; collecting the still-unpaid tuition bills that turn his face bright red; and brainstorming Newbridge’s long-term future. Try to just keep the K-8 growing? Merge with another school? Lobby a local college to make Newbridge its lab school?

But before that--before 10 eighth graders graduated on June 14--there was one more Newbridge tradition to introduce. In a raffle, one graduate won the chance to be Head of School for a day.

On the last day of classes McCabe drove the lucky kid to see Newbridge benefactor Michael Segal, who was working part-time on development and special projects for Harvard-Westlake. The young man told the retail mogul what a good experience he’d had at Newbridge, then asked him to repeat his four-figure donation to the Santa Monica school. He looked around at Harvard-Westlake’s scholastic splendor and said, “Mr. Segal, all schools need help. Not just big ones like this one.”

Segal, trying hard not to laugh, agreed. Then the boy turned to Pat McCabe and said, “OK, that’s one down. Only 159 more calls to go.”