George Shirley, 61; Controversial Teacher Pushed Poor Youths to Attend College

George Shirley, a controversial former high school teacher in Salinas whose belief in the innate abilities of his underprivileged students helped dozens of them enter prestigious colleges -- including Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- during one remarkable year in a brief teaching career, died of cancer Aug. 30 at his Sacramento home. He was 61.

In 1985, Shirley was in his second year as a government and English teacher at Alisal High School in Salinas when he made an unusual class assignment: He instructed his students, most of them children of poor migrant workers, to apply to 10 colleges and universities outside of California and three in state.

For Alisal students, attending the local community or state college was their highest ambition -- if they considered college at all. Disparaged by one student as a “factory for farm workers,” Alisal had a 50% dropout rate, and the median SAT score was 700 out of a possible 1,600. English was virtually a foreign language for a majority of Alisal’s 1,400 students, and three-quarters of them read below grade level. Shirley’s assignment struck some as an exercise in futility.

But the former poverty lawyer, who had switched to teaching for a “lower stress” job, pushed his students to give the assignment their all. He helped them polish their essays, wrote scores of recommendation letters, got application fees waived and even convinced the principal to pay the postage out of Alisal’s budget. He told college admissions officers that they should overlook the students’ dismal test scores in favor of personal qualifications forged by their real-life struggles.

The results, for Alisal, were astonishing. In 1986, 84 of the 225 graduates were admitted to four-year colleges that included Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Notre Dame and Cornell. That was almost three times the number who went to such colleges the previous year.

About three-quarters successfully completed college and went on to professional careers as teachers, lawyers, doctors and business executives.

Shirley did not fare as well. The year that he helped send a record number of Alisal graduates to college, he was fired. His dismissal came amid reports that he had psychological problems and that he had mismanaged a student trip to Washington, D.C., that had left the district with a $6,000 tab.

Although the official reasons were never given, anyone who knew Shirley could not have been completely mystified by his firing. A renegade who broke rules and spoke his mind, Shirley bristled at injustice and wasn’t afraid to bite the hand that paid him $18,000 a year. His recommendation letters for college-bound students contained what he acknowledged was “a direct attack on the school,” arguing that the colleges should disregard the applicants’ low grades and paucity of advanced classes because Alisal was a segregated campus that offered “a lousy education.”

“He knew what he was,” Laura, his wife of 12 years, told The Times last week. “He was a rabble-rouser.”

After his dismissal, Shirley dabbled in politics and did some private legal work. He was inundated by offers to turn his Alisal experiences into a movie but none of the scripts met his approval.

No stranger to adversity, Shirley had been a Tennessee “hillbilly” who overcame poverty to earn a law degree at the University of Denver in 1966. After doing some teaching and legislative work, he spent the 1970s working on poverty issues and civil rights for California Rural Legal Assistance and similar organizations in Florida and Minnesota.

By the early 1980s he had a private trial practice in Monterey, but assumed such a heavy caseload -- much of it pro bono -- that, in late 1983, he suffered a breakdown outside the county courthouse and woke up in a hospital the next day.

Diagnosed with mental exhaustion, he took anti-depressants and spent the next year at home taking care of his son, Bryan. (In addition to his wife and Bryan, Shirley is survived by sons Andrew, 11, Robert, 8, and James, 6; two grandchildren; and a brother.)

When he recovered, he decided it would be therapeutic to teach. The Salinas Union High School District hired him as a substitute but soon offered him a one-year contract to teach at Alisal High.

His unconventionality was evident his first day on the job. Pam Bernhard, an Alisal counselor who would become his primary ally in the college drive, remembered that Shirley took the outdated history textbook and just “tore it up and threw it in the garbage can.” He used the U.S. Constitution as his teaching manual, brought guest speakers to class, made his students read the newspaper and discussed current affairs.

It pained him to see how limited their horizons were.

When he mentioned the names of distant colleges such as Bard, Oberlin, Brown and Williams, he might as well have been talking about the moon. “I was blown away,” recalled former student Manuel Lopez. “I had never heard of 99% of these schools.” His goal had been to attend Salinas’ two-year Hartnell College and become a bank teller. But Shirley “told me I could go to Vanderbilt, I could go to all these places,” Lopez said. “No teacher had told me that before.”

Shirley rounded up his best students to meet visiting college recruiters. He held after-school and Saturday sessions to help them fill out applications and apply for financial aid. He guided them to write essays that tugged at the heartstrings, telling of illiterate parents who gave them love and hope, of selling vegetables from a truck for a few dollars a day, of missing months of school to work in the fields. “If it doesn’t bring a tear to my eye,” Shirley said of the essays, “do it again.”

Years later, he admitted he actually rewrote some of the essays himself, an ethical breach that would have doomed Shirley as well as the applicant if detected by college admissions officials. But, Shirley explained a few years ago, “it was a war to me, and it was a war hopelessly stacked against them,” his students.

After months of anxious waiting, proof of victory began pouring in. Nine in the Class of 1986 were admitted to the Ivy League, including a boy with a 990 SAT. Another student with a 600 SAT but a 97% on his French achievement test won a full scholarship to a small Eastern private college.

With each triumph, Shirley grabbed the victor from class and headed for the principal’s office, where the good news would be trumpeted from the PA system. “Today, Princeton University accepted

Newspapers wrote glowingly of Shirley’s successes, but resentments quickly surfaced. The principal and district officials hated Shirley’s depiction of Alisal as a substandard school that stunted the intellectual development of its students. He received his termination letter the same day he was honored as Alisal’s employee of the month.

His students, though dismayed at his firing, took away an important lesson: how one person can make a difference. “He could have just gone through the motions, taught what needed to be taught and never created this big stir,” said Miguel Cordova, a graduate of Minnesota’s Carleton College and the first in his family to earn a degree beyond high school. “His biggest role was to open our eyes to the importance of getting involved and trying to make a difference wherever you can.”

Cordova went to work in programs that prepared and recruited minority college students. Now he helps shape the tests that measure the proficiencies of elementary to high school students in California public schools as a consultant in the state Department of Education.

Lopez went to Bard College in upstate New York and studied pre-law but discovered that education was his true calling. He became a teacher, then a principal who turned around a failing middle school in Soledad, Calif. He returned to the classroom this year as a teacher at Salinas’ Alvarez High School.

“He [Shirley] tapped into our dreams,” Lopez said recently. “We didn’t know we had those dreams. He knew all along we just needed to believe in ourselves.”