Victory in Our Schools: We Can Give Our Children Excellent Public Education

by John Stanford

Education is not just a matter for the politicians and professionals; it is a matter for all of us. For we are the public in public education. When we work together, we can do it...we can reach and teach these children.

Meet John Stanford, the successfully unorthodox superintendent of Seattle public schools and former U.S. Army major general, whose gutsy, no-nonsense educational reforms and inspirational leadership have sparked a revolution in public education. Under his visionary guidance, test scores are improving, violence has declined to a ten-year low, student/teacher morale is soaring, and the community has rallied around the schools as never before.

In this remarkable book, he outlines the essential strategies a school district can use to transform the system and offers a concrete plan of action to mobilize educators, parents, and the community at large into an army of educators.

Learn how your school district can:

Establish standards of achievement for both students and educators
Ensure that the school system believes that all children can learn--and that they act on that belief
Encourage schools to run themselves like businesses, turning principals into enterprising CEOs, promoting high performance through competition, and drawing vital investments from the private sector
Enlist the aid of local businesses, nonprofit, religious, and ethnic organizations, and volunteers in order to meet the needs of every child
Expand the traditional classroom to include the surrounding community

Here is a new, dynamic plan to help you and your community achieve Victory in Our Schools .

Genres: Education

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Erik]

I completely missed the Stanford years, even though I made my home here during those years he helmed the Seattle Public Schools. But as I had already graduated from high school here, and as I was still a few years from interning at one its elementary schools during my graduate program at the UW, I never followed Stanford that closely.

Sure, I’d heard of his highly engaging and oft-inspiring managerial style. But it wasn’t until I picked up a 50-cent remainder bin copy of his one and only book, published shortly after he passed away from a very public battle with cancer, that I was able to fully appreciate his enthusiastic vision of school reform.

What is most striking in retrospect about Stanford’s visionary outline for how to reinvent public schooling is just how much it is in complete alignment with state-wide reforms – if not national ones – that are vigorously alive today in schools like the one I teach at. I don’t know if Stanford himself is himself the original visionary, as I’ve never heard him referred to as the brain behind much of what we are accomplishing in my district (just south of Seattle’s). But I do know that everything that Stanford advocates – a singular focus on academic achievement by way of measurable goals, being paramount in his estimation – can still be heard today.

As I think back to the two interim superintendents after him (who shall not be named), and before the current one who may actually be doing something about narrowing the achievement gap, I cannot help but think that a lot of momentum and focus has been lost in Seattle. Month in and month out, all one can read about the Seattle Public Schools are either the on-again off-again school closure plans, a lawsuit (either against affirmative action, or against negligent principals for allowing child abuse to continue for years under their noses), or even their near-constant budget deficit woes (eight years and counting on that one). In my modest-length career – count that seven years, folks – those three issues make the headlines quicker than any of the district’s music programs win national awards. (Yes, it’s that pathetic.)

Stanford, despite still being right about 90% of the time as I look back on it, has just a couple of short-comings. Or rather, two details in his plans and predictions have simply been proven false. First, he advocated a decentralized school-district in which schools operated entrepreneurially – which, you must admit, sounds good on paper. But in reality, this has been a bureaucratic and time-consuming nightmare; which it was supposed to avoid. Instead, each school acts autonomously in its hiring practices, making several high-paying district-level jobs completely redundant. But did the district axe those jobs? No. Also, the amount of time each school spends interviewing new teaching candidates wastes valuable teaching time; and there is no minimum standard of qualifications for new hires. Instead, schools reward nepotism and favoritism. If the Seattle Public Schools wants to have high standards and expectations for its teaching force, it needs to have a district-wide recruitment and retention plan that all its schools follow.

Second on my list of “you got that dead-on wrong, Gen. Stanford” is his belief that if you close schools – which the district has done over the years (often after painfully tense open board meetings) – then the south-end schools will burst at the seems, while the north-end classrooms will look more sparse. But if you’ve been following any of the demographic trends in recent years, it’s the reverse that is true. So-called “white flight” may have been a reality in the 80s and early 90s. But with a more segregated school-system, whites have surprisingly flocked back to schools they once shunned. In fact, the district just may have to either open a new elementary school in the north-end, or remodel an older one and make it larger. (All of which says a lot about us whiteys really liking to be separate and no-quite-so-equal.)

My (few) criticisms aside, I’m still convinced that much of what John Stanford stood for a decade back is still valid today. And that says a lot as we operate in a culture that is constantly obsessed with the next-best-thing and the-only-constant-is-change mind-sets.