Lowell, SF’s Elite Public School, Wrestles with Radical Discourse

San Francisco Coalition for Essential Small Schools quietly has become one of San Francisco Unified’s go-to groups to train teachers and administrators to make their schools better places for students on the wrong side of the achievement gap, mainly African-Americans and Latinos. Much of the work includes talking openly, and often uncomfortably, about race.

The group, dubbed SF-CESS, has worked with several schools in San Francisco, along with others outside the city, and has run off-site training for SF school faculty. In a city with displacement and gentrification tensions, where the African-American population has dropped from about 13 percent to under 6 percent since 1980, and where the Latino population has plateaued at 15 percent after decades of growth, several groups are working on matters of race, diversity, and equity. But SF-CESS advocates do not mince words.

“Nobody else is doing this,” says Glen Park Elementary Principal Jean Robertson, pointing at an SF-CESS training manual on her desk that runs to 165 pages. “This is the scariest work of all.”

Describing this — what SF-CESS does — can be tricky. Even people intimately involved have trouble getting it across to people not steeped in academic and educational theory, or outside social-justice and public-policy circles. That’s been part of the problem at Lowell, where SF-CESS has agreed to spend four years planning reforms and training staff to be more attuned to its African-American and Latino students. (They make up 2 percent and 10 percent of the student body, respectively.)

White faculty members will hear about it if the group or discussion leader senses they hope to assuage concerns about potential biases by just showing up.

Principal Ishibashi says over those four years, SF-CESS should gradually hand over the reins to school staff, leaving them to manage their own reforms, acknowledge their own biases, and open themselves to new ways of teaching. “SF-CESS is very provocative, on the money,” he says. “They stick to the game plan and I find that it’s worthy. Whether we feel discomfort, we’re all talking about race. This is definitely the beginning.”

One year into the contract at Lowell, things aren’t quite going according to plan.

Say that again

Everyone says they want what’s best for students, especially those that are historically disadvantaged and under-represented. SF-CESS says the goal of better schools, however, starts with teachers undergoing a personal transformation. “I think I’ll be checking myself for the rest of my life,” says Robertson, who is white, about what she’s learned from SF-CESS and has applied at two city elementary schools. “I have friends on the East Coast who say, ‘You’re so politically correct.’ You’re damn right I am! Why aren’t you?”

The modus operandi of SF-CESS is to shake up teachers, especially white teachers, who don’t realize that their habits and interactions with kids — especially black and brown kids — are perpetuating what SF-CESS executive director Gregory Peters calls the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

In its own words, SF-CESS says it employs radical discourse to have instructors “commit to interrupt, transition, and transform inequities in context — personal and professional.” The discourse is sometimes hard to parse: part management consultese, dashes of academic theory, and a quiver of catchphrases like “hold space,” “speak your truth,” and “the skin we’re in.”

So how does this nonprofit’s program work? Unlike some groups focused on equity in schools, the main work of SF-CESS does not deal with kids directly. The changes are supposed to flow through the staff, who take part in workshops and seminars — professional-development sessions that can last a week, a summer, or in the case of a major reform effort, for years.

At these development sessions, faculty often break up into groups for discussions guided by “protocols,” or meticulous instructions that SF-CESS has drawn up. They urge participants to talk intensely about race and inequity, as well as scrutinize their own prejudices, but in a structured manner; one of the things you hear again and again is creating “safe spaces” for honest talk. Participants might recall personal stories, discuss outside texts, and write poems or reflections. Sessions can be confrontational too. Discomfort and vulnerability are part of the plan. White faculty members, for example, will hear about it if the group or discussion leader senses they hope to assuage concerns about potential biases by just showing up.

Peters, the executive director, is a former math and art teacher and one of two full-time SF-CESS employees. Both ears pierced, the stubble of his shaved head matching his beard, he is also a font of the SF-CESS-speak many find frustrating. In person, he expresses great chunks of it at an impressive clip, along with peppered profanities and humorous asides. At its recent fund-raising auction, the group handed out “race cards” to serve as bidding paddles: word-jammed, compact distillations of Peters’ personality.

‘Blow this up’

The first time Peters revamped a school and shook up staff was at Leadership High, a 300-student San Francisco charter school. Around the time he left in 2012, Leadership dodged closure during its five-year charter review, and was recently fighting for renewal again.

Peters was on staff and took over as principal when the previous one was ousted. Looking back, he says it was “one of most overtly racist institutions I’d ever earned a paycheck from.” He and a cadre of teachers — including Jonathan Dearman, now an SF-CESS director (plus real-estate agent, no longer a teacher) — decided to “blow this up and do things differently” even as they knew it would be painful, according to Dearman.

Dearman (who is black) and Peters (who is white) operate as a verbal tag team, finishing each other’s sentences and prodding each other to tell this or that story. The two recount how they revamped Leadership High, starting with a sort of extended homeroom called an “advisory” that becomes a home away from home where the teacher becomes a mentor and advocate for his or her students. (The advisory is also where students also learn leadership and responsibility — a philosophical pillar of the national school-reform organization that inspired Peters decades ago in his hometown of Providence, R.I.)

This advisory became a core class, 100 minutes a day. Student evaluation was shifted to long-term projects — “exhibition and portfolio.” Peters now says the changes were instrumental in reaching near-100 percent graduation rates while recruiting all kinds of kids, without “creaming the pool” (pumping up the numbers by bringing in students more likely to graduate).

Since his departure, Leadership has come under fire for substandard test scores. But few in education today put too much stock simply in test scores; attendance, suspensions, graduation rates, student and family satisfaction surveys, all these factors and more create a complex mural of evaluation. Leadership graduates have been fierce advocates for the school in its tussles with the school board.

Restorative situations

When I ask Peters what outcomes schools hope to see after working with SF-CESS, he responds with an anecdote. The Zellerbach Family Foundation, an early funder of SF-CESS, didn’t want to hear about raising math scores 10 points. The foundation wanted SF-CESS to create conditions to make schools equitable. (A Zellerbach executive confirms SF-CESS was really “pushing the envelope” at the time of the grants, but says that now its type of work is “more widely accepted.”)

Peters also points to a turnaround-in-progress at Garfield Community School in Menlo Park, Calif., nearly 100 percent Latino, which was once in the bottom 5 percent of California schools. Current principal Michelle Griffith arrived seven years ago. “We were failing our students” is how she describes it. First order of business was to impose structure, but she soon realized that wasn’t enough. The staff was struggling with the transition from a charter school back to the nearby Redwood City school district.

Griffith and Peters acknowledge SF-CESS training, now in its third year, is only one of many changes that have benefited Garfield and its student body of about 700. A literacy coach, for instance, has helped boost reading levels from 17 percent of kids at grade level to 79 percent. Yet SF-CESS has given Garfield’s teachers the ability to look at their own data, says Griffith, and alter their practices without being defensive or reactive.

Some data: 85 percent of the pupils sent to her office for misbehavior are boys, Griffith says. She now knows to turns a disciplinary incident into a “restorative situation,” where students craft contracts to avoid disruptive episodes and stay on track.

It’s common for teachers and administrators like Griffith who praise SF-CESS to talk like this. When asked about outcomes, they say SF-CESS is doing “necessary work.” They “facilitate conversations” that need to happen.

When pressed about results, Peters grows impatient over what he calls a double standard. The status quo isn’t working, he says, but people like him fighting for an overhaul always have to prove they’ll be successful before they’re allowed to try. “That’s just insane. That’s hegemony. That’s bureaucracy,” Peters says. “Because it’s a causality relationship, we have to prove it every single time. That’s resistance to equity. That’s attachment to white supremacy playing out.”

Not Lowell material

In the past at Lowell High, culturally sensitive changes came about under orders from above. Nearly 30 years ago, the superintendent forced a change in mascot from Indian to Cardinal. Eighty-six percent of the student body disapproved.

“Any change at Lowell turns into a big fire,” says Ishibashi with a rueful smile. (Disclosure: I graduated from Lowell in 1987.)

The school’s standards are high, and with more than 2,600 students so is the competition. Kids who don’t fit in won’t necessarily get a hand from their peers. Lowell’s massive size makes it ripe for self-segregation, whether it’s how students choose where they sit in class, interact outside of class, and so on. Whites make up 15 percent and Asians 66 percent of the school, respectively; the few black and brown folks there are can feel isolated and ignored.

Off campus, students encounter stereotypes too. “If you talk to another person or an adult, and you say that you go to Lowell and you’re black, literally their facial expression is shock,” senior Chrislyn Earle told the student publication The Lowell. “‘You go to Lowell? Are you sure you go to Lowell?’”

A program on campus called Peer Resources, part of a citywide network, offers classes and student-to-student mentoring and has been doing equity work at Lowell for years, well before SF-CESS came in. Peer Resources coordinator Adee Horn knows SF-CESS well. “It matches how I teach and why I got into teaching,” she says.

When I visited this spring, Peer Resources had put flyers in the halls asking students to be alert for “microaggressions” — daily slights and insults that the issuer might not realize he or she is making. Horn’s students have also jotted down examples they’ve encountered and stuck them to her classroom wall.

Ishibashi says things are getting better. The principal cites various ways he has fought the achievement gap in his decade at Lowell, including recruitment from under-represented neighborhoods, academic support programs at school, and small sessions for teachers to discuss books like Whistling Vivaldi. A common faculty attitude toward struggling students used to be “You’re not Lowell material,” he says, and now it’s “What can we do to support these kids?”

The city’s demographics are tough to fight, but Ishibashi thinks he has at least kept the dwindling African-American population from dropping ever lower.

The resistors

After the first three months of mandatory monthly SF-CESS meetings, the school’s union representative surveyed the faculty; 83 percent agreed with the goal of the training, according to The Lowell, but only 29.5 percent said it was “necessary and timely in reaching the goal.”

In a recent editorial, the publication cited that dissatisfaction and called for SF-CESS’s ouster and replacement with a different diversity-training program.

‘If you don’t actively fight injustice, you are a racist. That was hard to accept. I hadn’t thought about it that way.’

Even staff who support the program acknowledge that the rollout has been rough, in part due to some SF-CESS facilitators that people found abrasive.

It was enough to turn off some teachers completely. “Everyone’s trying to out-liberal each other.” That’s one of Tom Geren’s many unfettered assessments. He is white and teaches physical education at Lowell, and he despises the mandatory sessions. After sitting through a few, he felt insulted and felt his blood pressure rise; a doctor has written him a health exemption. He no longer goes. “It’s very tough to be told you have to transform yourself personally and professionally,” he says.

Other teachers have stopped attending the sessions as well. Physics teacher Cy Prothro calls the training “patronizing and unhelpful.”

“I would welcome conversations about why so few black students or women are in AP physics,” Prothro says. “What part do we have to play in changing that? But that’s not the conversation we’re having.”

Geren thinks more than 20 faculty members oppose the training out of a total of nearly 150. Ishibashi says the estimates are “just guesses,” but declines to offer his own estimate. Whatever the number of “resistors” — that’s the SF-CESS label for folks like them, and they know it — they have acted like small sharp tacks thrown under the wheels of the SF-CESS bus.

Lowell’s recent road map outlined plans to turn homeroom into an advisory, so critical at other SF-CESS sites. But those ambitions have been scaled back. Lowell will do without an advisory. There has been talk of creating buddy systems called “ally trios” — connecting students who want support with a faculty mentor and another student. But it’s not clear when the ally trios will get off the ground.

In addition, there is no guarantee that SF-CESS will last the full four years at Lowell. The first full-year fee was $113,000, but each year requires a new negotiation. If the school’s teachers learn to guide their own training sessions, SF-CESS staff would step away and costs would go down. That transition does not seem imminent, however; when asked if Lowell would again pay $113,000 next year, Ishibashi said the budget is not yet locked down.

Physics teacher Bryan Cooley, who is white, wants the effort to keep going: “It changed my perspective, made me realize there are significant groups on campus not feeling accepted or an in emotionally comfortable situation most of the time.”

Cooley begs to differ with those like Prothro who contend they’re not receiving practical tools. He has been experimenting with alternative teaching methods in the classroom, and he leaned on his training to deal with student conflicts in the school robotics group he advises.

It’s worth trying to “get teachers to a place of trust where they can have honest conversations with their colleagues” about how they teach, Cooley says. He also acknowledges that “there are some supercharged emotional words that make it hard to change people’s minds.” For example: “If you don’t actively fight injustice, you are a racist. That was hard to accept. I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

Keeping it together

One bright spring morning at Glen Park Elementary, it’s high traffic through the open door of Principal Robertson’s office. A couple kids come in to cool off from a fight; others just want to have a word or two. All are African-American. (The school is 11.6 percent black, 49 percent Latino, 20.6 percent white.) At one point, I offer to turn off my tape recorder. “Absolutely not,” replies Robertson.

During my visit, one student turns his curiosity toward me. I tell him I’m a reporter, and he says, “You can make an article about me. I’m a future rapper. Future on the radio, present at this school.”

Robertson talks to him about being amped up. She knows he’s going to visit his mom that night. (Part of the SF-CESS fundamentals is understanding students’ lives outside school.) He’s both excited and anxious. “How are you going to get through the day?” she asks. “Can you keep it together?” He answers yes.

She’s blunt with the kids but also calm. She listens, and she flashes a mischievous sense of humor. “Do you know how many times I want to fling people across the hallway in this school? At least 10 times a day,” she chuckles. Thanks in part to SF-CESS, she says, “I have mechanisms now so I don’t do that. Thank God or I’d lose my job.”

Alex Lash is the founder and editor in chief of The Frisc.