PHI DELTA KAPPAN - FEBRUARY 2003 issue, pages 425-437.

BY PAULA M. EVANS

SMALL SCHOOLS are big. Reformers have long contended - and growing evidence confirms - that smaller is better: for instruction, for relationships and community, and for behavior management. Students in small schools are more likely to be known well by faculty members, to be academically challenged, to take intellectual risks, and to engage in authentic learning. New York, Chicago, and Boston are among the cities that have experimented with the creation of new, small schools - not to mention charter schools, which are almost invariably small.

The question isn't whether small schools make a difference, but how to implement them, Dividing a large comprehensive high school into several small schools - each coexisting productively, side-by-side - is particularly difficult. Here, as with so many facets of school reform, there is a great divide between the world of university-based theorists, thinkers, and advocates, and the real world of actual school life. Bridging the divide is a challenge I experienced myself when I crossed over to become the principal of a large urban high school and broke it into five small schools.

After having taught high school for 17 years, I had spent 15 years at Brown University, much of it directing professional development for the Coalition of Essential Schools and then the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. At Brown, I worked with schools across the country and had constant contact with teachers and principals, I was learning continuously. I had wonderful colleagues. I could consult in a school and then walk away. People appreciated my work, and they told me so.

At the same time, I was increasingly jealous of the teachers and principals whose schools I visited. I missed the relationships with adolescents that had been so important to me during my years of teaching. I missed the community of a school. Our work at Brown - creating "critical friends groups" in schools and developing protocols to help teachers look at student work and their own practice - had some core assumptions about teaching and learning about leadership, about teacher/teacher and teacher/student/parent relationships, and about the whole process of change. I wanted to test these assumptions for myself. I wondered, Could I help make some of this work in a school? What would it feel like? Would I have the smarts and stamina and sensitivity? Would I run away screaming? And so, after two years of wondering, I took the plunge.

THE STORY

ln August 1999, I became principal of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS). It had 2,000 students and a tremendous achievement gap. As many in the school community acknowledged, it was really two schools: one for the minority poor and the other for the middle-class whites. All members of the school community said that they wanted big change. The school committee, the superintendent, and the teachers said that they wanted change now. The faculty members had studied change for years. They had created teacher, student, parent, and community committees to investigate options and had compiled a large book of proposed initiatives. But they had adopted none. They were ready for some leadership to help make it happen. This is what the faculty members and school administrators told me when I met with some 40 of them before I agreed to take the job.

I asked them to describe the strengths and weaknesses of CRLS. Among the former, they cited the school's diversity (it offered something for everyone), its many external partnerships, its standing in the community, its good facilities, and its high per-pupil expenditure. A good list. But the weaknesses they cited were also significant: unequal access to resources across the five houses, a large achievement gap between the strongest and weakest students, institutional racism, clashes of conflicting philosophies between faculty members, much skepticism and cynicism among some groups of teachers, a general lack of accountability a recent history of divided and unfocused leadership, and a pattern of too much talk and not enough action about school improvement.

For my part, I was clear about my beliefs and priorities during my interviews. I said that, for me, there were three cornerstones of a good school: high standards for all students, public exhibition of student work, and collaboration among all adults. If I were to come aboard, we would begin by building actively on the school's history and the staff’s commitments and concerns. Here, I told them, is what I would want to do:

• a break the school into five autonomous four-year schools of approximately 400 students each, drawn from the entire CRLS population, with each small school having high standards, a rigorous curriculum, and a coherent frame of reference and each devoted to teaching students to use their minds well;
• build a strong four-year advisory program in each school, a program with a curriculum that would offer credit;
• create schedules in which all adults, including administrators and counselors, would teach and in which no one would have responsibility for more than 80 students; and
• provide collaborative planning time for all adults within the school day so that they could learn from one another and could promote regular, public exhibition of student work across schools.

They agreed. "They" included the search committee and a few others, not the entire faculty. Moreover, some of those who agreed didn't, as it turned out, fully grasp what these priorities would involve. But I took people at their word, I believe that schools should be all about teaching and learning, focusing on the students and supporting the adults to do the best work possible. I approach schooling with a sense of "patient urgency" - perhaps a bit short on the patient side, Students go through school just once, and the years whiz by. How can one justify waiting decades to make the changes that might make a positive difference for young people? I signed on.

I won't take you step by step through my two years at CRLS. Suffice it to say that, on the personal front, I have never worked so hard in my life. I lost eight pounds in the first six weeks because I simply forgot to eat. I ran five flights of stairs so often that I eventually developed a chronic knee inflammation. Getting home at 7:30 p.m. felt like having a day off. I worked every weekend. The first year, I was often out four nights a week (120 nights between September and June). I was in classrooms almost every day, I met with groups of freshmen every week and held after-school student forums. I tried to learn new names every day. I hung out outside after school with the students, went to both lunches with them, and greeted them every morning outside the school building.

I designed staff development programs for the whole faculty to take part in during our 200-person, 45-minute, monthly faculty meetings. In early September, three weeks into the job, with the help of a seasoned and wise Cambridge educator, I organized a committee of 35 colleagues who worked with me to design the principles undergirding our school change and five templates for potential small-school designs. We were not looking to build academies with different themes but five excellent small schools, one as appealing and intellectually challenging as the next. The committee worked together through December 1999. Those of us on the committee shared our work periodically with the entire faculty. We decided on "common elements" as a frame for the small-school designs. In early winter, we circulated a draft among the faculty members, spelling out the foundation for the five small schools. (See the sidebar, "Building a Small School: Common Elements.")

By February 2000, we had divided most of the 200 faculty members into five small schools. Teams of faculty members from each of the small schools, guided by outside facilitator, immediately began to plan. During the summer and fall of 2000, we offered three strands of professional development workshops for all faculty members:

• advisory: why do it, what the advisory curriculum and structure might look like;
• working collaboratively: looking at student work, conducting classroom visits, and consulting with colleagues; and
• differentiated instruction: teaching to diverse ability levels.

Faculty members struggled with all I these new ideas. Many were energized and excited, but no more than a third had fully embraced the move to five small schools. At the same time, everyone knew the inequities of the current school structure and program.

The most common question people asked me back then and have continued to ask is: Why so fast? They wanted to know why I didn't slow down and build more support among the adults involved. I had three answers. First, every day I met with more students, and, while some of the learning at CRLS could not have been finer, the school's excellence reached far too few students. I knew that for a fact and so did almost everyone else. Second, I believed that faculty members and parents who understood the reasons for our redesign and who could grasp how we would implement it would convince others, who, in turn, would jump on board. Third, I sensed an intransigence in segments of the faculty and community that, given time, would build and ossify. I felt sure that the objections and obstructions that had stymied previous change efforts would reassert themselves. My gut told me that we had to move quickly and boldly.

By late May 2000, we had hired a new assistant principal, as well as a dean of curriculum and program and a dean of students for each new small school, Some new deans had extensive knowledge about the building of school community. Some were affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. Their focus was to be on teaching and learning, rather than on management of student discipline. More than half the members of this new administrative team were brand-new to Cambridge. We redistributed the students, who had previously been able to choose which 'house" they would be in, so that, even in the first year of the redesign, each small school would closely approximate the population of the entire school. We eliminated choice for incoming freshmen and distributed them equitably as well. Over the summer, we physically moved the rooms and belongings of 75% of the faculty. We also made some physical changes in the school.

In September 2000, just one year after my arrival, we opened CRLS as five small schools. And we struggled to keep our collective head above water. The students were angry. They didn't like being moved. Previously, all bilingual students, for example, had been separated into one house, supposedly so that they could learn more effectively. Now they were being distributed across three of the new small schools. Other students missed the comfort that had existed in their particular house, where everyone knew that little was expected of you. Still others, including those who had been in gifted and talented programs in elementary school, objected to the loss of the house for the privileged students; it had been heavily tracked.

Another question was posed over and over again: Why did we do away with all the existing houses, even those doing very good work? This was a decision I made with some trepidation, but, given the "deals" that had been struck over the years, the cliques of faculty members and students, and the clear lack of equity of expectations and opportunities, I saw no alternative. I truly believed that we could start over and that the new relationships and new constellation's of faculty members and students would serve us all well.

The teachers were uneasy. Many missed the comfortable niches they had inhabited for well over 20 years. They were now teaching heterogeneous groups of students in most subject areas, particularly at the ninth- and 10th-grade levels. And it was so hard. (Thirty percent of Cambridge ninth-graders read between the fourth- and sixth-grade levels.) How were we to do it? Suddenly, all those students who could decode but couldn't use reading to learn were out in the open. And they were in classes with students who were already set on entering competitive colleges. These groups of students had been carefully and subtly segregated from each other, by house and in at least one case within the house. But no longer.'

Parents were calling and meeting with us and filling my e-mail box. They were worried, rightfully so, about the effects of the new structure on their children. What if their children weren't challenged? What if they couldn't keep up? The deans and I kept our doors open. We responded readily to phone calls and held many meetings with parents. Parents were grateful for our responsiveness. Many urged us on and hoped that the redesign would make for positive changes quickly.

Each of the deans began working closely with faculty members in his or her individual school - less on behavior management, which had been the school's focus in the past, and more on teaching and learning. They introduced new ways of talking that would allow teachers to present work and benefit from shared expertise, and they employed carefully designed protocols to solve dilemmas and to learn more about one another's practice. I tried hard to build and support this team of strong, smart administrators. It was a constant challenge. Meetings ran for hours. Making collective decisions was so time-consuming. But we supported one another and attempted to learn from one another's successes and mistakes.

All of this was exciting, consuming, and brutally hard work. Then, in January, barely five months into the redesign, the school committee (the elected governing board of the Cambridge Public Schools) suddenly chose to undermine our efforts.

THE FIRST CRISIS

The committee - or rather, a bare majority of the committee - decided it wanted us to reintroduce "choice" for incoming ninth-graders. There must, they insisted, be differences between the five small schools, and so families must be allowed to choose on the basis of these. This, of course, would immediately return the school to its essentially segregated status. In spite of our protests, the committee voted for the change.

Parents came out in force to support the redesign we had implemented. The school faculty, divided on so many fronts, unified and picketed the school committee office. I threatened to resign. Students held a candlelight vigil on the night of the school committee's reconsideration. Such public support from the students, just five months after being ripped from the comfort of their house system, startled me. To be sure, we adults had been talking with the parents constantly. I had been visiting classrooms daily, listening to the concerns and questions of the students, and I had been writing to students, faculty, and parents regularly. But I hadn't realized that many in the school community were beginning to take some ownership for the changes that were still in their infancy. My e-mail folder exploded with support. Here's a brief selection.

• I have felt quite overwhelmed with sorrow and horror that all I of the work of the last year can be undermined and all the critical work left to do now stalled. It seems to me to be political expedience at its worst on the part of the school committee, and I am ashamed to have voted for them. (Parent)
• The redesign is an undertaking of daunting complexity given the race, class, and ethnic diversity within our city. Please don't discourage these important efforts and the people behind them. Change is hard and discomfiting but I am very confident this effort will be very successful for the students who have been chronically underserved (Faculty member writing to the school committee)
• Well, I'm writing to say that I am 100% behind you and your commitment to equity at CRLS. I know that there is a faction that will be following you out the door if that is the unhappy conclusion. We are working on letters and have already started circulating them … thanks for your hard work. (Faculty member)
• I am sorry that this recent dispute regarding choice at CRLS with members of the school committee has been so heated and seemingly adversarial, and, while last night's vote was surely a "victory" for you, I imagine it might feel somewhat hollow. The whole debate has unmasked a measure of hostility and a struggle for control. (Parent)

Yes, as that last e-mail indicates, we won the battle, but we didn't win the war. The school committee rescinded its vote, but spending one month's precious attention, time, and energy on this fight sapped our strength as a leadership team. Meetings with the committee were lasting until the wee hours. We were beat, but we continued to plan for the 2001-02 school year, which would be the second year of the redesign.

We reconfigured the daily schedule to allow for an advisory period twice a week for all freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. (During my first year, only freshmen had had an advisory block.) For seniors, there would be a special senior seminar. We cemented planning time for freshman and sophomore teams of teachers in each small school. We created a special support/enrichment block for every freshman and sophomore, in the hope of narrowing the achievement gap and, at the same time, challenging all students. Despite inefficiencies in the district office, we hired more than 30 smart, talented, new teachers to fill vacancies and retirements. The deans began designing professional development for the summer months. Each small school held community meetings for students and parents in which we showcased student work. And we tried, over and over again, to personalize the environment of each small school and push for higher standards across the board. It was brutally hard work.

As I write this in the fall of 2002, CRLS has just entered its third year of the redesign. I am no longer the principal. I resigned at the end of my second year. My decision to leave was the most difficult of my professional life. As I will explain below, the superintendent's unwillingness to clarify my hiring authority and the school committee's intrusion into the daily running of the school made my job untenable. In late June 2001, 1 wrote to the school community:

Unfortunately, I will not renew my contract as CRLS Principal.... I have tried to avoid this decision, but too many constraints compromise my leadership and my ability to support the school's deans and faculty so that they can succeed with our students. Among the key difficulties have been continuing restrictions on my hiring authority and the school committee's micromanagement, shown most clearly in this winter's effort to restore a choice plan for student assignment and in last week's imposition of a new attendance policy, which was approved despite the unanimous opposition of the administrative team. In this context, I am unable to lead and to support the important redesign work we have begun.

There was an interim principal, a long-time and well-respected Cambridge veteran, in place for the 2001-02 school year. After two national searches for a permanent principal, the superintendent appointed a Cambridge elementary principal to head CRLS as of September 2002. All of the deans have remained on staff. They are the leadership in the school.

And the work moves ahead, two steps forward, one back. For some, the small schools are beginning to come together. Knowing students well and working as a team are making a big difference, Expectations are high, and students are rising to the challenge. The extra support we built and the focus on literacy have begun to change the lives of some students. For others, the discipline problems remain a plague, and the heterogeneous grouping is proving more difficult than anyone imagined. While many teachers are enthusiastic, some remain resistant. Some of our eager newcomers aren't sure that they want to remain in a building with so much dissension and anger. Student achievement has not yet demonstrated any measurable shift. No surprise, but people are impatient. One of the school committee members was indeed voted out of office in November 2002. The new committee has just voted not to renew the superintendent's contract. And the work remains brutally hard.

From my point of view, we accomplished a tremendous amount in two years. People were attempting to focus on teaching and learning. Members of the school's leadership team were definitely all on the same page. We (deans and faculty members) were changing the conversation among the adults at the school. We had some ideas about how to begin to bridge the achievement gap. We were, at the very least, facing the challenges head on. No one was pretending that CRLS was a high-achieving school or that we lived in a community of "decency and trust." We knew how much we had to do, and we were working as hard as I have ever seen any group of adults work.

REFLECTIONS: THE DILEMMAS AND THE COLLISIONS

That, then, is a quick outline of the story. Now, I want to highlight the dilemmas we faced at CRLS and some of the collisions between the assumptions inherent in the work I had done for years with the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and the reality of the school I entered - the reality of many large, mostly urban schools in this country. I say large and urban, but these dilemmas nest themselves just is comfortably in small rural and mid-sized suburban schools as well. What seemed so logical and commonsensical to me, to my colleagues at Brown, and to educators in more and more schools across the country was new and not terribly welcome news to many faculty members, parents, and students in Cambridge. Making public the strengths and shortcomings of the school and then acting to build on the strengths and address the shortcomings were not necessarily what people wanted to happen. Again, I took people at their word.

The students. Let me start with the students - the heart of it all. Of the 2,000 students at CRLS, 60% are students of color. The students are quite used to being "tolerated" - Cambridge is a very tolerant place. At the same time, many were not used to being stretched or challenged; they resented it. Many didn't understand that high standards are for everyone; they were content with poor grades. After-school detention for skipping class or misbehaving had served as a minor deterrent at best. Moreover, many students enjoyed their anonymity. Students touted the diversity within the school, but they remained with their own groups whenever possible. AP classes were almost all white, even though any student could sign up for AP courses.

Needless to say, the rearrangement of the school, which may seem purely structural, rocked everyone. The structural changes forced attitudes toward achievement into the open. Many students were used to being taught by teachers with low expectations, whose tacit message was, "You just need to put in your time here. Show up. Don't cause trouble. We'll do a little work. You'll get a B." Suddenly, these same students were in classes taught by teachers with much higher expectations. And their classmates knew how to discuss a book, how to formulate questions, and how to write a critical essay. Meanwhile, the students at the upper end of the spectrum now complained that they were not being challenged enough. They felt robbed. They let it be known that they didn't want to be in classes with these other kids who misbehaved and didn't do homework. They were appalled by the bad behavior of their struggling peers who, either terribly anxious or used to the role of delinquent, acted out or withdrew and refused to participate. The students had lots to say to me:

• I feel like people are in my face all the time. Be cool. Just let me hang. I'm here, at least.
• Please don't say my name when you see me in the hallways. Do you have to say hi to me? I don't like it.
• I love going to school here. I don't want to go to a small school. So why are you trying to make this place smaller? Why can't I take courses all over the building?
• Those of us who can handle honors work should be in those classes. I'm bored. I'm not learning anything.
• It seems like you're insisting that everyone here learn.

Our students were uneasy. Going public with their work? Being asked to demonstrate their knowledge? Never heard of such a thing!

I had been actively reaching out to students all the time. They slowly began to approach me, coming directly to my office. They were not used to having a relationship with the principal. That was just the person you had to talk to if you got into very big trouble. I had snacks. We talked. They wanted to touch the shells and rocks and pictures on my desk. We took baby steps in getting to know one another. They asked me over and over again why I was doing what l was doing. And I explained over and over again.

At Brown, we had assumed that all students want to be known well and want to be challenged intellectually. I think that many do, but they don't know that they do. And giving up what they already have is not the trade they want to make. Creating a different kind of school that leads to knowing students well and raising standards is not greeted with automatic enthusiasm. And we should never assume that students will automatically want to work with classmates who are different from them or that students will be quick to accept responsibility for themselves or their peers.

On the other her hand, at our graduation ceremony in June 2001, our salutatorian, barefoot at the podium, spoke of diversity, which, she said, was something always talked about at CRLS but rarely seen in action. She described her experience with heterogeneous classes:

They didn't work because the people everyone expected to do well, did well, and the people everyone expected not to do well, didn't do well, and both claimed to be bored.

They didn't work, but they could have, if we had cared. You need to care. And you need to care about whether or not everyone else cares. You need to want them to care. And you need to try to help them care. When you get put in a heterogeneous class, you need to not just write off the people who you think don't care, or aren't as smart as you, or aren't going to make it. Because if they fail, and you and I let them, then you've failed. You perpetuate your own stereotypes and everyone else's, and nothing ever changes.

Building a community among students and shifting a culture from one that makes demands of selected groups and tolerates mediocre work from others, to one that fosters genuine self-respect and insists that everyone learn, runs against the entire tide of students' lives.

The faculty. What about the faculty? For two years prior to my arrival, a committee of teachers had initiated a process for change at CRLS. They had studied all sorts of change and explored block schedules, advisory programs and interdisciplinary teaching. They had attempted to be as inclusive as possible and had welcomed all members of the Cambridge community to participate. They then designed a plan of action (which I read, cover to cover, before I started) and brought it to the CRLS faculty for a vote. It failed to pass. Many teachers were understandably frustrated and tired of the whole effort, "We want action," one said. "Please don't put us through another process."

Predictably, when we started to move toward serious planning during that first semester of 1999, many teachers grew nervous. They pulled back. They hadn't imagined really changing the courses or the program or the distribution of the students or the responsibility of teachers or administrators or the leadership within each of the current houses. Nearly 50 of the 200 faculty members had been teaching in the school for at least 30 years. Some of these veterans became strong, vocal supporters of the redesign, and they still are. But many were tired. They were finding students increasingly difficult to teach and blamed the students for their lack of achievement. These teachers came to work, did their jobs, and, in some cases, left as soon as they could (sometimes before the end of the school day). Some had little interest in collaborating with their colleagues. They could not imagine why a group of teachers would examine student work together. After all, each of them was paid to teach, test, and grade. Wasn't that sufficient? Why spend time looking at someone else's practice?

At Brown, we had wrongly assumed that, because the research points to a clear link between adult collaboration and student achievement, teachers and principals would leap at the chance to work together. It’s better for students, and who really wants to work alone, anyway? We assumed that people would want to examine - together - the products of their students and would want to untangle the dilemmas posed by their students and their parent community. And we assumed that it was possible to provide the support necessary for such change - the money, the time, and, most important, the psychological and intellectual support. At CRLS, as at most schools, the assumptions did not apply widely.

In one sense, faculty skepticism was healthy. We want our students to raise questions; the same should be true for the adults. Teachers had many legitimate concerns: how to find time to meet and be in one another's classrooms; how to involve those parents who - rich or poor, black or white - might not have the time or energy or confidence or desire to be partners with the school; how to teach mixed groups of students (for example, the 10th-grade algebra class with a student who can't do basic arithmetic). And teachers worried about engaging students who have experienced nothing but failure for eight or nine years. Genuine, reasonable worries all. Indeed, their worries were my worries. I communicated often - in writing weekly and in conversations all day long and well into the evening - my appreciation of their questions and my intention to listen carefully as we moved forward.

The teachers' concerns reminded me that so many teachers feel helpless. They feel guilty. They experience challenge and failure every day. Over time, they find it harder and harder to come to school. The journey is long and arduous. Even when we try to support them in that journey - by providing time during the school day, by modeling new behaviors, by pushing and celebrating creative new solutions, by using the best consultants, and by bringing in good food for meetings - it's never enough. The teachers wrote me about their concerns:

• I don't know how to be an advisor. I don't have the credentials. I don't want to talk with kids about heavy personal issues. The less I know about my kids' home lives, the better.
• What does race or class have to do with this? We're a school. We educate all kids. I treat every student the same. I don't even notice the color of a kid's skin.
• How can we integrate kids who have major learning difficulties with regular education students? Is that a realistic plan? Who will support us? What happens when we fall on our face? What will you do about parent complaints?
• My bright kids are bored to death. I'm spending all my time writing up the behavior problems.
• How can you expect me to want to spend more time on my job when I have elderly parents and adolescents to tend to both at the same time? Work is only one part of my life. I want to do less, not more.

I heard them, that's for sure. Their voices rang out at 3:00 a.m. when I thrashed about unable to sleep. But listening and sympathizing didn't make me want to revert to the past. After all, we were a school, and so many of our students were doing so poorly in every aspect of their lives. There had to be a way for me to support the adults so that we could all think and work smarter with our young people. What we had wasn't nearly good enough - for anyone. Even faculty members who dreaded coming to work had to know that we could do better. I believed in them and in our collective reach.

The parents. It was the parents I spoke with that first year - four nights a week at the elementary schools, in community centers, and at the high school. Helping parents to make sense of the inequities and opportunities at CRLS was a challenge that none of my previous work had prepared me for. For the most part, parents were not pushing for change. In fact, many were staunchly opposed to it. (In the minority were parents advocating for the redesign - initially a small and energetic group - encouraging our planning, and tirelessly communicating with the larger community.) If your child is bent on admission to Harvard; if you are currently able to choose the "house" your child is to be in and so, in effect, choose your chiId's teachers; and if you are seeing other children who look like yours being admitted to Harvard, why would you want a change? If your child will get a high school diploma, is not, in trouble, is attending school regularly, and seems satisfied, why would you want a change? If your child is failing, in constant trouble, facing endless detentions and occasional suspensions, how will this change help her? Will the change guarantee that all I students will pass the state test, the infamous MCAS Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System)?

In the early fall of 1999, parents organizing against the change suddenly appeared outside the school building in the early mornings, distributing leaflets to those who might be dropping off their children. They also ran a large ad in the local newspaper headlined, "Did you know ... your high school is going to be radically changed?" It accused us of, among other things, not soliciting parent input, and it urged people to attend the next school committee meeting and oppose the redesign. Five hundred people showed up. I attended with a colleague, and we answered questions and for over two hours tried to explain the rationale and plan for change. The critics there assured me that the school was coming apart at the seams. They said that I was arrogant and didn't care about their children, that I wasn't listening to them, and that I didn't know the community. This is Cambridge, they said. Choice has always mattered. It is central to the way we live, part of our democratic way of life.

The parents in opposition were almost exclusively white. I saw the same faces at meetings over and over again. They claimed that the purpose of the redesign was only to help underachieving minority students. Of course the school should address that problem, but not at the expense of their kids. When I met with African American parents, usually in settings outside of school, they wondered if this redesign wasn't really aimed at getting more of the white students in to Ivy League schools. How would it help their kids? So the base of parent support, no matter which way I looked, seemed thin. We continued to meet often and to engage in straight talk about the school, about our kids, and about the larger community. The deans became critical organizers of potluck suppers and get-togethers to celebrate student achievement. They organized and nurtured a base of parent support in each small school. Over the two years I spent at CRLS, the parent support base solidified. Several of our most virulent detractors even came over to our side.

I never had any question that parents want the very best for their children. Some assume that the school has the best interests of their child in mind and at heart; others are more skeptical. We learned that we could not assume that a design focused on high standards for all students and on knowing all students well would make obvious sense to parents. Those phrases - high standards and knowing students well - sound fine, but when they are translated into program and staffing details and into requirements for students, parents aren't so sure. In the spring of 2000, we wrote a simple message to all parents, titled "The New CRLS: What It Means for You and Your Child." We emphasized five themes.

• Challenge: CRLS would become more academically rigorous for all I students.
• Connection: each student would be known well by the adults in the small school and would have an individual advisor.
• Community: the small schools would provide the chance to be a true part of a meaningful group, to learn firsthand the responsibilities and opportunities of democracy.
• Fairness: the schools would be of equal size, permitting a fair distribution of students, teachers, and resources.
• Teaching: the schools would give teachers new learning communities of their own, with more time to plan and coordinate their work together so that they could better prepare to teach students.

But we didn't just explain things to parents, we listened. In addition to meetings, I had almost daily telephone and e-mail contact from parents. Here's a sampling:

• I was prepared to not like and to challenge the plans for change that you and the design teams have put forth. However, I was impressed with the proposal and your strong defense. … I hope that the community gets behind [you].
• You and many of your supporters [have characterized] those of us who were opposed to the restructuring as "racist" or "elitist" parents who cared about nothing but our own children. ... I resent this.
• I've been impressed with the recent collaboration that's been going on between [my daughter's] history and literature teachers. … She just finished doing an essay that will be read by both teachers. ... Very creative and exciting.
• I wish that you would realize that you are sacrificing the education of all the kids for the sake of a romantic ideal of all kids being equal academically. ... Please get the message before the whole school is ruined.

Instead of being on one side or the other, many parents had mixed feelings, After I announced my resignation, one laid into me:

I stuck by you this year ... I believe that if you leave you have failed the lives of many kids in Cambridge, including mine. ... You tossed the high school upside down, ruining it for the short term, leaving families and kids in limbo, with two more years of solid work to do. ... You may quote the above when you write your fancy academic book. I've never been so disappointed in anyone in my life. … you screwed up royally.

Three days later, this same parent wrote: "Is there any way we can convince you to stay? Who else has your vision, your leadership? You and I may have disagreed a lot but, man, your stamina, your ability to stick to the issues, have convinced me."

The central office. Although Cambridge is not a big-city school district, its bureaucracy and inefficiency were mind-boggling to me. How could it take two months to get stationery? Why were supplies for the beginning of the year showing up in November? What happened to the paperwork I had hand-delivered two weeks earlier? Why did we cling to an interminable, Byzantine hiring process while neighboring districts were grabbing some of our best teacher candidates? I refused to get sucked into it, challenged it whenever I could, and made my own promises to strong candidates. But still I found it constantly in my way. At one point, a parent sat for hours outside an office to be sure that our teaching positions would be properly advertised. Colleagues in the district office were kind but ineffectual. I tried hard to be understanding but too often lost patience.

The superintendent told me from day one that she supported my work. We talked frequently. I kept her informed of my every move forward. On several occasions, she asked that I slow down. I explained that I could not. If we were to redesign the school, we needed to move quickly. There had been enough talk and enough process. People needed to see and feel the change. Just before the school committee endorsed the redesign in February 2000, it wavered. She did, too. How about waiting a year? I refused. She worried about my selection of deans of curriculum and deans of students. We were bringing in outsiders. Veterans were no longer guaranteed administrative positions.

She and I had some vigorous disagreements, but she backed most of my decisions. She endorsed the fundamental principles of the redesign. She lobbied for professional development funding for the high school. She tried hard to help me negotiate the complexities of the personnel and business offices. In December 2000, she had hoped that I would compromise with the school committee and reintroduce choice as one factor in our student placement process. When I refused, she supported me.

Our first rift occurred in the late spring of my first year, when she denied me the crucial hiring authority I had been promised. (The very first question I asked when offered the principalship was, "Will I have hiring authority for all the adults in the school?" The superintendent's response was, "Absolutely." The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of June 1993 clearly designates the school principal as hiring authority.) As we began our searches, I discovered that "full hiring authority" did not include teachers in so-called special subjects - and that all subjects except mathematics, English, and social studies were considered "special" in Cambridge. Curriculum coordinators handled these special subject hirings pretty much as they wished, sometimes cutting private deals with favored applicants. I protested heatedly and repeatedly. The superintendent decided to stick with the status quo for the current year, but she promised me that I would have full hiring authority the following year.

I wrote a formal letter explaining that her decision would undermine our redesign effort and "send a strong message to the faculty that Cambridge will continue to cut deals and that excellence is truly not what we are about." I reminded her of her promise that I, in consultation with the deans, would have ultimate hiring authority for all faculty and staff at the high school. I asked for a letter from her confirming this understanding. I repeated my thanks for her personal expressions of support but said that, without full hiring authority, I would have to leave the following August, at the end of my contract. The superintendent assured me that we would work out these differences. I don't know if she actually took my concerns seriously – or my intention to leave if they weren't met. We had repeated phone conversations, and I wrote her four more memos about these very same issues during the school year. Each time I got verbal reassurance, but nothing more.

The following spring, she did expand my authority to hire staff in most academic subjects, but she refused to include special education or bilingual education - two areas of particular importance for the following year. Both departments serve large numbers of CRLS students. In both bilingual and special education, we were moving toward significant inclusion of students in regular education classrooms. We - the deans and I - needed to hire faculty members who shared our philosophical bent, who could think beyond the traditional definitions in each field, and who could work with the teams we had established in each of the small schools. The superintendent refused to grant us this critical hiring authority.

To this day, I do not understand the superintendent's decision. I imagine there were political considerations to balance. But in any school, nothing is more important than hiring. Without a committed, intelligent, creative faculty the best-laid plans are nothing more than that. And there was no way CRLS was going to accomplish its ambitious goals with the staffing based on patronage and deal-making.

In June of my second year, I still had not been offered a contract and was still receiving only reassurance about that, too - though repeated, effusive reassurance. Not to worry. Of course, I would be staying. Of course, we would work out the details. In the end, the superintendent felt she could not give me the written assurance - which I had requested and been virtually promised over a year earlier - clarifying my hiring authority. A solid contract, endless verbal reassurance, but nothing in writing about hiring authority. That, in combination with the school committee's regular interference, drove me to leave CRLS. I chose not to renew my contract.

The school committee. During my two-year tenure in Cambridge, I worked with two different committees and three different chairs. Incredibly, Cambridge reelects its entire school committee every two years. One campaign is barely over before the next one starts. Cambridge also reelects its entire city council every two years. One of the councilors is then chosen by the rest to be mayor and serves as chair of the school committee. This is a way of life in a highly political city. It is a focus of enormous interest for the many residents who are devout proponents of participatory politics. Everything in Cambridge and its schools is political - a fact I learned early and often. The politicization and the every-two-years schedule are sacred, but they are not a sound, stable basis for governing a school system.

Despite its structural instability, the school committee supports its schools. It definitely hopes for the best for all children. It funds a per-pupil expenditure second to none in Massachusetts. It is terrified that the white upper-middle-class minority will desert the public schools. (A significant number do send their children to parochial and! private schools.) The committee allows parents to choose among Cambridge's 14 K-8 elementary schools, which has resulted in much de facto segregation. (The committee determined last year to use socioeconomic status as a factor in elementary school placement.) As a result, students reach CRLS with varied experiences and with many different levels of academic preparation. As one student in a class I taught at CRLS told me, "We never had discussions in my elementary school. All we did was worksheets." Other students in the class were shocked to hear this.

The committee welcomed me warmly. I think that some imagined that one person could transform the high school without upsetting too many people. They said they didn't like the fact that the students of color were predominantly placed in the lower tracks, were underrepresented in AP courses, and were overrepresented in suspensions and expulsions. Couldn't I do something about that - and right away?

When we began to move toward change, the committee asked good questions. We had many meetings. We provided documentation. We made genuine attempts to answer every question the committee posed. (I have a thick folder of this correspondence.) After some hesitation, the committee approved our redesign plan in February 2000. We were launched. Committee members called frequently. They were interested in every detail. We always responded. As we proceeded, they, along with everyone else in the community, began to get nervous. They worried about white flight. (In fact, our enrollment held steady during the 2000-01 school year, and the enrollment to date continues to hold strong.)

As parents began to complain, committee members reacted. Usually, rather than referring parents to us at the school, they tried to address the problems themselves. Some 6 committee members came to me in early December of 2000 to let me know that they expected us to reintroduce "choice" as one factor in determining student placement for incoming ninth-graders. Though, as noted, there were no significant programmatic or curricular differences among the five small schools, the committee maintained that families had the right to choose - to determine, in effect, which students would be in their child's classes.

Later, in May, the same committee members who had stood for choice determined that the high school attendance policy - one they themselves had adopted before my arrival and that I enforced - was too rigid. Two of them, entirely on their own and without consulting me, redrafted it, spelling out in fine detail the attendance-related roles of each administrator. (I wondered if I should install additional desks in my office, so that these members could administer the school on a daily basis.) They appeared to be responding to the same parent constituencies (mostly white, mostly of better-performing students) who had complained earlier about the loss of choice. They wanted their children to be able to "take vacations in the fall or make multiple college visits without being counted absent.

For our part, as administrators, we were trying to turn CRLS into a place of serious learning for all students, a school where, for the first time in years, attendance counted, in good part because the evidence is so compelling that improving performance and closing the achievement gap - which the committee had insisted it wanted - require improving attendance. When the deans and I presented an alternative plan that would preserve some educational integrity but allow for some flexibility as well, the committee never even considered it. Some of the committee members did not support the attendance rollback and were embarrassed and angry at the majority's unilateral intrusion, but they didn’t have the votes.

This was the last straw. I was more committed to our CRLS redesign than to anything in my professional life, but I couldn't do my job without both hiring authority and freedom from micromanagement. It was clear that, without the superintendent’s and the committee's support for my essential decision-making authority as a principal, I could not provide the leadership or the protection vital to the administrators and teachers brave enough to undertake meaningful change. And, though I was never looking for material, I suppose I have enough for a "fancy academic book."

The principal. I've talked about the students, the faculty, the parents, the superintendent; and the school committee. I want to end with a few words about the principal, me. I entered Cambridge Rindge and Latin with what seemed to be a clear mandate to redesign the school. I chose to move quickly, knowing that a year or two of waiting and exhaustive discussion would be more likely to encourage opposition than foster support. I was doggedly focused on three goals: increasing the intellectual pitch for all students, knowing every student well, and building a sense of collaborative community among the adults. They were, for me, nonnegotiable, and they still are. I see them as the heart of excellence, and I have no interest in being in a school where they aren't primary.

We made a real start on them while I was at CRLS, but, I ask myself daily: What could I have done differently? Could I have compromised more, at least on small matters? Possibly. Should I have built faculty and staff participatory decision making more carefully? Conceivably. Did I pay enough attention to relationships? Should I have listened even more? My door was always open, and I met with people at all hours. Was I politically naive? Absolutely, though this wasn't always a bad thing. Might I have managed relationships with the district office and the school committee without abandoning the essence of the redesign? I don't think so.

Looking back, I'm honestly not sure that I could have - or would have - done much differently. I assessed the culture of the school, the needs of the students, and the talents and capacities of the faculty. I crafted a plan of action and modified it somewhat over time, though never changing its core goals. Despite the size and complexity of the institution, I tried hard to engage faculty and staff in the crafting of change and to communicate with a large, diverse parent population. I know I couldn't have worked any harder. Still, I ask myself, did what happened have to happen? Upon my leaving, a parent wrote:

One of the things I learned in a nonprofits-management class is that it happens fairly often that a leader in your position - the one who is in charge during the early phases of radical change and who must make decisions that are controversial - is effectively immobilized by the forces against change. Tenure in such positions is frequently short. Often, the program goes on and thrives, and the leader thrives in a different setting, I hope both you and the high school thrive.

Are we both thriving, the school and I? The school is struggling - and making progress. But politics continues to taint every effort to put students and program first. "Choice" continues to rear its head. Students continue to cut classes and to act out. The detention and suspension rates remain higher than anyone would like.

Yet the overall tenor of the school is more respectful. There is more talk about making the small schools truly autonomous and separate from one another. That could be very good. The teaching is perhaps better. Teachers are reflecting on their practice and using student work to help them solve knotty problems. In many cases, they work collaboratively. Some students have begun to do work that they never imagined possible. The support built into the school day for students who enter CRLS years behind grade level is making a difference. Students are, without a doubt, better known. More are reading and writing and tackling levels of mathematics and science that were not available to them three years ago. The small schools have become going concerns. The deans are truly leading the small schools. They are strong, but they are unsure. Will any of this stick? Will they have the support to lead? People are just getting to know the new principal. How does she understand the redesign, the promise and challenges of CRLS? Thriving? Across the whole school? Some days, yes; some days, no. But no one who has invested in the change, including me, has given up hope.

As for me, am I thriving? I have reclaimed my life. Last year, I served as an interim principal in a small suburban high school. The setting and population could not have been more different from Cambridge. The year gave me time to reflect and opportunities to do some good work with the students, faculty, and parents. I chose to move on. Right now, I lead a freestanding teacher education program, consult with schools across the country that are attempting major changes in program and practice, and concentrate on my writing. I hope to be back in a school soon.

LESSONS

In addition to the questions I ask myself, colleagues pepper me with their own. What are the lessons I learned? Can I distill them into a list that might be helpful to others? What did I find to be the essential elements of school change? These are all important questions, ones that could lead me back toward the university perspective. But we already have a large library of excellent books about the theory and practice of school change - leadership, decision making, professional development, and so on. I don't think I learned anything that isn't in a book somewhere or that I didn't already know in theory. What I did do was relearn ordinary, essential lessons about school change and leadership in an intensely personal way. I learned, very acutely, not just how hard school change and leadership are, but how personal.

I now know in my bones that a principal's chief responsibility is to shape and keep the vision, not just to preach it but to personify it, to make it come alive and stay alive. That's what my work was about. The three guiding principles kept me focused. I always knew why we were changing, and every faculty and staff member knew that these principles drove our work. They may not have agreed with this platform, but there was no confusion about why we were changing.

I seized an opportunity and ran as hard and as long as I could with it. I taught a student course because I believed that all adults in a school should teach - and because I missed teaching. I picked up trash because I believed that we shared collective responsibility for the cleanliness of our school. Our every action - not just out rhetoric - should reflect the principles and the vision that drive us. A secretary, explaining to a caller that I was out at lunch talking with the students and picking up trash, said, "She never asks anyone to do what she won t do herself." I know that some scoffed at me, but the work of building a community and focusing on serious learning was, for me, both profoundly personal and seamless. I saw our every action and decision and program through the same lens. Looking through that lens, my answers about the lessons I learned and relearned in Cambridge are simple: stay tightly focused, no matter what; support the adults in their work with students; and keep talking, listening, and moving - with patient, personal urgency.

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