Hope and Progress in America’s Urban Schools

This profile of Carl A. Cohn was excerpted from “Turning the Tide: Six Years of Middle

School Reform,” a 40-page report published by the Long Beach Unified School District in 2002. The report was required and funded by the New York-based Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which has awarded several grants to Long Beach in support of school reform.

When Carl Cohn needs extra inspiration, he thumbs through a book of speeches by Robert F. Kennedy. Among the impassioned texts and the black-and-white photos, Cohn finds his favorite pages, flagged by paper clips and penciled with check marks. In one key passage from 1966, Kennedy challenges community leaders in New York City to change:

“Let us, as a beginning, stop thinking of the people of Harlem – the unemployed, the dropouts, those on welfare, and those who work for less than the minimum wage – as liabilities, idle hands for whom some sort of occupation must be found. Let us think of them instead as a valuable resource, as people whose work can make a significant contribution to themselves, their families and the nation.”

Kennedy’s words touch on some of Cohn’s own life experiences, stirring a social conscience and voicing a compelling cause that shapes the tenacious superintendent’s actions to this day. The 1968 murders of Martin Luther King and RFK triggered Cohn’s passion for this cause. As a young man deeply disillusioned by the assassinations, he transformed his dismay into his life’s mission: giving poor children a brighter future. His new calling became even more important than staying in the seminary and becoming a priest. He left on a new quest, bringing civility and hope to unruly U.S. history classes at Dominguez High School in Compton (CA).

The rest of Cohn’s story reads like a poignant version of the American dream come true. He has lived the change that his martyred heroes advocated. He strives to help others do the same. This inner city Long Beach kid who battled poverty and a list of other disadvantages would go on to lead his hometown schools into the national spotlight with a host of pioneering reforms – reforms that would help give all children a chance at a better life, regardless of color, culture or family income. The nation would take notice, the President of the United States would visit Cohn’s schools and praise his courage, and many of his reforms would catch on elsewhere.

Despite progress, Cohn knows the job is not complete, and the stakes are higher than ever. It used to be that kids who didn’t cut it in school could still find work in a factory or go into the military. But today’s dropouts are likely to become a huge drain on society and prime candidates for the criminal justice system. Cohn believes that California and the nation must do more to prevent those dropouts, especially among the disproportionate share of black and Latino students who are still scoring low on reading and math tests.

“It’s sort of a social time bomb,” he said. “If our state is going to work as a multicultural test of democracy, we have to educate the kids who are behind. We have to get them caught up.”

Cohn speaks from experience. One of six children, with a mother on welfare and a father in prison, he did not attend kindergarten. His formal education started with his first grade teacher, Sister Mary Martin. This no-nonsense disciplinarian taught him to read, using simple methods.

“She treated me just like all the other kids,” he said. “I remember thoroughly enjoying every afternoon after lunch, when she would read us ‘Winnie the Pooh.’ I wanted to learn to read it myself.” Nowadays, “Winnie the Pooh” might be considered by some experts to be too difficult for a new reader, Cohn said. But it worked for him, because of high expectations and a tight connection between home and school.

“I don’t know why we can’t have that in public schools,” he said.

In many ways, his school district does.

Supporting Change

Cohn has earned national recognition for reforms that have raised standards in dress, behavior and achievement while helping children to achieve them. When he visited school officials in Akron, Ohio last year, the local Beacon Journal newspaper wrote, “Cohn travels the country, visiting schools, greeted with the utmost respect, followed as if by doing so you might find a magic coin or two that had slipped from his pocket.”

Among the most visible of his reforms was the trailblazing 1994 requirement that all K-8 students wear uniforms. The move resulted in a 1996 visit by President Bill Clinton, and since then, school districts nationwide have used school uniforms to make sure children arrive at school ready to learn.

Under Cohn, subsequent reforms improved teacher training, increased communication with parents, emphasized literacy, revamped entire schools, and ended social promotion, the practice of passing students from one grade to the next whether they’re ready or not. Cohn helped the Board of Education set the agenda for change, and then he selected and supported key staff to make it happen.

One of those staffers was Kristi Kahl, who worked from 1995 to 1999 as Cohn’s administrative assistant for middle school reform. She appreciates the superintendent’s supportive leadership style.

“He asks a lot of critical questions about student achievement and lets people come up with solutions. It really makes you feel excited and invigorated and challenged,” said Kahl, now a middle school principal in Long Beach. After asking probing questions, Cohn devotes resources and builds the collective will to get the job done. He took the unusual step of creating Kahl’s job anew, specifically for middle school reform. She reported directly to him, and her office was only two doors away.

Creating the new middle school reform job was an important move, said Hayes Mizell, Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the New York-based Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. “If you really want to pay attention to middle school reform, you’ve got to have a leader,” he said. Mizell’s foundation gives millions of dollars to middle schools in Long Beach and elsewhere. His major criticism of public educators is that they don’t understand the middle grades. But Long Beach is different, and it has used repeated grants from the Clark Foundation -- most recently a two-year, $950,000 grant -- to improve teaching, testing and other processes.

“There’s reason to believe that this district, systemically, has moved along at the middle grades level better than most,” Mizell said. “In terms of Carl’s attention to that level, it’s been very important, and I think others could learn from that – and Carl would be very honest and reflective about what he’s learned, which is pretty rare.”

Mizell’s foundation pushed for middle school reform long before most educators recognized its importance, Cohn said.

“Now, middle schools are on the radar screen because this is the level that really prepares kids for our state’s new high school exit exam,” Cohn said. “The reform of middle schools takes on even more significance now. It just shows that you can’t write off any grade level.”

Cohn hasn’t ignored the elementary and high school levels either. In many ways, middle school reform has sparked action beyond those crucial grades. Checkpoints for elementary and high school kids now make sure students are ready to move from one grade to the next. Intensive summer school sessions, a new Evening High School, and partnerships with local colleges and universities are giving students more chances to catch up, and often, to get ahead by earning college credits.

But first came the middle school reforms, which defied old assumptions about large school systems being incapable of change.

Signs Of Progress

Long Beach’s focus on the middle grades in the early and mid-1990s resulted in a Middle School Advisory Committee, where central office staff and teachers from each middle school shaped the district’s first standards-based reforms. Long Beach implemented many of the Middle School Advisory Committee’s suggestions. Almost a decade later some of the teachers’ wishes are still being granted, including a new middle school credential program at nearby California State University Long Beach. The credential classes for aspiring middle school teachers started in fall 2001 in cooperation with Long Beach schools.

Cohn considers such improvements in teacher training to be crucial for students. The school district now has dozens of seasoned teachers who coach fellow teachers throughout the year, directly in the classroom. Cohn recalls his early skepticism about academic coaches for teachers, “but now we have schools making some great progress,” he said. In the old days, a principal with a clipboard might have visited a classroom once or twice a year. Often, those visits were the only times when colleagues observed and critiqued teachers’ practices. It wasn’t enough, Cohn and his colleagues have learned.

“Teachers need help,” Cohn said. “When you’re talking about significant change, just announcing it and hoping it takes place is absurd.”

As a recent middle school parent, Cohn sees other signs of progress. His two children attended Hill Middle School on Long Beach’s eastside before enrolling in nearby Poly High School.

Cohn was impressed by his local middle school’s parent conferences and portfolio days, when teachers, parents and students talked about standards and student work. “It seems so simple, but teachers were talking about academic standards and children’s progress toward reaching those standards. The substance of what was talked about was a real shift. It engages typically shy middle school students with adults in a real conversation. The students understood the new grading scales, why they received the grade they did, as opposed to just sitting there and saying, ‘I got an A.’”

Also encouraging to Cohn is the ability of his school district to change some long-held practices in short order. After elementary schools boosted their literacy instruction, the middle schools quickly did the same. And some of the inner-city middle schools were reconstituted and renovated, almost overnight. In 1999, Jefferson Middle School became Jefferson Leadership Academies, offering separate classes for boys and girls. In 2000, Washington Middle School became Washington Intensive Learning Center, with a new principal, new staff, longer school day and longer year. The buildings at Washington and Jefferson schools received facelifts and an injection of new equipment and supplies.

Long Beach won’t know the full impact of these changes for a few years, though Jefferson saw strong academic gains recently. The important message, said Cohn, is that the school district is willing to take extraordinary steps in schools that have not traditionally made good progress.

“For me, when a Washington youngster -- a female Latina -- tells a news reporter that she thinks she can be president of the United States someday, that shows that we can improve students’ own views of their life chances,” Cohn said. “That’s progress.”

Long Beach Roots

Cohn’s determination to see Long Beach’s reforms create lasting, positive change drives him daily, and he takes the job personally. These are the streets and neighborhoods he navigated as a youngster on his bicycle. At 10 years old, he began delivering the Los Angeles Times in downtown Long Beach. Each day, he woke up at 4:30 a.m. and pedaled to his street corner by 5, greeted by a tough curmudgeon of a boss who demanded reliability, 365 days a year. No holidays. No days off. No excuses. When it rained, Cohn wrapped the Times in waxed paper before stuffing his bundles of cargo into canvas bags for the bike trek from Anaheim Street to Fourth, and from Atlantic to Locust Avenue. He earned $15 twice a month, “which seemed like a huge sum at the time.”

His roots in Long Beach and his early character-building experiences there still color his high expectations for local school children. He is not afraid to demand better performance. In 1997 his school district stopped more than 400 eighth graders from going on to high school because they had two or more F’s on their report cards. The same newspaper Cohn once delivered was now describing the failed Long Beach students as “possibly the biggest single group of Californians to be flunked in a generation, maybe two.” The students began attending a new Preparatory Academy for an extra year of help before high school. Today, ending social promotion remains one of the school district’s biggest challenges. But the 1997 decision shined a national spotlight on the issue, and Cohn said he’ll never forget the time a parent approached him on the opening day of the Prep Academy.

“She walked up to me and said, ‘You’re doing the right thing. I knew my daughter wasn’t ready for high school.’” Cohn said.

“The investment in youngsters, and altering their life chances, is the important thing about ending social promotion. We’re still fine-tuning these efforts, and in many ways it’s just the beginning,” Cohn said. “But this whole message to kids and parents -- that you have to take each year seriously -- is a message that wasn’t there with the old system.”

The Achievement Challenge

The results of Long Beach’s reforms are real. In 2000, most schools reached or exceeded the state’s achievement growth targets after the first year of California’s new school accountability system. Various student ethnic groups showed enough progress to earn state cash rewards for their teachers and schools. A study by the Washington, D.C.-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s largest school public systems, found that Long Beach has performed better and better on state math and reading tests over the past several years. The increase in scores often exceeded the average gain recorded statewide. Taken as a whole, though, Long Beach scores remain below state and national averages. The Council pointed out that Hispanic and black students’ scores cut the achievement gap in math and reading at many grade levels, though the gap is by no means closed. White students still achieve considerably higher scores.

In the reform-intense middle grades, Long Beach has seen improvement, though it has fallen short of its own goal of bringing 75 percent of all students up to academic standards by 2001. The average eighth grader still scores below grade level in reading and math on the state Stanford 9 test. Part of the challenge is that about 30 percent of middle school students speak a language other than English. The English-speaking students tend to perform at or near grade level.

“I think we actually started out thinking this was easier than it turned out to be,” Cohn said. “It is hard work.” To illustrate his point, Cohn describes how he recently took a sample high school exit exam in math. The new test is required by the state.

“I did well on the first couple of pages, then I started running into some hard-core algebra, geometry, statistics and probability. I was struggling. It’s not the math that the average Joe on the street thinks of,” he said. “When we started reform in middle schools, we set goals by thinking in terms of our own experiences in school. But then you realize these really are high standards, and there are new challenges. That doesn’t mean we should give up.”

We Can Do More

Cohn has some more ideas about improving education here and nationwide

He thinks families should shut off the TV more often.

“If we’re really serious about literacy, we should work to diminish the amount of time youngsters engage in passive video activities – TV and video games,” Cohn said. “Start by turning off your TV for week.” Yes, Cohn has done this in his own household.

He also believes it’s hard to improve Long Beach schools from either Sacramento or Washington. He wants more attention to local governance of education, and more research about which governance structures work best. In 1978, California’s Proposition 13 took away much of the power of local government to tax and spend based on the approval of local voters. Taxes instead were capped and sent to Sacramento to be redistributed. While Prop. 13 saved the average California homeowner many thousands of dollars in property tax payments, Cohn said it also lulled educators into the sense that all they had to do now was find a way to work with Sacramento, not local constituents.

“That’s a false sense of reality. Local government is the most accountable,” Cohn said. “I know this might not change, but it’s really important to me.”

Cohn developed a new appreciation for local control in 1999 when more than 70 percent of local voters approved $295 million in Long Beach school bonds to build new schools and repair old ones. His schools hadn’t asked local taxpayers for money in 28 years.

“If schools had to go to local voters regularly for approval of funds,” Cohn said, “imagine how many more things they might do to reach out to the community.”

‘We Are The Change’

Assuming California’s Prop. 13 isn’t going to be overturned any time soon, superintendents and school boards must make the best of the situation. To Cohn, that means shunning personal politics, playing as a team, and making school board meetings as efficient as possible.

“In some school districts, people feel that the Board should be the center of controversy -- an exaggerated, distorted form of democracy – where the longer you wrangle in public, the better the decision you’ll make,” Cohn said. “I don’t subscribe to that. In fact, when school districts hit rock bottom and the state takes over, you don’t have those kinds of long conversations any more.”

In Long Beach, controversial items begin at the committee level, allowing time for study, reflection and deliberation. By the time the matter gets to the board, the controversy often has been wrung out of it, and educators have had a chance to win people over, said Cohn, whose Board of Education tries to present a united front whenever possible. Board members can disagree and hold strong views, “but there’s an informal, unwritten rule that you don’t sit at public meetings and pound the table,” he said.

Having a board that can get down to business without political posturing is likely to become more difficult, said Cohn, whose doctoral studies at UCLA focused on the politics of education. Today, the major political parties are funding school candidates, pushing special interests and eroding a long-held tradition of non-partisan local school elections.

Short of warding off party politics, he said, the best way for a board of education to remain functional and less susceptible to partisan whims that cause trouble, is for it to advance an agenda of positive change.

“If the board is not seen as an instrument of the status quo, then the new board members who come aboard are more likely to realize that they need to be a part of this change,” Cohn said. “It’s like Ronald Reagan’s classic line, ‘We are the change.’ ”

Applying The Pressure

Cohn’s colleagues marveled at his knack for astute politics early on when he worked at Long Beach’s Poly High School in the 1970s.

“He has uncanny political instincts – organizational instincts,” said David Burcham, now Dean of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. At Poly, Burcham worked as an activities specialist while Cohn was a school counselor. The two served on Poly’s Community Interracial Council with parents, alumni, students and teachers who worked to end heated racial tensions, fistfights, bottle throwing and near rioting among the student body. Since then, the high school has become an award-winning powerhouse, the district’s flagship high school, where parents from Long Beach and beyond line up their children on waiting lists to attend.

“Carl knows who the key players are, where pressure needs to be applied, who needs to be convinced of what. It seems like he was born with that,” Burcham said.

And apply the pressure, he does, even when it means taking unpopular or bold positions, like the time in 1994 when Cohn was a vocal opponent of Proposition 187. The California ballot initiative would have removed undocumented children from public schools and denied emergency health care to people who were living in the state illegally.

In a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, Cohn called the measure “antithetical to the Constitution” and pointed out that school officials are sworn to uphold the state and federal constitutions.

More than 60 percent of voters approved the measure.

“It was a really scary time, because we didn’t know whether the courts would uphold it,” Cohn said. “If the courts had upheld it, I would have had to resign. The image of standing in the schoolhouse door and barring access to children who’ve never done anything wrong – I absolutely could never have done that,” he said. Eventually, a federal judge agreed with Cohn’s view and found the measure to be unconstitutional.

Then there was the time Long Beach decided to use drug and gun-detecting dogs to conduct random searches of students’ book bags. To Cohn and his district, it was simply another way to keep students safe. California’s Attorney General has since told schools to stop the practice.

When education observers across the country watch Long Beach long enough, they report a clear pattern. Decisions here, more than in many places, are based on what local educators truly feel is right for children, not what’s politically correct, business as usual, expedient, liberal or conservative. How else could the same superintendent teeter on the edge of resigning over an anti-immigrant law, yet push for police searches and student uniforms?

“What Carl is really good at is showing that being a progressive thinker in education doesn’t mean you’re soft on standards or accept less than 100 percent accountability from the people who work with you, and from the institution as a whole,” Burcham said. “It wasn’t a surprise at all to me that Long Beach got way out in front on school uniforms, even though you’d expect that type of overture from a more conservative, reactionary person.”

Change As A Constant

Through the ups and downs of Long Beach’s gutsy policy agenda, Cohn and his Board have never backed away from change, competition and the creation of more choice for parents. In fact, Long Beach recently has approved several charter schools that receive state money but are free from many of the district’s own policies and procedures. Cohn views charter schools as an asset, an additional choice, not a threat.

“The perception of our Board as an agent of change is key,” Cohn said. “In other urban districts, the perception is very different. That’s why the worst thing that can happen here is that we rest on our laurels, and that’s why I’ve got to go,” said Cohn, whose contract expires in September 2002.

Despite supporters who urge him to write his own ticket to stay with Long Beach schools, Cohn will leave next fall to teach at the University of Southern California, where he will oversee the creation of a West Coast version of Harvard’s Urban Superintendents Program. Working with USC’s Graduate School of Education and the larger university, he will focus on developing the next generation of urban school superintendents.

“I think my departure is a good thing,” Cohn said. “I honestly feel organizations need this kind of change.” He recalls a conversation he once had with his colleague, Burcham, when the two had just completed their stint at Long Beach’s Poly High in the ’70s.

“We were standing there saying how sure we were that the place would fall apart when we were gone,” Cohn said. “But the truth is, it got a lot better. There’s a lot of strength in this school district, and I fully expect it to become even better.”

To his fans in Long Beach and nationwide, his departure might be cause for concern, but to Cohn it’s just another logical step in the process of change, or as RFK once said, “The future does not belong to those who are content with today.”