With tears, cheers, Johnson leaves Memphis
School chief hailed for heart, grit
MEMPHIS -- Unruly students often jumped out the first-floor windows at Winchester Elementary School. Two bullets had pierced the building. Enrollment had plunged by half. Test scores were so deplorable that 75 percent of third- and fifth-graders were failing the state math exam. One administrator described Winchester as the "school from hell."
Carol Johnson had an unorthodox solution shortly after she arrived in Memphis four years ago as the city's new school superintendent. She dismissed the principal, made all the teachers reapply for their jobs, then gave her hand-picked principal the power to choose her entire staff.
"I got anonymous calls from upset teachers," said Flora Childres, the replacement principal at Winchester. "But on the flip side, the parents were like, 'Thank God!' "
Johnson will bring her determined style to Boston, where she is to be named today as the city's school superintendent. Last night, at a Memphis school board meeting marked by emotional pleas for her to stay, a teary-eyed Johnson announced she would be resigning her post. She received a standing ovation from a crowd of more than 200.
Driven by her own experiences as a child in a segregated elementary school in the South, Johnson is unapologetic about taking harsh steps to try to rescue students from persistent failure. But in her nearly four decades as an educator, including stints heading three school systems, she has also earned a reputation as an unusually down-to-earth leader, prone to hugging teachers as she greets them and reading Harry Potter novels to keep up with student interests.
The teacher outcry in Memphis over Johnson's approach to failing schools didn't daunt Johnson, who had worked with the teachers' union to restaff 12 failing schools. In coming to Boston, Johnson is leaving her home state as well as a school system with 115,500 students, where she is beloved.
Last year, when Boston first attempted to replace superintendent Thomas Payzant, the search firm asked Johnson to apply but she declined to be interviewed. She said there was too much work left to do in Memphis.
The search committee contacted Johnson repeatedly in recent months after Manuel J. Rivera, who last fall had agreed to become Boston's superintendent, changed his mind in February. Johnson said she was drawn to Boston -- with half the enrollment of Memphis's schools -- because she felt she could have an impact in a system where black and Hispanic students trail their white and Asian peers. "What they described as Boston's challenges reminded me of what I believed in," said Johnson, 59, in an interview Sunday night in a Memphis restaurant. "It looked like a good match for me."
Now, she said, she would be more comfortable leaving Memphis because she has made progress in the last year. Restructuring failing schools, she said, has been among her biggest challenges. "I talked to teachers who felt very hurt that the work they've done wasn't valued," she said. "But you have to make it work for the student. In urban education, your work is to inspire and motivate children who might not see a future beyond their neighborhoods."
Johnson plotted her steps carefully, collaborating with the union and quietly scouting for new principals before asking the school board to approve the plan.
Johnson said neither she nor the new principals always made the right hiring decisions. Often, the process was disruptive, she said. But she presented parents and teachers with a stark choice: Either Johnson would take dramatic steps, or the state would.
Once schools remade their staffs, Johnson offered bonuses of up to $3,000 a year to teachers for meeting several criteria. Their schools had to improve test scores, report card grades, and student and teacher attendance. Also, more students had to be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and expulsions had to decrease.
The union went ahead "with some reluctance and hesitation," said Yvonne B. Acey, president of the Memphis Education Association. "But we realized that change is necessary if we want to move forward."
At Winchester, enrollment, which had dropped to 400 by 2004, rose to 600 as the school improved. And 93 percent of third- and fifth-graders scored in the two highest categories on the 2006 state math test.
In Minneapolis, where Johnson was superintendent from 1997 to 2003 and had spent most of her career, the reviews were more mixed. School officials, teachers, and parents gush about how warm, down-to-earth, and hard-working she was. But she drew criticism for her role in overseeing a return to neighborhood schools, which made schools more segregated, critics and defenders agree.
She became superintendent soon after the city had devised a plan to assign more students to schools close to home so few would be bused long distances.
John Shulman, a civil rights lawyer, condemned Johnson for defending the plan.
"It was very convenient for the power structures to have an African-American superintendent who seemed so comfortable with segregation in the schools," said Shulman, who sued the state on behalf of the NAACP and won a settlement that allowed students from certain ZIP codes to attend suburban schools. "She said, 'Give us more time,' but of course she left, and children and families are left with the legacy of failure."
Judy Farmer , who recently retired from the school board after 27 years, said African-American families were among the biggest proponents of the new system. In a school system that is 73 percent minority, it is hard not to have segregated schools, Farmer said.
Johnson won praise for expanding all-day kindergarten amidst severe budget cuts, and raising millions of dollars from local donors and foundations, officials and teachers said. She also worked with the teachers' union president to make evaluations and tenure more rigorous. Under the peer review system she helped craft, teachers who are not doing well get intensive mentoring. If they do not improve, they are fired.
Johnson also oversaw a rise in students' test scores, although not a dramatic one.
Her personal style was remarkable, people recalled. Even though she was usually the highest-level person at a meeting, she would be the one to offer guests a drink or to help clean up the food afterward.
Johnson stayed in the same modest home and drove the same car even after becoming a superintendent. When she earned a $10,000 bonus in her first year, she donated it to the schools, Farmer said.
At times, though, she could have been tougher, said Farmer, a strong Johnson supporter. For example, Johnson mandated that the school system use one reading program, since students frequently switched schools. But she found it difficult to crack down on teachers who did not comply, she said.
"When she left for Memphis she said, 'Judy, I think you need more of a bulldog,' " she said. "My own personal feeling is that she thought if she went to another school district where she wasn't known as the nicest person in the world, she would be able to do that."
Johnson, the third of nine children, grew up in a small town of Brownsville, about 55 miles east of Memphis. She was known as the serious, focused one among her siblings. While younger siblings would giggle in the back pew during church, Johnson, even at 8 years old, sang in the chorus as if she were living the lyrics, said her younger sister, Nancy Gardner, 55, of Nashville.
Education was always emphasized at home. Their mother, a teacher, decorated Johnson's and Gardner's shared bedroom with cursive writings of the alphabet on the walls.
Their father, who had left school after the eighth grade to work on his family farm after his father died, ran a barbershop and billiards hall. Their mother, a college graduate, spent summers at the University of Michigan working toward her master's degree during their childhood. "I thought teachers were special and important people," Johnson said.
But all was not bliss in the classroom. The all-black elementary school she attended in the 1950s received hand-me-down textbooks stamped "obsolete" when white schools received new books. Science lab equipment was outdated, and only white students got to go to kindergarten.
"People didn't dwell on that," Johnson said. "They were aware of the inequities, but it wasn't an excuse not to read, not to write, or not to perform."
For a better education, her mother sent Carol Johnson and five of her siblings to high school in Virginia at a Catholic boarding school for black girls. Johnson would attend the historically black Fisk University to become a teacher, and while there, she met her future husband, Matthew Johnson, now a history teacher at a Memphis charter school. They have three grown children.
Johnson often greets students and employees with hugs, said parents and educators in Memphis and Minneapolis. "The majority of the community has gravitated toward her pleasing and inviting personality," said Wanda M. Halbert, a Memphis school board member for seven years.
After she announced her decision, School Committee members vowed to boycott Boston -- jokingly. "Our loss is without a doubt a gain to the Boston Public Schools," said Patrice Jordan Robinson, the school board president. "Boston saw we had a jewel, and they're taking it away from us."
Tracy Jan reported from Memphis; Marcella Bombardieri from Boston. Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com. Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com. 