POV: The Principal Story

“Teachers have no idea how to manage a classroom,” says Tresa Dunbar. “They’re learning how to teach. I have so much compassion for them, because I know they don’t know.” As principal of Henry H. Nash Elementary School on Chicago’s West Side, Dunbar is responsible for her teachers as much as her students, and sees their educations as mutually interdependent. “Own up to what you’re feeling,” she tells a group of young teachers, seated in a classroom. “It’s okay if you’re breaking down.”

One of two elementary school principals featured in The Principal Story, premiering tonight as part of PBS’ POV series, Dunbar is visibly empathetic with her stressed out faculty members. She means to help them cope with the difficulties of working at a school that has been on academic probation for 12 years, where 98% of the students come from low-income families, and where behavior problems, including violence and turmoil, are daily occurrences. She means to make them more creative, encourage their independent thinking, trust in their own good instincts. But she is also fiercely protective of the children in her charge. She insists that teachers learn to “lead” students, as she says more than once.

The Principal Story follows Dunbar for one year, paralleling her experiences as a new principal with those of veteran principal Kerry Purcell at Harvard Park Elementary, in Illinois’ capital, Springfield. “If I make it through this year with my brain intact,” Dunbar jokes at the film’s beginning, she imagines a fresh start for Nash. This isn’t exactly a new idea for the school: she notes that it has had five principals in six years, evidence of what she terms a “real struggle with leadership.” Purcell has been at Harvard Park for six years, but still faces ongoing problems, as the percentage of students in low-income situations is 87%. When she arrived, she recalls, “The building was in crisis on several levels. Teacher morale was low, behavior was out of control, and test scores were in the gutter.” While all of these measures of a school’s success and failure have improved during Purcell’s tenure, she needs to keep up the momentum. There is, in all senses, no rest for the weary.

That’s not to say either women shows signs of fatigue. Each evening they head home to their homes alone, where they prepare the next day’s plans while eating their dinners. “It’s not a job,” says Purcell over an image of her poking through the cupboards in her shadowy kitchen. “It’s way beyond a job. Sometimes you have regrets because then it becomes your life, but it’s worth it.”

Tod Lending and David Mrazek’s film shows what makes their many sacrifices “worth it,” in close-ups of children hard at work in the classroom. It also shows how much effort goes into granting just one of these brief moments. As teachers struggle with the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act (that is, teaching for tests in order to obtain or maintain funding for their facilities), students face more immediate, minute-by-minute dilemmas: when one boy brings a knife to Nash, Durban listens as he explains his reasoning. Though he knows it’s not allowed, Jameel says, he’s worried about boys in his neighborhood who attack him on the way home from school. Asked what he has to “deal with,” he explains that his mother “got into some stuff” and is now in jail, like his father. In his block, he says, “You cant really have feelings. If you can’t fight, you ain’t tough enough, you really ain’t nothing. It’s get or be gotten.” Still, he half-smiles and dreams of being a cook someday, because he likes to make meals.

Even as students and their parents tell stories of poverty and chaos at home — or more frequently, leave these stories unspoken — their time at school appears to be organized and reassuring. It’s true that when Durban decides to have a seventh grade families’ night in order to discuss the “problems have gotten so bad,” only seven of 65 families show up. Still, he keeps focused on the positive, the families who do show interest in their children, who want to help them escape the cycle they might be in themselves. Dunbar observes that students can’t be blamed for their bad behavior if they have no alternatives. She speaks for students who feel, “The only thing I know how to do, because my whole family or my entire community acts up, is to act up.”

Purcell repeatedly encourages the children at Harvard Park to “make safe choices,” to avoid aggressive behaviors (school rules include no lying and no putting hands on anyone else). When she has one child rub her hand lotion on his arms, so that when he smells it, he will be reminded of her, of her love for him, and so he will also remember to make those good choices.

The film’s rendering of both principals, so different in approach but so similarly innovative and compassionate, reveals that no single method — or program, like NCLB — can solve the many problems facing America’s schools. Both situations demonstrate, in Purcell’s words, that “School is the ticket out. We have to work together to make this happen, working with one family at a time.”