It’s been seventeen years since I taught at Brockton High School, the mega-school applauded on the front page of the New York Times today (September 28), but I remember something about Sue Szachowicz not mentioned in the article. She loved the city of Brockton. She was born there, educated there, took her first and only teaching job there, and never stopped thinking about how to make the high school better. In my experience she never saw the high school as a project, but as a part of herself that needed prompting now and then.  To me, this is what set her apart as a school administrator.

The article remarks that she fired very few teachers, but adopted the slogan, ” Let me help you,” when teachers complained that teaching reading and writing was more than their time or expertise could bear. It mentions that she followed the teachers’ contract to the letter, and she courted the respect of the union. And it mentions how she restored pride to the school by celebrating its achievements with banners and encouragement.  The teachers would often start sentences with “When you go to college . . .”

This is the kind of motivation we expect from parents, not “turnaround” specialists.  And that is what the present Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, could learn from Sue Szachowicz. School reform is not an operation performed on a dying patient, it is a shared commitment of a community working together. And that is probably the most amazing achievement of Brockton High School. This enormous comprehensive high school, conceived in the archaic vision of the 1960’s, took shape as a community and committed itself to teaching reading and writing across the curriculum. I never saw it coming.

And yet I recall Sue Szachowicz, her energy, her pride in the community and even in the athletic teams she had to rein in. She participated in everything Brockton,  the history, the immigrant cultures, the musicals, the exhibitions. She was never an outsider, a consultant with a two-year or a three-year plan.  She lived for the city and the Boxers, Brockton High School.

That’s a rather superficial view of school reform, because, of course she was a good administrator and all that entails. Yet there are hundreds of successful school administrators who don’t know how to turn around a school.  They are rotated around the school district to make sure they don’t become too friendly with the faculty, so they keep their cutting edge.  They need distance from the faculty they lead in order to prod them to be better.

Sue Szachowicz proves the opposite can be true.  Sue was an exemplary teacher and learner. She never asked more of her students than she asked of herself.  You can expect more of your friends and your family, if only because you want the best for them. You can work beside them and not over them. You can teach for long-term gains, not for the dramatic short-term.

It’s a rather sentimental reflection on an administrator I haven’t known for seventeen years, but there’s nothing in this article suggesting Sue has fundamentally changed. And there’s nothing in this article that credits her devotion, her compassion, her commitment to a community that raised her to teach.  So I thought it should be said. . . .