When Magnets Fail

A Change in Leadership, a Change in Priorities and a Public Montessori Program Unravels

By Mark Anderson

The Tuscaloosa, AL schools’ effort to launch a new magnet program has been stirring up memories—some happy, some not—among educators who built the district’s first generation of magnets 12 years ago.

One school in that early wave of magnets was University Place Montessori Elementary, the district’s first Montessori program and a good example of what the magnets hoped to be—an effective, racially integrated school in a segregated community.

But University Place Montessori lasted only nine years. As in many districts, Tuscaloosa’s support for magnets declined when the desegregation orders that prompted them ended, and when educational ideology shifted towards the uniform academic requirements laid out by No Child Left Behind.

Jeanette Bell was University Place’s principal from its startup in 1995 through her retirement at the end of 2002, and she’s eager now to share some of her experience and opinions as Tuscaloosa ponders a resumption of its magnet program.

As Bell sifts through her experience, she’s been poring over a pair of questions that have been on her mind, and which she agreed to talk about: What caused University Place Montessori to close, and what lessons can other public Montessorians learn from its story?

Path to desegregation

The federal desegregation orders that were the impetus behind Tuscaloosa’s first magnets were issued back in the 1960s. By the early 1990s, the district was ready for a new approach toward meeting those goals.

It hired Superintendent Robert Winters, hoping he could duplicate his experiences as an administrator in New Jersey, where he oversaw magnet programs that succeeded in drawing families voluntarily back into racially segregated schools.

Winter urged the district’s staff to propose a slate of Tuscaloosa magnets, and Bell and a handful of teachers outlined plans for a Montessori school that became one of three magnets that opened in 1995.

A federal grant provided Montessori materials for each new classroom and training for all its teachers. The program launched as a pre-K-3rd grade program, adding 4th and 5th grades over the next two years.

The outcomes soon confirmed what Winter and the magnet founders had expected. The school established a reputation for academic excellence and for its high-quality learning community, and enrollment increased from 500 students to 650.

The ratio of white students also grew from 10 percent to 35 percent, and parents—both African-American and white—were volunteering and participating in school affairs.

“We had a good name,” Bell said. “People heard about this school, and they chose it or they moved into its zone.”

But there was a price to pay for that success, and it became the first shadow on Montessori’s future in Tuscaloosa.

“We outgrew what we were really prepared to serve” as a Montessori program, Bell said.

That gap between resources and the needs of the growing school first appeared when the school ran out of money to provide Montessori training for new teachers, a shortcoming that eventually played a significant role in the program’s shutdown, Bell said.

Training costs for all the magnet’s first teachers were covered by the initial federal grant, but after a few years of paying follow-up training, the district said it couldn’t afford any more tuition expenses. Despite a 30 percent enrollment increase, no more teachers received Montessori training.

A second blow to University Place’s long-term Montessori goal came from its failure to obtain funding for a program coordinator position.

“I’d definitely put that in the category of ‘why our program didn’t survive,’” Bell said, especially in light of the fact she was the only administrator in the school, with no assistant principals to help carry out the long list of daily operational chores.

That meant less support for the newly trained staff in implementing Montessori curriculum, but an even greater loss came in the program’s relationship to school families.

“We didn’t have anybody who could take care of the parents,” Bell said. “No one had time to set up activities that could help them understand what Montessori was about, or how they could be involved” in their children’s learning—or, in the long run, in recognizing Montessori’s value and advocating for it when district goals started to shift.

An organized parent community would have been especially useful at University Place because the school was operating simultaneously as a magnet and a neighborhood school.

Bell and her staff had recommended that arrangement. Most of them had already served many years at University Place when the Montessori program launched, and their attachments to the families in the low-income neighborhood around the school ran deep.

“We’d made a lot of progress there together over 10 years. We had lots of families participating, and we wanted to keep serving them.”

But that commitment also took a toll on Montessori practices. High transience in the neighborhood meant high turnover in the school enrollment, and it meant that many students and families had no background in Montessori.

“Teachers had to bring children along who were behind, who had great learning needs or who weren’t accustomed to independent, multi-age study,” Bell said. “It was a big task and it kept getting bigger.”

In spite of those challenges, Bell said enthusiasm for Montessori in the University Place community remained high, built around a core of long-term, trained teachers and the success children were still having in their classrooms.

But a generation was passing, and with it the conviction that had supported Montessori and the other magnets.

Bell was about to retire, and many administrators who had helped launch and build the magnets were leaving. At the same time a wave of reform was introducing standardized curricula and testing requirements into all Tuscaloosa schools.

There was rapid turnover at University Place, too. Bell’s Montessori-trained successor left the school because of illness within a few months of her appointment, and four more principals followed in the next four years, none of them Montessori-trained.

By spring of 2005, with the number of trained teachers falling and most classrooms adopting conventional curricula, University Place formally ended its Montessori program.

Bell said she’s thought hard about what might have changed that outcome, but hasn’t come up with an answer.

“I think about whether I might have been able to do anything differently, and I just don’t know. There were so many things that contributed to this”—the loss of Montessori training and family resources, the loss of supportive administrators, and the adoption of non-Montessori curricula.

But she’s convinced the city’s children would have been better served if University Place Montessori and the district’s desegregation commitment had continued.

“When the classroom is desegregated it’s evident that there are differences in our community, in race, in income, in the neighborhoods or homes children come from. But the thing about a Montessori classroom is that it is a community. Children see differences, but they learn how much we’re all alike, how much we gain from each other, how much we can learn to work together.

“That was really working. I think it’s a crime that it was allowed to die.”