At P.S. 172 in Brooklyn, a Principal Rewrites the Book

October 23, 2015 - NYT article by Ginia Bellafante

In 1970, Jack Spatola, born Giacomo, a young immigrant from the small town of Paceco on the western tip of Sicily, who had come to the United States at the age of 14 with his parents to live in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was called to service in the Vietnam War. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a seamstress, and neither wanted him to go; Mr. Spatola managed to avoid the draft on the grounds that he was the only person in his family who spoke English. Instead, he went to college — to Pace University — and got into educationFrom the outset he knew he liked challenges, which was fortunate, given that the New York City school system in the ’70s and ’80s provided a caldron full of them. He taught children with special needs, children who didn’t know English (he is trilingual; Spanish is his third language), children coming up in especially rough neighborhoods, like Bushwick. In 1984, he became principal of Public School 172 in Sunset Park, an elementary school, where he has remained for 31 years. In the beginning, his student body was predominantly Puerto Rican; today it is predominantly Mexican and Latin American, with more than 85 percent of those attending eligible for free lunch.

Demographic realities have not hindered achievement. Last year, 98 percent of third, fourth and fifth graders, those required to take state exams toward the end of the year, passed the math test. Seventy-six percent passed the language test. Those figures far exceed citywide averages, which sit in the 30s for both disciplines, and they match or surpass scores at many affluent schools. On the tests administered this past spring, students at P.S. 172 did better than students at P.S. 234, a celebrated school in TriBeCa, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Even among those students requiring special education, a subset that makes up 25 percent of the population at P.S. 172, the results were impressive — 69 percent received the highest possible score in math. On a recent visit, I watched a small group of fifth graders in a hallway, working through an exercise calling for an estimate of the value of two large numbers when multiplied together. The teacher was about to guide them through an elaborate written formula for rounding off, but before she could proceed, one little boy blurted out the answer, 174,000, correctly calculated in his head within seconds. Students are grouped by their ability for these exercises, and this particular section, I later found out, was the remedial one.

Students at P.S. 172 have performed well for many years. Although scores dipped slightly after the introduction of Common Core standards, they quickly bounced back, and as a result of Mr. Spatola’s long-running success he receives many observers who want to know how he does it. Next month he is expecting a visit from the business guru Jim Collins, who studies what makes certain companies great and some leaders especially adept. Mr. Spatola has a way of speaking in chief executive patois — potential is unknowable and presumably limitless, success breeds joy and so on — but the platitudes belie a rigorous system of self-assessment that is at the center of the school’s philosophy.

Teachers, students and administrators are engaged in a constant process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t; why, for example, one student might be quickly gaining an understanding of symbolism in reading while another isn’t. Professional development is an experience that is not relegated to occasional seminars but is lived daily. Strikingly, members of the school’s senior staff have an extended shared history of knowing what is effective and what isn’t — Mr. Spatola’s assistant principal, Erika Gundersen, has been with him for more than 20 years; the math and literacy coaches on hand to work with teachers to enhance practices have been with him on average more than 12 years.

Mr. Spatola’s most notable innovation, though, may be the manner in which he comes up with the money to finance all the additional academic supports his school deploys in the absence of enormous Wall Street donations, which are available to many charter schools. Mr. Spatola doesn’t use textbooks, which are notoriously expensive (and a major factor in the low graduation rates at community colleges, where students often drop out because they can’t afford them). In the past fiscal year, the city and state spent $100 million on textbooks in New York City schools. At P.S. 172, the allocated money is used to buy primary texts, works of fiction and nonfiction selected by teachers and administrators. Students will, for instance, use the Internet to research how the branches of government work. The many dollars left over are spent on other services.

For Mr. Spatola the commitment is driven by ideology as much as anything else, the theory being that textbooks dilute and essentially cheapen the experience of learning. In fact, textbooks are much rarer in elite private schools than in public ones. Following a similar logic, P.S. 172 creates its own curriculums, grade by grade. It does not use budget money to purchase the expensive curriculum the Education Department recommends for meeting the Common Core standards, which at a school the size of P.S. 172, with its roughly 600 students, could cost close to $50,000.

“It is absolutely crazy to me that a company out west would really have any idea what my children need,” Mr. Spatola said. “If you are a professional, you take ownership of the curriculum.” Otherwise, he continued, “you’re taking away the respect that an educator needs and deserves.”

The question of whether the P.S. 172 model can be made scalable is dependent on the widespread availability of educators who are impassioned and focused and hardworking enough to take on the challenges demanded by the kind of culture the school has established. Devising curriculums and maintaining notebooks on every single child, which are updated constantly — another feature at the school — amount to very labor-intensive efforts. Mr. Spatola still lives in Bensonhurst, but like many chief executives, on Saturday you’ll find him in his office.