Love Him, Hate Him : Brash Educator Seen as Innovative, Divisive

CERRITOS —  Robert Sterling Beall has bullied, cajoled, sweated and innovated his way through close to 30 years as a teacher, principal and district administrator in the ABC Unified School District.

He began a year-round school before most educators even considered the concept. He put babies into classes before they could talk to see if the head start would help. He is best known as the first principal of Whitney High, a college preparatory school in Cerritos that is at or near the top statewide in test scores every year.

Despite that record, Beall, 56, was recently stripped of his post as an elementary principal. For the rest of the school year, he will sit in a barren office in a dead-end administrative job where the phone never rings, where he rarely sees a student. And he is being demoted to a classroom teacher position next year.

The reasons for Beall’s downfall have much in common with what made him a genuine, though controversial, star in education. The burly, restless Beall never held his tongue or his ideas. His brash, determined, almost flashy manner frequently placed him at odds with bureaucracy, and he liked it that way.

Critics look at Beall as a divisive, sometimes wrong-minded, maverick whose style bred unrest. Supporters view Beall as a trampled hero, a voice that shouted new ideas in a field begging for them.

“You either love him or you hate him. I’m on the love side,” said Whitney graduate Dan Kramer, a spokesman for the California Independent Petroleum Assn. “He doesn’t suffer mediocrity well. He believes kids should rise to their highest level, that all kids can rise to the challenge if given the opportunity.”

The incident that led to Beall’s recent removal as principal of Carver Elementary School in Cerritos demonstrates the sort of controversy, opposition and adulation that swirls around him.

The furor began after the start of school in September, when a disgruntled Carver teacher called in the parent of a black child and pointed out that one of the two kindergarten classes had all five black kindergarten pupils.

The parent, Calethia Henderson, said she became convinced that her child was the victim of segregation. She launched an anti-Beall crusade that shook the district up to the boardroom.

The kindergartners had been grouped in their classes based on testing, a practice some teachers found objectionable. They said a principal should not group children before their formal learning has begun. In some cases, grouping by ability has been judged illegal. Teachers complained to parents and officials because they said Beall would not listen.

The allegations painted Beall as an elitist, a racist, or both. The district transferred Beall in December from Carver to a temporary, ill-defined job overseeing students on independent study programs.

His ouster raised the ire of other Carver teachers as well as many parents, including some black parents, who accept Beall’s explanation of events.

Beall said the grouping of the kindergarten classes was only temporary, and that he had already directed teachers to make the classes racially balanced when the flap arose. Beall pointed out that only a divider separated the two kindergarten classes. And both classes had comparable numbers of Latino, Anglo and Filipino students all along. One class had a disproportionate number of black students, and the other a disproportionate number of Asians, but the numbers would have been balanced weeks before the mid-October deadline for final class assignments, he said.

Beall’s defenders included Carver PTA President Sydney Byron, who resigned in protest.

“About 15 families were active in getting Bob Beall out,” Byron said. “The other 400 didn’t know or didn’t want to dignify the (effort) by starting a fight here. We never dreamed it would go this far.”

At several recent district board meetings, parents delivered heated statements either for or against Beall. Supporters far outnumbered detractors.

Beall became principal at Carver in March, 1990, and immediately started changing things. Using discretionary funds and money raised by the PTA, he brought teachers in from the high school and lined up community members to offer fine arts and academic classes after school.

He began a nonprofit association to raise money for the school, a project that lost steam when he left Carver. Parent John Lee, who worked on forming the association, said he was impressed by Beall’s ideas and tirelessness.

“When my little daughter was in the fourth grade, she came home one day and said the principal had spoken to each class,” Lee said. “She was really excited and pumped up. She would spend one more hour on her homework each day.

“I am a minority. I know Bob Beall well enough to sense there is no racism on his part.”

Carver serves students from a wide range of economic and ethnic backgrounds. The student body is 34% Asian, 27% Anglo, 25% Latino, 9% Black, 4% Filipino and 1% other ethnic groups.

Beall also started a homework challenge. He would select students to describe their homework assignments before they went home. Then he would personally check them and praise the students the next day for completing their homework.

“I believe any child can learn anything provided that they’re given the right basics and that their minds are stretched by having high expectations,” Beall said in a recent interview. He proudly showed off letters from dozens of children who said they miss him and his homework challenge.

Beall expected much from his teachers as well as his students. Supporters said his willingness to disturb the status quo got him in trouble.

“Some teachers were upset with Mr. Beall,” former PTA President Byron said. “The teachers solicited parents and created an emotional riot among a small group of people. They got some school board members involved, and it was election time.”

One veteran teacher, who tried to serve as a mediator between pro- and anti-Beall factions, likened the school to “Hungary before the Cold War ended. I was meeting with people in closets. They were afraid. They distrusted each other,” said the teacher, who asked not to be named.

Beall said that sometimes people incorrectly interpret his drive for change as a personal attack. “People said I offended them,” Beall said. “I raise my voice. But it’s not at the person; (it’s) over the issue.”

Three teachers were upset enough to transfer from the school, an unusual step in midyear, Supt. Larry Lucas said. “The problem was not necessarily what the decisions were, just that the people weren’t getting along,” Lucas said, explaining Beall’s removal.

Beall said he hopes that some of the controversy surrounding him is a measure of his courage. “If you’re given responsibility to make sure that children learn, you need to make decisions that some people won’t agree with,” he said. “My passion for children to learn is my shortcoming, but it is also my strength.”

Former students described Beall as an around-the-clock principal who attended all school functions. He would flip hamburgers for fund-raisers and root for academic and sports teams. Like many teachers, he would dip into his own wallet when something needed to be paid for, they said.

His wife, Gerri Hunt, understands Beall’s passion for education. She is vice principal at Faye Ross Junior High in Artesia. One son is an attorney, the other a structural engineer.

Beall began his career as a sixth-grade teacher in Colton. He moved to the Long Beach area and began teaching in 1963 at Killingsworth Junior High in Hawaiian Gardens. In 1967, he became principal at Furgeson Elementary, a school that serves largely poor, Latino neighborhoods.

By 1971, he was ready to begin one of the boldest innovations of his career, a flexible year-round schedule. Beall’s goal was to get as many children as possible attending classes as much as possible. Furgeson closed only on holidays and for three weeks of maintenance in the fall.

Families could check children in and out of school as they pleased as long as the students attended the required minimum days. Teachers could take vacations whenever they wanted. A pool of substitutes filled in.

To make this plan work, Beall instituted a flexible curriculum. When students re-entered school after a vacation, they took placement tests and entered classes based on the results. Students of different ages frequently attended the same class. Students sometimes switched classrooms several times a day and changed subject teachers several times a year.

The idea caught on. In the first year, 379 of the school’s 629 students voluntarily came to school during the traditional Christmas vacation. During the traditional Easter vacation, 431 students attended. District research indicated that students were progressing faster than previously, and the students learning the fastest were the ones in school the most.

The program was entirely state funded under a formula that paid the school based on attendance. The district discontinued the Furgeson program in the leaner budget days of the late 1970s, and the state later limited how much it paid for a student’s attendance, Beall said.

At Wittmann Elementary in 1973, Beall experimented again. His projects included an infant-learning program that attracted more than 1,000 participants. Starting at six months, parents would bring their babies to school for muscle coordination training. The children learned to dance and a studied foreign language at ages 3 and 4. Parents paid nominal fees for the classes, which also received partial state funding.

Supt. Eugene Tucker next chose Beall to create an academically intensive high school for college-bound students. “I wanted someone creative, open, free-wheeling,” said Tucker, now superintendent of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

In 1978, Beall became the first principal of Whitney High.

Whitney attracted little student interest at first. The school had a small capacity and no gymnasium. Initially, it had no cheerleaders or sports teams. The school enrolled students as early as seventh grade and required all students to take college preparatory courses in several subjects. Beall asked teachers to be more versatile, to teach several subjects at more than one grade level. Several asked to be transferred.

“It took Bob a while to attract a staff that could buy into a new vision of a high school. The school had to be constructed to serve the students,” not the employees, Tucker said. “Bob had to put a team together who shared that view.”

Today, Whitney has a waiting list. The U.S. Department of Education twice selected Whitney as a National Recognition School, an award for academically distinguished schools given to only 210 schools a year. Fewer than two dozen public schools have won it twice. In the past four years, every Whitney senior has gone to either a four-year or community college. Whitney seniors led the state in scores on California Assessment Program tests the last two years the test was given. The state stopped funding the exams after the 1989-90 school year.

School board President Dixie Primosch, who has clashed with Beall at times, said Whitney’s success is the product of many teachers and administrators. Beall was just one of many who contributed, she said. In fact, the second national award did not come until a year after Beall left the campus in 1988.

Other officials, who asked not to be named, said Beall ran a loose ship at Whitney, that he failed to provide regular teacher evaluations required by the district, and used his power over admissions to curry political favor in the community.

While at Whitney, Beall vociferously resisted parents and officials who wanted to shut it down. Some say he fomented antagonism as a result. Critics attributed Whitney’s academic success primarily to the caliber of its students.

“The high schools believed Whitney was skimming all the smart kids,” Beall said. “I don’t think that’s true. If you tell kids they’re smart, they start to act smart. I don’t think some people like to see something be the best.”

Former Supt. Tucker said Whitney proved to be healthy competition for the other three high schools, prompting them to improve their programs also.

Beall left Whitney to create a nonprofit association to raise money for the district. His job also included writing grant applications. Before long, he yearned to return to a school site as principal. He went to Carver to fill a midyear vacancy.

“The schools are where the action is. Everything else is just palace politics,” Beall said.

But at Carver, the politics caught up with him, Beall said. And he admitted that his own style through the years had created enough enemies to make his downfall possible.

“Innovation in education is not like a seed in a fertile field,” he said. “Instead, education is a living body. Like a living body, when a foreign protein (innovation) is put into its bloodstream, the antibodies (educators) of the system rally to destroy the foreign protein.”

Beall said he has no remorse about going back to the classroom. He vowed to make a difference in students’ lives.

“My students will start to really know that someone believes in them and they will perform accordingly,” he said. “Are the kids learning? That’s all that counts.”

Profile: Robert Beall

Age: 56

Education: Master’s degree in educational psychology from Cal State Long Beach in 1966; bachelor’s in social science from Cal Poly Pomona in 1960.

Experience: Principal at Furgeson Elementary (1967-72), Wittmann School (1973-76) Whitney High (1978-88) and Carver Elementary (1990-91). Also worked in Cerritos and Hawaiian Gardens schools as a teacher, counselor and vice principal and in the ABC Unified School District office as administrator, bringing new funding to the district (1988-90).

Major contributions: Opened three new schools, overseeing experimental programs at each. Among the programs were a flexible year-round schedule at Furgeson, an infant-learning center at Wittmann and an accelerated, mandatory academic curriculum at Whitney.

Quotes: “We have to require more from our children, and at the same time provide a safety net so they can get extra help when they’re not achieving at the level you’re expecting. . . . I preach only one thing: learning. . . . I also preach that any kid can succeed. Some people might say that’s just hype, and they’re right. But if you don’t hype a program, then kids will not be encouraged to be enthusiastic about learning.”