For the Children

The news from the battleground of urban schools continues to be chilling, but Madeline Cartwright's story of her 11-year tenure as a principal in Philadelphia's inner-city demonstrates that one person in one school can turn around even the most dire conditions. For the Children is Cartwright's account of her battles with a deteriorating building, uncooperative teachers, a demoralized and suspicious drug-and crime-ridden community, a bloated and unresponsive school bureaucracy, and a highly politicized city hall. In it, she weaves a fascinating story of her valiant efforts to rescue the students of James G. Blaine Elementary School from the destruction around them and endow them with a sense of purpose and self-worth.Cartwright begins by recounting the details of her own childhood in a small, rural Pennsylvania community. Although she rightly observes that the privation of her youth was genteel compared to that experienced by most of the street-toughened children at Blaine, she asserts that her background led her to be acutely empathetic to the daily life-and-death challenges faced by many of her young charges. Thus, one of her first tasks after becoming principal, she recalls, was to create a school pledge that affirmed the students' ability to transcend their environment. The pledge, which students recited each day before entering the building, was simple enough: will act in such a way that I will be proud of myself and others will be proud of me, too. I came to school to learn, and I will learn. I will have a good day. It soon became a rallying cry for the children, who took to reciting it often when the going got tough.Cartwright details many instances in which she took on the school bureaucracy and won. For example, she recalls how she was able to change systemwide testing procedures by changing the way a standardized test was administered. In another instance, she was able to get the mayor to intervene personally to get her school painted. When she refused to participate in a highly touted curriculum innovation because she felt that her school did not need it, her refusal stood.While Cartwright did battle on a number of fronts, her best efforts were reserved, as the title indicates, for the children. The book is replete with stories of such endeavors. For this reviewer, perhaps the best one was about the time this pragmatic principal became convinced that one of the best things Blaine School could do for its students would be to purchase a washer and dryer. Few of her students, she realized, had pajamas, and many slept in the same clothes they wore to school. Because most were forced to sleep in the same bed with younger children who sometimes wet the bed, their clothes often reeked with the smell of urine. The realization of this, by others or by the children themselves, often caused the children to feel embarrassment or shame. The solution to the problem, as Cartwright saw it, was simply to wash the children's clothes at school. She therefore put her considerable energies into organizing a raffle to raise the $600 needed to purchase the laundry equipment

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