Manual High School Principal Rob Stein

HeadFirst Colorado editor Alan Gottlieb sat down recently with Manual High School Principal Rob Stein to get his take on the newly reopened school’s first year. What follows is a liberally edited transcript of their conversation over lunch at M&D’s Barbecue.

Q: In answering questions about their freshman year at Manual, a startling number of kids said that until this year, they never had a teacher who cared about them.

Stein:  We’ve definitely reached kids this year who feel like they would already have dropped out otherwise. We looked at kids’ past grades. And they would be all Ds and Fs. There is this one kid, M, who has never passed a class, I don’t think. And (math teacher) David Singer talks about how M has never seen any modicum of academic success. David talked to him and said, what do you expect from school? And M said, “I expect to fail. I don’t pass school.” In his mind, that’s who he is.

And he actually started to see some growth in the second half of the year, passing some classes, doing satisfactory work on some assignments. I think of it as trying to change a trajectory, and what if that intervention had happened sooner to change M’s trajectory – in sixth grade instead of ninth?

I’m not saying those other schools didn’t try; but I don’t feel that they singled out M for the intensive advisory, cajoling, making him stay after school, calling home, visiting home, visiting psychologists; all the things we tried to figure out what would make him change his patterns. He wasn’t a behavior problem. He was just very passive. And I think the passive aspect is why he went unaddressed elsewhere.

Q: What were your biggest lifelines and obstacles in this first year?

Stein: Lifelines have definitely been resources in the community. The foundations, my friends who are in some ways colleagues or peers in the broader education community. ( Denver School of Science and Technology Principal) Bill Kurtz. I mean, God, DSST has been a lifeline. They literally opened up their hard drives to me, and anything they had they made open source available to me. And also the inspiration. There were a few really bad days when I just went over there for their morning meeting. I needed to be reminded of an exemplar that was more positive. Then I went back to Manual reinvigorated, thinking ‘we can make this work here.’

It was unexpected the degree to which people were helpful. KIPP Sunshine Peak Academy is another example. (Principal) Rich Barrett brought over his entire faculty for two work days for us. Just an amazing network of that kind of support.

Of course the other shoe is that this was all outside of DPS. I didn’t have anything I could call a lifeline in DPS. I think I crafted some networks of relationships that allowed me to go to people to get help on specific issues. When I needed someone to help explain how to do something, I could always find someone. I’m sort of tired of being the bad boy. There’s this DPS protocol, and I always felt like I was the bad boy who didn’t follow directions.

But it’s almost like the system is not set up to help. And oftentimes when you ask questions you feel reprimanded, like ‘you don’t know that?’ Or, ‘we already told you that.’ And there’s some truth to that. I blew off a lot of meetings I should have gone to, and missed information.

But I’ve said this all along: the biggest barrier has always been the challenges the students present. Getting them to learn has been the been the biggest challenge of the job.

Q: You’ve taught in urban areas before. Were you surprised by the magnitude of the challenge Manual students posed?

Stein: It always feels different when you’re on the inside than when you’re on the outside. So, I don’t know that I was surprised, but it was just a big uphill climb. I had a really healthy respect for the odds. A lot of talented people have done good work in DPS and at Manual previously and not seen great results. So to come in and think that suddenly we were going to turn it around...you know, I had those days earlier in my career, where I felt like all kids…if we just treat them well, with cool stuff to do, they’ll become bright-eyed students. But I gave up on that 20 years ago.

Q: Before coming to Manual, you were Head of School at the Graland Country Day private school, a totally different universe. Was that a big adjustment?

Rob: No, it really wasn’t. I feel much more at home at Manual than I did at Graland. I don’t know why. I just do.

Q: Superintendent Michael Bennet pledged to the community that Manual would become a premier high school. Where can Manual realistically end up?

Stein: The number one thing is to serve the kids and that means the kids in this community – the 80205 Zip Code, and other kids who have been underserved by schools in their past. But I already believe that kids perceive us as doing a better job for them, and when we get the data I think it will reflect that we are doing better for those kids. To me, that is a premier school.

But at the same time, if we’re really going to serve those kids, we’re going to have to provide them more exposure to other kinds of kids, and other kinds of expectations. We were talking the other day about how we need to bring in some exemplars of student work from other schools because we have a bell curve like any school, but our bell curve is further to the left than other schools. And we don’t want our bell curve to define our norm. We have to show our kids an exemplar of what a ninth grade essay looks like in the IB program or at East High School or in an honors class.

Q: Will this motivate them or deflate them?

Stein: Well, a little bit of both. It’s about how we present it. No kid benefits from being the fastest runner on a slow team. Ultimately, they need to see what quality work can look like.  And I think over time we will start to draw more kids who have had success in school. Already, for this coming year our student profile is a more accomplished profile than last year’s. More kids are doing well in school, and excited about high school.

Last year, for example, Wyatt Edison (a neighborhood charter school) was taking a wait and see attitude, and mostly low-performing kids came from there. This year I think they urged some of their higher performing kids to give us a look. They got to know us, we got to know them, I met with their principal, teachers are exchanging ideas. I think they’re trusting we’re a good school and are willing to encourage people to check us out.

Q: Might Manual ever look like the DSST student body? More economically mixed?

Stein: I don’t know. One thing is that as the neighborhood changes it may very well end up that way. But that would be a 10 or 20 year trajectory. I don’t suspect so, though. DSST is 40 percent free lunch and we’re pretty much 90.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comment form