Charleston County district's first black chief took on racial divide

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Maria Goodloe-Johnson wasn't on the ballot last November, but the School Board elections were a referendum on the first black superintendent in Charleston's history.

Her record inspires people to pick teams -- for or against "Dr. Maria," as she's known here. Most members of an all-white slate of conservative candidates blasted her plan for fixing failing schools as ineffective and called Goodloe-Johnson, now one of two finalists for the Seattle superintendency, financially reckless.

In response, the mayor, business leaders and other supporters backed four other candidates -- two white, two African American -- who supported Goodloe-Johnson and the plan.

"She won, basically," said Joe Riley, Charleston's mayor for the past 32 years. "She came as an agent of change. The election showed her we support her approach."

The election transformed the School Board from obstinate to cooperative, and validated Goodloe-Johnson's oft-controversial approach to reversing deeply rooted academic gaps between white and black students. She is described by those who know her as so aggressive and confident in her vision that she comes across as domineering at times.

Critiques of her four-year tenure are mixed. A quarter of Charleston County School District's 80 schools were recently commended for closing the "achievement gap" between black and white students. Yet another quarter are still deemed failing. The district in 2004 and 2005 received a "good" rating from state evaluators but last year slipped to "below average" when test scores didn't rise fast enough.

The 43,000-student district is nearly 100 miles end to end -- the distance from Seattle to Ellensburg -- and caters to the affluent suburbs with 11 countywide magnet schools and five charter schools considered among the best in the public system.

But a persistent core of failing schools in downtown Charleston -- the vestiges of segregation -- remain the tests of Goodloe-Johnson's leadership. Block after block of dilapidated row houses, their streets full with young black children, testify to a racial and economic chasm that splits the city.

"The history of this place is a blessing and a curse," said Jonathan Butzon, executive director of the Charleston Education Network, a school-reform advocacy group.

"The curse is that we've been able to rationalize educating some children to an excellent level, and to ignore the other kids. One of the really good things is Maria Goodloe-Johnson confronts that."

"A massive sign"

Goodloe-Johnson, 49, counts her mother, a teacher in Omaha, Neb., as her role model.

Goodloe-Johnson started as a special-education teacher in Colorado, and she earned graduate degrees as she rose to administrative jobs. She was an assistant superintendent in Corpus Christi, Texas, when Charleston, which had a run of short-term, caretaker schools chiefs, hired her.

She was an instant celebrity. Billboards across the city hailed her arrival, and Riley, the mayor, gave out bushels of apples at a rally in her honor.

"Charleston was one of the last bastions of school segregation, and her hiring was a massive sign," said the Rev. Joe Darby, a leader in Charleston's NAACP chapter, which has been among her strongest supporters.

But with her celebrity came personal attacks.

Less than a year into the job, she married a local man, and she had a daughter three months later. Charleston is known as "The Holy City" for its bounty of pinnacled church spires, and she heard rebukes for setting a bad example.

And last fall, a (now former) School Board member described the superintendent on a radio call-in show as being on "CPT" when she missed a plane flight, which most interpreted to mean "colored people time."

Inez Tenenbaum, a former South Carolina state schools superintendent, said Seattle would be a "breath of fresh air" for Goodloe-Johnson.

"Maria has been tested," Tenenbaum said. "She kept going and she never lost her focus."

Pressure from both sides

Goodloe-Johnson's supporters compare her five-year "Plan of Excellence" to rebuilding a crumbling foundation. Announced in 2004, the plan is still a work in progress, and she is in the midst of installing a districtwide curriculum, ending a practice of school autonomy. She likes holding principals accountable: She replaced about three-quarters of them at failing schools, and put in thrice-yearly student testing to hold principals' feet to the fire.

"When you have schools that have not been successful, to make them successful you need lots of structure, accountability and support," she said in a recent interview. "I think we have given too much flexibility to our schools."

To improve eight failing schools, she turned to the for-profit Edison Schools for help, although Edison doesn't run the schools as it does in some districts.

Recently, parents have pushed for a new charter school to appeal to middle-class families returning to restore the 19th-century "Charleston single" homes in traditionally poorer neighborhoods downtown. In the past, those families have flocked to private schools.

Goodloe-Johnson initially rejected the charter plan. It was also blasted by the NAACP. But she's since changed her mind, said Park Dougherty, a white stockbroker who lives downtown and supported the plan for a new charter school. "The gentrification of the peninsula is putting pressure on the schools to improve," he said.

She has withstood equal pressure from the predominantly black neighborhoods, frustrated that one high school, Burke, continues to struggle and in 2006 and 2007 was considered for state takeover.

Marvin Stewart, a former teacher and downtown-schools activist, says Goodloe-Johnson's plan to fix Burke and other failing schools is sound. But he sees the historic inequities -- like a vast disparity between foreign-language offerings -- continuing.

"We don't have time for a five-year plan. A student only gets to be in that grade for one year," he said. "We have to have the change today."

"At least she tried something"

Brentwood Middle School typified the institutional rot confronting Goodloe-Johnson. When she arrived, just 3 percent of the 440-student downtown school passed state tests, continuing a 10-year pattern. Police were routinely called. Turnover was so bad that second-year teachers were considered veteran.

And race relations were so tense that a white teacher there filed a federal discrimination suit in 2004, claiming black students regularly called her, among other things, "white cracker, white honkey, white whore," with no intervention from the principal. White students backed up her claim, saying they were also routinely pelted with epithets.

In 2005, Goodloe-Johnson made a radical change: She disbanded Brentwood and another, similarly failing school, and made all faculty reapply for their jobs. In exchange, she pledged extra math and science instruction, tutors and a Saturday school.

Many of those promises weren't kept, swelling the existing sense of inequity, said Butzon, the school-reform advocate. "I'd like to say she had the Midas touch for everything she tried, but at least she tried something," Butzon said.

Amid the controversy over academics, the lawsuit filed by the white teacher went to trial, ending with a $307,000 verdict against the district. A federal judge labeled the school a "hostile workplace."

After the trial, Goodloe-Johnson told The (Charleston) Post and Courier that the teacher had "played the race card" and she didn't see the insults as racist.

"She didn't create problems, but you'd think as superintendent she would stand up and say something to students, that this is wrong," said Larry Kobrovsky, the teacher's attorney and a former Charleston School Board member.

The controversy fed tension into the School Board elections. But the outcome -- the conservative slate won just one of the three open spots -- likely means she will have more time for her turnaround plan if she remains in Charleston.

The improvements aren't always clear to the community, but they're there, said Gregg Meyers, a School Board member and Goodloe-Johnson supporter who won re-election last November. "It's like a baseball scout spotting talent," he said. "The scout can see that a guy is clearly going to hit 35 homers soon, even when his performance hasn't quite reached that level."

Staff writer Linda Shaw and staff researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this story from Seattle. Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com