As we celebrate Black History Month, we should acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the birth and 50th anniversary of the assassination of Marcus Foster, one of the 20th century’s finest educators and the first black, big-city school superintendent. It’s a story seemingly out of Hollywood but in fact born from lived experience.
Foster believed that education was the surest way to achieve the American dream, a dream written about in equally applicable terms in our country’s founding documents but historically denied to children of color. He left a legacy of success in Philadelphia and was poised to do more as Oakland superintendent when he was murdered in a hail of cyanide-filled bullets fired by the Marxist Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patty Hearst infamy).
Despite this tragic ending 50 years ago, Foster’s life gives us several important lessons today.
Foster excelled in grammar school and later at Cheyney State College (now Cheyney University) where he graduated with a teaching degree in 1947. At a time when all-black schools were often tools of oppression, Foster could nevertheless see the tight relationship between education and economic mobility in post-WWII America.
He started his professional teaching career on a quest to convince other adults that the minds of black students were of equal importance and capability as those of any other students. This expectation alone was often counter-cultural.
Much attention has rightly been given to the idea that we should be more protective of black lives; Foster knew black minds are just as integral. Yet now, as then, a shockingly small number of black students are proficient in reading and math (17% and 15%, respectively). Recognizing and remediating these statistics are good first steps in honoring Foster’s legacy.
When he was 3 years old, Foster’s family moved from Georgia to Philadelphia, part of the 20th century Great Migration chronicled in Isabel Wilkerson’s best-seller, “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Thousands of blacks left the Jim Crow South in search of opportunities in the North and West.
While these migration patterns have waned, black families still seek great opportunities, in the form of schools. Polling from 2022 shows that 60% of parents prefer a school other than their local, public school, suggesting a strong desire for the freedom to choose one’s path.
In today’s climate of social media trolling and hot takes, nuance is often left on the cutting room floor. In education debates, this often means you are either in the “excellence” camp or the “empathy” camp. Foster believed both were vital to student success.
When a female Irish-American elementary-school principal delivered a boy to Foster with instructions to “fix him so he can’t walk,” Foster instead chose to “defuse conflicts with dialogue and mutual understanding,” a hallmark throughout his later career.
As principal at the disruptive Catto Disciplinary School, which served secondary students expelled from elsewhere, Foster reached out to parents, brought back extracurricular activities, improved academics, and developed vocational programs with businesses so students could get jobs after graduation.
He also reoriented counselors away from doing paperwork and toward helping kids. Amazingly, parents began to request that their children be assigned to Catto.
Foster also turned around what was considered the worst comprehensive high school in Philadelphia, Simon Gratz, by improving outreach to parents, imposing structure, and bringing back extracurricular activities like dance. He also created “storefront schools” in the Gratz community to serve parents and students after hours.
Great educators, he insisted, could “break through generations of non-achievement and sell the idea of college to these students.” The results: Foster’s academic program more than doubled college acceptances and halved the dropout rate.
Many fear that three years of COVID disruption will wreak havoc on K-12 students. But consider Foster’s time: outright racial segregation, under-resourced black neighborhoods, and the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and 70s. Despite these challenges, Foster built a cross-racial, bipartisan coalition focusing on student learning.
Though he leaned politically left and opposed the Vietnam War, the Nixon White House approached Foster to serve as US Commissioner of Education. Modern issues like lagging student achievement, curriculum debates, parent disenfranchisement, and overworked teachers are serious and warrant responsible solutions. But they are no more intractable than the challenges Foster overcame.
This Black History Month, in addition to recognizing the well-known accomplishments of heroes like Martin Luther King and others, we’d do well to remember Marcus Foster and the lessons gleaned from his mixture of leadership, courage, and hope.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and has served on both public and charter school boards. Shaka Mitchell is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children.