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SHIRLEY THORNTON
Written by Sheri Rice
April 2003
"Life could be wonderful but it isn't," said Shirley Thornton,
California's Deputy Superintendent of Schools, in a 1990s interview recalling
her life and career.
Despite this statement, Thornton -- the highest-ranking African American
female in public education in California -- remains hopeful, not negative,
practical, not pessimistic. Her primary goal has been and continues to be
to provide equal access and opportunity to all school children in California.
And as one of the state's most dynamic advocates for children as well as one of
the state's prime "movers and shakers," Shirley Thornton has achieved
this lifetime goal by creating programs such as the widely acclaimed California
Local Education Reform Program (C-LERN) for exactly this purpose.
Although
much of her work these days requires her to spend time in Sacramento, Thornton
remains a deeply rooted member of her community in Marin City. But it's
not where she started out – not in the Bay Area, not even California, but in
New Orleans, Louisiana, where she was born and where she attended Valena C.
Jones Elementary School. The majority of students attending this school
were Catholic and Creole, and every day the Catholic students went to the
Catholic school for Catechism lessons while the non-Catholics (Thornton among
them) stayed in the study hall.
While
at Valena C. Jones she became inspired early on by the principal of the school,
Fanny C. Williams, who subsequently became her role model. At the time,
Fannie C. Williams was one of the most educated, influential "Colored"
women in America. She was invited to the White House numerous times and because
of that presidential relationship she also had the opportunity to invite Eleanor
Roosevelt to visit the Valena C. Jones School. Eleanor Roosevelt was not the
only noteworthy citizen to visit that school where high expectations were the
rule, those expectations ranking alongside academics, for all of its attendees.
In her community, "There was never any question about
would you go to college, "Thornton says, "but where would you go to
college." Where Shirley Thornton grew up, attending college was
considered far more than acquiring an education. According to Thornton, it was:
"What would
you do to honor your family and your race?"
"What would
you do to honor the traditions of the past?"
"What would
you do to honor yourself?"
Thornton
and her siblings grew up in a "Colored" community where doctors,
lawyers, teachers, maids – everyone – lived in the same neighborhood
because it didn't matter who you were or how much money you made. There
was no choice for African-Americans; they simply could not live anywhere else.
Yet, because of this mixture of people and professions, many good role models
affected the Thornton children and others who were expected to grow up and to
"be somebody." This sense of being somebody formed a solid foundation
that the Thornton’s continued to build on when, like so many other families in
the '50s, they decided to move away from the South.
Despite
the positive role models around them, plus the strengths of the elementary
school, the family decided to move away from the South. They decided to
move because of the basic ways and thought processes of the South and because of
outside influences, particularly regarding the African-American population.
Thornton's mother feared for her children, for their physical safety, for their
psychological safety, and her biggest fear of all: that they would eventually
think of themselves as less than others. Though she was from the South,
she refused to buy into all the ways of the South. While the "yes
sir" and "yes ma'am," were acceptable, other accepted modes of
behavior were not. For example, the way the children had to refer to
themselves as "colored" in school, the attitudes of others toward
African-Americans, and the way her children felt an inexplicable hatred directed
toward them, although, at the time, they didn't interpret what was
happening as racism. All of these factors were more than Mrs. Thornton
wanted her children to have to bear. Also, her mother believed in the American dream, though in California she found
that the "American dream," like so many dreams, turned out to be
something to believe in from afar. More of a myth than a reality and, as
in New Orleans, the reality in California required work. Specifically, for her
mother, who gave her family a firm structure, and who expected a measure of
success from each member of the family.
In
the Bay Area, Thornton's mother worked in Woolworth's, at the Restaurant &
Bakery, as the first African American cake decorator at the Powell and Market
store in San Francisco. When each of her children turned sixteen, and to
reinforce the Protestant work ethic, she had them work at Woolworth's, too, in
the kitchen, busing dishes, cleaning and scrubbing floors for the minimum wage.
She wanted them to realize that they needed to have an education in order to do
something with their lives or they would be doing that kind of work all their
lives. Still, she left it to each one of them to make that decision: work or
school, but no in-between.
At
fifteen, Thornton became a Bay Area resident, settling first with her family in
Oakland, later Berkeley, then San Francisco, and as an adult, finally, Marin
City where she has lived since 1967 in a house she purchased with a $500 loan
from her parents. Dr. Thornton continues to live there despite her twenty
years of commuting ninety miles to Sacramento to the Department of Education and
later to California State University, Sacramento, where she is presently an
adjunct Professor in the School of Education. Embedded in her community,
Thornton refuses to leave her "base of security," the nearby church
she attends in San Francisco and the opportunity to "still be me" by
staying put in the same familiar place.
It
was in high school that Thornton began to try and figure out who that
"me" might be, and so a future career in education might have been on
her list. However, her counselor at Balboa High School, the high school
she graduated from in San Francisco, informed her that the world of teaching,
for a "Negro," was not a viable option in the '50s in California.
So after graduation, she considered college, then marriage, but instead chose
the Army.
During
Thornton's senior year, Balboa High School offered a vocational course to all
graduating seniors, a brief survey of the working world. In one of those
sessions, female members of the military visited the class, lectured and
answered questions, thus providing a viable career option for all the near
graduates. Though enlisting in the Army was not an expected career path
for a woman in the '50, something drew Thornton in. She made her decision
and when time came for her to join up, she was backed by her mother, who told
everyone, "If this is something she wants to do, I will support her."
So Thornton enlisted.
Once
in the military, she says, it was the best choice she could have made for
herself. Life seemed simpler in the Army. In the Army there were
merits and demerits and that was all that counted. And after she'd earned
enough of those demerits, along with the accompanying KP duty, she also learned
one of her most important lessons from the military: Diplomacy. Having grown up
in a family that never allowed hitting physically, she had learned early on to
hit verbally. Called "the dozens" in the Black community,
youngsters learn to use their mouths instead of their fists to control
their environment. This philosophy -- fighting with her mouth -- though it
helped Thornton as the youngest of five children, didn't work quite as well in
the Army. After three years of service, the chief therapist in the
Physical Therapy Department she worked in advised her either to "Re-enlist
and learn to curb your mouth, or get out and get some degrees to go with your
mouth."
Thornton
combined both choices. She enlisted in the US Army Reserve and enrolled in
college. But, not until after she'd tried, unsuccessfully, for a variety
of jobs where she was told each time that she had failed the test, yet when she
asked to see the test she was told "No."
While
stationed at Fort Ord, she had taken classes at Monterey Peninsula Junior
College and did quite well. So today, Thornton thanks the US Post Office,
PG&E and the Telephone Company for not hiring her because if they had, she
says she would have never achieved any of her present success.
Her
marriage was also ending and so, she thought, about the college career she'd
halfheartedly begun in criminology at Monterey Peninsula Community College and
decided to try college again. Next she attended City College of San Francisco
and completed her AA degree, then San Francisco State where she received her
B.A. in Biological Sciences. Although she had a tough time studying -- never
having learned properly how to do it -- she never let the challenges and
obstacles get her down and she persevered. With the positive success she'd
had in the Army, she intended to re-enlist after graduation with the thought
that the road map for her continued success stretched before her on the military
path. At the time, that road equaled safety to her and equal access
opportunity in her work. Having grown up with the color issues of New
Orleans, she says that the opportunity to excel was a key aspect in the life she
sought.
The
Army, she felt at the time, was a place where the most important color was not
the color of a person's skin. The most important color in the Army was
green. Green was the color of uniforms, the color of walls, the color of
blankets, the color of so much, which permeated daily life. And in the
Army, if you did your job well, positive evaluations would follow and you would
be promoted. It seemed a simple path at the time. But after going through the
military physical therapy training, her high expectations for a military career
were squashed when she was told, at the age of twenty-four, that she had
glaucoma and was ineligible to become a commissioned officer because she would
not be able to pass the physical. This blow hit hard but she stayed in the
Army Reserves and considered her options.
With
a degree in Biological Science, she considered teaching (despite the bad
advice she'd received in high school) and enrolled at San Francisco State where
she discovered she would have to take 30 more credits. At the time
Thornton completed college, to earn a teaching credential with an academic
major, you could also have a non-academic minor. She chose a minor in
Physical Education so she could teach, and then completed 30 units in one year.
After graduation she took the national teachers' exam, where she scored in the
top five percent in California.
In 1967, she began her teaching career in San Francisco, starting at
Marina Junior High where she did her student teaching and then at Aptos Middle
School as a Science and Physical Education teacher. At the time, Aptos was
considered one of the most desirable schools in the Bay Area. But also at
the time -- the '60s -- it was also a school in transition, transitioning from a
white school to a desegregated one. This move also brought a new
challenge: Thornton was one of the first two African-American teachers at the
school in the turbulent '60s. So when the demographics began to change and
the racial clashes and fights resulted, Thornton was called out of her classroom
on a daily basis to solve problems between students. After that, since no
one else seemed to know how to counsel the African-American children -- who were
new, like her, at Aptos – her position at the school changed and she was
promoted to Counselor in 1969, then to Assistant Principal in 1973.
Then
Thornton also decided to have her eyes tested again for the glaucoma she'd been
diagnosed with. This time she found out she didn't have glaucoma, but she
was already deep into her teaching career so she decided to pursue her Army
career as an officer in the Reserves.
"Many
times doors open," Thornton says, "and we stand there and don't go
through them because we're not sure what's going to happen.
Though
discouraged by her principal who told her it would not be possible, her
counseling experience at Aptos motivated Thornton to return to college for more
advanced degrees. But at San Francisco State, she didn't receive much
encouragement when a district office administrator told her she'd be an
administrator "over his dead body." Faced with these challenges as
well as the challenge of being an African-American woman, Thornton proceeded on
her chosen path of becoming a school administrator. She received a Masters
Degrees in Counseling, and a California State Administrative Credential.
Later she received her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University
of San Francisco. Her study habits had obviously improved.
Thornton
credits Affirmative Action for a portion of her success. Yes, she had the proper
prerequisites but Thornton will tell you "I got where I am because of
Affirmative Action," she says. "The day I start believing I made
it because of me and my wonderful, bright, creative self, I know I have gone
over the edge."
Thornton's
successes, as well as many other African-Americans' successes have Affirmative
Action to thank for helping them achieve. "There
were many brilliant people before us who were much more capable, but did not
make it because the doors to success were closed," Thornton says and simply
states that she was there at the right time and the right with the right
preparation "I believe you get your degree in what you're about and I'm
about education and instruction. You get your leadership skills
elsewhere." And for that she often credits the Army.
"In
the military," she says, "I realized that if you say something long
enough with enough conviction, you are believed." "The military,"
she continues, "taught me what men learn in organized sports and through
their military experiences. They know how to play on the team and how to
behave at war. The combat training taught me how to understand the plays.
It gave me structure." The combined result of these career experiences
allows Shirley Thornton to concentrate today on the children she wishes to see
succeed.
Her education helps her educate the children, to see her
role as affirming that all children can learn and that all teachers can teach
until proven otherwise. As administrator, she says, the school principal
needs to be the catalyst of change, the one to encourage, the springboard that
allows others to achieve success.
Her
military experience helps her to keep open the communication between the people
necessary to complete a task, to share that necessary information and to involve
others in the plausible solutions to whatever problems may arise. Focusing
on information and not on personalities is Thornton's way of keeping out the
emotional speculation and the attention on non-issues. "It's the non-issues
that keep us from seeing what's happening with the African-American in the State
of California," says Thornton, who guards against personal attacks by first
arming herself with a wealth of knowledge about each situation before she faces
it.
In
her rise from middle school science teacher to her role as Deputy
Superintendent, to head of Public Housing in San Francisco, to college professor
to today as Senior Vice President of the America's Schools Program, there have
been many challenging situations, but she's been well-prepared academically, as
well as practically, with the ability to keep personal business out of her
professional life. As a child living with divorced parents and stepparents, she
learned along the way, from her family, the clear difference in individuals'
roles, the difference between husband and wife and mother and father.
"Whatever
went on with my parents as husband and wife is not my business," she says.
"It was important that we not let that get in the way of our
relationships." So today she has a "family without the
splits" and, similarly, she works in her career toward a cohesive
organization also "without the splits." Building on thirty years in
the military, Thornton's recipe for success has been to establish a system of
change, organization and accountability, adding to that a database and training.
And leave out the personal. "Limit conflict by limiting contact," she
says. Set a mission. In Thornton's case, her mission has been significant
academic achievement for all kids. Then, after establishing the mission,
she says, you must look at the barriers to that goal. "Educating
children," she says, "is like a stool with three legs: community,
parents and the school." The school's only job must be to educate the
children. That's all. When teachers turn into pseudo-parents and
baby-sitters, their role is encumbered and their necessary daily tasks spread
too thin. They can't do everything.
"There's
nothing wrong with our children," says Thornton. "What's wrong with
our children is what's wrong with us. So what is the solution?
To train the parents, Thornton says, and to get the community involved.
And Thornton has done just that with the establishment of programs that address
the problems of teen-age pregnancy, dropouts, gang violence, career-vocational
education, special education, bilingual education, state special schools, and
youth, adult and alternative education. Tens of thousands of California
students have benefited from Thornton's leadership of the California Department
of Education's Specialized Branch. When she took over the Specialized Branches
Division, one of her first priorities, before proceeding further, was to gather
information. To accomplish this, she met with hundreds of educators and
parents. She poured over the data, saw for herself the exact problems:
soaring dropout rates, increasing gang violence and rising teenage pregnancy
rates.
"Teenage
pregnancy," she says, "is a man-child problem, not a boy-girl problem.
But when people hear the statistic that 72% of the males impregnating our girls
are men, not boys, they don't want to know the rest." But she gives
people the information anyway and tells them, "Now that we've identified
the problem, let's solve it. This way we are not talking about
Catholicism, masochism or girls wanting babies. We are either going to put
in programs of support or we are going to deal with prevention."
In
her information-gathering stage, she also saw how fewer minority and
disadvantaged youth were graduating from high school and how even fewer were
continuing on to higher education. "To be Hispanic-centered or
Afro-centered," Thornton says, "does not mean you're negating
Euro-centric but it's saying that America has to 'fess up and be honest and I
don't believe you can do that if you haven't done your homework." Having
done her homework, the information and statistics galvanized Thornton to speak
out across the state, to seek out, cajole, inspire and convince leaders of
businesses, foundations and universities to spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars to sponsor schools which would participate in one of her most valuable
and successful projects: C-LERN, the California Local Educational Reform
Network.
The
goal of this highly successful program called C-LERN is to reshape the education
system by targeting an individual school site and making the school serve as the
unit of change, by making the school the most viable means to increase academic
achievement and educational opportunity for all students regardless of their
race, social or economic differences. With technical assistance, resources and
training provided by C-LERN, the schools learn how to organize themselves to
meet the need of students more effectively: how to mobilize their communities,
reorganize their teaching practices, revise their curricula, and restructure
their learning environment. More than one hundred California public
schools have received this needed assistance and training on ways to restructure
and improve their entire systems.
Specifically,
the San Rafael City Schools benefitted from Thornton's vision with a partnership
between the school district, the Marin Community Foundation and the Department
of Education. Like Aptos, the first school where Thornton taught, the
entire district of San Rafael has been one in transition. Plagued by
insufficient funding and challenged by an increasingly changing -- bilingual,
multi-cultural student population, the San Rafael district welcomed the
structure and organization provided by C-LERN as a new way to tackle their
difficulties.
The
C-LERN partnership resulted in a five-year, $750,000 commitment to the schools;
this enabled them to initiate many positive changes in the system, such as
school-based management, increased parental involvement (one of Thornton's basic
tenets), expanded professional and leadership programs, district grade level
standards and alignment for whole language curriculum and more. Credit for these
opportunities to San Rafael must go to Shirley Thornton for her aid in bringing
the vision, the leadership and the resources to the district.
The
fight goes on, though, especially for people of color. While only sixteen
percent of San Francisco residents are African-American, fifty percent of
inmates in the San Francisco jail are African-American. Wouldn't it be
cheaper to build better schools rather than more prisons? Thornton questions.
So many problems remain: racism, Proposition 13, so many cutbacks in
schools that today it takes five years to graduate with a B.A. because of fewer
classes available to students.
Thornton
frequently tells African-American people that she can open the door for them,
"...but you have to come in with something in your basket."
African-Americans have spent so much time fighting to knock the door down, but
once the door is knocked down and they are in the room, they then must begin to
deal with "Why am I here?"
She
tells people, particularly African-Americans like herself, that they must
prepare themselves and remember, as our grandparents and parents told us,
"You will always have to prove yourself." And Dr. Thornton has
certainly proved herself -- beyond the norm and certainly beyond her childhood
community of New Orleans' expectations. As a contributor to her community,
some of the awards she has won are:
Marin
County Trustee of the Year (2003)
Jones
United Methodist Woman of the Year (2001)
Dr.
Edwin J. Griffin Award for Outstanding Service in the Field of Education (1986)
University
of San Francisco
Woman
of the Year (1986) for Outstanding Community Service
Delta
Delta Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta
Professional
Woman of the Year - National Association of Negro
Business
and Professional Women's Clubs, Inc.
Outstanding
Achievement in Education (1985)
National
Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Beta Nu Chapter
Alumna
of the Year (1985)
San
Francisco State University Alumni Association
Outstanding
Administrator for Northern California (1980-81)
California
Alliance of Black School Educators
Dr.
Thornton has been and still is a busy woman. Having achieved the impressive
position of Deputy Superintendent in the California schools (which she refers to
as a calling, not a job) as well as the rank of Colonel in the U.S. Army,
Thornton still finds time to serve on the boards of community organizations.
The Marin Community Foundation Board of Trustees and the National NAACP Advisory
Board for the Disadvantaged are two organizations which benefit from her
dedication to helping others.
As one of the highest-ranking
African-American female officers in California and Commander of Detachment 5-2
for the Selective Service System, she goes on active duty every year with the
Army. She also meets regularly with her Army reserve unit. Though
they're all men and all white, she says that as you listen to them talk about
their lives and their problems, you realize that everyone has the same problems.
She
also meets with a group of women -- women of color - who have been looking for
the past few years at a way of providing a retirement home for African-American
women. And she is involved in her
church. She believes that the general lack of church going in our country
has made people lose "the strong fiber of our being". "The kids
that are happy," she says, "singing in the choir, are not going to
have trouble with their self esteem, because they have a whole church of
spiritual people supporting them." At her church, she takes on, year after
year, the position of co-chair of the student financial aid committee.
Throughout the year, a number of events are held, the main one being the
Financial Aid Banquet each March. The money raised assists members of the church
with their college tuitions. This act also helps students feel that, as a
congregation, someone really cares about them.
Seen by others as a passionate, award-winning advocate for people of
color, Thornton views herself as a changing and evolving person, one who bounces
her strengths off the strengths of others. Though some people, she says,
are intimidated by her -- she wishes for people to see her as a caring person,
caring in particular for the rights and equality of all children. She says
if you are going to be a change agent never throw away your packing boxes,
because there is very little security in this very important role. But she
also stresses to remain true to yourself and your principles, knowing that when
one door closes, another door will open, one which will allow you to continue in
your quest to serve your fellow human beings. |
