The Providence Effect Educator Paul J. Adams III on preparing inner-city youth for the Ivy Leagues

On Central Boulevard across from Garfield Park, in a rough neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, is a top-notch prep school. Amid an inner city rid­dled with violence and gangland rule, Prov­idence St. Mel is a sealed-tight safety zone that boasts 29 consecutive years of send­ing 100% of its graduates off to four-year colleges, and over the last seven years, half of them have gone to first-tier and Ivy-League schools. The inception, survival, and growth of PSM as a college-preparato­ry institution is due primarily to the iron will of its founder, former principal, and current president, Paul J. Adams III.

Adams hadn’t planned on devoting his life to education, but his ousting from Alabama in the late ’60s sent him down a road he couldn’t abandon. Having participated in the Civil Rights Movement in Selma and Mont­gomery, he was blacklisted from teaching in the state, so he moved to Chicago to get his master’s degree in psychology at Northeast­ern Illinois University. At the urging of his uncle, and contrary to the lure of financial gain, he accepted the position of principal at PSM — a Catholic school at the time — in 1972, after a year serving as its director of guidance. When, six years later, the Archdio­cese of Chicago announced that it was pulling funding from the school, Adams organized a highly-publicized national fundraising campaign, which allowed him to purchase the building from the Sisters of Providence, and turn it into an independent, not-for-profit school. And to further protect PSM from the surrounding elements, the unrepentant disciplinarian and unwavering educator actually moved into the empty nuns’ quarters on the school grounds.

With the success of the school’s mission to send its students to college, Adams remains perplexed as to why the school’s programs and techniques haven’t caught on. “If you educate [the children],” Adams insists, “they can solve problems. If you educate them, they can create jobs.” Senti­ments like this run throughout The Provi­dence Effect, Rollin Binzer’s new documen­tary about Providence St. Mel and its excep­tional student body. “The world in general,” Adams continues, "is at a point of near melt­down. We need to have the best-educated people dealing with these problems. If we have these kinds of schools, those problems would be minimized, because you have thinking people, you have caring people, you have people with passion and under­standing, you have people with the grey matter and academic ability to solve prob­lems.” Documenting the rigors of the pre-K­through-12 school’s coursework and its grounding in stern discipline — considered controversial by some — The Providence Effect celebrates this unlikely beacon, as well as its new charter, Providence Engle­wood, as examples of schools that offer opportunity to kids who rarely get one. Adams spoke with us shortly after the film’s September 25th premiere.

Venice: Tell us a little about your own upbringing and education.

Paul J. Adams III: My mother was a teacher. I come from a family of teachers on my mother’s side. I often think about their education in the backwoods of Dallas Coun­ty, which is around Selma, Alabama — liter­ally no lights, and reading by candlelight, and they got a decent education. They were inspired by what their parents did, and their parents did not have an education. So the pursuit of education for their children was almost all that mattered. I never thought about anything else when I was growing up, but to go to school. [laughs] It was almost self-anointment, not through anything that was beaten into you — it was expected that you were going to go to school. Under the circumstances — I grew up in the segregat­ed South — your only salvation, your only way out, was to get an education. So I just assumed that everyone else was doing that, but that was not to be.

What kind of elementary and high schools did you attend?

Because my mother was a schoolteacher, I bounced around to a number of schools. Public school in first grade, somewhere around third grade I was in a Catholic school, then I moved with my grandfather to another public school, then I moved back with my mother, where I was in what was called a “lab school,” which was associated with Alabama State University. Then my mother had to start teaching out of town, so I ended up in a boarding school. My last three years were in a small town called Brudin, Alabama, where I finished high school. So I had a decent, above-average education, because that was the pursuit of my mother and of the family, that everyone was going to get an education. You’ve got to get an education and leave home! [laughs] It was understood.

At what point did you decide that you wanted to be a teacher, and to devote your life to education?

Well, that’s kind of a strange scenario. In the beginning, I didn’t want to be a teacher, to be very honest about it. But there were two or three things that happened to me in my life that made me think, “Something’s wrong here!” I can remember at age six, being on a bus for what I call my first job. I was sent to buy a thread pattern for a lady next door. I was sitting on this segregated bus, and I was told I had to sit there. That stuck in my mind. The death of Emmett Till really knocked me back. I knew that I had to do something. That stuck in my mind. I was in front of the 16th Street Baptist Church one week, to the hour, before it blew up. That stuck in my mind. When I came to Chicago, I got some other jobs, but I always ended up, somehow, going back to teach­ing. I had a national chain of restaurants for awhile, but I kept coming back to teach for some reason. It might have been providen­tial, but I always felt that whatever job I was doing, I needed to do it to the best of my ability. When I landed at the door of Provi­dence St. Mel, I did not anticipate making it a life’s journey, but circumstances, as they may be, indicated that I should probably be there. I came in ’71, I became principal in ’72, there was a move to close the school in 1974, and thought I’d really made a bad decision about being principal there. Then in 1978 they tried to close the school again, and I knew that I would have to stand up for something, or I was just going to be falling for everything that came along the track. At that moment, I knew that as a man, a black man, I needed to stand up for the children I was teaching. And by no means could I not do what I had asked them to do — that hard work pays off, and you stand up for what you believe. It was probably in that moment, on that Wednesday, the Holy Week of 1978, when I said, “Enough is enough. Let’s decide to walk the talk.”

Jumping back a bit, how did you become involved with Dr. Martin Luther King, and what did you do within the Civil Rights Movement?

I was a child. I was 13, 14, 15 years old at the time. Actually, I met Dr. King at a career day in 1954. We all went to this assembly because he was the new minister from Dex­ter Avenue Baptist Church, and everyone wanted to meet him. As I remember, he said very little, but we knew, as someone indicat­ed to us, that he had his Ph.D. from Boston — and that really impressed me! Because I’d met a lot of other people who had their Ph.D.’s, and they all seemed to be old peo­ple. [laughs] But he was a young man! Peo­ple don’t know this, but Dr. King was kind of forced into that position — and people who had been around for a long time wanted to maintain the status quo; they didn’t want to rock the boat. So Dr. King was pushed into this position, and he changed the world! As a child, I would see him, and I didn’t think of it as being historical. I thought we were just tired of being pushed around in Montgomery. The [Montgomery Bus] Boycott was just a symbolic statement to the power, the white power of Mont­gomery, that we’re not taking this anymore, and that became a national movement. So my involvement was that I participated in the Montgomery Boycott, I participated in all the marches on the campus, and was put in jail and all of that. And that has a lot to do with where I am now. I have a personal obligation to do what I’m doing because of the sacrifices of others. I think if you don’t have a sense of your history, you’re going to be misdirected. I have a clear sense of my history; I know whose shoulders I’m standing on. And it’s my personal obligation that I should pass this on to the next generation. As far as I know, from history, that’s how things have moved since the beginning of time. Each generation, each lifetime, has the responsibility to prepare the next generation for a lifetime.

What was it like to see the work that you had done come to fruition, as segregation was scaled back, and as “whites” and “coloreds” signs were removed?

You know, I really didn’t think about it until November 4th when I went down to Hutchison Field here in Chicago for the official indication that Barack Obama was going to be the next President of the United States. I knew it then that all of this had some meaning. It struck me at that moment, that it was time for me to relax now, to stand back, and to see where things go from there. I don’t know how to explain it. It was the most fulfilling experience I’ve ever had in my life. It said to me that what you do, and what you have done, makes a difference. The march from Selma to Montgomery made a difference. The traumatic experiences that you had with people being disrespectful to you made a difference. The separate water fountains, the separate colored waiting room and the white waiting room at the bus station. [Our fight] was a good experi­ence, and it turned out to be okay. I feel that I had my lit­tle piece in there, and I feel very satisfied about it. I only wish I could have done a little better of a job! [laughs]

And you did all this as a teenager.

Black children at that time had an agenda. We had something to do! We had to be out there dealing with a strategy; what we were going to do for our next move, and who was going to jail, and who was not going to jail, and where the bail money was going to come from. We were not dealing with foolishness. We were thinking about the rest of our lives. It was delicate; if you didn’t think properly and you didn’t strategize properly, the cost was your life. We realized that.

When were you hired at PSM?

I was hired in ’71 as the director of guidance. At the time I was running a restaurant in Chicago. It was open 24 hours a day, so I worked a shift there and a shift at [the school]. I remember the reason I took the job is because I needed to buy some furniture for the house that we had just bought. But the intrigue of the school was almost immediate to me. The place was up for grabs. Did you ever do something where you know there’s some good in it? You see all the chaos and confusion, but generically I thought that this could be a great place! Now I had no idea, and had no intentions, of becoming principal.

At what point did you decide that you were going to turn this school into a top college-preparatory institution?

The day I became principal, the first day. I said to whoever was working there at the time, “We can turn this around. Let’s look at what we’ve got, make an assessment of what we’ve got, and where we need to go, and who needs to go, and we’ll clean house.” Everybody who doesn’t want to go to school, go home. People who are involved with gangs are out. People who are involved with drugs are out, or involved with alcohol. So within a year, we had this place clickin’! [Like the movie poster says,] this is not rocket science! This is common sense. You can have discipline, you can challenge students, you can control stu­dents, if you empower them with the knowl- edge to go to the next level. It’s really that simple. You’ve got to have the best inter­ests of the children in front of you, and they will respond accordingly. Everybody wants to get better at doing whatever they’re doing, and our approach is that together we can make this happen. There are rules and regulations; these are the things we’re not going to tolerate. Cross this line and you’re out. And we began to turn this school around. We began to raise the expectation level. We started looking at who is teaching. Who is in front of these children? You’ve got to have smart people in front of children. People who have that base of knowledge, and who understand the objective of this institution, and have the ability to transfer the information that they have to the wonderful children in front of you. It works like a charm. And I expect that if you sign on, you will live up to your contract. You are here as a teacher, and I expect you to teach. I expect you to cherish these children to the point that you’ve given your very best — and when you’ve done your very best, I want you to do just a little more than that. It’s pushing. You’re pushing to the point where some­times you’re exhausted, but you’re renewed with what happens to the children. They become successful, and that’s a spurt of new energy for you. The better the students are, the better the teachers are. You can do more. Because they are right in front of you; they grow right in front of you, and you see them taking this knowledge to the next level. That’s what it’s about.

When you started out, how did you motivate the staff to rally around this new way of teaching?

I don’t think it’s a new way of teaching — it’s the same way I was taught! [laughs] Some people say, “This is something new!” This is not new! Sit down, shut up, and lis­ten! I mean, my goodness! I was taught by people who were disciplinarians. I was taught by people who were extremely intelli­gent. I was taught by people who had expectations. I was taught by people who cared, and that’s all I’m asking.

Tell us about your summer exchange program.

We’re always looking for little things to tweak, and in 1990 or ’91 the Chairman of the Board at that time, Tom Dittmer, sug­gested to me that if I thought I was so good, and these children were so brilliant, then why didn’t I let some of them go to some of these top schools around the country? I told him at the time, “I don’t want to lose all of my roses!” And I went home that night and I had to chastise myself, that I was really being selfish. How dare I block an opportunity for these children? And that was the beginning of the SOAL [Summer Opportunity of a Lifetime] program. So the students that do well academically in the school would get an opportunity, during the summer months, to study abroad. And in our case, to study at some of the top prep schools and universities around the coun­try. And since that time, we have sent 1500 or 1600 students literally across the world through the fundraising efforts of the school and United Airlines. They are the sponsors for sending these children all over the world.

These are kids from really rough areas, who may have never even left their own neighborhoods.

It’s the first time in many cases that stu­dents have an opportunity to fly. It’s definite­ly the first time they’ve ever gone to Europe, or Mexico, or South America, or Africa, or wherever they’re going. Those are the optional learning activities that should be available to all children.

How did you find Jeanette M. DiBella, your current principal?

She answered an ad in the classified sec­tion. She was moving to Chicago and saw it. She came in and she interviewed strong. She was very strong. At the end of the inter­view, she said, “If you’re not satisfied with my performance, I’ll give you your money back.” You’ll do what? [laughs] I’d never heard that one before! I thought, “I’ve got to find more people like this!” That’s one of the things you have to do. You have to vet the right people. You just cannot stick anyone in front of children. She had all of the academ­ic credentials, and she knew what should be happening in the classroom, and that’s the key. We are very lucky to have a Jeannette DiBella. And then in her tenure, she has gone out and found some amazing people. That’s the key to our success, and it’s going to be the key to anybody else’s success at any of the other schools around the country — vetting the right leadership for the school.

What happens when you encounter students with learning problems, who can’t keep up with their classmates?

What we do is give them more time. You might have to come in early, you might have to come in at seven o’clock in the morning, you might have to come in after school, you might have to come in on Saturday. We have school six days a week. When we have exhausted all of those avenues, then proba­bly Providence St. Mel is not the best place for you. But in this society, we quickly want to label children with a special learning dis­ability just to get them out of the classroom. But at our school we don’t want the labels. We want to try all the things that we can possibly do to give these children the opportunity so that they can learn. Now, everybody’s not going to learn at the same rate. So what you might be able to do in an hour might take me three hours — and that’s the time it takes! It’s going to take you a little longer, and you’re going to have to meet it. It’s not one of those things where you have the option of saying, “I’ll come if I want to.” You will come or you will go. If you have less than a C average, you will come after school every day. You will come on Saturdays. Not optional! On demand! So that’s what we do.

These kids are working hard.

We’re telling youngsters who come to Providence St. Mel, “Be prepared to do two to three hours of homework. In some cases, it might be four hours. And I hear parents say, “Oh, that’s so much pressure and ten­sion.” And I say, “Well, I offer you temporary tension and pressure, and if you don’t do what we ask you to do, it becomes perma­nent.” Pay me now, or pay me later. [laughs]

I’m wondering if the percentage of stu­dents with learning disabilities is lower at your school because you’re giving them the motivation to do the work.

That’s exactly our approach. We are say­ing, “Don’t show me that your child has some learning disability. Give us an opportu­nity.” Now, if we find out that we don’t have the ability or the personnel, then we’re going to be the first to tell you. But don’t go with the label! Don’t just assume because some­body said so, that it’s true! A lot of these observations are made from the fact that the kid was disruptive in school. “He needs spe­cial education. He or she has a learning dis­ability.” Give these youngsters an opportuni­ty, or give us an opportunity, to see if we can motivate these children beyond the disabili­ty. And probably 80% of the time — maybe the principal has better statistics on this — we find out that they shouldn’t have had the label in the first place. So they have to work a little harder, so what? So they have to spend another year at Providence St. Mel, so what? When they finish at Providence St. Mel, we can guarantee that you’ll be accept­ed into college. Guarantee! And you’re going to be able to compete.

The kids are protected when they’re at school, but how do they keep themselves away from dangerous elements when they’re off school grounds?

That’s a tricky one. This is how we describe it, because there’s only so much we can do: The psychology of the school has to be stronger than the psychology of the streets. And that’s a decision of children and their parents, or their guardians. They must make that decision. Providence St. Mel is a road out. Now, we didn’t promise you a road with no hills and no detours — in your neighborhoods, there are detours, and there are dark places, and there are places with no light, but you have to make a deci­sion that you want to do this. Of course, we’re working hard with the police depart­ment and all of that, but we can’t cover all of it. The generic thing that I need to explain to you is that each child, and each family, has to make a decision about Providence St. Mel. You either want to be there or don’t want to be there. These elements in the streets are not going to disappear because you go to this school. They’re going to be there. They don’t have the ability to move to a neighborhood that is much more attuned to the safety of children. So they have to use Providence St. Mel as a beacon to get out. And, hopefully, they can get out and come back, and help do what we haven’t done.

It was fascinating to see the seven­year-olds in the film being guided by their teacher to have structured conversations on specific topics.

We find that kids are so smart, that they can do all of this. They can do high-level math in elementary school, and they can perform scientific experiments in third or fourth grade. But that’s always been true! I think that’s the biggest mistake we make in education: We think that the kindergarteners can’t learn. It’s just the opposite. They’re like sponges. They have more ability than you and I, as adults, have to be able to acquire material, and to make the decision between what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just a mat­ter of having that structure, and giving them the opportunity to participate in a very struc­tured lesson, with goals. You need to expose children to a positive and stimulating learning environment as early as possible. I think that schools can do what we are doing — for example, as you said, having these very seri­ous discussions with very young people — and it’s not going to cost any money!

It must be amazing to watch these kids grow from kindergarteners to young adults who go off to top-tier colleges, even MIT.

That’s the amazing thing about Provi­dence St. Mel. You can literally see children grow from toddlers who can barely get up the steps, and now they’re walking off to Stanford, and Harvard, and Loyola, Univer­sity of Chicago, Northwestern. That’s a great day for me. The day we celebrate their commencement, their new beginning, that’s what I work for every year.  ▼

The Providence Effect is in theaters now. To learn more, visit www.providence effect.org and the Providence St. Mel web-site, psm.k12.il.us. Additional information was provided by an essay by PSM teacher Ray H. Greenblatt.