USC Rossier Centennial

“The dean was in the know when key jobs opened USC ROSSIER 49 The First Century

that could advance the careers of School of

Education graduates. Melbo became one of the

most influential deans in USC Rossier’s history.”

dean a sort of kingmaker aura. “Perhaps no other American school administrator
has prepared and sponsored so many students who have subsequently achieved
eminence as educational administrators as has Dean Melbo,” wrote Mary C. Lane
in her 1974 history The Melbo Years.

•—•

Melbo started his career in Minnesota as a teacher and principal and came west
to earn his EdD from UC Berkeley in 1934. Five years later, when he was 31, he
became an assistant professor of education at USC.

Described by Levitt in his dissertation as “young, vigorous, worldly, and imagi-
native,” Melbo quickly emerged as a leader.

He began to distinguish himself at the outset of World War II, when he steered
a faculty committee that was instrumental in realigning the school’s programs to
address wartime priorities. Later he led the school’s efforts to assess the educa-
tional needs of postwar Los Angeles. One recommendation called for providing
graduate-level training of industrial arts teachers, whose numbers would boom in
the postwar years as returning veterans and others sought peacetime occupations.

Melbo was a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and spent part of the war orga-
nizing training programs in Europe. Given his experiences, it was no surprise that
when he became dean he took the School of Education global.

In 1963 the school contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense to begin
offering graduate courses in educational administration in Wiesbaden, Germa-
ny, chiefly for principals and other administrators at overseas schools for U.S.
military dependents. Initially directed by Prof. Emery Stoops, the program quickly
expanded: Over the next decade more than 800 master’s degrees were awarded
abroad. The first overseas doctorates were conferred at a ceremony at U.S. Army
Headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1972.

Other graduate centers were established for teachers in American-sponsored
elementary and secondary schools in Taiwan, Thailand, Okinawa, Japan and
Korea. One of Melbo’s most ambitious undertakings abroad was a project for the
U.S. Department of State to develop a polytechnic college in Malawi. It opened in
1966 and became part of the University of Malawi.

All of the overseas programs were taught by regular faculty of the School of
Education, who coveted the assignments for the extra income and opportunity for
foreign travel.

“The sun never set on USC,” noted Myron Dembo, an emeritus professor of
educational psychology who taught in programs in Okinawa and Germany. “We
were all over the place.”

Melbo’s entrepreneurial spirit would set the tone for ever-expanding horizons,
and that mindset would guide the school for years to come.

LEO BUSCAGLIA Leo Buscaglia had been an education pro- Starting in 1951, he taught speech in the
fessor at USC for four years when a tragedy Pasadena school system and was promoted to
changed his life. director of special education in 1960. But he
was, he later acknowledged, a “lousy admin-
A “beautiful, sensitive, intelligent girl” in istrator.” He quit the job, sold his possessions
one of his classes killed herself by jumping off and traveled throughout Asia for a few years,
a cliff in Pacific Palisades. “I wondered what meeting Zen masters and soaking up Eastern
I might have done; if I could have, even mo- religions. He returned in 1965 and joined the
mentarily, helped,” he wrote later. USC School of Education, which had just
created a special education department.
Although it was too late to help his stu-
dent, Buscaglia decided he could do some- The popularity of his Love 1A class
thing to help others. He went to Dean Irving turned Buscaglia into a syndicated colum-
R. Melbo and asked to teach a class on love. nist, TV talk-show favorite and sought-after
lecturer. His passionate speaking style and
Titled Love 1A, it was an instant hit: positive message of love for oneself and for
600 students signed up for the non-credit, others riveted audiences, who would wait in
ungraded course. The class led to Buscaglia’s line for hours for a hug from the man Psychol-
first bestseller, Love (1972), which consist- ogy Today described as a “one-man encounter
ed of his classroom lectures. He became group.”
known, on and off campus, as “Dr. Hug” for
the bone-crushing embrace he gave to nearly The popular professor retired from
everyone he met. teaching in 1984 but was named a profes-
sor-at-large in 1985. In 1989 he gave USC
He went on to write 15 more books; he real estate valued at $500,000, part of which
once had five titles on the New York Times was used to fund the Leo F. Buscaglia Schol-
bestseller list at the same time. When he died arship for Inner City Teacher Education.
in 1998 at age 74, he had sold 11 million cop- Recipients of the full, four-year scholarships
ies of his various titles, which included Liv- came from Crenshaw, Fremont, Manual
ing, Loving and Learning, Loving Each Other Arts, Roosevelt and Jefferson high schools in
and The Love Cookbook. the Los Angeles Unified School District and
were required to teach a minimum of two
Buscaglia himself was, not surprisingly, a years in a disadvantaged school after earning
“love baby,” the 10th child in a boisterous Ital- a bachelor’s degree and teaching credential
ian family. Shortly after he was born in East at USC.
Los Angeles in 1924, his parents, Rosa and
Tulio Buscaglia, took him to live in Italy for Reviewers were not as smitten by Bus-
five years. When they returned to L.A., young caglia as his loyal readers were. A writer for
Leo could speak Italian and a smattering of Time magazine once wrote that the author’s
Spanish and French, but not English, a defi- focus on self-celebration “helped fuel the nar-
cit that teachers thought was due to mental cissism of the Me decade,” while Psychology
handicaps. He began school in a special ed- Today criticized the “great lover of love, fami-
ucation class. lies and children” for being a lifelong bachelor.

When he was finally transferred to a reg- “I face the world as a lover,” Buscaglia
ular class he missed the warm interactions his wrote in Born for Love, published in 1992. “I
special-ed teacher had with all her pupils and know this may seem naive and perhaps a lit-
pronounced the rest of his elementary school tle simplistic to the cynic, but as far as I can
career “boring.” But his parents, especially his determine, it is the only sensible decision.”
father, a waiter, instilled in all the children
a belief in the importance of education by
asking them every night at the dinner table,
“What did you learn today?”

“Nothing we said was insignificant to
them,” Buscaglia said in the Los Angeles Times
in 1983. “They were awed by the process of
learning.”

After serving in the Navy during World
War II, he enrolled at USC, where he earned
three degrees, beginning with a bachelor’s in
English and speech in 1950. He received a
master’s in 1954 and a doctorate in 1963, both
in language and speech pathology.

When Laurence J. Peter was in grade school counselor in Vancouver. LAURENCE J. PETER
in British Columbia, his teacher regarded him With an EdD in 1963 from Washington
as a problem. “I asked too many questions in USC ROSSIER 51 The First Century
class,” Peter recalled. State University, he became an assistant pro-
fessor of education at the University of Brit-
But, as he later realized, he wasn’t the ish Columbia, where he wrote a treatise about
problem; the teacher was. His subsequent en- “prescriptive teaching,” a system he created to
counters with incompetence—in school and help teachers diagnose learning issues and de-
college settings, businesses and other bureau- velop individualized programs.
cracies—eventually became grist for an in-
ternational bestseller, The Peter Principle: Why That work, which became his first book—
Things Always Go Wrong. Prescriptive Teaching, published in 1965—
drew the attention of USC education dean
Published in 1969 when Peter was a USC Irving R. Melbo.
education professor, the book was a satirical
analysis of the tendency in human organiza- “I interviewed him,” Melbo recalled in
tions to promote someone who is great at one 1973, “and incidentally enjoyed his dry and
job to a higher position for which he or she is droll sense of humor, replete with bits of sat-
woefully unqualified. Peter told of competent ire, and appointed him to the faculty” in 1966.
students who became incompetent teachers,
hot-shot salesmen who became inept team In 1968 Peter established the Evelyn Frie-
leaders, outstanding civil servants who floun- den Center for Educationally Handicapped
dered as supervisors. The theory became so Children at the USC School of Education.
popular that “the Peter principle” became a Named in honor of a graduate student in spe-
sort of universal shorthand for general inepti- cial education who died in 1967, it was a lab-
tude and poor managerial choices. oratory for the prescriptive teaching method,
which Peter considered his most important
“In a hierarchy, each employee tends to work. But his system never gained the atten-
rise to his level of incompetence,” Peter wrote. tion he believed it deserved.
“Cream rises until it sours.”  
His farcical work on incompetence,
The success of the book enabled Peter co-written with Raymond Hull, had also
to retire from USC in 1970, after only four seemed headed for obscurity. It was rejected
years at the School of Education preparing by 30 publishers until Peter wrote an article for
future teachers. He went on to write eight the Los Angeles Times in 1967 called “The Peter
more books that elaborated on his provoca- Principle, or The Incompetent Shall Inherit the
tive theme, including The Peter Prescription: Earth.” After the article ran, he was inundated
How to Make Things Go Right, The Peter Plan: by offers and chose William Morrow & Com-
A Proposal for Survival and The Peter Pyramid: pany, which paid $2,500 for the manuscript.
Or, Will We Ever Get the Point?
The 40th anniversary edition of The Peter
Born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1919, he Principle was published in 2009, two decades
was the son of a railroad worker whose ac- after Peter’s 1990 death from complications of a
cidental death when Peter was a boy led the stroke at age 70. Even then, a reviewer called the
family to live in poverty. Competence became book “a flash of brilliance so profound that ex-
essential to their survival. amples of it in practice instantly come to mind.”

“Our home was just a shack. We cut wood Once he’d become a celebrated author, Pe-
out of the bush to give us fuel. We grew most ter found himself fending off attempts to turn
of our food in the garden. It was unthinkable him into something he knew he was ill-suited
to waste anything,” he recalled in a 1984 Los for, such as a management consultant or the
Angeles Times interview. chair of his department at USC.

Given the negativity of his elementary The way to avoid rising above his own level
school teacher, Peter could have tuned out in of competence, he once told Los Angeles Times
school. But he persevered because “luckily one columnist Jack Smith, was by practicing “cre-
of my own incompetent characteristics is that ative incompetence—the technique of being de-
I’m super tenacious,” he said in the Times sto- liberately incompetent in something completely
ry. “I never know when to stop.” irrelevant to your area of accomplishment.”

In high school he discovered that he en- So how did the professor respond when
joyed teaching when he helped run a boys’ Dean Melbo tried to talk him into running
woodcarving club. He began his career in the department?
1941 as an industrial arts instructor. He later
taught in the prison system and was a school “Peter simply parked his car for a week in
the dean’s parking space,” Smith wrote. “The
offers of promotion stopped.”



With enrollment exploding, the department The S
was spun off from the College of Liberal Arts univer
and became the School of Education, the high s
largest graduate school in the university. Welty
40 yea
USC hired “renaissance man”
James Harmon Hoose to join The Sch
the faculty and establish the would b
Department of Pedagogy. the Doc

With the number of public Health problems led Dean
high school students in Los Stowell to step down. He
Angeles rapidly growing, was succeeded by Lester
USC was approved to endorse Burton Rogers, who would
candidates for high school serve until 1945.
teaching credentials. It was the
first in Southern California
to earn the authority, and the
third in the state.

1896
1909
1911
1917
1918
1919
1920
1927
1928

USC received its accreditation to train all categories USC offered
of teachers, from elementary to high school. “Americanization”
training to teachers
The Department of Pedagogy was renamed of English and
the Department of Education, under the civics, and public
guidance of newly-hired teacher training schools in immigrant
expert Thomas Blanchard Stowell. neighborhoods became
testing grounds for
USC graduates, who
led the way in tackling
social problems with
progressive solutions.

chool of Education produced the Faculty across USC led the “Revolt of
rsity’s first successful PhD candidate, 1946,” resulting in the resignation of
school teacher and counselor David USC President Rufus von KleinSmid
y Lefever, who would spend the next and the appointment of Osman R.
ars on the School of Education’s faculty. Hull as the School of Education’s dean.

hool of Education created what A study by USC led The state of California The School of Education
become its signature offering: to wholesale changes issued 799 credentials worked with the U.S.
ctor of Education degree. in the “dysfunctional” to teachers and Department of Defense
bureaucracy of the administrators trained at to offer graduate
Los Angeles Unified USC—more than twice courses in educational
School District. The the number of qualified administration in
new governance model candidates produced by Wiesbaden, Germany,
adopted then is still in any other university. for administrators of
place today. overseas schools attended
by military dependents.

1930
1931
1934
1943
1946
1950
1953
1961
1963

George H. Bell and Verne R. Dean Melbo created
Ross received the school’s first EDUCARE, a support
education doctorates. group that raised
tens of thousands of
dollars for scholarships,
conferences and lectures by
distinguished educators.

Ethel Percy Andrus, one of the first Verna B. Dauterive began a six-decade career Irving R. Melbo was appointed
women to lead a large California in LAUSD as a teacher, administrator and dean, after Dean Hull decided
high school, received a PhD. She principal. She later earned a master’s and to return to teaching. His focus
later founded the National Retired doctorate at the School of Education. on developing educators as
Teachers Association and AARP. administrative leaders would
guide the School of Education
for decades.

Stephen J. Knezevich—a USC religion professor John
scholar, author and expert Orr, who had worked on school
on school administration— desegregation issues, replaced
was appointed dean, in the Knezevich as dean.
midst of a university-wide
push for the academic rigor The Center for M
and scholarship that would Multicultural Res
establish USC as a major established. Since
national research university. school has created
focused on educat
Waite Phillips Hall, named for the and psychology, h
Oklahoma philanthropist who funded and K–12 educati
construction, opened as the School of
Education’s new home.

1967
1968
1969
1971
1974
1979
1981
1983
1988

The School of Education’s Dr. Audrey Schwartz, USC launched a lecture
Teacher Corps Urban an assistant professor of series named for Earl
Program and Rural- education, co-founded and V. Pullias, the School of
Migrant Program was the first president of Education’s authority on
equipped teachers to the Sociology of Education higher education. The
raise the achievement Association, the first and first talk was delivered
of disadvantaged Black, only professional group by USC President
Latino and limited- dedicated to that discipline. Norman H. Topping.
English-speaking students.
Leo Buscaglia, a special
education professor, taught
USC’s first course on love,
which led to a career as a
bestselling self-help author.

USC Rossier entered the digital age, USC Rossier
with the first fully online master of unveiled a new
arts in teaching program offered by mission focused on
a major research institution.   preparing leaders to
achieve educational
equity through
practice, research
and policy.

Multilingual The School of Education USC Rossier opened the
search was was named after alumni first of five charter schools
e then the Barbara and Roger Rossier, with an emphasis on
d 10 centers who donated $20 million personalized learning and
tional equity to their alma mater. At that positive multigenerational
higher education time it was the largest gift change. The first three
ion policy. ever made to an education graduating classes achieved a
school in the United States. 100 percent graduation and
college acceptance rate.
USC Rossier is
ranked as the
10th best school
of education in
the country by
U.S. News &
World Report.

1995
1998
1999
2000
2009
2012
2016
2017
2018

Emery Stoops and Joyce Karen Symms Gallagher became the Michelle King EdD ’17 became
King Stoops endowed the 10th dean—and the first woman—to lead the 11th alumnus to serve as
Dean’s Chair in Education. USC Rossier. The former education dean superintendent of the Los Angeles
The first holder, in 2000, was at the University of Kansas, Gallagher Unified School District.
Karen Symms Gallagher. stabilized the school’s budget, streamlined
its programs and refocused the school on
Guilbert C. Hentschke, former head of improving urban education.
the University of Rochester’s Graduate
School of Education and Human Dean Hentschke announced he would step down
Development, succeeded Orr as dean in a year. He would return to teaching as the first
of the School of Education. Richard T. Cooper and Mary Catherine Cooper
Chair in Public School Administration.





USC ROSSIER 59 The First Century

CHAPTER 6

The Superintendent Pipeline



For decades, educators who aspired to become USC ROSSIER 61 The First Century

superintendents in California heeded a crucial piece Michael Escalante EdD ’02
reading to students when
of advice that helped propel them to the top. he was superintendent of
the Glendale Unified School
I f you want to become a superintendent, go to USC.” District
Stuart Gothold was a rising administrator when he heard it from Nor-
man B. Eisen MS ’61 EdD ’66, who ran the Whittier Union High School
District. Accepted to the doctoral program in 1969, he never regretted
his choice. The School of Education was rich in former superintendents
steeped in the issues that anyone hoping to run a school system would need to
understand.

And, of course, USC had Irving R. Melbo, who cemented its reputation as a
powerhouse in developing future district chiefs.

How the School of Education became a pipeline to the top jobs in California
public education is not just about one influential dean, however.

From its earliest years, the School of Education embraced the vision of USC’s
founders, who were determined that the university would produce the leaders who
could help Los Angeles prosper. In education, the example was set 90 years ago.

In 1929, Vierling Kersey ’16, a pioneering night school principal in Los Angeles,
became California’s superintendent of public instruction, responsible for shaping
education policy for the state’s fast-growing K–12 grade population.

Later that year, Frank A. Bouelle ’12 was named superintendent of the Los
Angeles city school district, known nationally then as a beacon of Progessive-era
reform. Kersey would succeed him and serve a record 11 years.

Their ascent signaled the beginning of a trend that would mold the identity of
the School of Education and leave its mark on districts across the region.

According to the 1965 study “Impact of USC on the Operating Personnel of the
Southern California Educational System” by Rosalind Harrell ’64, USC graduates
accounted for 35.1 percent of district superintendents in Los Angeles County in
1940, 39.1 percent in 1950 and 45.5 percent in 1960. Trojans also made up 47
percent of principals in the county in 1960.

The school’s track record since then has continued to impress.
Since 1970, more than 230 USC graduates have run California school districts,
including 78 superintendents in 2018. Those figures are based on membership in

the Dean’s Superintendents Advisory Group, which was founded by former Tustin
superintendent Ed Dundon EdD ’72.

No one has kept a scorecard by university affiliation, but the USC Rossier
superintendents’ dinner at the Association of California School Administra-
tors’ annual meeting in Monterey is an often-cited indicator of success. It is the
largest event at the meeting after the association’s own gatherings, with 60 to
80 USC-educated superintendents in attendance, according to ACSA executive
director Wesley Smith EdD ’05.

“It’s difficult to measure influence, but in superintendent circles—even in
Northern California—USC was perceived as having the strongest network of
superintendents with doctorates,” said Smith, who previously led the Cascade
Union Elementary School District in Shasta County and Morgan Hill Unified School
District in Silicon Valley. “That is the perception of a lot of people—and percep-
tions are reality.”

•—•

One factor in the longstanding prominence of USC graduates may be timing. USC

Rossier had a head start on filling the leadership pipeline and building its alumni

network because for two decades it was the only graduate school of education in

Southern California.

“We were preparing leaders who knew good organizational theory and good

business practices,” said Gallagher, who held top education positions in Kansas

and Ohio before becoming dean of USC Rossier in 2000. “So almost immedi-

ately, while we were preparing teachers we also were preparing principals and

superintendents.”

By the 1930s the school had established a strength in “field-oriented course

work and research,” Melbo-era chronicler Mary C. Lane wrote.

That emphasis continued for decades as well-connected former district

administrators, including Melbo, joined the faculty and assumed leadership of

the school.

“My first administrative job came about because a professor at USC got a call

from someone in a local district who needed candidates for a job. He approached

me and it led to me getting a job” as an assistant principal in Monrovia, recalled

Joseph Aguerrebere ’72, MS ’75 EdD ’86, who later became president of the

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

“From its earliest years, the School of Education “They always said, ‘We can maybe help you get in

the door, but we can’t get you the job. You have to

embraced the vision of USC’s founders, who were do that on your own.’”
Many School of Education graduates who be-

determined that the university would produce the came superintendents later joined the faculty. John
W. Stallings, for example, earned a master’s degree
leaders who could help Los Angeles prosper.”
in education in 1948 and a doctorate in education

in 1958 before serving six years as superintendent

of the Corona-Norco Unified School District in

Riverside County. When he returned to USC, he chaired the educational policy

and administration department and wrote a widely used text on school business

administration.

“They had real powerhouse people, faculty who were practitioners. That’s

what really lured me to USC,” said Rudy Castruita EdD ’82, the USC Rossier Irving

and Virginia Melbo Chair, who was superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School

District and the San Diego County Office of Education.

Castruita, a former California Superintendent of the Year who later worked

with search firms to place superintendents, said he has helped a dozen USC

Rossier alumni land jobs running school districts.

“The real foundation is that SC believes in promoting and preparing our

graduates to be urban leaders in our communities, whether teachers, principals,

assistant superintendents or superintendents,” he said. “It’s the network of peo- 1 USC ROSSIER 63 The First Century
ple who are going to help you get where you want to be.”
2
Other faculty members developed advantageous relationships with local dis-
tricts through the school survey movement, which aimed to make education more 3
efficient as public school enrollment grew in the 1910s and 1920s. School boards
began commissioning university-trained experts to conduct scientific studies on 1. Ed Dundon, Superintendent
such issues as school spending, teaching methods and management. of Tustin School District and
founder of the Dean’s Superin-
At USC, one of the most prolific authors of school surveys was Melbo, who tendents Advisory Group
formed a consulting company with USC colleagues that not only conducted sur- 2. Frank A. Bouelle, first USC
veys but performed executive searches to fill administrative vacancies. alumnus to be Superintendent
of the Los Angeles City School
“They would identify who had promise and vet them,” said William J. Johnston District
’49 MS Ed ’51, LAUSD superintendent from 1971 to 1981. “They had the No. 1 search 3. Stuart Gothold, Los Angeles
group … that named superintendent candidates up and down the state.” County Superintendent of
Schools and Emeritus Profes-
Melbo aggressively plotted careers and expected his advice to be followed. sor of Education
“Melbo would call you up and say, ‘You’ve been doing a good job, you’ve been
doing it three years, now go here,’” recalled David Marsh, an emeritus professor of
curriculum and instruction whose doctoral students included several who became
superintendents. “If you turned him down once, OK. But if you turned him down
twice you were dead meat.”

The long-serving dean made other keen moves that helped Trojans climb the
career ladder. He persuaded university officials to move the placement office
into the School of Education, for example. He also created abundant networking
opportunities for faculty and alumni, including coffee hours at major education
conferences and EDUCARE events that were considered essential for aspiring
superintendents to attend.

“It is our responsibility to help advance their careers in all ways possible,”
Melbo once said of the school’s support of its graduates, “and this in turn builds
loyalty on the part of our alumni to the School of Education.”

•—•

Trojan dominance was perhaps most evident in the Los Angeles Unified system,
where USC graduates permeated the central office.

“You had an edge if you were a teacher who graduated from USC” and wanted
to move into administration, Alfred Moore ’53, who rose through the ranks to be-
come one of the highest-ranking Black administrators in LAUSD in the 1980s, told
historian Michael Slaughter in a 2011 interview for the UCLA Oral History Center.

“USC education really determined a great deal the direction of this particular
school system,” Moore said.

That influence was pronounced in the LAUSD superintendent’s office, which
was occupied by Trojans almost continuously for more than 50 years, including
every year of Melbo’s two-decade tenure as dean.

Bouelle and Kersey ran the district for a total of 19 years, from the start of the
Depression to 1948. After a short interruption, the Trojan streak resumed in 1954
with Harry M. Howell ’24, who was acting superintendent for less than a year.
He was followed by Claude Lamar Reeves ’20 (1954–56), Ellis A. Jarvis MS Ed ’35
(1956–61), Jack P. Crowther MS Ed ’56 (1962–70), William J. Johnston (1971-81),
and Harry Handler MS Ed ’63 PhD ’67 (1981–87).

The most recent USC Rossier graduate to hold the top LAUSD job was Michelle
King EdD ’17, who served from 2016 to 2018.

In 2002, Darline Robles PhD ’94 became the first woman to head the Los An-
geles County Office of Education, which provides services to the region’s 80 public
school districts. Previously superintendent of the Montebello and Salt Lake City
districts, she became a professor of clinical education at USC.

No dean after Melbo could replicate his success at anointing district leaders,
nor did they wish to try. “That’s not ever going to happen again,” said Gallagher.
“No dean can tell a school board what to do.”

MAX RAFFERTY

The year was 1961. The Eisenhower era was schools chief was a household name. than English. The new law declared that “the
ending. The Cold War was raging. Rock ’n’ He made headlines trying to revoke the native language of all students should be re-
roll was fueling a rebellious youth culture. spected and utilized ... and the bilingual abil-
And Max Rafferty EdD ’56 made his political credentials of San Francisco teachers who ity should be viewed as a distinct asset.” The
debut. assigned works by African-American writ- federal Bilingual Education Act, signed the
er-activists Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones following year by President Lyndon Johnson,
That year, Rafferty, the newly named su- (later known as Amiri Baraka); Rafferty lam- was modeled on the California law.
perintendent of the tiny La Cañada school basted their writing as “obscene and profane.”
district near Pasadena, delivered a scorch- The year of the federal act’s sign-
ing critique of his generation of educators, He also attempted to ban the Dictionary ing—1968—also was notable locally for pro-
blaming them for “youngsters growing up to of American Slang from school libraries, call- tests, including the East Los Angeles walk-
become booted, side-burned, ducktailed, un- ing the reference work “a practicing handbook outs, in which thousands of Chicano students
washed, leather-jacketed slobs. of sexual perversion” for its inclusion of some walked out of Los Angeles high schools to
graphic terms. throw a spotlight on substandard conditions.
“With everything blurred, with noth- Among the students’ demands were more
ing clear, with no positive standards, with In most of his battles, the conservative bilingual teachers, counselors and adminis-
everything in doubt,” he said in his opening firebrand railed against “progressive educa- trators. Rafferty turned against bilingual ed-
remarks to the La Cañada school board, “no tion,” which he contended was weakening the ucation after the walkouts, which he came to
wonder so many of [the students] welsh out curriculum, turning a lesson on Eskimos, for view as “part of a radical agenda,” historian
and squeal or turn traitor when confronted example, away from reading about them to Natalia Mehlman Petrzela wrote in her 2015
with the grim reality of Red military force learning how to “construct harpoons and eat book Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the
and the crafty cunning of Red psychological whale blubber.” Making of Modern Political Culture.
warfare.”
His frequent targeting of progressivism In 1968, he ran for a U.S. Senate seat,
His speech, titled “The Passing of the irked many educators. defeating incumbent U.S. Sen. Thomas H.
Patriot,” was reprinted in Reader’s Digest and Kuchel for the Republican nomination, but
widely circulated among conservative groups, “Fifty years ago, a poor teacher of reading losing in the general election to Democrat
which urged the small-town superintendent was just a poor teacher of reading, but today Alan Cranston. Two years later his political
to run for the state’s top education job. He a poor teacher of reading is ‘progressive,’” Los career came to an end when one of his dep-
accepted the challenge and in 1962 defeated Angeles County Superintendent of Schools uties, Wilson Riles, unseated him as state su-
a University of California professor, who had C.C. Trillingham PhD ’33 said in a 1964 perintendent of public instruction.
been favored by the state’s education estab- Los Angeles Times article, which reported that
lishment, to become state superintendent of more than 50 of California’s school superin- A New Orleans native, Rafferty spent
public instruction. tendents viewed Rafferty’s criticism as mis- his last decade as dean of education at Troy
guided. State University in Alabama. Shortly before
In 1966, Rafferty was re-elected in a his death in a car accident in 1982, he told
landslide. He called his victory a mandate to But there was one surprising turn in Raf- an interviewer that he paid no mind to critics
restore “lasting values, discipline and patrio- ferty’s otherwise conservative agenda: Early in of his unwavering conservatism. “I can wait,”
tism” to the schools. his tenure he supported bilingual education. he said, “until it finally perks through to them
that I knew what I was talking about.”
His tenure may have been the first time Rafferty developed the state’s first bilin-
in California’s modern history that the state gual education law. Signed by Gov. Ronald
Reagan in 1967, it lifted a longtime ban on
providing instruction in a language other

Current and former superinten- USC ROSSIER 65 The First Century
dents at the 2019 USC Rossier
Dean’s Superintendents Advi-
sory Group Awards Dinner

•—•

As the university pushed to join the top ranks of major research universities, pri-
orities changed, and at USC Rossier that meant more tenure-track positions went
to nationally known scholars and not to former superintendents.

Many faculty members welcomed the change.
“The Melbo years represented a powerful but outdated view of what lead-
ership was in schools,” said Marsh, who in the early 2000s helped redesign the
education doctorate program to make it more relevant to the needs of urban
schools in the 21st century.
“One of these former superintendents said, ‘Superintendents don’t need to
know more about instruction, they need to learn about how to work with school
boards, get bonds passed,’” Marsh recalled. “That is what the old version of
schools of education was.
“Over the years our school transitioned from that view of leadership to a view
more grounded in diversity, of having all kids learn well, and having leaders who
know something about instruction,” he said. “We dramatically changed what our
program was for school leaders.”
But even after the Melbo era ended, Trojan leadership in public education
continued.
When Michael Escalante EdD ’02 was superintendent of the Glendale Unified
School District, from 2003 to 2010, he hired or promoted more than 40 USC EdD
graduates to work in its schools and central administration, effectively turning the
district into a laboratory for the USC Rossier approach.
Glendale students’ test scores rose during his tenure. And Escalante credits,
in part, the education shared by the many USC alums in leadership roles—partic-
ularly their focus on urban education and using data to produce positive change.

1
2

34

5 USC ROSSIER 67 The First Century

1. Santa Ana Superintendent Rudy Castruita, who would later serve as Superinten-
dent of the San Diego County Office of Education
2. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Vierling Kersey (left)
3. Thelma Melendez, former Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Ed-
ucation at the U.S. Department of Education as well as Superintendent of the Santa
Ana and Pomona Unified School Districts
4. Members of EDUCARE at a USC School of Education Steak Bake
5. Frank A. Bouelle (fourth from right) and the Los Angeles School Board
6. Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Darline Robles
7. Dean Karen Symms Gallagher and Los Angeles Unified School District Superinten-
dent Michelle King

67



USC ROSSIER 69 The First Century

CHAPTER 7

Facing Turbulent Times



In the spring of 1968, Julian Nava, the sole Latino USC ROSSIER 71 The First Century

on the Los Angeles Board of Education, turned to Protesters participate in the
East L.A. walkouts, 1968
Superintendent Jack P. Crowther with some blunt

words about a series of student walkouts roiling

the school district.

J ack, this is BC and AD,” he said. “The schools will not be the same hereafter.”
“Yes,” Crowther replied, “I know.”
Crowther was a former teacher who rose to the top of the district in
1962, six years after earning his master’s in education. It was likely that
nothing in his training had prepared him for the tensions that erupted in March
1968, when 20,000 students streamed out of several predominantly Mexi-
can-American high schools in the unprecedented display of Chicano power later
known as the East L.A. “blowouts.”

Thousands of disaffected youth—joined by parents and other community
members—marched in the streets and packed school board meetings, demand-
ing changes in the system that had stranded Latino students at the academic
bottom for generations.

Along with the 1965 Watts riots, the walkouts signaled a new era in L.A. that
would cast a harsh light on substandard conditions in schools predominated
by Black and Latino students—including outdated textbooks, overcrowded and
dilapidated facilities, and poorly trained teachers—that contributed to high drop-
out and low college attendance rates.

The troubled period would leave its mark on Trojans like Crowther and on the
School of Education that trained them.

Even before the walkouts began, Crowther, who ran the system for most of the
’60s, had his hands full.

In 1963, the landmark Crawford lawsuit was filed against the Los Angeles
Board of Education, alleging that district policies involving such crucial matters as
school attendance boundaries and student transfers had resulted in the segrega-
tion of students by race. The case ignited a battle over desegregation that would
span 18 years.

Crowther drew up a controversial voluntary busing plan to diversify schools,
but the court later rejected it as ineffective. Then, in 1965, Watts exploded in

“Crowther was a former violence that claimed nearly three dozen lives. The superintendent was one of
teacher who rose to the dozens of officials called to testify before the McCone Commission, which was
top of the district in charged with investigating the riots.
1962. It was likely that
nothing in his training In its final report, the commission identified numerous causes, including stark
had prepared him for the inequalities in the nation’s second-largest school district. Crowther estimated
tensions that erupted in that reducing class sizes—one of the remedies urged by the commission—would
March 1968.” cost $250 million, which he said the financially-strapped district could not afford
after years of state budget cuts.

The financial constraints and demands for wholesale change pushed the
superintendent to his breaking point. On several occasions over the next years
Crowther would announce his intention to resign. “It is heartbreaking to see a
great school system start to deteriorate because of lack of funds,” he said at a
news conference two months after the walkouts. Calling his job “man-killing,” he
went on an extended medical leave in 1969 and stepped down a year later.

•—•

Tensions over finances and integration continued to mount under Crowther’s
successors. Robert E. Kelly MS Ed ’38, a 41-year veteran of the district, served a
year as interim superintendent and wound up coping with a crippling, five-week
teachers’ strike involving half of the district’s 25,000 teachers. He was followed
by William J. Johnston, who would serve as superintendent for 10 years, the sec-
ond-longest tenure in district history.

Johnston, who had headed adult education for the district, said in his inau-
guration speech in 1971 that one of the district’s chief challenges was restoring
public confidence in the system. “We have to have the parent, particularly the
minority parent, with us step by step, all along the way,” he said.

But events would conspire to poison the district’s relationships with thou-
sands of parents.

In 1976 the California Supreme Court upheld a 1970 court order to desegre-
gate the school system and directed the district to “take reasonable and feasible
steps” to eliminate segregation. It was up to Johnston and his staff to devise a
plan that would satisfy the court while answering to a Board of Education majority
that was fervently opposed to crosstown busing.

Mandatory student reassignment and busing commenced in 1978, leading tens
of thousands of White parents to pull their children from the district. By 1981, too
few White students were left to sustain the busing program. It ended that year,
and so did Johnston’s tenure as district chief after the board, steered by a conser-
vative bloc, opted not to renew his contract.

Another Trojan who was prominent at the height of the integration battle was
Robert L. Docter PhD ’60.

A pro-integration professor of educational psychology at California State Uni-
versity, Northridge, he was elected to the board in 1969 and was president when
the mandate to desegregate was handed down. Anti-busing forces mobilized
to unseat him, and he was replaced in 1977 by San Fernando Valley anti-busing
leader Bobbi Fiedler.

•—•

Although not on the firing line like some of its well-known alumni, USC and
its School of Education had a role to play in responding to the racial tensions
in the city.

“We must acknowledge the problems of the Mexican-American community
and the Negro community since we are a great university in the shadows of a
ghetto,” Manuel H. Guerra, an associate professor of Spanish known for his work
in bilingual and bicultural studies, said in a front-page 1967 Daily Trojan article
headlined “Mexican-Americans: Forgotten Minority?”

12 1. Los Angeles teachers’ strike, USC ROSSIER 73 The First Century
1970
Guerra, who had made an unsuccessful run that year for the L.A. school 2. Graffiti in support of strik-
board, called on USC to address the impact of language handicaps and culture on ing teachers
Latino students, who dropped out of school at disproportionately high rates.

“Do you realize that there is not a specialized teaching curriculum in our
colleges or universities to train our teachers in Mexican-American problems?” he
wrote. “There are no reading textbooks, no manuals, no teaching guides in this
specialized area … How can [teachers] deal with the special problems of lan-
guage and differing culture when they may not ever have seen a Mexican-Ameri-
can child before they reach the classroom?”

That same year, the USC School of Education would launch the Teacher Corps
Urban Program to prepare teachers to work in urban schools predominated by
disadvantaged Black and Mexican-American students.

A pilot project of the National Teacher Corps, established in 1965 as part of
President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the program sent college graduates
into seven school districts in Los Angeles and Riverside counties for a two-year
period that included academic studies, special workshops and community activi-
ties intended to show that “education cannot operate in isolation from the needs,
viewpoints and concerns of the people it is to serve.” The program would lead to a
master’s degree in education and a California teaching credential.

By 1971, 88 interns had completed the program and most of them went direct-
ly into teaching in low-income communities, according to an evaluation by the
federal Office of Education.

The report noted that the Teacher Corps Urban Program “introduced teaching
methods not previously used in the schools” to which the interns were assigned.
The new methods included stimulating children to learn to spell by using words
that were familiar to them and reading books, produced by the interns, that were
based on the children’s own stories. The federal report cited studies showing that
reading levels rose by an average of more than two grades. It concluded that the
novel program “strengthened educational opportunities available to children in
the schools where corps members were assigned.”

According to a 1969 account by Donald E. Wilson and Annette M. Gromfin of
USC’s teacher education department, the program also resulted in broadening
the School of Education’s teacher education curriculum to include coursework in
teaching English as a second language to non-native speakers and English as a
second dialect for native speakers who lacked proficiency in standard English.

AFTON NANCE

More than 100,000 Americans of Japanese tion process,” Gutfreund wrote in his 2013 ifornia Department of Education. She began
ancestry were forced into internment camps doctoral dissertation at UCLA. “By 1945, to study the challenges of educating the chil-
during World War II, including dozens of they were discussing it in terms of school dren of the braceros, the Mexican guest work-
current and former students of Afton Nance desegregation.” ers who helped fill labor shortages during and
MS Ed ’48, who taught English at an elemen- after World War II through an agreement
tary school in Palos Verdes Estates. Born in Idaho around 1901, Nance spent between the U.S. and Mexico.
her early childhood in Wyoming before mov-
Nance was furious about the internment ing with her family to California. After grad- Her research culminated in the first
and, through letters and visits to the camps, uating from Long Beach High School and framework for teaching English as a second
kept in touch with her pupils, most of whom Mills College, she taught at the Shanghai language.
were second-generation Japanese Americans, American School in China.
or Nisei. Developed in collaboration with Helen
When she returned to the United States Heffernan, who oversaw rural and elementa-
Those friendships gave her a keen under- she was “deeply concerned with questions of ry education for the state, the program aimed
standing of the injustices dealt them and fu- social and racial justice,” education historian to enable immigrant students to become flu-
eled the passionate arguments she made on Kathleen Weller wrote in 2011. ent in English while maintaining their eth-
their behalf as they re-entered public schools nic identity. Introducing the program at a
after the war. In “The Return of the Nisei,” Nance ar- conference in San Jose in 1963, Nance and
gued that democracy depended on eliminat- Heffernan urged ESL teachers to “study and
“They are coming back because they have ing prejudice against Japanese Americans and appreciate the culture of Spanish-speaking
the right to come back – the right guaranteed other minorities and called on teachers and peoples,” Gutfreund wrote, because they be-
by the Constitution of the United States,” the principals to lead the way. lieved “all children were better students when
teacher wrote in “The Return of the Nisei,” they took pride in their ethnic identity.”
published in the journal Education for Cultural “[Until] the streets of California towns
Unity in 1945. and villages are safe and pleasant places for Nance retired in 1966, the same year she
Melvin Shiramizu,” she wrote, “they are not helped found TESOL, Teachers of English to
In standing up to the prejudices of the safe for Rudy Garcia, for Tommy Holland, Speakers of Other Languages, an internation-
time Nance helped reframe public schools’ colored, or for any white child you know.” al organization with more than 10,000 mem-
approach to children who were foreign-born bers. She died in 1986.
or the offspring of immigrants, providing a In 1948, Nance completed a master’s de-
perspective that shifted the emphasis from gree in education at USC with a thesis that Fifteen years later, a collection of 300
“Americanization” to integration through drew attention to the important role teach- wartime letters to Nance from her Japanese
more culturally sensitive methods. ers and school administrators could play in American students was donated to the Japa-
fostering healthy human relations. One of nese American National Museum in Los An-
Her seminal contribution was helping to the findings from her study of 40 classrooms geles. Many of the letters expressed gratitude
develop English-as-a-second-language in- in Riverside County schools was that chil- toward the teacher who rejected the racial an-
struction in California, according to Louisiana dren of color—in this case, mainly Mexican imosities of the time.
State University Prof. Zevi Moses Gutfreund, Americans and Blacks—were less likely than
an expert on the history of language education their White peers to be chosen for class lead- “Why can’t [the] majority of the people be
and racial politics in 20th-century Los Angeles. ership positions. like you?” one student wrote in 1944. “Trust-
ing, and helping others, thinking of the future
“Before the war, Angeleno students, She developed a “model intercultural pro- of the people and not just for yourself.”
teachers and administrators looked at lan- gram” in Riverside that led to her hiring in
guage learning’s impact on the Americaniza- 1948 as a curriculum consultant for the Cal-

•—• USC ROSSIER 75 The First Century

Another Teacher Corps grant funded USC’s Rural-Migrant Program, a pioneering
effort to develop bilingual teachers for the Spanish-speaking children of migrant
farmworkers.

Patricia Heffernan Cabrera directed the Rural-Migrant Program. She joined
the School of Education in 1966 to run its ESL program and was uniquely suited
to lead the rural-migrant effort in part because of her own upbringing. “I was an
Army brat,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1970, “and in a way I learned the
same things children of migrants learn—to overcompensate, to establish yourself
all over again.”

Cabrera also was following in the footsteps of her mother, Helen Heffernan, a
California Department of Education official who helped write the first ESL curric-
ulum in the early 1960s, according to historian Zevi Moses Gutfreund, an expert
on the education of language-minority children in Los Angeles from the 1900s
through the 1960s. Heffernan’s collaborator was a graduate of the USC School
of Education: Afton Nance MS Ed ’48, a Palos Verdes teacher who advocated for
Japanese-American students incarcerated during World War II and for Mexi-
can-American migrant children after the war.  

The interns in Cabrera’s Rural-Migrant program were assigned to a cluster
of school districts in Tulare County and lived in the migrant communities they
served. They learned from a “flying faculty” of USC professors and other special-
ists who commuted to Tulare County to teach classes aimed at increasing the
interns’ knowledge of migrant children’s cultural, language and socioeconomic
backgrounds. During the summer months the interns took classes on the
USC campus.

A key component developed by Cabrera was high-intensity Spanish instruc-
tion, a six-week crash course that aimed to teach non-Spanish speakers enough
Spanish to meet basic social and work demands, including giving simple instruc-
tions to students and communicating with parents. She based the program on a
rather subversive idea: “Rather than teaching English to students, she wanted
teachers to learn Spanish,” Gutfreund wrote in his 2013 UCLA doctoral thesis on
the politics of language and race in Los Angeles.

Seventeen interns completed the Rural-Migrant program with master’s
degrees and state teaching credentials and nearly all went on to teach in rural
communities. The U.S. Office of Education identified the program as a model of
bilingual-bicultural teacher training.

“It coupled pragmatism with idealism and proved that teachers, as innovators
and change agents, can make education meaningful and relevant,” Cabrera wrote.
She said teachers had an “irrevocable responsibility … to reach and teach the
child in his cultural setting as he functions in his language community.”

The Rural-Migrant program was one way that the School of Education worked
to advance the practice of language instruction years before bilingual education
was driven to the top of the education reform agenda. To Dean Melbo’s credit,
these novel efforts unfolded during his tenure. But could the school have done
more to improve educational opportunities in Los Angeles?

“We were doing some good things,” said Myron Dembo, an emeritus professor
of educational psychology who joined the faculty in 1968, “but that didn’t perme-
ate the School of Education in terms of its most important mission.”

1

USC ROSSIER 77 The First Century

2

1. A bilingual workshop for
teachers
2. Anti-busing protesters



CHAPTER 8

Changing Course

USC ROSSIER 79 The First Century



The years after Melbo stepped down as dean brought USC ROSSIER 81 The First Century

challenges to the school that had been so thoroughly Waite Phillips Hall

molded by his vision.

H is long and eventful administration ended in 1973 when he returned
to teaching as the first recipient of an endowed chair named after
him and his wife, Virginia. He rejoined the large and influential
department of educational administration, which was dominated
by former superintendents.

Their views about what students of education needed to know, based on
decades of wisdom steering districts throughout Southern California, would pit
them against newer faculty members, whose forte was research.

The conflict between the scholars and the practitioners was not a minor
intramural squabble, nor was it unique to USC’s School of Education. Nor has it
gone away.

“As long as I’ve been here, there has been tension between research and prac-
tice,” said William G. Tierney, University Professor and Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of
Higher Education, who joined USC in 1994.

But how that tension plays out matters. It affects the character and mission
of an institution expected to respond to increasingly complex challenges in the
classroom, the community and the policy arena.

In the School of Education the ex-superintendents held sway.
“The classes to a great extent were about learning from a mentor how to run
a school or district,” observed Dembo, the educational psychology professor who
was hired by Melbo. “That was important … but there wasn’t an intellectual cli-
mate for discovery of new knowledge or research-based practice, mainly because
of Melbo’s influence.”
David Marsh, who was hired five years after Melbo returned to the classroom,
recalled how frustrating it was to be a research-oriented assistant professor
seeking tenure in that climate. By his late 20s he had already led a major na-

tional study of teacher training, but the promotion committee, made up mostly
of former superintendents, turned him down, suggesting he needed “more time
working with practitioners,” Marsh said.

“It was clear the Melbo era continued after Melbo left,” added Marsh, who
retired the same year as Dembo, in 2009.

•—•

Melbo’s immediate successor did not have radically different ideas about the

direction or mission of the school. His experience suited him well for the practi-

tioner team.

John W. Stallings, the former superintendent of the Corona-Norco Unified

School District, joined the faculty in 1969 as a professor of educational admin-

istration. With three degrees from USC, including an EdD in 1958, he was highly

regarded for his expertise on district finances and facilities and was one of the

reasons the school was “held in high regard by the field,” Gothold, the former su-

perintendent of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, observed years later.

Named interim dean in 1973, Stallings ran the school for a year.

In 1974 a permanent replacement was named: Stephen J. Knezevich, a Milwau-

kee native who came to USC from the University of Wisconsin.

Like his predecessors, Knezevich was an expert on school administration. But

he also was the prolific author of more than 100 scholarly publications. He said

that one of the reasons he was drawn to USC was its interest in strengthening

research across the university.

That drive for greater academic rigor and scholarship had begun under Presi-

dent Norman H. Topping, who led USC from 1958 to 1970.

Topping was a distinguished scientist who developed the typhus vaccine used

in World War II by millions of American, British and

Canadian servicemen. He earned his undergraduate

“The conflict between the scholars and the and medical degrees from USC and was vice presi-
practitioners was not a minor intramural dent for medical affairs at the University of Pennsyl-
vania when he was chosen to head his alma mater.

squabble, nor was it unique to USC’s School His goal was to turn USC into a major national re-
search university. He improved faculty salaries, built

of Education. Nor has it gone away.” new laboratories and institutes, and raised hundreds
of millions of dollars for expansion and research

from alumni, foundations and government agencies.

In 1969 his efforts were rewarded when USC was admitted to the highly se-

lective Association of American Universities, which grants membership after an

intensive review of an institution’s research and scholarship in undergraduate,

graduate and professional programs. Admission to the AAU enhanced USC’s na-

tional standing and increased the flow of federal research money.

Knezevich attempted to bring the School of Education in line with that effort

by hiring 22 nationally known scholars. But his move, intended to change the

school’s culture, only intensified the conflict between the research and practice

sides of the faculty, and most of the new hires left after a few years.

“I don’t want to call it a culture war, but we got really beat up” by the former

school district administrators on the faculty, said Marsh, who was among the

younger generation of professors hired by Knezevich.

In 1981 after seven years as dean, Knezevich cited an increase in research and

training grants and the growing reputation of the school’s journal, Educational

Research Quarterly (later associated with Grambling State University in Louisi-

ana), as major achievements of his tenure.

But an internal review for the university led by Frances Feldman, a distin-

guished scholar in the School of Social Work, was far less glowing. “She said our

school didn’t have much of a research agenda,” Marsh recalled.

Knezevich stepped down.

•—• 1 USC ROSSIER 83 The First Century

The next dean was John Orr, a longtime USC religion professor who had been 2
involved in school desegregation issues in the South. He also had worked with
President Topping on a task force to study educational issues raised after the 3
Watts riots.
1. Stephen J. Knezevich, Dean
One of his chief tasks as dean “was to peacefully try to move along our prog- (1974–81)
ress toward this kind of balance between the clinical and research faculty that all 2. John Orr, Dean (1981–88)
of us knew we needed to achieve,” said Orr, who would lead the School of Educa- 3. Lawrence O. Picus, As-
tion from 1981 to 1988. sociate Dean for Research
and Faculty Affairs and the
“John Orr was hired to start thinking about how this culture gets changed,” Richard T. Cooper and Mary
said Lawrence O. Picus, an expert on school finance who had been a RAND Corpo- Catherine Cooper Chair in
ration researcher before Orr recruited him in 1988. Public School Administration

“I flipped the balance” in the department of educational administration, Picus
added, recalling the subtle put-downs lobbed by the ex-superintendents in the
division who were displeased by Orr’s moves.

Picus later became the Richard T. Cooper and Mary Catherine Cooper Chair in
Public School Administration and associate dean for research and faculty affairs.

He was one of several additions to the faculty during Orr’s deanship who
brought solid research experience to a school that was trying to better address
the evolving needs of local districts by broadening its expertise.

To build on one of the school’s strengths, Orr created a task force on bilin-
gual-bicultural education that in 1983 spawned a research center devoted to
scholarship, training and public service in such areas as ESL instruction, foreign
language learning, and the development and retention of minority teachers.
Called the Center for Multilingual and Multicultural Education, it was one of
several specialized research centers the school would establish over the next
decades.

Under Orr, the school also developed and administered the state’s first exam
for the certification of bilingual teachers, in 1984. The exam was one consequence
of the 1974 California Supreme Court decision Lau v. Nichols, which affirmed the
rights of limited-English students to an equal education.

“When it came to expertise and strength in the field of bilingual education,
USC at that point had no peer,” Orr said.

Orr also closed a number of off-campus graduate programs in Northern Cal-
ifornia and overseas that were rooted in the Melbo era. The Feldman report had
criticized them as poorly managed and a drain on the faculty.

“I was aware that people felt Dean Melbo’s days were done and the school just
had to change its identity,” Orr said.

He and his predecessor, Knezevich, had made what a later dean would charac-
terize as “course corrections.” The transformation of the school was still to come.



USC ROSSIER 85 The First Century

CHAPTER 9

The Drumbeat for Reform



To be sure, pressure for change in the School of USC ROSSIER 87 The First Century

Education came from within the university as it strove Music students at Benton Mid-
dle School in La Mirada
for national distinction. But the school also found itself

reckoning with powerful forces beyond the campus gates.

T he signal event was “A Nation at Risk,” a 1983 report commissioned
by President Ronald Reagan’s Office of Education that declared a “ris-
ing tide of mediocrity” was engulfing America’s public schools.
The stinging critique launched a perpetual season of hard scrutiny
of public education. To counteract the harmful “tide,” reform efforts bloomed
across the country, sending millions of dollars from the federal government and
foundations to schools willing to apply new approaches to old problems.

The spotlight also fell on education schools. Long considered an academic
backwater with fuzzy goals and low standards, they were forced to rethink how
they worked, what they taught and how well they prepared the teachers, princi-
pals and other key personnel on the frontlines of the crisis.

“The sea change was this shift from a focus on schooling processes and proce-
dures—how many hours you should be teaching reading, how many periods you
should have in a day—to student outcomes,” said Guilbert C. Hentschke, who was
named dean in 1988 after five years leading the University of Rochester’s Graduate
School of Education and Human Development.

“As much as we love the field, if we can’t address how to improve it we have
trouble justifying our existence,” Hentschke said.

The existential threat to USC’s education school was real.
When Hentschke succeeded Orr as dean, the library science school had just
been closed, and there were rumblings that nursing and education, which faced a
$1.5 million budget deficit, could be next. Those schools ranked low on the univer-
sity’s status hierarchy, in part because they lacked the extremely wealthy alumni
who supported schools like medicine, law and engineering. Adding to the anxiety
was the shuttering or downgrading of education schools and departments at oth-
er major universities, including Yale and the University of Chicago.

“They were forced to To avoid a similar fate, the School of Education under Hentschke took an
rethink how they worked, active role in reform. If authorities said public education was failing, the school
what they taught and how needed to help frame the problems and find solutions. “It was very much a con-
well they prepared the scious effort to be involved in the reform movement,” recalled Picus, the school
teachers, principals and finance expert who was hired by Orr. “Gib led us in that direction.”
other key personnel on
the frontlines of the crisis.” •—•

One bright spot was the USC Latino Teacher Project.
Conceived and funded by the Ford Foundation, the project was launched in

1992 to turn bilingual classroom aides into credentialed bilingual teachers. At the
time Los Angeles County had about 500,000 students classified as limited-En-
glish proficient, of whom more than 80 percent came from Spanish-speaking
families. Only 15 percent of the county’s 59,000 teachers were Hispanic.

The program was initially led by Michael Genzuk, one of the first recipients of
a bilingual certificate from USC. Genzuk was a bilingual teacher and adviser in the
Los Angeles school district who returned to USC in the 1990s to earn a master’s
and a doctorate in education.  

He became the founding director of the Latino Teacher Project, which was
part of a consortium involving several universities, including the California State
University campuses in Los Angeles and Dominguez Hills, and the Los Angeles,
Lennox and Little Lake school districts. The classroom aides recruited from the
districts each received a $1,500 scholarship and took classes and special semi-
nars at USC leading to the bilingual credential.

Reynaldo Baca, who later ran the program with Genzuk, said about 1,300
aides completed the program, which eventually expanded to train teachers for
students from Korean and Armenian backgrounds. A 1995 report by the U.S. De-
partment of Education commended it as an exemplary program, noting that “one
indicator of success is that other districts are raiding the project for new hires.”

Adriana Chavarin-Lopez was a USC freshman in 1992 when she heard about
the project.

“I was a first-generation Chicana college student and was always looking for
spaces at USC that were welcoming of students like me,” said Chavarin-Lopez. After
completing the program she worked as a bilingual teacher and principal for 22 years
before entering Harvard University in 2017 for a doctorate in education leadership.
“The Latino Teacher Project was one of those spaces and it directly contributed to
my success as a first-generation college student and as an educator.”

•—•

USC’s school of education tackled the problem of education quality from two direc-
tions—increasing preparation for teachers and encouraging students to do well.  

To support students and their families, it participated in the EXXCEL (Edu-
cational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations) Apartments
project, a novel venture by two Orange County developers to address the housing
and educational needs of low-income families. Their intent was to “build a closer
link between school and home,” Hentschke said in a 1992 interview with the Los
Angeles Times.

The project was based at a newly constructed, 46-unit apartment complex in a
South Los Angeles neighborhood scathed by the violence that tore across the city
in 1992 after LAPD officers were found not guilty of beating motorist Rodney King.
It was named Academy Hall and offered families a substantial discount on rent if
their children did well in school and engaged in extra academic activities.

Graduate students from the USC School of Education provided tutoring and
counseling services in exchange for rent-free apartments. The building included a
study room equipped with textbooks and other learning aids.

The most prominent effort supported by the school during Hentschke’s deanship

He became the fou
director of the Lat
Project, which was
consortium involv
universities, includ
California State Un
campuses in Los A
and Dominguez H
the Los Angeles, L
and Little Lake sch

HILDA HEINE

Hilda Heine EdD ’04 blazed a trail full of degree at the University of Hawaii in 1975. family expectations about education provided
firsts. Over the next 15 years she worked as a for the successful students a real appreciation
for and understanding of the role of education
In 1990 she became the first woman to teacher, counselor and college administrator. As in their lives,” Heine wrote.
head the College of the Marshall Islands, the president of the College of the Marshall Islands,
only college serving the tiny Pacific island na- she oversaw its transition from a continuing She also examined the impact of cultural
tion of 60,000 people. education program to a community college. identity, language barriers and the complex
relationship between the U.S. and its former
In 2004 she became the first Marshallese She returned to Hawaii in the 1990s in trust territory. The U.S. conducted exten-
person to hold a doctorate after earning an EdD search of better educational opportunities sive nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands
from the USC Rossier School of Education.   for her two children. In 1999 she began her between 1946 and 1958, which left a legacy
USC doctoral studies with a group of U.S. of contamination and extremely high cancer
Then, in 2016, after serving as Minister of military officers and educational leaders from rates among the Marshallese people. Heine
Education, she became the Marshall Islands’ throughout the region who met at Hickam suggested that Americans’ ignorance of this
first female president. She was the first wom- Air Force Base in Honolulu. The program painful history contributes to the alienation
an to lead any Pacific island nation. at Hickam, taught by USC Rossier faculty, felt by many Marshallese students.
was one of a number of degree programs the
Heine can lay claim to another distinc- school offered in Europe and Asia, many at “Hilda had that marvelous combination of
tion—one she would rather not have. She U.S. military bases. a strong research base coupled with a strong
heads a country that may disappear in a gen- sense of service to her people,” said Emeri-
eration’s time because of climate change. Heine earned her doctorate with a dis- tus Professor of Education Stuart Gothold, a
sertation on the characteristics of successful member of her dissertation committee.
“It’s a very scary scenario for us,” Heine Marshallese high school students in the U.S.,
told the Washington Post in 2018 after a study focusing on Marshallese immigrant enclaves In the early 1980s the U.S. and the Mar-
sponsored by the Pentagon showed that the in Hawaii, Oregon and Arkansas. Her re- shall Islands entered into an agreement that
collection of 1,000 tropical islands between search was motivated by Marshallese students’ allows the Marshallese to live and work in the
Hawaii and Australia could become uninhab- dismal achievement levels—their dropout U.S. without visas. A fifth of the islands’ pop-
itable by mid-century or sooner. rate was as high as 80 percent in some of the ulation left between 1999 and 2011, according
schools she studied—and the dearth of re- to the Marshallese government, and Heine
She has been outspoken in urging other search on the cultural, social and economic said many view the “massive out-migration” as
countries to reduce greenhouse gases. When obstacles they face. a grave threat to Marshallese culture.
President Donald Trump pulled the United
States out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate “There is virtually no information out “I don’t want to think about that scenario,”
agreement, she said he was “at best misguided” there about how Marshallese students learn, Heine said on CNN after her 2016 election.
and appealed to the European Union to per- what values and expectations they bring with “The land is very much connected to our culture.
suade him to change his mind. them to school, and how those values and For us it is very important we remain there.”
expectations are nurtured and promoted by
Heine was born in 1951 on Jaluit Atoll, a families and support systems in school and in
4-square-mile coral formation that was dev- host U.S. communities,” she wrote.
astated by U.S. bombing when it fell under
Japanese control during World War II. Af- One of her key findings concerned the
ter graduating from Marshall Islands High role of the family in student success. “High
School, she earned a bachelor’s degree at the
University of Oregon in 1970 and a master’s

was the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP), launched in 1995 USC ROSSIER 91 The First Century
with a $53 million grant from Walter H. Annenberg, the philanthropist and former
publishing magnate.

A holistic initiative to engage parents, equip teachers and enlist technology, it
was a prime example of what USC President Steven B. Sample, who led the univer-
sity from 1991 to 2010, said USC should be doing—getting out of the ivory tower
and conducting “academic good works” in the community.

“The basic pitch,” Hentschke recalled, “was that being relevant in the com-
munity should be seen as an academic endeavor. That drove all of us out into the
community as a faculty.”

Hentschke wrote the LAAMP proposal with Theodore Mitchell, dean of the
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “It was a rare
example of USC and UCLA working together,” Joseph Aguerrebere, a USC alum-
nus who was then at the Ford Foundation, said, alluding to the historic rivalry
between the two universities. “Gib wasn’t going to let that stand in the way. And
Ted wasn’t either.”

The proposal crafted by the two deans did not prescribe a particular approach
but was intended to build on and “turbocharge” existing reform efforts, especially
the LEARN network of schools in Los Angeles Unified that had been created in
1992 to promote power-sharing on campuses and give schools more flexibility.  

LAAMP, which ultimately involved 247 schools grouped into “families,” offered
a parent involvement program, technology support and teacher training, and also
gathered data to gauge the schools’ progress toward specific goals. The school
clusters decided how to spend their money, which they used to fund a wide range
of needs, including computers and Saturday classes.

Despite high hopes, both LAAMP and LEARN fizzled out by 2000, done in by
shifting educational politics and an intractable district bureaucracy. The EXXCEL
experiment ran aground after two years when the development group behind the
apartment complex declared bankruptcy.

“Good things were done, but you can’t pick one that really lasted,” Hentschke
said of the era’s plethora of reform programs.

•—•

Some experts say that education schools must share the blame for the prob-
lems in public education. “Our schools of education are the weakest link in our
public education system, and, of all the system’s parts, they may be the hardest
to change with the tools available to policymakers,” Marc Tucker, president of
the National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit that advises
states and districts on school improvement strategies, wrote in a 2018 Educa-
tion Week column.

But those failures in the trenches didn’t stifle USC’s commitment to help drive
change. The School of Education’s pursuit of relevance was evident not only in
its involvement in reform efforts but in the work of a growing group of nationally
known faculty members whose research bore directly on the headline-making
education issues of the day.

Hentschke hired William G. Tierney, who founded USC’s Pullias Center for
Higher Education—the only endowed center of its kind in the country—and Es-
tela Mara Bensimon, Dean’s Professor in Educational Equity, who in 1999 founded
USC Rossier’s Center for Urban Education. Both are specialists in college access
for underrepresented groups, particularly Latinos, Blacks and low-income stu-
dents, and have appeared on the American Enterprise Institute’s annual rankings
of the nation’s most influential education scholars.

Education policy professor Priscilla Wohlstetter gained prominence as an
expert on “shared decision-making,” a reform aimed at improving school perfor-
mance by giving individual schools more authority. It was one of the approaches
tested in a “living laboratory” she ran in conjunction with the Los Angeles County



(Opposite) Students at Crete USC ROSSIER 93 The First Century
Academy in Los Angeles
1. Priscilla Wohlstetter, former
Professor of Education
2. William G. Tierney,
University Professor and Wil-
bur-Kieffer Professor of Higher
Education
3. Estela Mara Bensimon,
Dean’s Professor in Education-
al Equity
4. Guilbert Hentschke, Dean
(1988–2000)

1 234

Office of Education at three failing Compton schools. Test scores rose at the three
schools after two years.

Another influential member of the School of Education was Allan R. Odden,
who was, along with Picus, a widely cited authority on school finance and school
spending. Odden, a former math teacher in New York’s East Harlem who sent his
two children to public schools in Los Angeles, also represented USC in two influ-
ential education policy consortiums, PACE (Policy Analysis for California Educa-
tion) and the Center for Policy Research and Education.

Odden’s research included a study that refuted the existence of what con-
servative critics called the “administrative blob,” the allegation that education
dollars meant for the classroom were squandered on school administration.

“They spoke to a larger audience,” Hentschke said of Wohlstetter, Odden and
Picus. “They developed lines of research that were well-regarded in the academy
and widely respected among practicing professionals and policymakers in K–12
education. That was very new.”

A dark note in this period came when the Los Angeles Times published a story
in 1996 alleging that an associate professor had handed out A’s to athletes with-
out requiring them to attend class or complete course work. His undergraduate
course on tutoring was stacked with basketball and football players, including 12
members of that year’s Rose Bowl team.

Investigations by USC officials and the Pacific 10 Conference found no wrong-
doing, but the controversy tarnished a school that had been trying hard to change
its identity. The professor took early retirement and Hentschke offered to resign
but USC President Sample, though livid, turned him down.

The tumult didn’t end there.



CHAPTER 10

Crisis and Change

USC ROSSIER 95 The First Century



Barbara and Roger Rossier were high school counselors USC ROSSIER 97 The First Century

who by the early 1970s had married and enrolled in the USC Hybrid High School grad-
uation ceremony
USC School of Education.

A fter each had earned a master’s degree and a doctorate, they
reached for the next rungs in their careers: Roger joined the Cypress
College faculty to work with foreign students, while Barbara taught
at Cal State L.A. and opened a private practice for diagnosing devel-
opmental delays and other learning challenges.

They had no intention of going into business until 1980, when a friend called
them about a small private school in Orange County for children with emotional
or learning disabilities. “Why don’t you buy it?” he asked.

“So we got it,” Barbara Rossier recalled years later. “It was just that simple.”
She and her husband turned the facility into one of California’s largest private
special-education schools, with campuses in Garden Grove and Fountain Valley.
It became the foundation for a multimillion-dollar enterprise that grew to include
educational travel and real estate businesses. And it put the Rossiers into a rari-
fied league: wealthy educators.
In 1998 they agreed to give $20 million to their alma mater—at the time, the
largest gift ever made to an education school in the U.S.
Their pledge, which came with naming rights, brightened what had been a
glum outlook for a school struggling in an era of sharply rising expectations under
USC President Sample.
“It helped in some ways to save the school,” acknowledged Hentschke, then in
his 10th year as dean. “Now, named schools are a dime a dozen, but they weren’t
back then.”
USC Rossier’s future was fortified by the gift, but the school remained vulnera-
ble to criticisms about quality that had dogged it for years.
“There was some talk of ‘Do we need a school of education?’” recalled Dembo,
the emeritus professor of educational psychology who spent more than 30 years
on the faculty. “You were going to be left behind if you didn’t shape up and go
with the mission of the university.”

•—•

Fears of closure were heightened in 1999, when the school came up for its period-

ic academic review. Conducted by a group that included USC faculty from other

disciplines and education professors from Boston College, Columbia University and

Northwestern University, the review resulted in a harsh portrait of a flawed school.

Among the shortcomings cited in the final report: too many mediocre stu-

dents, a dispirited faculty with few nationally recognized research leaders, the

lack of a coherent vision for the school and an EdD program that was outdated

and indistinct from the PhD program.

“It put the school on notice that lack of alignment with university academic

aspirations would not be tolerated,” Hentschke said. “I did not like it, but I did

not take it personally.”

Still, he decided to move on and leave to his successor the tall agenda

outlined by the review panel. He would return to teaching as the first Richard T.

Cooper and Mary Catherine Cooper Chair in Public School Administration.

Karen Symms Gallagher was education dean at the University of Kansas

when, as one of the finalists for the deanship, she was given a copy of the aca-

demic review.

“The president and the provost both indicated one of the options was to close

the school,” she recalled. “I said, if you want to close the School of Education,

OK, but don’t bring me in—I’m not going to do that. But if you want to look at

what we can become, I would love to be the one to do that.

“I thought there were enough things to turn around.”

In 2000 she became the 10th dean—and first woman—to lead USC Rossier.

She seized on the report as “a blueprint for change.”

One of her first acts was to stabilize a rollercoaster budget and make $3 mil-

lion in cuts. She closed several programs, including a master’s in K–12 leadership

for principals, because their enrollments were small or because, she said, “you

could get the same thing at Cal State for a third of the price.”

While grappling with the fiscal issues, she invited faculty, staff and other

stakeholders, including students, to a three-day retreat in 2001 called “Future

Search.” Its purpose was to devise a strategy for fixing the problems identified by

the academic review panel.

“We were going to tear everything down and start over. Which we did,”

recalled Emeritus Professor of Education Robert Rueda, a scholar of bilingual

education. “It was an intentional starting point to create something different.”

First, the group examined the school’s mission—

improving urban education—and made it stronger.

“Their pledge, which came with naming rights, Going forward, the group decided, the themes of
brightened what had been a glum outlook for leadership, learning, accountability and diversity
would guide any reconsideration of the school’s phi-

a school struggling in an era of sharply rising losophy, curriculum and goals for students.
The new mission statement set the stage for a

expectations under USC President Sample.” reconstruction project, one that would break the
logjam over the research versus practitioner issue

and reshape the school’s two doctorate programs.

“The EdD was the stepbrother no one wanted,” Rueda said. “Someone who

couldn’t get into the PhD program went into the EdD.”

Over the next year faculty committees worked intensively to define the scope

and purpose of each degree. The four-year PhD program would shrink, enrolling

six to 10 students a year, and would be aimed at producing scholars interested in

a research or academic career in urban education policy.

And the much-maligned three-year EdD would be redesigned and become the

flagship program. It would admit 150 aspiring or established educational leaders

aiming to become “scholarly practitioners,” capable of using research to diagnose

and solve problems in their schools.