By Chris B. Bennett, The Seattle Medium
In a bittersweet moment, Garfield High School Principal Ted Howard II announced the he has accepted an offer to become the Chief Academic Officer (CAO) for the Tukwila School District, and will leave Garfield after serving 16 years as principal.
While he says that it was a difficult decision to make, Howard maintains that the move will allow him to address academic achievement gaps from a long-term systemic approach, rather than trying to address and correct academic deficiencies encountered by students long before they make it into high school.
“What attracted me [to the position] was knowing that I’d have the opportunity to work with a group of people that really were going to look at how to improve all kids from the time they walk in at kindergarten to the time the walk out of twelfth grade,” said Howard. “I’m looking at it from a K-16 approach, I can’t look at it any other way, I can’t look at it from the K-12, and what I mean by that is that I want to make sure that students not only walk out of the Tukwila School District and be successful, but be able to be successful in completing what their hopes and dreams are when they decide to go to work, or career, or college.”
While he acknowledges that the task will not be easy, Howard says that navigating the politics at SPS’ flagship school, while improving the overall culture and academic achievement of the school was not an easy task either, but one that has helped prepare him to take on the challenge of improving outcomes for an entire district.
“When I first walked into Garfield people will probably describe Garfield as five schools in one,” said Howard. “We had the APP program, we had the ESL, we had the special ed, we had the regular ed program and you had a program that you would basically say kids were walking through the door, but they were never graduating. That was what I inherited at Garfield.”
“But, we moved forward and started chipping away [at the problems] day in and day out trying to make sure that all kids got a quality education. So when they walked across the stage you could say [without a doubt] that all of our kids were getting a quality education,” added Howard.
According to Howard, when he first started at Garfield he had to ask himself and his staff some very tough questions. Especially because the greater Garfield community — which includes students, parents, alumni and people living in the neighborhoods adjacent to Garfield — wanted to know, “why are certain populations graduating at a high number and other students are not graduating? How were students able to come into high school and not read? And how are students walking out with a diploma even though they still can’t read?”
In order to address these problems, Howard first needed to collect data to assess the reasons for the disparities and to help craft their solutions. Howard also wanted to make sure that he had staff in place that not only wanted to be in the building, but also truly cared about all of the students, not just a select few.
The first department that Howard addressed was the math department. Prior to Howard’s arrival, the school had a policy where older students (i.e. sophomores, juniors and seniors) had priority enrollment in math classes over underclassmen, even if they had failed the class two or three times before. The notion didn’t make much sense to Howard, as it was obvious to him that the policy was impacting all of the students in the building – the ones who were failing, as well as the ones who couldn’t get into the classes because repeat students were taking up the slots.
“When I came in and saw that, I started asking questions,” said Howard. “Why are they failing, number one. And number two, how did they get to high school and they didn’t have the skills. Those were some of the things we started analyzing, and once when we started analyzing [the data] we saw that the curriculum wasn’t doing its job and so we dismantled the curriculum.”
According to Howard, they converted the learning model into a group learning model, which meant it was no longer about the individual excelling, but about the entire group excelling. Teachers had to re-learn how to teach small groups and the teachers and students held each other accountable for the academic progress of the entire group. He also emphasized the importance of putting teachers in the best position to have successful outcome with their students.
“We starting hiring teachers who had the [right] skillset,” said Howard. “Not just I took one class in math, but who had majored in math so they had more tools in their toolbox to work with kids who were coming in who didn’t necessarily have the skills.”
“We had to work really hard to give our teachers the skillsets they needed to work with all kids,” added Howard. “Not every teacher who walks through the door can work with all kids, and that means all races, they just can’t.
“A lot of them haven’t been exposed [to diverse populations], so we had to ask the tough questions,” added Howard. “Are you a staff person who’s willing to put the time and energy in? Are you afraid of Black kids? Are you afraid of White kids?”
According to Howard, the questions were not to point blame or fault, but rather to set the framework for all teachers to look at each student the same and take a sincere interest in helping them reach their full potential.
The changes began to work and Howard and his staff started to analyze and make changes to each department at the school in order to provide all students with a chance to succeed. He alsoallowed his staff to have a voice by having open dialogue about what was working or not working in all subject areas, which was key to the overall success of all students in the building.
For his efforts, Howard, who is well-respected by his peers, was named the KingCo principal of the year, was appointed by Governor Christine Gregiore to the State Standards Award committee, served as PASS (Seattle Public Schools Principal Association) President for two terms, served as VP of the Association of Washington State Principals (AWSP), and he served on the Sea-King District 2 Eligibility Committee.
Under Howard’s leadership, the school established the Garfield High School Athletic Hall of Fame, Microsoft donated $250,000 of equipment to the Quincy Jones recording artists program, and they installed smart boards in all the science rooms with a $25,000 grant Howard received from winning the Alliance for Education’s Thomas B. Foster Award for Excellence for his outstanding leadership.
In addition, the school was recognized by Newsweek as one of the top 200 schools in the country every year during his tenure and the school had over 200 students with a 3.5 – 3.99 GPA each year as well.
Athletically, the school won four state boys basketball titles, one girls track title in 2017, one girls basketball title, one softball title and one title in both boys and girls soccer. In addition, he worked with churches and the community to address student homelessness, and the school began hosting the annual Black College Fair.
Despite all of his accomplishment at the school, the last remaining priority Howard did not accomplish was re-naming the music classroom in honor of Clarence Acox, the school’s legendary band director of 40 years who recently retired.
“That was the last thing that I wanted to get done that I didn’t get done and hopefully I can get that done in the coming days, if possible,” says Howard.
While Howard has found memories of Garfield as both a student and a principal, he wants his students to remember that Garfield’s banner will always fly as high as they raise it.
“I’ve always said to each and every student that walks through Garfield, this is your school, and your job is to make it better,” says Howard. “No one else is going to take care of your school better than you.”
“We have this thing that we say [to students],” says Howard. “The Constitution was just the first try at America. Now if you guys re-write that Constitution in 2020, what would it look like? What rules would you change? How would you change the police? How would you change your education? How would you change the world? How could you make things more progressive instead of being slow to change? How would you hold corporations accountable? Those are the things that we are asking our students to look at and change.”
