What school leaders can learn from a pioneering urban superintendent
Although Marcus Foster’s 25-year career was cut tragically short, his legacy can tell us much about the history of urban schooling and remains relevant for school board members and educators today.
January 15, 2025
IN WHAT IS BELIEVED TO BE ONE OF HIS LAST PHOTOGRAPHS, FOSTER DISCUSSES HELPING PEOPLE WITH OAKLAND STUDENTS IN 1973.
PHOTO COURTESY OF OAKLAND UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT.
“Where there is conflict there is energy, and where there is energy, there can be change.”
—Marcus A. Foster
After the COVID-19 pandemic’s great disruption, will schools revert to the status quo, or embrace positive change? To create a better future, we should look to the past.
2025 marks the 102nd anniversary of the birth and the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of Oakland superintendent Marcus Foster, one of the first African American superintendents of a large U.S. school district. Foster was a first-generation college attendee, a proud Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) graduate. He was a highly successful principal and central office leader in Philadelphia before leading the Oakland, California, public schools in a tenure that was tragically cut short.
We argue that Foster was one of the greatest educators and civil rights leaders of the latter half of the 20th century, yet few remember him today. Lessons from his 25-year career tell us much about the history of urban schooling and remain relevant for school board members and educators today.
A SUCCESSFUL SCHOOL LEADER
Marcus Foster was born in 1923 in Athens, Georgia, to a schoolteacher mother and a postal worker father. After his parents broke up, Foster and his mother became part of the Great Migration of Southern African Americans to the North, by relocating to Philadelphia. Foster attended Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University), graduating in 1947. He taught briefly in the South, and then back in his native Philadelphia, at a time when Black teachers were only assigned to teach in Black schools and had virtually no upward mobility, as John P. Spencer documents in his book, In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform.
Foster’s leadership philosophy could be best described as a mix of pluralistic leadership involving whole communities, instructional leadership using school time wisely to close achievement gaps, and servant leadership, putting his teachers ahead of himself and students and parents ahead of teachers. As school board members can attest, such leaders are hard to find.
Foster offers 11 maxims in his 1971 book, Making Schools Work, but his career suggests that he focused on six that emphasized building trust and relationships:
- People are always more important than the system.
- Success is important to the integrity of any group.
- To move people, start where they are.
- In a conflict situation, all sides usually have legitimate concerns.
- The best way to help people is to get them to help themselves.
- Massive problems are solved little by little.
As Spencer details, Foster led three all-Black inner-city Philadelphia public schools. He improved safety, morale, attendance, and achievement at each school by empowering and inspiring. He sometimes transferred teachers and other staff to give parents what they wanted. At the same time, Foster brought more resources into schools from their communities and through private donations and tax dollars.
Foster’s leadership in two Philadelphia schools was particularly noteworthy. He stabilized the Catto Disciplinary School, which served secondary students whom other public schools had expelled. He brought back extracurricular activities, improved academics, and developed vocational programs with business participation so graduates could get jobs. Foster toured the school with new Catto parents to reassure them, even allowing parents to take vocational classes for their own career advancement. Remarkable for a “reform” school, some students and parents began requesting assignment to Catto and others turned down transfers back to their neighborhood schools that they earned for good behavior.
Foster’s next assignment was to revamp Simon Gratz High School. This overwhelmingly low-income school was widely considered the worst high school in Philadelphia during the 1960s, captured by the local saying, “Gratz is for rats.” Aside from bringing order, Foster actively recruited talented students who had transferred out of Gratz’s attendance zone, set up an honors program, and brought back a long-dormant National Honors Society. He took the lead in teaching about Black excellence, developing a culturally responsive curriculum before there was a name for it.
School dances, band, debate team, and successful sports teams returned. In two years, the school’s dropout rate fell by half, the number of students taking the PSAT rose from 38 to 238, and college acceptance rates more than doubled. Foster gave students and community members reasons to be proud of their school. One longtime Philadelphia educator knows seven Gratz graduates who become public educators because of Foster’s example.
TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
In 1970, the Oakland, California, school board chose Foster to be the superintendent. This made him one of the first African Americans to lead a large urban system in the U.S. Foster saw Oakland with its 70,000 students as more changeable than Philadelphia with its 291,000-student enrollment. He said in an interview that “Oakland looks doable. I know kids and teachers and communities. Those basically don’t change. It gives me confidence. If it works at Gratz and in sections of Philadelphia, it can work in Oakland.” As in his prior jobs, Foster approached solving massive problems “little by little,” in part by fostering relationships and building credibility.
Foster presaged 21st century business-oriented school reformers, stressing to principals and teachers the need for measurable goals. For low-income parents, the most understandable goal is for their children to achieve at grade level, which requires measurement. Just as a doctor uses diagnostic tests to gauge a patient’s improvement, so too must schools measure individual student learning.
Addressing an overflow crowd of more than 2,800 teachers and staff to kick off his first school year in Oakland, Foster began with a dramatic statement of the potential for schooling to create a social revolution, while lamenting that “the chasm between our promise and our performance, especially for the urban poor and minority groups, is there for all to see.” To fulfill the promise, teachers and leaders must set measurable goals and be accountable for meeting them, solving massive problems little by little.
FOSTER VISITS WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. ELEMENTARY STUDENTS.
PHOTO COURTESY OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, OAKLAND HISTORY CENTER.
Foster’s leadership soon yielded results. In his second inaugural address in the fall of 1971, he reported 21% lower elementary and 34% lower secondary absenteeism, 20% fewer students entering juvenile institutions, and improvements in elementary reading scores.
Yet, Foster was not optimistic about making more gains without more spending, pointing out that unequal needs required unequal spending to achieve equity, an agenda which 21st century progressive reformers continue. To get that spending, Foster and hundreds of Oakland parents and educators successfully lobbied the California state legislature and Gov. Ronald Reagan for more money. Back in Oakland, Foster led the first successful referendum in a generation to increase local funding.
School safety was a concern in Oakland. Foster refused calls to hire Black Panthers to keep order, but also spurned demands by conservatives (including many teachers) for armed police in schools. He argued that if Philadelphia could do school safety without a police presence, so could Oakland. He proposed police-trained peace officers and student identification cards to keep out drug dealers. As Spencer detailed in his book, this prompted the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) to condemn Foster to death as a “puppet of the White power structure.”
Ambushed after a school board meeting, the 50-year-old Foster fell in a hail of cyanide-filled bullets. The SLA hoped the assassination would spark a popular uprising. Instead, it proved such a “public relations mistake,” as one member put it, that the SLA kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst to change the conversation. It worked, and today the Hearst kidnapping is remembered while Foster’s murder is largely forgotten.
FOSTER’S LESSONS FOR LEADERS TODAY
Marcus Foster’s many successes offer five broad ideas to inspire school leaders today, from school board members to teacher leaders.
1. Conflict = Opportunity
Much of Foster’s success as a principal and superintendent can be attributed to his political ability to resolve conflicts. He understood that in most conflicts, all sides have legitimate concerns. Yet if the different groups of grownups fail to empathize with one another, destructive, winner-take-all battles are inevitable. Foster saw a better way. In Making Schools Work, Foster wrote, “Where there is conflict, there is energy, and where there is energy, there can be change,” further explaining: “The peak of crisis sometimes provides the best opportunity to set things right. For a brief instant, legitimate concerns may flash into the open. If one can perceive these issues, clarify them in the heat of battle, and harness the available energy, there is the chance for turning a destructive situation into a period of reform. It’s not easy.”
Foster reminds us to focus on what we ultimately want to accomplish and to consider whether specific actions will get us closer to our goals or move us further away from them. In schools, student learning and development must matter more than adult egos.
2. Relationships matter
Arguably, Foster’s emphasis on personal relationships is particularly important in urban schools, where for understandable reasons including White supremacy and constant “reform” by outsiders, neither leaders nor bureaucracies command much trust, as Charles M. Payne shows in So Much Reform, So Little Change. Foster spent his days forging relationships with teachers, students, and parents. Accessibility and trust enabled Foster to keep order in schools without using police.
Foster saw parents as partners in school improvement since the time children spent outside of school mattered. Years before the federal Head Start program, as an elementary school principal, he created a handbook showing parents what their children should know before starting school and offering parents concrete ways to help (e.g., counting the number of cars on the street).
When Foster became principal of Gratz High School, he went door-to-door in the North Philadelphia neighborhood that surrounded the school to attract families who had “shunned the school due to its bad reputation,” as Spencer wrote. Many became Gratz parents and supporters. To meet families where they were, Foster also started “storefront schools” in the community to serve Gratz students and their parents after school hours.
3. Have high expectations for all students
Not long after earning a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, Foster wrote that “inner city folks … want people in there who get the job done, who get youngsters learning no matter what it takes [emphasis in original]. They won’t be interested in beautiful theories that explain why the task is impossible.” Once asked at a public forum if he was a militant or moderate, Foster playfully declared “I myself am a militant about getting children to read.” As Spencer points out, Foster’s approach came three decades before No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) attack on “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” though Foster did more to stress shared accountability than NCLB-backers.
This is of particular importance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While academic achievement fell across the board, it fell most among historically disadvantaged students, whose schools were shuttered the longest, as one of us, David Marshall, and Tim Pressley, wrote in Lessons of the Pandemic: Disruption, Innovation, and What Schools Need to Move Forward. Equitable school reforms must thus help those students the most.
4. Consult data in decision-making
One of the keys to Foster’s success at Gratz High School was his reliance on data. He created the Center for Personal Adjustment, which identified students who fit patterns suggesting a high risk of leaving school, an idea ahead of its time. Interventions with students most at risk targeted resources, cutting the 80% dropout rate in half in two years. It was not until the 2000s that numerous school systems began using formal early warning indicator systems to identify students at risk of not completing high school. Setting measurable goals and relying on data to gauge success helped Foster drive improvements in K-12 attendance, achievement, and graduation rates in both Philadelphia and Oakland. In this pivotal post-pandemic moment, today’s school leaders must do likewise.
5. Teachers matter
Foster valued teachers, as should all school leaders, especially now. Teaching was challenging prior to the pandemic; during the COVID-19 crisis, it became unsustainable. Teachers were asked to teach in ways for which they were never trained, as Marshall and Pressley detail, whether remotely or in person. Fewer teachers have been entering the profession over the last decade, and those who are in the classroom are leaving at higher rates. As Payne writes in So Much Reform, So Little Change, “most discussion of educational policy and practice is dangerously disconnected from the daily realities of urban schools, especially the bottom-tier schools.” School board members and other policymakers must work with teachers to avoid such disconnects and to retain talent in the classroom. Throughout his career, Foster modeled both.
THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE
Marcus Foster was decades ahead of his time and remains worth studying a half century after his assassination. From the creative use of political conflict to valuing teachers, Foster’s strategies remain relevant in all public schools, particularly in urban schools. So do tactical innovations like building relationships with parents, early warning systems to prevent dropouts, and even storefront schools and other means to bring public schools into the communities they serve. Putting students and parents first, teachers second, and himself third, Foster was driven less by ideology than by common sense and love for and belief in his students, many of whom later became public educators.
Marcus Foster was an inspiring leader for his time, and ours. He reminds us of the wisdom of being guided by a sense of pragmatism and the art of the possible. School board members must be on the lookout for such men and women, to recognize and nurture their leadership potential.
Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Endowed Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a former school board member in Fayetteville.
David T. Marshall (dtm0023@auburn.edu) is an associate professor in the College of Education at Alabama’s Auburn University and a former middle and high school social studies teacher in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.