You, like me, may have heard of New Roads only because one of its graduates, a 23-year-old named Amanda Gorman, electrified the nation by reading her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of President Biden. Gorman was one of three children raised by a single mother, who was a sixth-grade English teacher in Los Angeles.
The current New Roads head of school, Luthern Williams, told me “diversity is imperative to true academic rigor and excellence. It benefits the education of all and better prepares them for life.”
How did such a school come to be? It wasn’t easy. Its creator Paul F. Cummins revealed repeated setbacks and disappointments in his 2015 memoir “Confessions of a Headmaster.”
Cummins had already founded in 1971 the private Crossroads School in Santa Monica, which graduated future film and television stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Maya Rudolph, Jack Black and Jonah Hill. He decided he wanted to help revitalize a rundown public elementary school, Coeur d’Alene, serving a mostly low-income neighborhood near Santa Monica.
He thought if he found the right backers he could turn that campus into “a center of progressive education and community service—an entirely new education model. We could draw students from Crossroads School’s huge waiting list and double the size of Coeur d’Alene with tuition-paying students. Coeur d’Alene had 200 students with per-pupil funding of about $4,000. My idea was to add 200 students paying $10,000 each [the tuition then at Crossroads], thus creating an average expenditure of about $7,000 per pupil. . . . We would thereby create a unique community of rich and poor, Caucasian, African American, Hispanic and Asian. This community would reflect the true diversity of the city as a whole,” he wrote in his book.
Parts of that idea soon fell apart, with lessons for a dreamer like Cummins. He managed to persuade the public school’s principal and most of its faculty to turn Coeur d’Alene into a public charter school. The Los Angeles Unified School District board said yes. But the teachers union president said if they went ahead with that scheme, their teachers would be “risking their pensions as well as future job placements,” Cummins said.
There was also no flood of applications from the wealthy families on the Crossroads School waiting list. A local newspaper article about New Roads “stressed its ‘affirmative action’ qualities rather than its academic goals, and this slant may have frightened away some applicants,” Cummins said.
Later, the affluent Black residents of Baldwin Hills also did not flock to a New Roads offshoot in their part of Los Angeles. “Those who could pay continued to send their children across town to existing prestigious, predominantly White schools rather than taking a chance on a brand-new school in their own neighborhood,” Cummins said.
New Roads in Santa Monica succeeded anyway. With the first head of school, David Bryan, Cummins forged ahead. All kinds of families signed up. The New Visions Foundation and influential people such as Herb Alpert, Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, James and Suzy Cameron, Lee Walcott of the Ahmanson Foundation and Fred Ali of the Weingart Foundation helped provide the money. Cummins was in charge of inspiration.
At his first headmaster job at St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal School, also in Santa Monica, he showed how a heavy emphasis on the arts could have a powerful influence on college and career success. He brought that approach to Crossroads and then to New Roads.
Parents who made good livings in traditional occupations did not like his idea at first. “To many of them,” Cummins said, “the arts were a frill, a pleasant diversion perhaps, but a deflection from the real business of the Three Rs. I knew instantly and intuitively that this attitude did a disservice to children. The joys of childhood—inventing games, make-believe, play, storytelling, and fantasy—are as natural to children as breathing. To do anything but give children full and untrammeled encouragement to express their gifts and forces of their inner worlds is not only misinformed but harmful.”
At St. Augustine’s, Crossroads and New Roads, professional artists were hired to teach several classes. Some families withdrew, but those that stayed saw how much their children loved what was going on. And it did not hurt that New Roads student Gorman — who wanted to be a poet, of all things — got into Harvard.
New Roads still has little appeal to some parents, but both its low-income families and its affluent families appear drawn to the emphasis on social justice. The school says about 40 percent of its 520 students receive financial aid. Weekly two-hour workshop classes engage students in what Cummins described as “discussions, activities and projects dealing with issues such as prejudice, rights of the disabled, endangered species, child labor, animal rights, using art in activism, AIDS, ecological design, consumerism and the dynamics between poverty and privilege.”
That is perhaps a politically explosive blend for most schools. But the fact that it works at New Roads, and some other adventuresome private schools, is something to think about. Williams, the head of school, said “New Roads democratizes access to its exceptional education that not only prepares students for college, civic engagement and careers but also teaches them to embrace the full spectrum of humanity.”
Cummins told me recently that he thinks the school’s unusual curriculum is one reason so many graduates are involved in social service jobs, community and environmental action jobs, nonprofit sector work and jobs in the arts.
We are heading into an era in which there are likely to be many other wild experiments in education. Some of them may prove their worth.