Unprincipled, One Year Later: My Year Teaching Public School Under a Brutal, Out of Control Administrator. An Update.

A year ago next month, the Washington Post published an article about my first and only year as a teacher at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The experience it described, in which I was berated repeatedly by a principal in front of colleagues and students, paraded through the school as a failure, and placed in the first year equivalent of teacher jail, was the worst experience of my professional life. I was the target of the most aggressive and out of control manager I’d ever encountered — a principal who ran roughshod over every norm of professional decency, then, despite my making every possible effort to improve, fired me and banned me from working in the district altogether. I was hardly the first person she’d targeted this way. Far from it: what she’d done to me was, for her, entirely routine. The high level administrators who supervised her were indifferent to the many teacher complaints against her, mine included, and essentially ignored the harassment complaint I filed, replete with 50 pages of documented proof. I wrote about my experience for Medium, hoping to expose LAUSD’s obvious hypocrisy. Jay Mathews of the Post got wind of the story and wrote about it for his column, giving it national exposure.

This is the story of what happened next:

The article circulated amongst the faculty quickly. A few colleagues who knew it was coming told me there was a sense of excited expectation among them, as they waited for the district to make its reaction known and perhaps finally investigate the principal. She was absent the day it appeared in the Post and the rumor was that she had been summoned downtown to answer for her actions. Simultaneously, the article arrived on the desk of union officials. They’d heard rumblings about the principal’s terrible treatment of teachers over the years, and quite a few complaints had made its way to them, but the article brought home the degree of the principal’s aggressions in truly dramatic fashion. A union representative visited the campus to offer support and held a meeting for teachers.

According to several participants, the rep asked the gathering how many people believed what was described in the article to be true? No one raised their hand. She was perplexed. She tried a different route: how many people think it could have happened? Still no one responded. “People were scared,” one teacher told me. “The principal still had spies.” The atmosphere of fear and paranoia she had created in the five years she was in charge was palpable. Despite the hope that the principal would soon be removed, no one was yet willing to risk her wrath, even with her not in the room. Finally seeing the meeting was getting nowhere, the rep told attendees to put their heads down and asked them, “Knowing what you know about the principal, raise one finger if you believe it did happen, raise two fingers if you believe it could’ve happened, raise three if you don’t believe it happened.” The rep announced the results: out of some 30 teachers, nearly every hand was a one or a two. Audubon Middle School was clearly a toxic place and the principal Charmain Young was to blame.

But as weeks passed, there was no word from the district. “We were all waiting on something to happen,” a teacher told me who has since left the school voluntarily, “but nothing ever did.” I had reason to fear that no calvary was coming. I had emailed the article to the superintendent of LAUSD and to every member of the school board myself, alerting them to the conditions at Audubon. The superintendent responded that Young’s supervisor a woman named Cheryl Hildreth would get back to me. But Hildreth was the area superintendent who’d overseen the initial investigation that exonerated Young, the one that was closed without anyone speaking to any of my eyewitnesses. Cheryl Hildreth was the district higher-up who was protecting Young. I wrote to tell the superintendent as much. She never responded. What would soon become clear is that Young would dodge two bullets, the initial internal investigation into her wrongdoing and then, most shockingly, public exposure in a national newspaper, without suffering any consequences. Charmain Young was invincible and, in time, she responded as such.

Young wasted no time going after teachers she disliked. By the end of the year she had managed to fire eight teachers, all out of personal animus, some of whom were long-standing veterans, whom I’d come to deeply admire in my time there. By the end of September, just a month into school, a veteran teacher who I’d naturally befriended as one of the only other black male teachers on campus, was in an altercation with a student. He blocked a violent kid from entering his classroom by standing in the doorway to keep him out. The student attacked him, and so he moved to restrain him, until older students were able to grab him and take him away. Young, whose dislike of the teacher was well-known and who’d given him unsatisfactory evaluations in the past (while also blocking him from accepting a job offer at a different school in LAUSD under a principal he’d worked with before), used the altercation as a pretext to place him in teacher jail, wrongly accusing him of being the aggressor. By the end of the year the student had assaulted two other faculty members and was ultimately expelled. Rather than fight Young and the district’s notoriously punitive teacher jail policy, he resigned after ten years with the district. Young was just getting started.

Young’s attacks on first year teachers, like myself, grew more openly aggressive, too. During the first fire drill of the year, a rookie teacher went down the wrong hall by accident. Young flipped and berated her in front of her 8th grade students: “If this had been a real fire, those children would be dead! You put their lives in danger!” When the drill was over and the teacher tried to get the students to return to class, they angrily refused, yelling that she had almost had them killed. “It was terrible,” the teacher told me. “She was always undermining me in front of them. It made it worse for me there.”

This was the principal’s MO: to harshly criticize teachers in front of their students, which undermined the students’ trust, then blame the teacher for not having any rapport with their students. When Young ultimately fired the teacher at the end of the year, she cited her failures of classroom management. Young even used the PA system to call into this teacher’s class to berate her while she was teaching.

And Young’s constant use of the PA system was also a source of contention — for local residents who lived near to the school. Young used the PA so often and at such length that neighbors, who could hear it up to two blocks away, eventually complained about the noise pollution. Young responded to those complaints by getting on the PA system and rebuking residents about “anonymous complaints” and saying that if they knew of a better way for her to communicate with the school they should offer suggestions rather than complain. “She was just out of control,” one teacher said.

Throughout all of this, her supervisor Cheryl Hildreth, who had the ability to remove or discipline Young at any time, was being constantly updated (by teachers and union officials) of the complete breakdown at the school, but Hildreth made no efforts to intervene. But her indifference to Audubon was in great contrast to her quick actions at another school struggling under a newly appointed principal. The school was in Brentwood and also under Hildreth’s supervision. The new principal had taken over from a much beloved principal who had died suddenly the year before. She only been on the job a few months when an anonymous letter was sent to Hildreth in late November, describing the faculty’s unhappiness with the new principal’s draconian methods. According to sources, less than four days later, Hildreth herself showed up at the school to personally interview teachers about their problems with the principal. Relations with the new principal improved. Hildreth never made such an effort at Audubon.

The difference between the two schools? Brentwood is one of the wealthiest (and whitest) neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Audubon is in South LA, and serves some of the most underprivileged black and brown students in the district. “So a single letter can get the district to act when the school is white, but when it comes to poor black and brown kids, they do nothing. Even after getting writing up in a national newspaper? It’s shameful,” one source knowledgeable about the situation told me. Over 40 complaints were made to LAUSD’s staff relations about Young this year alone, yet her supervisors sat idle. I contacted staff relations about those complaints, but at this point have received no response to those queries. (A statement from staff relations received after publication read: “The District is bound by confidentiality and cannot discuss these matters.”)

Throughout all this, conditions at the school this past year only worsened. In the two years since I’ve been associated with Audubon, upwards of 50 teachers and staff — including two assistant principals and two guidance counselors — have left the school. The ongoing staffing problems meant classes were being taught by substitutes, most of whom had no history with the school or special qualifications to teach long-term. This exacerbated the already difficult behavior problems in the school as students lacked any respect for temporary subs. Parents showed up to fight students on behalf of their bullied child. Parents showed up to fight other parents. Throughout it all Young was AWOL, never responding to urgent radio calls or emails, about the chaos on campus. One teacher told me that from the very beginning of school, “everyday felt like the last day of school,” with packs of up to 30 students roaming the campus or ditching class at any given time while “Young was nowhere to be found.”

Parents concerned about the violence on campus also met with a principal who was consistently unavailable. Her primary method of dealing with unhappy parents, according to several I spoke to, was to set meetings only to cancel them at the last minute or keep them waiting for hours and then ultimately never show. “She’d only come out of her office door after she knew parents had left,” a teacher told me. One parent in particular, Keisha Giddens had grave concerns about the safety of her daughter who had been beaten up several times. When Giddens tried to meet with Young, Young steadfastly avoided her. Young canceled meetings so often that, on one occasion after waiting for over an hour, Giddens told me she had to force her foot into Young’s door to keep her from closing it and demand that she meet with her. Giddens made half a dozen complaints about Young with the district this past year. The district never responded.

What finally seemed to have done Young in, happened ten months after the Post article was published, and a year of absolute chaos. It involved her use of the “matrix”, the computer system LAUSD uses to program student schedules. Young had taken over control of the matrix from school counselors and assistant principals her very first year as principal and never relinquished it, leaving her with the sole authority over the system. “It’s all about control with her,” one teacher told me. But it was a disaster from the start. This past year “students were locked in homeroom for over a week with no classes to go to” because Young was the only one allowed to assign classes for all 400 students. Even the bell schedule was not set by Young until after school had already begun.

As the union began to file more and more complaints against her— for placing 90 students in a single PE class, when it was supposed to be capped at 55, for programming test days without giving teachers any warning to prepare their students, for failing to show up for scheduled grievance meetings, and more — Young ultimately used the matrix to fire 7 teachers at the end of the year. According to union leaders, Young “initiated an improper matrix process,” three weeks before the end of school, by deliberately low-balling the student population by several hundred, giving her the power to request a fewer number of teachers for the coming school year. She was then free to fire all the teachers who had issued grievances against her, which she promptly did. That one of those teachers was a widely admired veteran who had been been elected union chair days earlier gave the union their opening for a claim of retaliatory firing by the principal.

On June 16th, Young sent out a letter touting all of her “success” and saying she had been appointed “Administrator of Innovation” by Cheryl Hildreth who, the letter read, was working “to provide consistent and stable leadership for the Audubon community.” What exactly any of that that meant was anyone’s guess, but what is clear is that the district allowed Young far greater dignity in her departure from Audubon than the dozens of teachers and staff Young fired, displaced, jailed, or simply drove out over the 5 years she was principal. As of this writing, those displaced teachers have not been given any indication of where they will be teaching in the fall or whether they will be teaching at all. But under LAUSD rules, which grants principals tenure after three years, Young will maintain her six figure salary and a fancy administrative title.

As for Hildreth, if the stability she is offering looks anything like what she has allowed over the last many years, then Audubon’s problems are far from over.