Morningside Elementary School

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Dolores Cisneros Emerson, the principal of Morningside Elementary School, never found learning particularly easy in the Catholic schools she attended growing up. “I didn’t learn to read until second grade,” she says. “Then something happened and the light went on.” Even so, she was never very interested in school.

“I went to school to talk and to socialize. I never read a book for pleasure,” she recalls. Despite that, she graduated in the middle of her high school class, began to buckle down in college, and eventually decided to be a teacher. Her history as a student shaped two of her bulwark principles:

• “You don’t give up on a kid. He may not get it the first time you explain it. It might take different explanations and he might not get it until the sixteenth or seventeenth explanation but you don’t give up.”

and

• Learning isn’t always going to be enjoyable, and sometimes it is downright difficult. “We can try to make it fun, but I tell kids that they have to work hard and learn the skills and in the end their reward is a good education that will make their lives easier. I tell the kids life is hard without an education and education is key.”

Those principles permeate Morningside, which went from being what Texas called an “academically acceptable” school in 2005—which, to Emerson, means operating at a level that is “not acceptable”—to being “exemplary” in 2009. To achieve that status in the Texas system, 90 percent of students, including 90 percent of each demographic subgroup, must meet or exceed state standards.

This sets Morningside apart from the rest of the state.  While 99 percent of the low-income fifth-graders at Morningside met state math and science standards in 2009, across Texas 78 percent of low-income students did. Similarly, that year 99 percent of Morningside’s Hispanic third-graders met state reading standards, compared to 87 percent of Hispanic third-graders who did at the state level.

Morningside is on the southern side of Brownsville, just a couple of miles from the Rio Grande River marking the border with Mexico, a border that has become more volatile as the Mexican drug cartels have grown bolder and more violent. Danger is a presence in some children’s lives, and can enter the school.  One day, when a father came to withdraw his child from school, a staff member recognized him.  He was wanted for having shot someone in the face a few months earlier. Emerson showed the visitor to a seat in the hall outside her office, quietly sent runners to put the school on lockdown, and called the police, all the while smiling and nodding at the man through the glass in her office door so that his suspicions would not be aroused. The incident ended calmly when undercover police arrived to arrest him. That gives a sense of what some of the school’s children are dealing with. Although many parents are employed as landscapers, housekeepers, hairdressers, and tradespeople such as mechanics, many others are unemployed and quite a few are in jail. All of the students are Hispanic, and 91 percent meet the qualifications for free and reduced-price meals.

Many students enter without knowing any English—59 percent are considered English-language learners—and when Emerson arrived she found that the early grades were taught almost entirely in Spanish, contradicting district policy that students would be “transitioned” into English within a couple of years after entering school. To Emerson, this was not a kindness to the children—as many of the teachers thought—but a practice that kept them isolated and unable to function in the United States.

One of Emerson’s first actions was to decide that second graders would be instructed in English. Even though many third-graders had only had one full year of English instruction, Emerson insisted that most of the third-grade children would be tested in English. She then sweated that decision for the rest of the year, worrying that few would be able to pass mandated state reading and math tests in English. “I went home crying,” she says, remembering how she wondered, “What have I done?” When spring testing came, however, all the students passed.  From that moment, she believed that her third-grade team of teachers walked on water. “I give them anything they want,” she says.
Emerson inherited what she considers to be a good staff; many teachers and administrative and support personnel predate her. A few teachers, anticipating upheaval, left even before her arrival— and others left after she began the upheaval.  Those who have stayed, she says, “are superstars.”

Among those who left, she remembers, were a few teachers who were “poisoning my climate” by saying among themselves that her expectations were unrealistic, that the school had never had high pass rates on the state tests. Emerson was most offended when she heard that they believed that she was wrong to expect that the students would change. 

So, that first year, “I brought them in and asked them, first, if what I had heard was true and when they said it was, I first had to get myself off the floor. I couldn’t believe they admitted it.” She made clear that she expected all the students to meet standards.  Most of the teachers who thought that was unrealistic left at the end of the year, although one who stayed has become one of her “superstar” teachers.

Nicolas Serrata, a kindergarten teacher who predated Emerson and has worked for six principals in his career, says that Emerson’s leadership has dramatically changed Morningside. For one thing, he says, she has recognized the importance of the early grades. “It’s the foundation for everything else,” says Serrata.  Previous principals had paid little attention to those classes, saving their attention for the grades subject to state testing—that is, those from third grade on. In contrast, Emerson has written several grant proposals to get books and computers for kindergarten and for first grade and second grade.

Emerson says she leaves most instructional decisions to her teachers and encourages them to try different and innovative strategies. Her role, she says, is as a monitor to make sure they are being successful.

So, for example, she builds the master schedule which tells teachers when their students will have physical education, music, library, and lunch—but which allows teachers to build their instructional schedules,  deciding when their students go to science and the computer lab, and when the reading and math specialists come to their classrooms. “Teachers want to be empowered,” Emerson says of the way she manages the school. However, teachers must ensure that more than 90 percent of their students meet or exceed standards.  If they are not hitting that mark, Emerson will intervene and send additional help in the form of specialists to help teachers work on any deficiencies in their instruction.
This exemplifies the way Emerson leads the school—she sets the uncompromising goal that every student will meet or exceed state standards; she provides teachers with resources; and then she monitors to make sure that teachers are teaching and students are learning.
The result is a school that, despite its difficult external circumstances, helps its students achieve academic success.