John Freeman, heroic educator

One of many whose hard work is not often acknowledged.

We often focus on threats to public education.  There are the individual “haters” like NH Commissioner Frank Edelblut and NH Board of Education Chair Drew Cline.  Jody and Ian Underwood also deserve mention.  They’re the Free Staters who stealthily organized decimating the Croydon, NH school budget.  Finally, Ryan Terrell should be mentioned because he is now running for the NH Executive Council.  He was the unqualified candidate nominated to the State Board by Chris Sununu.  Terrell was an unthinking follower of Edelblut and Cline.  His Executive Council campaign motto is “Keep NH Great.”  Hmmm.

There are also hateful organizations funded by deep pools of dark money like Moms for Liberty. 

I’d like to put the haters aside and take a quick moment to recognize an education hero; one who hasn’t received awards.  There are many heroes of this sort from the overworked teacher who pays for supplies or children’s shoes from personal funds to the taxpayers in financially stressed communities who pay the highest taxes to see their communities’ children get a decent start in life.  Let’s let my friend, John Freeman, be recognized in his own right and as a stand-in for those who aren’t often acknowledged.

John is a lifelong educator who started out teaching in New Jersey where he was also a union rep.  John taught on the Ojibwe Reservation in North Dakota and ended up in NH working as a teacher, then principal, and finally as a superintendent, first in Pittsfield and then in Strafford. 

Pittsfield is among the poorest and the lowest spending school districts in NH.  It experiences a turnover of one third of its teachers in most years because its pay is not competitive.  The school system lacks many services and stretches to cover core subjects. 

Average teacher pay in New Hampshire is low when compared to the other New England states.  On average, teachers are paid $67,000 per year, but Pittsfield’s average is $22,000 less at $45,000.  An average Pittsfield teacher can transfer to Epsom, a very similar district less than ten miles away, and earn $18,000 more.  The pay for a starting teacher with a child in the Pittsfield School District is so low that the teacher qualifies for food stamps and the child qualifies for the free and reduced-price lunch program

John Freeman has shown what well thought out, and funded, interventions can accomplish.  John was the principal of the Pittsfield Elementary School for nine years when he was promoted to superintendent in 2008. 

As principal, John knew that there was little money for teachers’ professional development.  The elementary school had poor literacy scores on assessment tests and every teacher appeared to be on her/his own in battling the problem.  Teachers also turned over constantly.  With just a little money from the school district, John fashioned a homegrown professional development program that coordinated the efforts of the school’s teachers resulting in remarkable improvement.  In June, a year after the coordinated effort was put in place, one experienced teacher remarked to John, “we were holding them back.”

The next year, with a small state grant, John did the same thing by coordinating the grade-to-grade elementary school math curriculum and again assessment scores improved dramatically. 

In 2009, John wrote an application for the U.S. Department of Education’s School Improvement Grant (SIG) program which went to each state’s five lowest performing high schools and five lowest performing middle schools.  Pittsfield won grants for its combined high school and middle school because both were atrociously bad. 

The SIGs had lots of requirements which included that John fire the principal of the middle high school and revamp the district’s teacher evaluation program.  Each SIG was for three years at $600,000 per year at a time when Pittsfield’s budget was just shy of $10 million.  The six percent increase in funding for three years resulted in huge improvements; so much so that an undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education visited the district to check that its reporting was on the up and up. 

In the second year of the School Improvement Grant, John learned of a Nellie Mae Foundation grant program that was open to every high school in New England with at least 40 percent free and reduced-price lunch participation and Pittsfield won a one-year planning grant for $200,000.  If the planning period was successful, Pittsfield would be eligible for a six-year implementation grant focused on personalizing student learning.  Personalized learning is like fashioning an Individualized Education Program for every student, disabled or not.

The Nellie Mae Foundation, founded in 1998, is the largest New England based foundation committed to education.  Its goal is that “[a]ll youth have access to excellent and equitable public education that prepares them to succeed and thrive in the community.” At the time of John Freeman’s interaction with Nellie Mae, its executive director was Nick Donahue, a former education commissioner in New Hampshire, a good one who was committed to improving education in the state. 

Pittsfield won the only planning grant in New Hampshire.  In part, John used it to form a community advisory council that was drawn from the greater Pittsfield area, which he stretched to include Concord.  The advisory council included students, parents, faculty, staff, local community leaders, the police and fire chiefs, and Tom Raffio. Tom was the CEO of Delta Dental, a successful insurance company and was the former chair of the New Hampshire state board of education. Also on the committee were Lynn Kilchenstein, the president of the local community college, and Jack Barnes, who was the state senator for the area.   The membership of the council fluctuated between 25 and 30 members.  Locals called this shadow school board “the Nellies.”

The council operated through sub-committees that gathered information about successful schools.  They visited charter schools and small high schools in New Hampshire, New York, Maine, and Massachusetts. 

The extensive planning effort led to Pittsfield winning one of the four multi-year implementation grants.  The other winners were school districts in South Portland and Sanford, Maine and in Winooski, Vermont. Unfortunately, leadership changes in the other districts undermined their success, but John Freeman remained in Pittsfield for the entire grant period.  The first three years of the implementation grant were fully funded and then funding trailed off for the next three years. 

Again, one focus on which John insisted was consistent district-wide professional development.  All the educators got on the same page and stayed there.  The results were phenomenal.  90 percent of the grant’s benchmarks were met.  Assessment scores improved and dropout rates declined. 

John knew that academics improved when students are engaged, particularly in school leadership and in extracurricular programming.  New clubs were funded if students could find an advisor.  John considers watching student presentations at national leadership conferences about student empowerment a highlight of his career. 

In the ten years that John was superintendent, the school district’s budget increased by 3.5 percent.  This was in total, not each year.  This was much less than the rate of inflation.  The district’s results were so remarkable that visitors interested in Pittsfield’s “magic sauce” came to Pittsfield to learn about the district’s operations.   One group of almost thirty people came from a Chicago charter school.  The charter repaid Pittsfield’s hospitality by sending enough deep-dish pizza to feed the entire middle high school.  Senator Maggie Hassan visited when she was governor and NH Education Commissioner Virginia Barry also visited on several occasions. 

Although repeatedly invited, Commissioner Frank Edelblut never showed up. 

John Freeman’s experience shows what good leadership and a small, about five or six percent, sustained increase in funding can do.  Unfortunately, the town’s school board concluded it could not raise taxes to replace the grant funding when it ended and again Pittsfield’s programs and outcomes declined.  There are now few extended learning opportunities.  Extracurricular activities were cut.  There is no foreign language teacher. Music and art are almost non-existent.  There is, however, a school funding lab that engages with the legislature to advocate for change.  The lab is the brainchild of social studies teacher Logan Laroche.

John Freeman’s work deserves to be recognized and lauded.  In many ways, he reminds me of one of my other “education heroes,” Charlie Marston.  Commissioner Marston was our first witness at the 1996 Claremont School Funding Trial. He had just retired from state government.

Marston was New Hampshire born and bred.  He spoke with a flat New England accent and was a commissioner dedicated to the mission of supporting public schools.  During his 31 years with the Department of Education, Marston visited every school in the state.  He knew about Lisbon’s use of a chicken coop for classroom space, the loss of Stevens High School’s accreditation and Allenstown’s dilapidated “temporary” classrooms.

Marston was well-respected and a very credible witness.  He laid the foundation for the rest of the trial.  This is what you want from a first witness.  Marston explained that graduation rates and the number of students going to college were measures of the quality of the education provided.  He noted that many fewer Stevens grads went to college than Lebanon High School grads. 

Marston testified that the ability of school districts to fund their operations based on their property values varied widely across the state and that the state’s small funding contribution was not enough to make a difference.  This was the key issue in our Claremont case and we credibly addressed it with Charlie Marston, our very first witness. 

Thanks to John Freeman, and thanks again to Charlie Marston.