Don Griffith is superintendent of schools for the City Schools of Decatur in Decatur, Georgia. He is a longtime educator, and was selected in 1993 as one of the one hundred outstanding educators in North America. In the following interview he talks with contributing editor Geraldine Schiering about the part spiritual understanding has played in turning around a school system.

Don, please acquaint us with Decatur, Georgia, and your school district. We are a school district of 2,400 students. We're part of metropolitan Atlanta, where a number of school systems have over 50,000 students. But within the state, our system is the average size.

And it also has attracted a great deal of attention. Why? Because consistently, over a period of years, our test scores have been exceptionally good. And our circumstances make this unlikely.

When pupils start out at the kindergarten level in the Decatur school system, they are classified as being from the lowest range of expectation for their achievements? Yes. Over 60 percent of our students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Our kindergartners do not come to school with the same experiences and skills as do middle-income students, so they score very low on school readiness tests.

Usually they come from homes where there is one parent, and sometimes no parent. That's correct. At one time three quarters of our high-school students were not residing with their original set of parents.

What you have proved, then, is that these children who come from such unfavorable backgrounds have been able to achieve at a high level through the years. Yes, but it has taken time. Too often education reform is "one year in, one year out." The newest fad ends up being followed. Consequently, you stand still although it looks like you're moving.

Can you tell us what happened in your district? How do you explain good educational achievement by students who do not usually achieve? I accepted the position of curriculum director for the school system in the early 1970s. In preceding years, the population had shifted from a middle-income bedroom community to an integrated urban area. Test scores had fallen to more than a year below grade level in all grades.

One school board member for whom I had great respect stated that our test scores were not acceptable. I explained that children from low-income homes didn't perform as well as middle-income children. This was a national problem, and research supported it. Still, his comment challenged me.

He had sort of given you orders? Yes, he had. And as a student of Christian Science, I was studying the Bible Lesson every day (from the Christian Science Quarterly), learning from every one of them that God, Mind, made man in His own image— spiritual, reflecting His unlimited intelligence. I believed this was true for every student. Then all of my learning in the field of education would come back, and I would think that raising the test scores would not be possible.

It became plain to me that I needed to progress in my own spiritual demonstration. This was the time for me to bring together the needs in my career and the healing power of God's truth that I practiced in my private, family life.

As I prayed about this, the thought came, "Go to the roughest school, where you have the most transiency and deprivation, and talk with the teachers."

Did you have a clear idea of what you would do? I felt we needed to start at the beginning, the first grade, and establish performance standards. We needed a plan of accountability between teachers so that we could be sure a certain level of achievement was taking place.

I met with the teachers several times. The process went something like this: I asked the second-grade teacher, "What exactly does a student have to learn in first grade in order to be a good reader in second grade?" Then I asked the first-grade teacher if these expectations were realistic for her students. After we established these standards, we agreed to hold to them, and that we were going to expect every one of our students to be successful.

We decided there would be no more social promotion, no more shoving children into the next grade when they did not qualify. We agreed that the teacher who did this was literally creating future dropouts.

I can see that one reason a child becomes a dropout is that he gets so far behind the class and eventually feels overwhelmed. Exactly. And this needed to be prevented from the first grade on. With teacher participation, each year we added performance standards in an additional grade. Teacher accountability was also very important to student success. No child was allowed to "fall through the cracks" in Decatur.

We developed special programs for students with needs, tightened up the way we offered remedial courses and summer school to directly relate to the regular classroom, and added some very exciting extras for our students, such as Outward Bound activities and community service projects.

Apparently the program went from that first school to your other schools as well. Did your prayer continue to be part of developing this new program? Very definitely. All through these years, my prayerful study each day of the Bible and Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy gave me the understanding of what we needed to apply next. I knew I had to study, pray, and wait, and then definite answers would come clearly. At first, when I would get a clear idea through prayer for another progressive step, and others would say it wouldn't work, I would waffle. But when I went back to prayer and still felt the idea was right, I would implement it in the school system. And there would be success! This increased my confidence. I learned that when there was serious prayerful work behind these decisions, they needed to be followed. They were not mine but had come from God.

And people catch the vision and feel the authority of an idea when it has come from God. Yes. And as we began to get good results, the principals and teachers gained confidence in what the children could learn.

Would you say that the teachers in your system have accepted that? At first they didn't. But year after year, as the children began to perform up to our standards from grade to grade, the thinking on the part of teachers began to change.

And as the first children in the new program came into the middle school, a wonderful thing happened. We had to get different textbooks because the children needed more advanced instructional materials. By the time they reached high school, teachers were free from doing remedial reading work. And through the developing years of this program, our test scores continued to rise.

The people I work with are now very supportive. They don't accept new ideas without questioning, but they come and listen, and we discuss. We work together as a team that is free to progress. New teachers accept as natural that these children can learn.

You just showed me your last chart of test scores for the state. City of Decatur schools are performing above grade in every single department of testing on the chart. By the time our students finish the twelfth grade, they are decidedly ahead of other school systems. And the initial program we implemented eighteen years ago is now simple, compared to what we are doing today. Now we expect our students to go well beyond the "basics," and our approach is changing.

You are known in education circles for implementing collaboration. What does this mean? For the last six years, our schools have served as the centers of their communities. Many programs and services are provided for students and their families at our schools before, during, and after school hours. These include after-school programs, summer recreation programs, grandparents' programs, social services, and many more. All of the social agencies in the area "collaborate" with City Schools of Decatur to meet the needs of children and their families. We share personnel, services, grants, and facilities.

Was funding an important part of developing this idea? I point out to individuals who want to form "collaboratives" that they first have to change the way they think about working together. Actually, money can impede collaboration. When the state offered block grants as incentives for collaboration, many just divided up the money and went their separate ways. This isn't collaboration.

But the more we have worked together with right motives for the good of children, and with much sharing, friendship, and love, the more our resources have expanded. We have received millions of additional dollars for the school system through collaboration. Seven years ago, I never imagined such resources (human and financial) were available.

It appears that the entire progress in your school system began and developed from that point when you brought your private practice of Christian Science into guiding the public life of your career. There is no doubt about it, and the good keeps multiplying. We now work closely with the Atlanta Project, created out of the vision of former President Jimmy Carter. Some of his fine project was patterned after our work in Decatur.

The last two years you have addressed the Governor's Conference on Education. And Lamar Alexander, the former Secretary of Education in the United States, along with the Governor of Georgia, came to visit your school system. It was from that visit that you were asked to participate in the national Town Meeting 2000 program. I know that you've also addressed a National School Boards Association meeting, which attracted numerous school systems to come visit you and learn about your concepts. These many opportunities, opening up out of your practice of Christian Science in education, show the power of spiritual ideas to succeed, to communicate, to help, and to cut through resistance. A few years ago I confided in a friend who is a Christian Science practitioner that I wanted to be a more effective student of Christian Science. (Actually, I felt I couldn't make a real difference without being in the full-time public practice of Christian Science.) She said, "In your career, you are doing an excellent job as a Christian Scientist." This gave me a renewed focus on practicing Christian Science in my work. From that time, many more opportunities to share and to demonstrate Christian Science as a professional educator evolved naturally.

Your experience does illustrate that problems in our society today can be overcome through prayerfully taking a stand for the truth about man—through practicing the law of God as Christ Jesus taught. It wasn't just what Jesus said, but what he proved. As Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health, "Jesus established what he said by demonstration, thus making his acts of higher importance than his words" (p. 473). My study of Christian Science has taught me that every idea of God has infinite intelligence and that material background cannot obstruct it.

As my concept of children and their unlimited potential has expanded over the years, so have my goals and expectations for them. Today Decatur is moving toward a new model of educating our children—one that requires wonderfully different ways of thinking about children, about learning, and about our responsibilities as professional educators. Prayerful reliance on God is continuing to transform my school system.