Last of the Heroes

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Joe Caldera is the principal at Griffith Middle School, and he is retiring this year. I will miss him. I will miss seeing him each month at the Middle School Principal’s Organization meetings. I will miss watching him as he sat quietly and peacefully, listening attentively to each of the speakers and presenters. He used to speak up more often at these monthly professional meetings of all the middle school principals of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), but he does so only on occasion now. When he retires from this organization, I will be the last representative of a band of principals who lined up by assignment dates in the spring of 1992. The activity was an icebreaker at the beginning of a professional development training we had that year at Holy Spirit Retreat House. He and I were the newest principals in that group. That was 17 years ago.

Nowadays, when you get Joe talking (and it doesn’t take much - he loves to talk), he’ll use words like “retro”, and “old school”, in describing his perspective on things. If one takes these terms at face value, you might be tempted to dismiss him as old, outdated, and anachronistic, in this new world of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and high stakes testing. You’d be wrong. The first clue is the fact that Joe always gives you a calm, knowledgeable, and reassuring smile when he describes his actions in those terms. That smile should cause you to think that perhaps Joe knows something that you don’t, but unless you want to learn, he’s not going to share it. Don’t be fooled by his quiet demeanor, he knows a lot, and it comes from 35 years as a teacher, administrator, principal, and director of instruction.

I first met Joe Caldera when he was president of the Council of Mexican American Administrators (CMAA) in 1982. My uncle Charlie, an adult school assistant principal at the time, introduced me to him, at the annual Leadership Conference that was sponsored jointly by the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) and the CMAA. It was held at the old USC Hilton Hotel on Figueroa. I was a Dean of Students at Ritchie Valens Middle School in the San Fernando Valley, and just starting to think seriously about becoming a school administrator. He was pretty impressive in those days, and I was a little awed by him. Joe was a young assistant principal, intelligent, humorous, charismatic, “well connected”, and ambitious. I found him to be open and helpful to me and other aspiring school administrators, especially if they were Chicanos.

Over the years, I’d meet him at various professional and association functions and we’d talk, and eventually I got to know him a little better. We shared enough ethnic and professional values and similarities to make conversation easy. I regret now that I did not make more of those infrequent opportunities, but I did discover that there were many stories and legends about Joe (some of which he may have started himself). I heard he went to Catholic schools, and might have been an ex-seminarian (like my uncle Charlie). Someone else told me he graduated from Bishop Mora Salesian High School, an all-male high school in Boyle Heights (or was it St. John Bosco High School, in Bellflower, or Cathedral High School in Downtown LA?), and then went to the University of Southern California. Regardless of the myths, my clearest memory of Joe was as an eager and ambitious young assistant principal during the Heroic Age of LAUSD. This was a forgotten time in the 1970’s when giants and demigods walked the halls of schools and the administrative offices of 450 North Grand: people like Bill Johnston, Harry Handler, Jim Taylor, Sid Thompson, Bill Anton, Paul Possemato, and Jim Prescott. It was a time that required heroic leadership because these were years of social and political turmoil: mandatory integration, forced busing, bilingual education, Board politics, Proposition 13, and the struggles to quantify teaching based on the tenets of Madeline Hunter. These were not Marvel comic book super heroes like Ironman, The Fantastic Four, or the X-men; they were heroes in the classic Greek mold – half god-like and half human. These leaders were driven by ingenuous ideals and ethereal goals, but burdened with all too human faults and frailties. This was Joe’s time. He walked among these heroes, during this golden age. He was imbued with the same ideals, and burned with equal passion to implement programs of social justice and equal education. In fact, Joe was so eager to act, that he grew impatient with the promotional process and left the district for a short period of time to serve as a principal in Pasadena. He returned to the District in 1991, as the principal of Gage Middle School, at the twilight of this Heroic Age.

I became a principal soon after Joe’s return to LAUSD, during the beginning years of the Middle School Division, under the leadership of John Leichty. As middle school colleagues, I was able to see and speak with Joe as he practiced and perfected his skills as a principal during this period. This was the decade before the new century, a time of transition in politics and instruction. It was a time when paradigms were shifting, and no one knew where education was heading. Fortunately, middle school principals had an advantage over their elementary and high school brethren, we were part of a nationwide movement. We had a philosophy and a vision, and it was driven by a document, or a plan called Caught in the Middle (a manifesto similar to Emiliano Zapata’s Plan de Ayala, during the Mexican Revolution). The movement was student-centered, and it was embedded with the belief that all students could and would learn in the right middle school environment. Joe was one of the first principals to wholeheartedly embrace this movement. He was devoted to the principles of Caught in the Middle, and became one of the strongest advocates.

With the passing of time, Joe has slowly evolved into a Yoda-like figure, wise, patient, and compassionate. Except for a brief stint as a local district Director of Instruction, Joe has been a middle school principal. This is how I will always think of him. If I were to choose a metaphor for Joe, I would pick a bullfighter, a matador de toros. The metaphor is not meant to illustrate his bravery, but his skill. Don’t be misled by popular notions of bullfighting. It is not the act of standing in front of a charging bull, as big and intimidating as a diesel locomotive barreling down on you at full speed. That would be crazy. Bullfighting is an aesthetic ritual, an art form, in which a dancer performs a graceful ballet with a monstrous partner. It is an expression of grace under extreme pressure. That is how Joe performs his job as a principal; artistically, creatively, with style and grace. I’m glad he is retiring as a sitting principal. It is the job he always wanted, and the job he was meant to have. Joe chose the better part. He chose to return to a school. I’ll miss him.