Cynthia Gunner is not easily daunted, but on an October afternoon in 2016, she was feeling especially discouraged. Gunner, 47, is a career educator who has worked for the Atlanta Public Schools for nearly 20 years, always in segregated neighborhood schools that primarily serve low-income students on the city’s predominantly black southwest side.
Gunner got her start at Peyton Forest Elementary, a K-5 school where she completed her student teaching in the late 1990s and later taught fourth and fifth grades through the mid-2000s. Stints at other schools followed — as a classroom teacher, a literacy specialist and an assistant principal. And as of that fall, she was back at Peyton Forest as a first-time principal, a promotion that felt like a homecoming.
In 2009 and 2010, the Atlanta school system endured a cheating scandal that involved more than 40 schools. That turbulent time had begun to feel thankfully distant. But the goal of increasing student achievement remained. High-poverty, segregated neighborhood schools like Peyton Forest have, on average, low reading and math scores. In 2015, it ranked in the bottom 10 percent of Georgia public schools, which were then being targeted for potential state takeover, and had earned an F on the state’s annual report card. As a result, Gunner and her teachers were under intense pressure to increase scores. That afternoon, Gunner was visiting teachers’ classrooms, as she did most days, and was struck by the dispiriting reality of how many of the school’s roughly three dozen teachers were struggling.
Although most of them had taught for three or more years, several of the veterans were new to the building. Over the summer, Gunner scrambled to fill multiple openings, especially in third through fifth grade, which were subject to state testing and particularly acute scrutiny. One new hire, for a fourth-grade class, was Bianca McNeal, who grew up in southwest Atlanta and graduated from college in Savannah, where she was still living just the previous December. Gunner conducted the interview by Skype, as principals often have to, and was concerned about McNeal’s inexperience — she was only 24 — but hoped, given her background, that she might have a rapport with students. “I’m going to take a chance on you,” she told the teacher.
Now Gunner, an imposing presence with a warm laugh, was turning from desk to desk in the back of McNeal’s classroom two months into the school year, kidding with students. She accused one of “throwing” her “under the bus” when he revealed her assistance on some work, prompting a rare laugh from McNeal, who with sober dutifulness was walking her students through a math problem. “So, the question,” McNeal said haltingly, “is how many students from each school will be inside the auditorium. We already have 140 and 110.”
