Stand and Deliver
At the helm of an innovative, internationally-focused two-year-old pilot school in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Jina Kim-Qvale works around the clock as a passionate advocate for urban schoolchildren.
story by Katherine Yungmee Kim
photographs by Mark Edward Harris
It’s mid-morning on a school day, and principal Jina Kim-Qvale uncharacteristically steps away from the Ambassador School of Global Education, her fledgling K-through-5 elementary school in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. She sinks into a rattan chair at the quiet Heyri Coffee House—a few blocks from work—and it’s clear she’s already eager to get back to campus.
Day planner and Blackberry stacked in front of her, she’s checking the time and fielding questions at a spirited clip. Kim-Qvale confidently reels off ed-stats and unfurls aspects of the innovative pilot school curriculum that she conceived, wrote and is now in the second-year grip of implementing. Then a question about her own childhood catches her off guard. Suddenly, it seems, Kim-Qvale has forgotten the name of her elementary school. Not the school she currently administers, but the grade school she herself attended. “Gosh, I can’t remember the name of it,” she says, flustered. “It was on Farmdale … I don’t remember if that was the name … Farmdale Elementary? I’ve got to look that up. This is embarrassing.”
It is the first indication that Kim-Qvale had an inauspicious start to her public school education in the United States. It is also a peek at an experience that may have inadvertently set the trajectory for her role as a leader and passionate advocate for urban schoolchildren in Koreatown.
Born in Seoul, young Jina had completed first grade before immigrating with her parents to North Hollywood. Because of differences in how age is determined in Korea, she isn’t sure if she entered school in the States in the second or third grade.
“For the first five years I was in a haze,” Kim-Qvale relates. “That’s what I remember about my early education—being in a haze. It had to do with me coming to the States as a second-language learner. Looking at it from a child’s perspective, I don’t know if the teacher knew what to do with me.”
Though her own recollection might be dim, Kim-Qvale’s disempowered grade-school experience in the same school district she now works in gives insight into her educational strategy, as she appears determined not to let the same sort of classroom miasma befall the students in her charge.
Today Kim-Qvale is, by all accounts, both a fast-track educator and innovator. At age 38, she is 11 years younger than the average American school principal. The school she helms is part of the exemplar Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, one of six elite “pilot” schools taking root on the historic Ambassador Hotel site, which has been dubbed Los Angeles Unified School District’s “Taj Mahal” for its memorial gravity, aesthetic splendor and astronomical construction costs.
The $578-million RFK Community Schools boasts a 24-acre, state-of-the-art campus with marble memorials and fine art murals—the nation’s most expensive public school campus. But it’s juxtaposed with the Koreatown neighborhood, where students must hail from, an area long known for overcrowded and underperforming schools. Students have been bused out for decades.
At Kim Qvale’s Ambassador School of Global Education, or ASGE for short, 98 percent are students of color, 85 percent are economically disadvantaged, and 66 percent are English-language learners. The recession has contributed to more transiency and instability for families. Over winter break, a father of one of her students lost his job, and the family became homeless. Last fall, Kim-Qvale referred more than one mother to a local transitional shelter after they reported being abused. Yet, despite these factors that often have the principal also playing de facto social worker, Kim-Qvale is doggedly fighting to fulfill the pilot school’s mission—for every child to leave the elementary school self-directed, armed with critical thinking and foreign language skills. She wants them to have an appreciation for the arts, be community-minded, college-bound and globally competitive.
“When I look at the kids, I see that, by chance, they were born into this neighborhood,” Kim-Qvale says. “Should that mean they should not do better? Why should they not go to college and do better? With our students from urban areas who have historically been struggling, what other options do we have than to try other innovative approaches?” She is well aware the odds are stacked against her. According toEducation Week, LAUSD has the second worst graduation rate, at 40.6 percent, in the nation. Last year, California unveiled for the first time middle school dropout rates: 17,000 eighth graders left school before entering ninth grade in 2008.
With such challenges in mind, and in the face of shrinking public school dollars, Kim-Qvale has identified areas of greatest need, and she has structured ASGE’s learning environment accordingly, notably with multiple partnerships that support everything from the arts to health education to an international curriculum. The school, in fact, is partnered with the Asia Society and is the first elementary school to be part of the International Studies School Network. Under this international school designation, students must learn a foreign language, either Mandarin, Korean and/or Spanish, and the curriculum incorporates international content in almost every subject. In a math class, for example, fourth-graders study yuan-to-dollar currency rates to solve word problems. Students—who come from Bangladesh, Korea, Mexico, Thailand, Guatemala, the Philippines and Nigeria, among other countries—interview each other and create PowerPoints on their classmates’ culture and life. Last year, one class participated in a math competition online with a school in Korea.
Such an embrace of diversity represents a far cry from the approach of the elementary school of Kim-Qvale’s childhood. She describes one incident, right after she immigrated to the United States, when she turned in an assignment to the teacher without her name on it, and another girl claimed it as her own. “It was the most frustrating thing,” she recalls. “Because I couldn’t communicate [in English], I couldn’t defend myself. I couldn’t explain.” Among ASGE’s 15 teachers, most are bilingual, some are trilingual. One-third of the faculty is Asian American.
The school doors first opened in September 2010, with a student enrollment of 360, and now in its sophomore year, people are taking notice. Attracted to the international focus, many are moving to be a part of the program. Late last year, the school district and local teachers union ratified an agreement for more schools to be eligible for pilot school status, which gives them greater autonomy over staffing, budgeting and curriculum—a move that pilot school principals say is liberating and empowering. The RFK Community Schools were specifically cited for their transformative successes.
At the outset of this school year, ASGE was enrolling so many new students that another K-1 classroom had to be added. Another sign of school desirability: parents began forging addresses to try to get their kids in.
In 2008, when the Los Angeles district called for proposals for the six new pilot schools at the RFK Community Schools, Kim-Qvale sat down and wrote a 29-page proposal, quoting Paulo Freire’s Marxist educational text Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
“We believe that social change is made possible through education.” She wrote about “developing in thestudents a sense of community, belonging and purpose,” and, beyond academic goals, emphasized community service and the arts. Toward that end, she pooled her considerable community contacts—neighborhood social service nonprofits, teacher colleagues, even her artist husband, Eric Qvale, who serves on boards of several community arts organizations. That helps explain why, as public schools are cutting their arts curriculum, ASGE students are learning ballroom dancing, taekwondo and putting on Shakespeare productions.
“I’m very impressed with what [Kim-Qvale has] put in place—the innovation and the programs,” says Jeanne Fauci, executive director of the Los Angeles Small Schools Center, which supports the work of pilot schools and other small learning communities by providing technical support and professional development. “She knows what she wants to do, and I never see obstacles get in her way. She goes beyond consideration of what she can do for the greater good,” adds Fauci. “That first day of school—they were under siege, with kids coming in unexpected—and she can just handle a lot and keep calm under pressure.” When asked, Kim-Qvale attributes her drive and sense of social justice to her parents. Her father, Tae Kon Kim, grew up poor in rural, postwar Korea, and his kindly Jesuit teachers pooled their money to buy his books. He made his way through college, earning money and taking classes when he could. Education for him was a means out of poverty, a value he imparted to his children. Her mother, Grace Kim, was a piano teacher in Korea, but after immigrating to California, she struggled somewhat with a loss of community. “Both my parents instilled in me and my siblings a sense of self-sufficiency. ‘Don’t ever be dependent. Fend for yourself.’ They’d say, ‘We are here because we want you to be educated and want you to have a better life.’”
Kim-Qvale started her career as a kindergarten teacher, then rapidly ascended to English-language specialist to assistant principal to principal. Despite the fact that she is involved with every aspect of school operation, she, the mother of a toddler, also handles responsibilities as president of the district’s Alliance for Asian Pacific Administrators and is closing in on a doctoral degree in education at UCLA, focusing on the history of Asian Pacific American principals in LAUSD. She serves as living proof that an uncertain start as a student does not condemn one to failure.
Her students, some of whom have a parent in jail or are from families living in fear of deportation, should not be condemned to failure, either. Kim-Qvale often employs the terms “nonnegotiable” and “urgency” in her quest.
She also repeatedly invokes the assurance, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” The striving instilled in her by her parents seems echoed in Kim-Qvale’s current drive to give her students that chance for a better life.
“I want to relate how urgent this is,” she says. “This is the last stop for us. Because by the time they get to middle school, they are not going to have someone following them, going from class to class. They’re going to be lost if they don’t know how to manage themselves.” To support such high expectations, her interaction with the parents at the school has been constant, and she has made it policy for faculty to be just as engaged. Before school opened in 2010, her teachers hit the streets making home visits. They send home progress reports every two weeks. When a student falls behind, Kim-Qvale meets that student with a parent and the teacher.
She holds monthly parent talks, in Spanish and Korean, around coffee, and there’s a designated “Parent Center” on the second floor of the school. She’s also implementing programs that treat the entire family and not just the student, enlisting, for example, the services of the Korean Health Education and Information Resource Center, a local nonprofit, which has provided medical resources and services for campus families—vitamin supplements, immunizations, blood pressure screenings and mammograms—at no cost.
The community has taken notice of this self-described “pushy advocate.” “She’s a young administrator who brings energy and a willingness to create partnerships,” says Sam Joo, director of Children and Family Services at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, which works with ASGE on community health initiatives. “She is very open and flexible, and has the best interest of the students. Some other principals I have dealt with who have been with the district for years are jaded and rigid.”
Joo lauded Kim-Qvale’s efforts to “really hustle” to provide students with supportive services, like afterschool programs, counseling and parent education classes, despite her tight budget. “She does go out there“ observes Tiffany Khaou, a fifth-grade teacher at ASGE. “She does her outreach to bring programs into the school. She gets things done.”
A few months into the school’s second year, the district issued a less-than-stellar evaluation. Although fifth-graders were performing at or above district level for English language arts, math and science, the third-graders were at “far below predicted” levels for math and language arts. Her teachers called for a meeting, and they sat with Kim-Qvale, discussing strategies for improvement.
Khaou, the fifth-grade teacher, noted that Kim-Qvale is not a “top-down” leader, but is open and welcoming of teachers’ input. “She’s ‘If these are the problems, then what solutions can we come up with?’”
The principal says she “wasn’t completely surprised” about the test scores. “It was a baseline. I looked at the average APIs [Academic Performance Index] of all the feeder schools, and I knew we were getting the same kind of struggling students. They’re not going to change overnight.”
When asked if she feels personally responsible for the future of each child, Kim-Qvale answers unequivocally, “Yes. And so do my teachers.” After a beat, she adds, “I am concerned, but most of all, I am thinking, ‘This doesn’t have to be.’
“I want my school to be a community where students and parents know they have rights, that they have worth and that they deserve access.”
This article was published in the April 2012 issue of KoreAm. Subscribe today!
