Adrift at the Top

When Tom Lau became the principal of Benjamin Franklin Middle School in 1996, he was the fifth educator to head the Long Beach, Calif., school since 1991.

Morale was low, students were misbehaving and underachieving, and academic programming showed little continuity. "My perception was a lot of people were hiding out here," Lau recalls. With all the turnover in leadership, he believed that many teachers thought the changes he was trying to make would soon go away.

Within a few years, though, the school has seen major improvements. Student suspensions fell from 204 in the 1996-97 school year to 68 in 1998-99. Lau reported last spring that "three-fourths of the people are working really hard." And Franklin students' standing on the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition climbed in nearly every subject tested for the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades— no small feat for a school in which more than half the students speak English as a second language.

Sixth graders, for example, rose from the 13th percentile in reading in 1998 to the 20th this year, while 8th graders went from the 24th to the 32nd percentile in math...