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| Feature |
Urban Champions
Elizabeth Harris and Emily DeNitto
05/01/2007
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Jim Barksdale hopes to rescue his state’s economy by salvaging
its moribund public schools.
Like the Goodnights, Jim
Barksdale believes that he must save the schools before he can save the local
economy. That is why the former Netscape Communications president and CEO—who
oversaw the company’s $4.2 billion sale to AOL in 1998 during a war with
Microsoft for Internet browser dominance—now spends most of his time traversing
his home state of Mississippi to visit its notoriously underfunded public
schools, which routinely place at or near the bottom of national rankings for
math and reading scores. "I sit in the back of the room and watch and listen and
try to give some help to the team," Barksdale says. "But I’m not an expert, and
I don’t want to appear to be one or begin to think I am one."
 | | (Photograph by Greg Campbell.) |
Barksdale, who grew up in Jackson, is a product of the
Mississippi school system, but he was one of the lucky students who came from
middle-class parents who instilled in him an early love of reading. He has now
adopted this mission: to improve literacy for children with the poorest reading
skills. "It’s my firm belief that if you really want to break the cycle of
poverty, the best way—the most productive way—is to improve reading scores," he
says.
Barksdale graduated from the University of Mississippi, which
is where he met his first wife, Sally; they married when they were both 21. He
then left the state to pursue the business career that made him his fortune. He
was an executive with Federal Express in Memphis and then with McCaw Cellular
Communications in Seattle. In 1996, when the couple’s three children were away
at college, Barksdale took a chance with a technology startup called Netscape,
and he and Sally moved to Palo Alto, Calif.
‘‘ It’s my firm belief that if you really want to break the cycle of
poverty, the best way is to improve reading scores.’’ |
While at Netscape, Barksdale began to develop his literacy
mission. He was serving as cochair of TechNet, a network of technology company
executives concerned that their industry faced a shortage of qualified workers
because of an inadequate public school system. Discussions among the executives
spurred him to thoughts of his home state, its depressing education statistics
and the problems that in-state colleges faced retaining Mississippi’s best
students. The Barksdales went into action, making a $5.4 million donation to Ole
Miss to develop an honors college.
But Barksdale knew the state’s educational problems started
long before students reached college, and, in 2000, he partnered with the state
department of education to create a literacy program that he would fund. The
Barksdale Reading Institute began with $100 million, which to date has paid for
teaching materials and more than 6,000 books for the lowest performing public
schools in the state. Barksdale talked his younger brother, Claiborne, into
moving back to Mississippi from Atlanta, where he was working as assistant
general counsel for Bell South. Claiborne had been a teacher before he became a
lawyer, so Barksdale thought he would be perfect as the institute’s CEO.
Initially, the institute focused on reading programs for
kindergarten through third grade. Today, it employs 50 individuals—many of them
teachers—who fan out across the state to work in schools and create
individualized reading programs. The institute trains educators in local schools
and provides master-level Barksdale literacy teachers in 12 schools. The
institute also offers intervention specialists who help identify at-risk
children reading below grade level and then test the students over a three-year
period to measure improvements. "We all assume that because we can read, it
would be pretty easy to teach somebody else," Barksdale says. "These children we
are working with come from a lot of very difficult home lives, so one of the
lessons is: It’s very hard."
Barksdale has faced challenges along the way. Sally, active in
the reading program, died of colon cancer in 2003. Two years ago, Barksdale, who
has since remarried, examined the results of tests that reading specialists had
given "his" pupils, only to find that students were not moving up to their grade
level in reading quickly enough. So he expanded the program to reach children
before they entered kindergarten. "We wanted to start working with 3- and
4-year-olds because, quite often, these children never see a book or a magazine,
and they’re never read to," Barksdale says.
He has become an agitator, urging politicians and bureaucrats
to improve education funding. In 2005, Barksdale issued a challenge to state
lawmakers after reading in a newspaper that the state was unlikely to pass a
fully funded education budget. He offered a $50 million carrot in the form of
scholarships for Mississippi students. That year, lawmakers approved a $2.2
billion elementary and secondary school budget—$87.7 million shy of the
department of education’s request. The state failed to find additional funding,
and Barksdale did not provide the scholarships.
But by February of this year, Barksdale hoped that a renewed
$50 million challenge would be successful in the next legislative round. He
remains enthusiastic about bringing all Mississippi students up to grade level
in the future, despite the vast challenges. "We’re not afraid of being
disappointed. We have to face facts that it’s an enormous undertaking, and no
one’s really pulled it off yet in school districts around the country,"
Barksdale says. "I look at it in a little talk that I gave to our teachers after
one year where we didn’t get quite as far as we wanted. Look, it’s like when
they asked Edison, ‘You’ve been through 900 filaments that don’t produce light,
are you disappointed?’ He said, ‘No, I know 900 things that don’t work—that
don’t produce light.’ That’s sort of our motto."
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