It’s all too easy to fall into doom-and-gloom when talking about education.
Bob Fuller is here to tell you to cut that out.
“People love to drag public education through the mud,” Fuller, a retired public educator who chairs the Mississippi University for Women’s Department of Education, told The Dispatch Monday afternoon. “But we’re educating 90% of our population, and we’re educating them at a higher level than we ever did.”
The oft-imagined glory days of the 1950s were pretty much the worst, Fuller said.
“In the 1950s, one in four white kids and one in 40 Black kids graduated high school,” he said. “The dropout rate was something like 90%. We had an uneducated populace, but they could get a factory job.”
Even when Fuller, a native of Winston County who now lives in Starkville, graduated from high school in the 1980s the graduation rate was still only around 50%. He’s quick to point out that now it’s about 90%.
“People don’t want to think that, but these are the best of times as far as pushing our students to achieve,” Fuller said. “For example, the math people used to graduate high school with isn’t taught past seventh grade. An eighth-grader takes higher level math than people (40 years ago) had when they graduated.”
Fuller spent his adult life as an educator, thanks to Gov. William Winter and, more directly, his father.
“My dad hauled logs,” Fuller said. “My daddy, my uncles, my cousins, my grandfather all hauled wood. After my first day in the woods I knew that tradition would end with me. After my dad passed, one of his friends laughed and said he did it on purpose. He took me out on the hottest day (of the summer) to make sure I wouldn’t like it.”
It was Winter’s Education Reform Act that lit a fire under him to be a teacher, though.
“(Winter) really brought public schools out of the dark ages,” Fuller said. “He fired me up. I wanted to stay in Mississippi and make a difference. I don’t know if I have, but I try to tell myself I did to keep myself going.”
Fuller went to Mississippi State University, and left (eventually) with a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees and a doctorate. His first teaching job was as a shop teacher in Crystal Springs.
“I recommend it,” he said of moving away from home. “Go someplace nobody knows you, and make all your first-year mistakes.”
After that he taught in Tupelo before returning to Starkville and a job at Starkville High School. He eventually became principal at Armstrong Middle School, a post he held for 15 years.
Retirement didn’t mean Fuller stopped working. It just sent him in another direction: higher education.
He worked as the liaison between the Starkville school district and MSU in preparing the Partnership School, a one-of-a-kind facility serving sixth- and seventh-grade students.
“(Partnership) should be the norm,” he said. “It’s a beautiful building. If we really value education, we’ve got to step up and invest. Kids shouldn’t be in buildings built in the ancient of days. Our students (now) are in some blighted conditions, and some schools are deplorable.”
Fuller also worked as an adjunct professor, both at MUW and MSU, before becoming the chair of the education department at MUW about three years ago.
“I have no regrets,” he said. “I feel sorry for people who don’t live this life and don’t experience education. It’s fun. You get to build relationships with kids and their families and the community.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
