More than three decades after turning a west side Chicago parochial school into a nationally acclaimed private K-12 academy that annually sends 100 percent of its high school seniors to college, Paul J. Adams has attained legendary status as an educator. Providence-St. Mel, the private independent academy Adams helped establish in 1978, is among the nation’s most successful urban schools and provides the model for Providence Englewood, a public charter school launched in 2006 in a partnership with Chicago Public Schools.
Adams and the two schools make for compelling filmmaking in “The Providence Effect,” a newly released documentary that examines the Providence-St. Mel story in detail. Directed by Rollin Binzer, the 92-minute film grips the viewer with inspiring interviews and vignettes of its students, teachers and alumni. Its most winning moments come unexpectedly when, for example, the film captures students cheering each other on to complete math and spelling exercises at the blackboard. Adams is seen as a blunt, driven man whose early life in the civil rights battleground of Montgomery, Ala., infused him with a fierce commitment to spreading education’s liberating and transformative power.
The documentary’s early scenes delve into Adams’ youth in Montgomery where he recounts regularly encountering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the civil rights leader’s tenure as pastor of what is now called the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. Adams says that it was his youthful involvement in the movement that got him blackballed from teaching jobs in Alabama public schools. The prohibition led him to move to Chicago, where he went from working as a guidance counselor at Providence-St. Mel to becoming its principal in 1972.
Adams recounts how his anger at the decision of the Chicago archdiocese to close Providence-St. Mel motivated him to lead a campaign to keep the school alive as an independent academy. By the early 1980s, his leadership and no-nonsense approach to urban schooling had garnered Providence-St. Mel important allies and national attention.
