The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  The researchers who turned District 2 into a national symbol of how to “scale up” reform could not know what we know now; the 2000 census figures were not available to them then. They attributed the gains solely to pedagogical reforms. They were unable to see that demographic and economic transformation buoyed the district’s improvements. Armed with new data, researchers should continue to analyze the effects of this transformation on District 2’s schools.

  There was much to admire about District 2. It was a fine school district that saw consistent gains on city and state tests. It had inspired leadership; many excellent schools; a smaller number of low-performing and highly segregated schools; a choice program that attracted white and middle-class students to the public schools; and a mandated pedagogy in reading.

  When the new corporate-style reform leaders learned about District 2, they thought they had found the secret to raising achievement across the board. They believed that District 2 had successfully closed the achievement gap among students of different racial and ethnic groups, and that this could translate into a formula. This formula, they believed, could be transplanted elsewhere to get results quickly. The time for debate about what to do and how to proceed was over.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lessons from San Diego

  WHAT HAPPENED IN SAN DIEGO from 1998 to 2005 was unprecedented in the history of school reform. The school board hired a non-educator as superintendent and gave him carte blanche to overhaul the district’s schools from top to bottom. Major foundations awarded millions to the district to support its reforms. Education researchers flocked to San Diego to study the dramatic changes. The district’s new leaders set out to demonstrate that bold measures could radically transform an entire urban district and close the achievement gap between students of different racial and ethnic groups.

  The San Diego reforms were based on New York City’s District 2 model. A few years later, they became the model for New York City’s schools during the Bloomberg era.

  In 1998, in response to San Diego’s business community, the city’s school board selected Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor, as city superintendent. Bersin immersed himself in education issues, consulted with education experts at Harvard University, and quickly learned about District 2 in New York City and its visionary leader, Anthony Alvarado. Bersin invited Alvarado to join him as chancellor for instruction in San Diego. Together, this team launched a radical venture in school reform. Intent on closing the achievement gap, the two introduced changes into every classroom, disciplined resistant teachers, and fired reluctant principals. And they did so to national acclaim, while alienating significant numbers of teachers and principals and creating a national exemplar of the “get-tough” superintendent.

  With about 140,000 students, San Diego was the eighth-largest district in the nation, second in California only to Los Angeles. Its enrollment in 1998 was 36.2 percent Hispanic/Latino, 16.7 percent African American, 28.2 percent white, and 18.3 percent Asian-Filipino-Pacific Islander.1 The district enrolled many recent arrivals from Mexico and Asia, as well as many students from affluent sections of the city, such as La Jolla.

  San Diego was a surprising place to launch a major reform effort, because the district was widely perceived in the 1990s as one of the nation’s most successful urban school systems. In 1996, two years before Bersin was hired, Education Week noted that San Diego had a “national reputation as an innovative urban district with a commitment to reform.”2 Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools (a national organization that represents urban districts in Washington, D.C.), expressed amazement that San Diego was the setting for an ambitious reform agenda: “You don’t have a school district that is broken, you have a school district that many cities would envy. If other cities had the performance levels of San Diego they would call it a victory.”3 The city’s stellar reputation had been due in large part to Tom Payzant, a talented educator who led the district from 1982 to 1993. When Payzant left to join the Clinton administration, he was succeeded by Bertha Pendleton, a thirty-five-year veteran of the San Diego schools, who was the system’s first female and first African American superintendent.

  Known as a conservative city, San Diego hosted the Republican National Convention in 1996. That spring, the city’s business leaders were aghast when the teachers’ union launched a strike seeking higher wages and a larger role in decision making at each school. The strike was settled after a week, with the union winning a 14 percent salary increase and a commitment to school-based decision making. To the union, the agreement was by no means extravagant, since the highest teachers’ salary would rise to only $55,000 by 1998; even with the increase, few teachers could afford to buy homes in the district.4 The business community fumed, however, believing that Superintendent Pendleton had capitulated to the union. The business leaders decided it was time the schools had a tough leader. Elections to the city’s five-member school board were held every two years. The San Diego Chamber of Commerce raised money to back three candidates whose platform supported strong accountability for students, teachers, and principals, which meant an end to social promotion and a push to remove principals and senior administrators for poor performance. The business community’s slate prevailed in November 1996, and this board hired Bersin in 1998.

  Bersin was no ordinary change agent. A native of Brooklyn, he was educated at Harvard, Oxford University (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School. He served as the U.S. attorney for the southern district of California from 1993 to 1998 and as the Clinton administration’s “border czar,” overseeing enforcement of immigration and drug laws. A friend of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, Bersin was well connected to business and political elites in the city, state, and nation. The business community concluded that Bersin—known as fearless and decisive—was just the man to shake up the school system. The school board voted 4-0 to hire Bersin (one member abstained). The San Diego Education Association (SDEA)—the teachers’ union—was unhappy about having been excluded from the selection process. The business community, however, didn’t care how the union felt, because it considered the union to be a self-serving adult interest group that cared more about money and power than about children.

  Bersin and Alvarado formed a partnership, in which Bersin was responsible for politics and relations with the public, while Alvarado was in charge of the instructional agenda. Admiring scholars called them “the dynamic duo from Gotham City.” The pair moved quickly and assertively to reorganize the school system and change its culture.5

  Bersin and Alvarado mandated a uniform way of teaching reading: the Balanced Literacy method that had been used by District 2 in New York City. All principals and teachers were required to participate in professional development training to learn the techniques of Balanced Literacy. Every elementary teacher was required to teach reading for three hours every morning, using only Balanced Literacy methods. Principals were expected to be instructional leaders and required to spend at least two hours each day visiting classrooms, observing teachers, and making sure they used the Balanced Literacy method—and nothing else.

  The two leaders eliminated the system’s five area superintendents, each in charge of a geographical area, and replaced them with seven “instructional leaders,” each in charge of a “learning community” of twenty-five principals from schools that were not geographically contiguous. Alvarado trained the instructional leaders, who reported directly to him. They, in turn, trained the principals.

  Bersin promptly downsized the central office bureaucracy by 104 people and used the savings to put Balanced Literacy coaches in every school.6 The teachers’ union objected, fearing that the coaches would act as spies for the administration. Eventually every school had one or more centrally trained coaches, staff developers, resource teachers, or content administrators, whose job was to diffuse the district’s philosophy of reform into every classroom.

  From the outset, the uni
on objected to the heavy-handed, fast-paced Bersin-Alvarado style of management, which centralized decision making and made no pretense of collaborating with teachers. Bersin and Alvarado were not interested in incrementalism. They wanted wholesale change, directed centrally and implemented quickly. In May 1999, some 2,000 teachers demonstrated at a school board meeting to protest the administration’s top-down mandates.7

  In June 1999, Bersin ordered the immediate demotion of fifteen administrators—thirteen principals and two assistant principals—whom he described as “ineffective” leaders. The school board unanimously supported his decision. The administrators were informed of their humiliation at a school board meeting, escorted to their schools by armed police officers, told to remove their personal items, and then directed to leave the premises. Most of those demoted were not in charge of low-performing schools. The episode had a chilling effect on other staff members. A raw display of force, it seemed calculated to send a warning to those who did not promptly comply with the leadership’s mandates. (Some of the demoted administrators later sued the district for denying them due process and eventually won a judgment against the school district in a federal appeals court.)8

  To ensure a steady supply of principals who were trained in the strategies of Balanced Literacy, Alvarado turned to Elaine Fink, his former District 2 deputy. In 2000, he appointed Fink to run the new Educational Leadership Development Academy at the University of San Diego, which would train principals for the San Diego public schools. Alvarado also imported consultants from Australia, New Zealand, and District 2 to lead professional development sessions for principals and teachers on Balanced Literacy.

  In the spring of 2000, Bersin presented his formal plan to the school board. Titled “Blueprint for Student Success in a Standards-Based System,” the document stressed the themes of “prevention, intervention, and retention” and summarized the activities that Bersin and Alvarado were pursuing and planned to pursue. Now, nearly two years into the reform era, mathematics was added to literacy as a core subject. The emphasis in the plan was on intensive professional development. Properly trained teachers sharing the same practices, the same ideas, and the same language, it was believed, would lift student achievement. The Blueprint added summer school, longer school days, and other support for students who needed extra time.

  The Blueprint borrowed heavily from District 2’s program of Balanced Literacy and constructivist mathematics. The Blueprint decreed that every school would adopt the district’s new literary framework; three middle schools would have a double-period mathematics block. Low-performing students in middle and high schools would be required to attend a two- or three-period literacy block termed “genre studies.” The central bet of the Blueprint strategy was that, over the long run, “as the base of instruction across the whole system rises, so will the academic achievement of all students.”9

  The cost of implementing the Blueprint was substantial. The annual cost of professional development rose from $1 million to about $70 million. The district paid for the reforms partly by shifting control over federal Title I funds from individual schools to the central office. (Title I is a federal program whose purpose is to improve the achievement of disadvantaged students.) In 1999, the schools controlled some $18 million in Title I monies; by 2001, that funding dropped to $3 million. During the same period, the Title I funds directly controlled by central headquarters rose from less than $3 million to more than $20 million. Bersin and Alvarado fired over six hundred classroom aides funded through Title I and used the savings to support the Blueprint reforms. In District 2, Alvarado had similarly redirected Title I funds, calling it “multipocket budgeting.”10 Bersin raised more than $50 million from foundations, including the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Broad Foundation. Several foundation grants had a specific contingency: The money would be available only as long as Bersin and Alvarado remained in charge of the district.11

  On March 14, 2000, the San Diego school board voted on the Blueprint. Thousands of teachers and parents showed up for the meeting, most to demonstrate vociferously against the Blueprint. Bersin insisted that the district’s academic performance was dismal. The San Diego Chamber of Commerce praised the Blueprint; John Johnson, president of the local Urban League, said that “collaboration, input, and buy-in” were fine and well, but sometimes “leaders must exercise leadership and move ahead.”12 Critics complained about the superintendent’s plan to fire six hundred classroom aides, as well as the narrowing of the curriculum to just literacy and mathematics. Behind all the complaints was a simmering resentment that the leadership had not consulted teachers or parents when forging their plans.

  The board approved the Blueprint by a vote of 3-2. The vote revealed a bitter split on the school board. Bersin and the Blueprint had the solid support of the three members of the board—Ron Ottinger, Edward Lopez, and Sue Braun—who had run for office with the endorsement of the business community. The other two members—Frances O’Neill Zimmerman and John de Beck—had the support of the teachers’ union, and they consistently opposed Bersin’s initiatives. Divisions within the board became open and personal, as the pro- and anti-Bersin forces argued over every decision and shift in policy. Every significant vote came out 3-2, with the pro-Bersin majority always prevailing.

  Many teachers in the district were upset by the heavy-handedness with which the reforms were implemented. Even those who were fully supportive of Balanced Literacy and constructivist mathematics felt disrespected by the leadership’s lack of collaboration and consultation. Terry Pesta, the president of the SDEA and a thirty-year veteran of the school system, complained about Bersin and Alvarado’s approach: “It’s been that style of leadership since day one,” he told an interviewer. “Everything’s been dictatorial. It’s ‘Our way is the only way.’” Pesta claimed that “morale among our members is at an all-time low” and that teachers felt they were being evaluated not on how well they teach, but “on how well they’re being a team player.”13 Teachers were often told that if they were not good team players, they were not good teachers.

  A study of the San Diego reforms reported that principals and teachers often questioned the rationale for the leadership’s choices: “Why this instructional content, why this model of leadership?” “Why is the method of instruction associated with Balanced Literacy better than what we have been doing?” “Why are district leaders telling us what to do instead of asking us?” The answer from Bersin and Alvarado, reiterated again and again, was that Balanced Literacy would close the achievement gap.14 The implication was that anyone who resisted Bersin and Alvarado’s agenda was opposed to social justice. San Diegans did not know that their model, District 2, had not closed the achievement gap.

  Bersin disdained school-based decision making, site-based management, and other means of involving teachers in matters of curriculum or instruction. He disparaged the research on school reform that spoke of cultivating teacher “buy-in,” that is, persuading teachers to embrace changes wholeheartedly. He was insistent, passionate, and impatient, sincerely believing, as did Alvarado, that their program was in the best interests of children. One of Bersin’s favorite expressions was: “You don’t cross a chasm in two leaps.” A study commissioned by the Bersin administration in 2004 defined the Bersin-Alvarado strategy with these three axioms: “1) Do it fast, 2) Do it deep, 3) Take no prisoners.”15

  This strategy assumes that the central planners know exactly what to do and how to do it. It relies on command-and-control methods rather than consensus. It brooks no dissent. It requires absolute loyalty. It rejects the conventional belief that incremental reforms are more successful in the long run, especially when they are shaped by consultation with those who are expected to implement them. For Alvarado, this was an abrupt change from his earlier roles in District 4, where he was known for giving schools autonomy, or in District 2, where he was known for working closely with teachers to implement his instruction
al agenda.

  Bersin made no apologies for his aggressive imposition of the reform agenda. He said, “There was no other way to start systemic reform. You don’t announce it. You’ve got to jolt a system. I understood that. You’ve got to jolt a system, and if people don’t understand you’re serious about change in the first six months, the bureaucracy will own you. The bureaucracy will defeat you at every turn if you give it a chance.” Bersin treated the teachers and their union as part of “the bureaucracy.”16

  Many principals and teachers did not like the changes. During the Bersin years, 90 percent of the district’s principals were replaced. Teacher attrition was high. Before the reform era, about 250 of the district’s 9,000 teachers resigned each year. In the first two years of the new regime, teacher resignations and retirements doubled to nearly 500. In 2002-2003, about 1,000 teachers accepted the district’s offer of early retirement. Altogether, more than a third of the district’s teachers left between 1998 and 2005. Some scholars thought this offered “real advantages for reform” because those who enter the district knowing about its program are less likely to offer resistance and “are likely to be ‘believers.’ ”17