The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  This pattern bore only a slight resemblance to Alvarado’s path in District 2. There, he did not fire teachers and principals outright, but quietly pushed out those who did not support his reforms. About half the district’s teachers and two-thirds of its principals left during his eleven-year tenure; most retired or relocated to schools in other districts in New York City. In District 2, he made staff changes without fanfare and without humiliating anyone. Alvarado cultivated a close working relationship with the United Federation of Teachers in New York City; this relationship facilitated his ability to transfer out the teachers he did not want. In San Diego, by contrast, the Bersin-Alvarado team was continually at war with the SDEA.

  In District 2, Alvarado described his reforms as a “multi-stage process,” in which principals and teachers reflected on teaching practice, tried out ideas, and refined their teaching strategies over time; he recognized that teachers would be at different levels of experience, and some would need more direction than others. During his tenure in District 2, Alvarado told Richard Elmore of Harvard, “Eighty percent of what is going on now in the district I could never have conceived of when we started this effort. Our initial idea was to focus on getting good leadership into schools, so we recruited people as principals who we knew had a strong record of involvement in instruction. . . . Then we wanted to get an instructional sense to permeate the whole organization. . . . So we settled on literacy. Since then, we’ve built out from that model largely by capitalizing on the initiative and energy of the people we’ve brought in. They produce a constant supply of new ideas that we try to support.”18

  As leader of District 2, Alvarado stressed the importance of “collegiality, caring, and respect” among staff members: “We care about and value each other, even when we disagree. Without collegiality on this level you can’t generate the level of enthusiasm, energy, and commitment we have.” He worried about outsiders reducing the lessons of District 2 to a set of management principles. Imposing these principles without recognizing the importance of its culture of “commitment, mutual care, and concern” wouldn’t work, he suggested then, because changes in management cannot affect people’s underlying values. District administrators, he insisted, could not impose change. Rather, the changes must originate with teachers, students, administrators, and parents as they work together to solve problems.19

  But when Alvarado moved to San Diego, this philosophy did not move with him. Bersin hired Alvarado to bring about change fast and to get results, not to embark on a multistage process that might take eight to ten years. Bersin assumed that Alvarado had perfected his formula for success, one ready for full implementation throughout the San Diego schools, not someday, but at once. The mandated professional development sessions were not opportunities for reflection and collegiality, but a time for teachers to be told what to do and how to do it. Unquestioning compliance was expected.

  In the fall of 2000, three of the five school board members stood for reelection. One, Frances O’Neill Zimmerman, was an outspoken opponent of Superintendent Bersin. A Democrat from affluent La Jolla, Zimmerman was a parent of two children in the San Diego public schools and had worked as a substitute teacher in the system. Zimmerman objected to Bersin and Alvarado’s coercive, top-down approach. The typical school board race at that time cost about $40,000, but leading business figures in the city contributed over $700,000 in an effort to defeat Zimmerman. Walmart heir John Walton of Arkansas, a supporter of charter schools and vouchers, and Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad each contributed more than $100,000 to the anti-Zimmerman campaign. Television commercials attacked Zimmerman for “leading the fight against San Diego’s back-to-basics reform plan.”20 This appeal was misleading, because neither Balanced Literacy nor constructivist mathematics was a “back-to-basics” method.

  The business-funded onslaught against Zimmerman failed. She was reelected (with a bare majority), but the board nonetheless continued to have a 3-2 majority in Bersin’s favor.

  In 2002, the school board election was again a battleground between pro- and anti-Bersin forces. The SDEA and the statewide California Teachers Association spent $614,000 in an effort to oust Bersin’s supporters.21 But the election produced the same 3-2 majority favoring Bersin and the Blueprint. The climate for reform, however, had cooled, as the state’s budget crisis was causing major cutbacks in funding. Elements of the Blueprint were put on hold, and the district offered early retirement to teachers to reduce payroll expenses.

  Although Bersin’s supporters won at the polls in 2002, Bersin decided that he needed to tone down the simmering hostility of the teachers and their union. A few weeks after the school board election, Bersin announced that Alvarado’s role in the district would be curtailed, a move widely viewed by critics as sacrificing Alvarado in an effort to appease angry teachers. This change, said Bersin, was “a mutual decision based on a joint and shared assessment of where we are” in reforming the schools. But there was no placating the critics. John de Beck, the newly reelected member of the anti-Bersin bloc on the school board, responded to the news: “Good riddance. . . . But [his] leaving is not going to make a difference. We’ve had four years of Alan Bersin’s top-down management and now he wants to pass off all his problems on Tony and use him as a scapegoat. Alvarado is not the problem, the superintendent is the problem.” De Beck had retired after thirty-six years in the San Diego school system; he saw himself as a voice for teachers and class-size reduction, but Bersin considered him a union spokesman. In February 2003, Alvarado announced his departure, although he still had nearly two years left on his contract.22

  As Alvarado’s influence waned and then ended, the district loosened its demands for instructional uniformity and moved on to a program of structural and organizational change, including small high schools and charter schools. As state budget cuts loomed, Bersin empowered principals to decide where to make cuts. In another show of flexibility, Bersin no longer required high schools to place low-performing students in the three-hour literacy block (“genre studies”) that was detested by students and teachers alike, enrolled mostly minority students, and had shown no results.

  In the 2004 school board election, Bersin finally lost his slim margin of control to a new board, which had three anti-Bersin votes. Apparently, the voters wanted a change. One of the new members, Mitz Lee, ran on a platform demanding Bersin’s ouster. Bersin announced his resignation in January 2005. The Blueprint era was over. The new board dismissed the peer coaches, suspended most of the professional development activities, and replaced Bersin with Carl Cohn, a respected educator who had previously led the Long Beach, California, schools and emerged from retirement to take over the San Diego schools.

  The San Diego story didn’t end with Bersin’s departure. Researchers had begun analyzing the results of the Blueprint long before Bersin resigned. Some studies were commissioned by Bersin, others by the school board. Scholars came to San Diego to witness for themselves this much-heralded experiment in urban school reform. Those who favored the Blueprint’s methods were impressed by the district’s rising test scores in reading and baffled by the teachers’ complaints.

  Early on, the San Diego school board had commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to evaluate the Blueprint. In 2002, AIR praised the Blueprint but reported that teachers were unhappy about the fast pace of implementation. AIR said that most teachers did not feel respected by district staff and were enjoying teaching less since the reforms started. Many complained of “a climate of fear and suspicion” and of being “exhausted, stressed out, and in some cases, fearful of losing their jobs if they do not perform under this new program.” A second AIR report, in 2003, concluded that the Blueprint’s academic results were mixed and that further gains might be jeopardized by continuing teacher opposition and impending budget cuts. The biggest academic gains were posted in reading in elementary school, where three-hour literacy sessions were required in every school. Yet in mathematics, the same students showed no ga
ins. The largest improvement was among English-language learners and nonwhite students, who were the primary focus of the Blueprint reforms. However, the reading and mathematics scores of high school students in San Diego had actually declined relative to the rest of the state.23

  AIR concluded that teacher resistance to the Blueprint was a large obstacle. “Teacher buy-in is critical for the success of school reform efforts,” it said, citing other research showing that “teachers who perceived decision making as being top-down tended to resist schoolwide reform efforts.” The study found that teachers had “rather negative reactions to both the district and to the Blueprint itself.” Elementary school teachers and high school teachers differed: Nearly half the elementary teachers believed that their students were learning more, but only 16 percent of high school teachers did. The most experienced teachers were the most negative toward both the district leadership and the Blueprint. The study’s authors had expected that the teachers’ negative attitudes would “soften over time,” but this did not occur.24

  By contrast, many education researchers treated San Diego as the mecca of education reform, waxing enthusiastic about Bersin and Alvarado’s relentless imposition of change. They liked the changes that were made and the swiftness with which they were imposed.

  Researcher Amy Hightower wrote one of the earliest studies. She concluded that the leaders’ “top-down, non-incremental approach to change” was necessary. Waiting for teachers and principals to agree to their plans would have been a waste of time and a risk, allowing the status quo to mobilize against them. She approved of the “big boom” and the “jolt” to the system because the leaders were building a “culture of learning,” acting on “principled knowledge.” Hightower was predisposed to agree with the reforms, so she concluded that it was commendable to impose them without consulting the teachers who were expected to implement them.25

  Larry Cuban of Stanford University and Michael Usdan of the Institute for Educational Leadership were cautious in their praise. They expressed hope over “the beginnings of a genuine district culture of professional norms,” yet noted Bersin and Alvarado’s “unrelenting top-down managerial direction at an accelerator-to-the-floor pace” and teachers’ unhappiness. The head of the SDEA told them that the reform was “being done to us, not with us,” but Bersin countered that the union was just part of the old, discredited status quo. Cuban and Usdan were uncertain “whether the consequences of the ‘boom’ theory of changing the system in the initial year have left raw, unhealed wounds that will continue to fester and undermine both the direction and institutionalizing of these reforms or whether the agenda of change has taken hold among principals and teachers sufficiently for the initial trauma to heal, leaving a few unpleasant but distant memories that will fade as new cadres of teachers and principals enter the system.” They said that “it is too early to answer this key question.”26

  Bersin invited Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to gather researchers to study the district’s reforms. The project was called the San Diego Review. The team presented its findings at a public conference in San Diego in the fall of 2004 and published them the next year in a book titled Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego. By the time the essays appeared, Bersin’s time in office was finished, so the book ended up as a sort of valedictory to the Blueprint. Most of the essays hailed the Blueprint and Bersin’s take-no-prisoners style of implementation. Teacher resistance was discussed but was largely attributed to the intransigence of the teachers’ union.

  The biggest surprise in the San Diego Review was an analysis of the academic results by economist Margaret E. Raymond of Stanford University and researcher Daphna Bassok. They found that “San Diego students were helped moderately” by the Blueprint, “but other districts were able to generate larger gains over equivalent periods of time.” San Diego consistently scored higher than the state average from 1999 to 2003, but its rate of change “lagged slightly behind the rate of change statewide.” Only the middle schools made the same progress as other urban districts in California, but the gains were small. Raymond and Bassok noted that in light of the many interventions in middle schools, “such as genre studies, literacy blocks, and extended days, it is surprising to see such limited growth.”27

  The study observed that San Diego’s reading scores in elementary school had improved since 1998, especially for low-income students and students in the lowest-performing schools. For those students, scores rose in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, but not in third grade. In high schools, improvement in reading was “minimal at best,” as there were no gains between 1998 and 2002 on state tests. In mathematics, the gains occurred mainly in the years prior to the adoption of the Blueprint and were smaller than the gains in other urban districts in California. Although there were bright spots, it was a dispiriting summary of the academic changes in San Diego, as compared to the rest of the state, during the reform era.28

  Analyzing test scores from 1999 to 2002, Julian Betts of the University of California at San Diego came to different conclusions. He declared that the reforms were so successful in helping low-performing students in elementary schools that they could serve as a model for the state and the nation. Betts and his colleagues found that the gains were largest in elementary schools, moderate in middle schools, but nonexistent in high schools. In fact, the double-and triple-length classes in high school seemed to diminish achievement. The most effective reform strategies were summer school and the “extended day reading program,” in which low-performing students received additional instruction for three ninety-minute periods each week, before or after school. Targeting low-performing schools with extra resources and a longer school year was also effective.29

  As Bersin’s term of office came to an end, the San Diego Union-Tribune , which had consistently supported him, summarized the seven tumultuous years of his superintendency. It was a mixed scorecard. Charter schools were flourishing. New buildings were going up. The number of high-scoring schools increased, and the number of low-scoring schools declined. Elementary schoolchildren made significant progress, but not as much as those in comparable urban districts across the state, such as Santa Ana, Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, and Los Angeles. The reforms “largely fizzled in middle and high schools.” The district’s dropout rate increased almost every year starting in 1999 and grew by 23 percent during Bersin’s tenure.30

  UP TO THIS POINT in the narrative, everything I learned about the Bersin years had appeared in books, essays, research studies, and news articles. I wasn’t sure what I thought about the reforms, because the picture was unclear. Some of the nation’s most respected educators praised the Blueprint as a transformative strategy and potential national model for urban education reform. But the achievement gains were mixed, and there was something troubling about the frequent reports of teachers’ resistance. So I began my own inquiries.

  In reading the Hess collection (Urban School Reform), I noticed that no one wrote about the curriculum in the schools. Many of the studies referred to the district’s strong curriculum but none actually described it. So I contacted Hess to ask about the curriculum for the arts, literature, history, civics, science, foreign languages, and other subjects. He referred me to Sheila Byrd, a well-known curriculum expert, who was originally engaged to write on the subject for the San Diego Review. She sent me her unpublished paper. In it, she wrote that San Diego never implemented the state’s academic curriculum frameworks and had chosen instead to focus on “intensive professional development” for teachers and principals. San Diego emphasized “how teachers should be teaching at the expense of conveying what students should be learning.” Consequently, she noted in the paper, “many teachers expressed frustration with what they viewed as the enforcement of loosely defined teaching strategies that sidestepped content and had been developed without their input.”31

  In an e-mail to me, Byrd said she learned after agreeing to write the paper that five years after the
reforms started, San Diego “didn’t have a curriculum. They had just started to create one,” but what was emerging was only about literacy and it “was not promising.” District officials had not been able to explain what the curriculum was, nor was there documentation of a systematic plan to develop one. Some schools had developed a few draft “curriculum maps,” but only in literacy. She said that at the San Diego Review conference in 2004, there was a panel discussion on high schools “and not one word about standards or curriculum escaped the panelists’ lips. It was all about administrative reorganization, etc.” Finally, Byrd wrote, a parent got up and asked, “Why aren’t you discussing what students are or aren’t being taught?” The parent described how weak her child’s courses had been. Said Byrd, “Panelists basically brushed her off.”32

  In January 2007, I visited San Diego to interview teachers, principals, union leaders, school board members, and central office administrators. Some of the principals had been removed by Bersin and Alvarado, and some had been hired and promoted by them. I spent time with the new superintendent, Carl Cohn, had dinner with Bersin, and later, when I returned to New York City, spoke at length with Alvarado. He was mortified by the public humiliation of the fifteen administrators and wanted to make clear that he had nothing to do with it.