372 pages Harvard Education Press Publication Date: April 2005 Paperback ISBN: 1-891792-57-1 Hardcover ISBN: 1-891792-58-X

April 2005
Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego
Edited by Frederick M. Hess

 This book summary is also available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

San Diego school superintendent Alan Bersin instituted one of the longest-running and continuously led urban reform efforts in the nation, making San Diego ideally suited to provide lessons for urban reformers across the country. Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego (Harvard Education Press, 2005), edited by Frederick M. Hess, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Bersin’s reform efforts and includes an essay by Bersin looking back on his tenure, which ends in June 2005.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI. His recent books include Leaving No Child Behind? Options for Kids in Failing Schools (2004), which he coedited with Chester E. Finn; Common Sense School Reform(2004); and A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom? Appraising Old Answers and New Ideas (2004), which he coedited with Andrew J. Rotherham and Kate Walsh.

In 1998, San Diego City Schools launched one of the nation’s most ambitious efforts at urban school reform. Superintendent Alan Bersin, former U.S. attorney for southern California and President Bill Clinton’s “border czar,” sought to reinvent the teaching, organization, and philosophy of the nation’s eighth-largest school district. Bersin’s tactics and his relentless commitment to wholesale change proved controversial in San Diego, even as his efforts attracted a national spotlight to the city’s schools.

In June 2005, Bersin’s stormy San Diego tenure will come to an end, making now the ideal time to take a good, hard look at the lessons learned in the course of his seven-year fight to transform a troubled urban school system. Bersin departs as the dean of the nation’s big-city superintendents and having engineered the longest-running, continuously led urban reform effort in the nation.

Bersin’s tenure has been marked by some visible successes. Between 1999 and 2004, the percentage of elementary schools scoring at the top rung of California’s statewide Academic Performance Index increased by more than 35 percent. During the same period, the number of schools scoring in the bottom category fell from thirteen to one. Meanwhile, the performance gap dividing white and Asian students from black and Latino students has narrowed. However, there have also been areas of little evident progress. High school achievement stubbornly refused to move, and some observers questioned the rigor of the district’s curriculum and wondered whether Bersin’s approach to the teachers union was unduly confrontational.

The length, ambition, and controversy of Bersin’s tenure suggest that the sunny climes of San Diego may hold valuable lessons—good and bad—for urban reformers across the nation. In the era of No Child Left Behind, with urban school districts across the nation being held to
a new standard and with many struggling under the accompanying demands, San Diego also holds valuable lessons for national, state, and local policymakers and educators. Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego distills those lessons through a rigorous and systematic examination of the whole array of measures needed to reform urban school systems.

Unlike previous texts on urban school reform, which typically focus on particular approaches to schooling or on telling a political story, Urban School Reform explores both threads and the way that the one affects the other. Urban School Reform plumbs the entire San Diego effort—scrutinizing politics, governance, high schools, school leadership, and teaching practice, as well as reforms in information technology, school choice, human resources, special education, English language instruction, charter schooling, and accountability.

The State of Urban Schooling

The troubled state of urban schooling has been at the heart of national efforts to address poverty, inequality, and urban blight. Despite occasional apparent successes and an uptick in urban performance in recent years, the nation’s urban schools remain an area of pressing concern. Decades of concerted efforts to reform these systems have accomplished little. Today, in cities such as Atlanta; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; New York; Chicago; and Houston; half or more of fourth-graders read at “below basic” level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In far too many urban districts, barely half of eighth-grade students go on to complete high school.

This situation has special poignancy because of the number of children—especially minority and low-income children—who are educated in urban districts. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that “large central city” school districts enroll about 15 percent of all public school students but more than 30 percent of black and Hispanic students. The result is that troubled urban schools weigh the heaviest on the most vulnerable children and serve to aggravate racial disparities in education, opportunity, and economic success.

The need to dramatically improve the quality of urban schooling has been accepted as one of the great tests of the American commitment to equality and opportunity. San Diego is a compelling laboratory in which a coherent theory of improvement has been pursued relentlessly. This examination is important, therefore, not because of the idiosyncrasies of San Diego but because of the lessons, guidance, and instruction it can provide for urban reformers across the nation.

San Diego

San Diego is a sunny, sprawling city at the southernmost tip of California, just miles from the Mexican border. In 2003–2004, the San Diego City Schools enrolled 140,753 students in 187 schools and had an annual budget of $1.2 billion. Fifty-six percent of students were eligible for the federal free and reduced lunch program, 29.4 percent were nonnative English speakers, and 10.7 percent were identified as special education students.

Two years after a teachers’ strike in which the community leadership felt that the union had trampled the then-superintendent and after a long dalliance with a decentralization strategy that showed little evidence of working, the academic performance of district students continued to languish. In 1998, on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-9), just 45 percent of students in grades two through eleven were performing at the national average in math. Just 41 percent of students equaled the national average in reading. The numbers were far worse for minority students. Just 21 percent of Hispanic and 27 percent of black children scored at the national level on the SAT-9 reading test. In grades four, eight, and ten, the SAT-9 “achievement gap” between white students and Hispanic or black students was routinely 30 to 40 percentile points in both reading and math. Faced with results like these, the community leadership pushed the school board to hire a “change agent” as superintendent.

In March 1998, after an intensive hiring process which was marked by board division, a three-to-two school board majority privately voted to offer the superintendent position to former U.S. attorney Alan Bersin. After Bersin accepted, the board formally offered him the position in a unanimous vote at its regular public meeting. Bersin, a collegiate friend of both Al Gore and Bill Clinton, brought star quality and a “can-do” reputation to the superintendency. However, he drew immediate opposition from San Diego Education Association president Marc Knapp, who had enjoyed a warm relationship with the previous superintendent and was angry that he had not been invited to participate in the search that produced Bersin.

Bersin quickly hired the mercurial Tony Alvarado, the renowned but controversial former superintendent of the second district in New York City, and named him chancellor of instruction. Bersin put Alvarado in charge of the district’s instructional and curricular
program while tasking himself with the district’s political and managerial leadership. Their partnering would prove nationally significant, helping to launch a raft of similar efforts to pair between “nontraditional” superintendents and chief academic officers in districts like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

The San Diego Blueprint

One of Bersin’s favorite aphorisms in his early public appearances as superintendent was, “You can’t cross a chasm in two leaps.” Once in office, Bersin moved quickly and ambitiously. As he explained one year into his superintendency, “There was no other way to start systematic reform. You don’t announce it. You’ve got to jolt the system . . . and if people don’t understand you’re serious about change in the first six months, the bureaucracy will own you.”

The San Diego reform effort was driven by a strategy of setting standards, building the professional skills of teachers and administrators, and identifying system-wide instructional needs and then aligning resources and organizational structures to address them. This commitment to clear and consistent instruction drew directly from Alvarado’s success in New York.

Ultimately, the clearest distillation of the San Diego reform strategy was formalized in a document called the Blueprint for Student Success. The Blueprint, adopted by the school board in March 2000, set out three strategies to drive student growth: prevention, intervention, and retention. The first objective entailed finding ways to improve overall learning while preventing school failure. The second called for targeted steps to assist students who were falling short of standards. The third called for retaining students for whom intervention had been ineffective, in order to deliver accelerated and intensive instruction and help them catch up. The Blueprint built upon the Bersin-Alvarado commitment to strong instructional leadership from district staff and school principals, intensive professional development, additional time for low-achieving students, special attention and resources for low-performing schools, and the use of high quality instructional and curricular materials.

The Bersin-Alvarado reform effort provoked sharp conflict with the San Diego Education Association and was reflected in a bitter three-to-two split on the school board. Today, what has come of all this effort? How much have matters improved and what lessons does the experience hold for school board members, superintendents, administrators, teachers, parents, civic leaders, and researchers tackling the challenge of urban school improvement? To address those questions, Alan Bersin asked me to assemble a team of scholars and analysts to study the district and share their findings. The results of that exercise are reported in this volume.

Overview of the Book

In Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, the authors of each chapter examine the various dimensions of San Diego reform and then distill the lessons that emerge for policy and practice across the nation. The contributors include a mixture of scholars and practitioners, including such renowned figures in the field as Jane Hannaway, Jennifer O’Day, Jon Schnur, Michael Usdan, Julian Betts, Patrick Wolf, and Macke Raymond.

The first section addresses the governance, leadership, and politics of reform, with chapters that examine the tensions of board governance, the “toxic” relationship between Bersin and the San Diego Education Association, and the management strategy of the Bersin administration.

The second section examines various dimensions of the Bersin-Alvarado instructional agenda, including the district’s approach to professional development, its efforts to transform school leadership and enhance the cadre of principals, its strategy for improving low-performing schools, and its move to embrace a “portfolio” model of high school reform.

The third section considers efforts to overhaul the district infrastructure. Chapters explore the District Accountability Framework that Bersin’s team introduced, efforts to improve hiring and the human resources operation and to align these moves with the instructional agenda, and the uneven efforts to address information and communication technology and to construct a coherent, flexible, and accessible technology architecture.

Additional studies address reforms intended to expand parental choice or meet the needs of special populations. One chapter examines San Diego’s public choice program, which now enrolls roughly one in four district students, and the efforts to mesh its program with federal No Child Left Behind requirements. A second examines the district’s experience with charter schooling and the challenges that confront an urban district intent on using chartering as part of its improvement strategy. A third chapter documents the district’s efforts to better serve English-language learners and finds that the focused approach has on average improved academic performance, but has done so in an uneven fashion. A fourth chapter examines the district’s ambitious effort to overhaul special education and suggests that, in a relatively brief period, the reforms have improved the delivery of services.

Finally, Margaret E. Raymond and Daphna Bassok examine the academic results produced by the San Diego reforms in the first several years and find a mixed record. Alan Bersin closes the volume by sharing his reflections on the various analyses and the lessons that San Diego holds for would-be urban reformers.

Improvement Is Possible

The single most important lesson in the volume is that districts cannot reinvent the way they approach questions of curriculum, classroom, or pedagogy simply by focusing on instructional questions. Coaching and training alone will not change the culture of schools hampered by seniority rules, restrictive staffing policies, outdated human resources departments, or overmatched principals.

For too many decades, America’s urban school districts have floundered. They have turned this way and that, embracing one reform after another, without ever changing in any fundamental way. This frenetic but largely fruitless exercise has yielded wasted lives, decaying city centers, and an entrenched urban underclass. However, it is a mistake to imagine that the failure of so many urban reform efforts means real improvement is hopeless.

In the past decade, evidence of more focused and effective reform has appeared across the urban landscape. In cities across the nation, reading and mathematics data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress suggest that districts have made incremental gains in recent years. These small improvements are positive developments, but they fall short of what is needed.

The key lesson of San Diego may be that real, dramatic, sustainable improvement is possible—but it will require bold steps to reshape urban districts for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

 This book summary is also available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.