Overhauling a Major Urban School System

In 1998, the San Diego City Schools launched one of the nation’s most ambitious efforts in school reform. Superintendent Alan Bersin, former U.S. Attorney for Southern California and President Bill Clinton’s border czar, sought to reshape the teaching organization and philosophy of San Diego, which is the nation’s eighth largest school district. Bersin’s tactics, his lack of an educational background, and his relentless commitment to wholesale change proved controversial, even as his efforts attracted a high degree of interest in San Diego and across the nation. 

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, then aligning resources and organizational structures to address those needs.

It had a mixed record of success. Between 1999 and 2004, the percentage of elementary schools scoring at the top rung of California’s academic performance index increased by more than 35 percent. The number of schools scoring in the bottom category fell from 13 to 1. Meanwhile, the performance gap dividing white and Asian students from black and Latino students narrowed significantly. But high school achievement stubbornly refused to move. A number of observers questioned the rigor of the district’s curricula and Bersin’s confrontational approach to the teachers’ union. In office, Bersin moved very aggressively. One year into his superintendency, he said there was no other way to start systemic reform: “You don’t announce it. You’ve got to jolt the system.” 

Lessons from the San Diego Experience

What have we learned from Bersin’s widely discussed, and often contentious, tenure? For my money, the most interesting lessons concern his bold effort to remake the system’s processes and its routines. The San Diego experience holds at least eight lessons about urban school reform.

1. The centralized, managed instruction model of improvement that Bersin and his chancellor of instruction, Tony Alvarado, embraced depends critically on personnel and managerial infrastructure and on quality curriculum. However, the relentless focus on Alvarado’s Institute for Learning for training principals and faculty, and on building a core of peer coaches, often resulted in a lack of attention to infrastructure, management, and curricula. The proposed peer coaches, along with moves intended to assign faculty strategically, ran afoul of the collective bargaining agreement. In addition, a human resources operation relying on outdated technology and inefficient practices inhibited district efforts to speed up hiring, improve recruiting, or render staffing more flexible. With regard to curriculum, despite seven years of work developing a carefully calibrated professional development model for literacy, by 2004 the district still had not established a coherent curriculum for reading in English. Consequently, while teachers were using the prescribed methods, there was remarkably little attention to the quality of the content.

2. It’s important to keep in mind that the managed instruction model that Bersin and Alvarado brought to San Diego is built entirely on our pedagogical and curriculum understanding of K-4 literacy. They took the routines, the pedagogical devices, and the ways of teaching that have been proven pretty effective in K-4 literacy, and they said, “These will work K-12; they’ll work across the breadth of the curriculum.” But they weren’t really modified in an appropriate way for 9th and 10th graders or for science, mathematics, or history instruction.

3. Bersin strengthened his hand in pursuing reform by embracing the California accountability system and, later, the No Child Left Behind metrics. Bersin welcomed the California Academic Performance Index, seeking to use the results to identify troubled schools, and to target professional development and resources on those schools. San Diego slashed the number of low performing schools during Bersin’s tenure by more than 90 percent. But these reforms never reached their full potential, either in terms of identifying low performing schools or reallocating resources.

4. Bersin came in with a lesson as U.S. Attorney that leadership is the key. From day one, Bersin and Alvarado 2 focused on building a core of leadership coordinators across the district. They focused with a fury on the quality of school principals. They terminated more than a dozen principals at the end of the first year. After six years, they had replaced more than 90 percent of the principals in the district. More than 50 percent of the principals in place in 2004-05 had gone through the training institute that Alvarado designed.

5. Dramatic efforts to improve high schools may conflict quite directly with other changes. In 2004, when the Bersin team adopted a model of high school reform that featured a portfolio of smaller, more personalized environments, an outside observer could see a potential clash with its six-year-old emphasis on centralized managed instruction. The flexibility that allowed faculty and small schools to modify curricula in accord with the school’s specialized mission, the emphasis on giving faculty a voice in curricular decisions, and the resulting inability to standardize content all meant that coaches working with faculty in these schools encountered math, English, history, or science teachers in a dozen small schools who may be teaching a dozen different curricula in a dozen different ways. Coaches can mentor all of these teachers on pedagogical technique, but they’re going to encounter great difficulty applying the kind of uniform content expertise that the Alvarado model takes as a starting point in building elementary literacy.

6. Even leading districts struggle with creating the infrastructure necessary to let educators take advantage of the technological tools and opportunities of the day. In San Diego, where Bersin sought to recruit and import high quality business operations staff, the district’s progress on technology integration remained uneven. Building a technological infrastructure that can support school improvement requires commitment from the instructional staff from day one. It requires recognition from the superintendent and the school board that infrastructure questions are not side issues or things that we can “get around to” but are critical to empowering school personnel, making human resources operational, making accountability effective, and reengineering district processes.

7. Some thoughtful observers have questioned whether Bersin’s style was unduly confrontational, particularly when it came to the union. What such critiques tend to downplay is that any effort to radically re-imagine the way an urban school district does business in the 21st century is going to be painful and conflictual. When faced with a powerful union--strongly attached to certain ways of handling staffing, hiring, school leadership, and accountability--it’s not clear, at least to me, that Bersin could have pursued his agenda without conflict.

8. Perhaps the biggest lesson from San Diego is how limited the possibilities are for radical improvement of urban schooling, short of structural change to personnel systems, technology, accountability, leadership, and compensation. For all of their sweat and struggle, Bersin and his team were continually scrambling to circumvent immutable arrangements that tied their hands when they needed flexibility. State statute and contract language governing teacher hiring, school assignment, compensation of principals, faculty and employees, and work rules all limited the district’s ability to build the workforce it wanted.

Bersin began his tenure with remarkable advantages, including his dazzling local and national context, personal charisma, negotiating and management skills, public service credentials, fundraising success, and a socioeconomic profile of a district that is actually one of the most conducive to achievement in all of California. The San Diego experience illustrates above all that even the boldest attempts to overhaul urban schooling are vulnerable to the institutional and organizational barriers that hamper these systems.

Underlying Principles of Reform

Finally, let me take a moment to talk about three principles that are essential to driving improvement in school systems: transparency, accountability, and continuity.

Transparency: It’s important to remember that America’s public schools are supposed to be just that: public schools. Yet community members, parents, researchers, and even district personnel often find it difficult to obtain ready information from defensive urban districts. Urban districts have often been managed like fortresses under siege, denying access to all but hand-picked outsiders, friendly scholars, and folks who are on the right page. The result is that educators and district leaders find themselves isolated, their claims treated with skepticism, and their efforts undermined by an alienated public. The San Diego review marked an important step in making that district more public in the most profound sense. By inviting researchers and observers into the district and by giving them unfettered access to district leaders, schools, and employees, the system modeled a desire to keep faith with its public and to be accountable for its efforts.

Accountability: Accountability is not simply about collecting data and monitoring performance. It’s also about the adults entrusted with education taking responsibility for their actions. This includes school boards, superintendents, administrators, and teachers. But it also includes civic officials, parents, and other community agents who choose to involve themselves in the educational process. I don’t care how noble their intentions are, those who would bear the mantle of educating our children have to be willing to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Continuity: School improvement is arduous, controversial, and usually frustrating work. Producing sustainable changes in attitudes, behavior, and expectations is not the work of a season or even of a year; it’s a process. The same is true, of course, of improving any large, unwieldy organization. This isn’t to apologize for schools or school districts; it’s just to recognize that we shouldn’t be unreasonable in the demands we place on them.

A five-year or a ten-year commitment on the part of both the district and the community is essential for sustainable improvement. We’re inevitably going to disagree about how to improve education. We’re going to debate the merits of competing strategies, how to interpret results, and what can reasonably be expected from our schools. However, if we pursue school improvement, and particularly urban district improvement, in the spirit of inquiry and public accountability, even our disputes can prove useful and illuminating and beneficial. Ultimately, a steadfast commitment to transparency, accountability, and continuity may give cities a fighting chance to build 21st century schools that are beacons of opportunity for all. 

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar at AEI.