Superintendent candidate aims at accountability

On average, California public-school students have consistently performed worse on standardized tests of math and reading skills than their peers around the nation. But if you ask Richard Barrera, it’s clear how to improve student achievement. San Diego Unified School District, where he serves as board president, has already done it; its students outperform those in similar large districts across the nation. A former community organizer, Barrera said he hopes to take the lessons he’s learned in his board role and help spread them across California as state superintendent of public instruction. For Barrera, who placed second in this month’s primary and has been a key advisor to current Superintendent Tony Thurmond, the key factor in improving student outcomes at the school, district or state level is setting goals and holding people accountable for meeting them. To him, though, accountability means something much different from rewarding or punishing principals or teachers. It involves collaboration and sharing of data and strategies to meet those goals. Whether he gets the chance to put his ideas into practice will depend on the outcome of the fall election, in which he’ll go up against Sonja Shaw, the board president of Chino Valley Unified School District. Shaw has emphasized culture-war issues, such as banning transgender girls from girls sports. The Examiner spoke with Barrera last week about how he would approach the superintendent job, what he sees as the best way of holding educators accountable and how he plans to face off against Shaw. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. There’s been a lot of criticism about student achievement in public schools, that California students aren’t keeping up. What do you make of that, and what do you do about it? What we’re missing in California is we don’t have clear goals at the state level. Every school board, one of their fundamental responsibilities is setting a clear set of goals. In our district, we have four: We want to improve student wellness, we want to improve college and career readiness, we want to improve literacy, and we want to improve math. It’s important to set those goals, because we then hold ourselves accountable and the community holds us accountable to making progress. And it allows us to clarify the strategies, the investments that actually move us forward towards those goals. That’s a foreign concept in Sacramento. There’s no common set of goals, and therefore there’s no accountability. I think it’s the job of the state superintendent to pull together educators, parents, school-district leaders, superintendents, school boards, community organizations, education stakeholders [and] set a common set of goals. It’s not rocket science — I think most people would agree that we should be improving college and career readiness rates, reducing chronic absenteeism and improving literacy and math. Doing that then requires all of us to be honest with each other: Are we investing in the strategies that move us forward around these student outcomes? Is the end result then a set of guidelines that’s issued by the superintendent, or is it something that gets formalized in law? So, yes, I think it is about developing clear guidelines. But the other place I think we’re really missing the mark in California is we’re actually not investing in the strategies that we know work. For over a decade, every year there’s been a discretionary block grant that’s provided to school districts [by the state Legislature, in addition to base Prop. 98 funding], but every year they call it “one-time.” What that does is school districts then say, “Oh, we can’t use that to invest in reducing class sizes or increasing compensation for educators to retain them or investing in long-term strategies around improving literacy and math. It’s one-time, so we’re going to maybe contract out with some technology company that claims it has the magic answer. And then we’ll do it again next year, because it’s, again, one-time.” That is wasted money in the system. If that was just allocated to districts through an increase in the base grant, I think we’d see improved student outcomes, because we’d have more and more districts investing into the strategies that actually improve student achievement. Ex // Top Stories A new week will bring outdoor concerts, special film screenings, street festivals and night markets to The City Once a month, a portion of the art museum’s fifth floor will become a showcase for Bay Area music and culture Bilal Mahmood’s proposal would enact a levy and create a new fund that could help convert corner stores into fresh-food purveyors You’ve talked about accountability. How do you hold people accountable? And who do you hold accountable? If you look at [the] high-poverty neighborhood elementary schools that are beating the odds, and you talk to the principal and the teachers there, what they will talk about is there’s a culture at the school where, say, the third-grade teachers, they don’t just stay in their own classroom working with their kids. They’re constantly getting together, meeting with each other, looking at data, identifying kids who might be falling through the cracks. If I’m a third-grade teacher that [is] doing well improving math outcomes, I might come work with you. But if you’re better at literacy outcomes, you might come work with me. That’s the culture of accountability that drives improved student outcomes. Those themes are very consistent, whether we’re at the school level or at the district level. Compton Unified — 95% of its students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. It’s as challenging an environment as any in the state. They took their chronic absenteeism rates down from about 17% a couple of years ago to now 6%. It’s all about a culture of accountability. They say, “This is a priority issue for us.” Literally, the superintendent every day looks at the attendance of every school in the district. But it’s not just that. The principals — say, three in the same area — get together, and the first thing they do is they report on their chronic-absenteeism rates, and they talk about their strategies. At the state level, a big role the state superintendent and CDE can play is: Let’s convene a group of districts that are struggling with chronic-absenteeism rates. Let’s pull them into a learning community in the same style [as] that group of third-grade teachers, and let’s hold up examples like Compton, and let’s learn from those examples and learn from each other. When people think about accountability in schools, they often think about the ability to fire teachers or principals when schools are underperforming, or give a bonus to a teacher who’s doing particularly well. It sounds like that’s not, from your standpoint, what accountability looks like. No. That’s what I would label the corporate-reform model of education, which I just don’t believe has ever worked. That model narrowly defines the purpose of a young person’s education as something that can be measured on once-a-year standardized tests. Any parent and any teacher will tell us that, “I don’t determine whether a student is doing well only by how they do on a once-a-year standardized test. I’m also looking at how they’re growing over the course of the year. And I also look at: Is the student gaining confidence in themselves as a learner? Are they motivated to learn? Are they motivated to come to school?” And that’s about: Do we have strong arts and music programs? Do we have career pathways at the high-school level? Do we have an environment at school where a student wakes up in the morning and says, “I want to be there because there’s people there that care about me?” That corporate-reform model of rewards and punishment actually works against this idea of creating environments where people are working together. I’m a third-grade teacher, and I want to get that bonus, and that means I’ve got to do bet