San Diego Metropolitan - Cover Story

What is passion to one is pushiness to another, and therein lies the dilemma of Tony Alvarado. He has but one professional passion: education. His mission: to make sure every child in San Diego’s public schools becomes a skilled reader and writer and good at math. It seems to be all he thinks about and all he does. Anthony Alvarado is Superintendent Alan Bersin’s point man and partner in the broadest — and some would say most disruptive — school reform program in San Diego history. He has the academic fate of some 142,300 students in his hands.

It is Tony Alvarado’s passion that replenishes the reservoir of energy and spirit needed to tackle one of America’s toughest tasks — big-city school reform. But it is also his passion that fuels those traits which his opponents find most onerous, and even his supporters admit: impatience, single-mindedness, intensity.

Alvarado heads the district’s Institute for Learning, and his reform road map is known as the Blueprint for Student Success. Now beginning its second year, the blueprint is organized around Alvarado’s acclaimed strategy for raising student performance, which he imported from his former post as superintendent of Manhattan Community School District 2 in New York City. At its center is a relentless focus on improved student performance in language and math, achieved by a systematic, continuous program of professional development for teachers.

It sounds simple enough. Concentrate reform on helping kids learn and teachers teach. But as with many school reform issues, a storm rages on every front. At the eye is Alvarado, 59, who some call an educational charlatan, and others, including Harvard education professor Richard Elmore, call “the single most powerful thinker in the country on large scale improvement in schools.”

Alvarado’s boss, former U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, is San Diego’s first school superintendent without a professional education background. He named Alvarado the schools’ first-ever “chancellor of instruction” in mid-June 1998 even before he himself took his own post. Alvarado personifies Bersin’s mantra: The mission of San Diego City Schools is to improve student achievement by supporting teaching and learning in the classroom. The words appear on every sheet of official district paper.

So Alvarado is the “inside guy” to Bersin’s “outside guy.” Bersin faces the public on the district’s behalf and manages much of the district’s massive structure, including its tortuous politics and budget.

Alvarado handles the school district’s “product” — educated students. He has done the superintendent thing, he says, with its political, legal and budget headaches. He wants to focus without distraction on what he calls the “educational transaction.” That’s what Bersin hired him to do.

Alvarado’s charge is to do for San Diego’s kids what he did for the 27,000 in Manhattan’s District 2 — raise their performance on such indicators as the state’s standardized exams, the SAT 9, which measures reading and math performance. School district statistics indicate he’s doing it. The share of San Diego’s students scoring in the top quarter of all students in America for reading rose from 20 percent in 1998 to 24 percent in 2000, and the share of lowest scoring students showed an even greater drop, from 35 to 28 percent.

Math figures show a similar trend: the ratio of high-scoring students rose from 24 to 31 percent in the same three years, and San Diego’s share of low-scoring students dropped from 31 to 22 percent.

Preliminary figures for the latest school year show the local rate of improvement has flattened out. Reading scores stayed level and math scores dropped slightly in 2000-2001. District spokesman David Smollar attributes the fall-off to two factors: first, more English-limited students took the exam than in prior years, and second, the district’s reformed math curriculum has yet to kick off.

The price for these improvements has been high for the school district’s management, however, climaxing this summer in a sweeping no-confidence vote in Bersin and Alvarado by the teachers’ union, and increasing public hand-wringing by community leaders over whether the city’s educational atmosphere has become too toxic for reform to survive.

Tony Alvarado works against this backdrop.

To call Alvarado passionate about public education actually understates it a bit. In fact, it’s hard to separate him from his work. Even he admits it. “I become my most engaged when the topics of conversation are serious, about something that counts. I’m not very good at small talk. I know it’s important and serves a purpose, but I’m just not good at it.”

Add this single-mindedness to his Bronx accent and you have a man with a straight-ahead, direct approach that invigorates some — his boss Bersin, for example — and grinds on others.

Ginger Hovenic is president and CEO of the Chamber Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce. A supporter of Alvarado’s blueprint, she is one of many who describe his personality as “very New York,” with a “passionate, take-no-prisoners style.”

“When you get to know Tony,” she says, “you find that he is an extremely intelligent person. But this is sometimes hidden by people’s misunderstanding of him as a New York operative.”

Bersin describes Alvarado as “a worldly and interesting person,” and “an intelligent, warm human being.” What the detractors may be responding to, Bersin says, “is that, within the district, Tony is the personification of policies that some people find difficult or threatening.”

The Bronx accent alone sets Alvarado apart in any San Diego meeting, along with his direct gaze and practice of demanding evidence of anyone expressing an opinion. He enjoys intellectual sparring.

“About a year ago Alan and I had a discussion in front of a group of principals, which most people took as a rabid argument. But it wasn’t. I think they were stunned to see us debate an issue, because what people want is to wash your dirty laundry in private. But the truth is that we are trying to create a public forum for high-quality ideas. It’s not the politics, it’s the quality of the ideas, the quality of the evidence, the quality of the work, the quality of the results, that should carry the day.”

Alvarado acknowledges that his forceful personal style jars many in the San Diego education community, and may underlie the reluctance of many local people to speak about him on the record.

He’s from a different culture, he says, one where educators are used to what he calls “public practice” to achieve results. In contrast, he says, “here, everyone seems to be more concerned about the quality of their relationships.” Thus, he says, “There is not a great deal of readiness in (the San Diego) culture to have those kinds of real conversations (necessary for reform).”

Alvarado sees education reform in urgent moral terms. He says, public schools perpetuate social injustice when they pass along uneducated students.

Prior school reforms have proved unable to dislocate the disadvantages of race and class on student performance, he says, which means education has not added value for students. In other words, most public education doesn’t improve the future of children — especially those of color — who are born into low social and economic conditions.

Thus Alvarado dismisses the criticism that he and Bersin are moving too fast to push radical reform on San Diego’s schoolchildren.

“When people say to me, ‘Tony, you’re moving too fast; (these changes are) just too demanding,’ it is always a question about the impact upon the adults. What drives the pace and sense of urgency, frankly, is keeping in mind the results on kids.

“In public education it takes so much time to get change. People say, ‘Well, change takes time.’” Alvarado sees that way of thinking as reducing the urgency and slowing the pace.

But what does that mean for the kids who are in today’s classroom, he asks. Were they born too soon? “Do we just say, I’m sorry, you just didn’t get into a good enough system?”

Alvarado’s passion, his personal style and the urgent pace he demands, drive Alvarado’s critics nuts.

One of them is Marc Knapp, in his third and final term as president of the San Diego Education Association, which represents the district’s teachers in contract negotiations and labor relations. Knapp agrees that Alvarado’s style irritates him, but says it’s superficial to think that is the basis of the teachers’ union’s problems with Alvarado.

“It’s true that Tony Alvarado doesn’t come across very well when you meet with him,” Knapp says. “My members say they feel he’s talking down to them and he’s not an active listener at all. You can tell by his body language and the way he talks. He’s got a real in-your-face way. His style is to shoot from the hip. I’ve observed it myself. He makes it up as he goes along.”

What has incensed union members, Knapp says, is, first, what he calls the utter lack of respect the Bersin-Alvarado team has accorded the teachers in the last three years. Next is the lack of collaboration in the implementation of the reform program. And the list goes on long enough, it seems, to cause 95 percent of those union members responding to an SDEA-sponsored survey this summer to say they have no confidence in the Bersin-Alvarado team.

“If this were a contract year, we’d be on strike,” Knapp claims. “We’ve put up with (the blueprint reforms) for three years and it’s not getting any better.”

Many school district employees contacted for this profile asked not to be identified. One, a teacher, explains Knapp’s points.

“The main problem is that teachers don’t feel they have a voice. They are not appreciated, but looked down upon. Their expertise is not valued.” Reform, she says, was well under way before Alvarado took the reins of San Diego’s school reform, “and it was done collaboratively, with accountability, with all stakeholders sharing in the decision-making.”

John de Beck does not mind going public. He is the Bersin-Alvarado team’s leading critic on the San Diego City Board of Education. He says that even he, an elected official, gets the same curt treatment from the chancellor.

“When there is a major initiative, I get called in — often on the day before it’s going to happen — and told about it. (Alvarado) gets someone else to present his sermon on the mount, then when I respond he lays back with his eyes closed and arms folded across his chest. I have the opportunity to say what I think, but I am ignored. I’m informed, all right, informed that my opposition will be ignored. Take it or leave it, down your throat.”

Both de Beck and Knapp condemn the keystone of the reform effort, professional development for teachers. Too many outside experts — New York experts, specifically — have been brought in and they give conflicting advice in their training sessions, Knapp says.

“Our teachers have all been trained in and are using different methods, to reach different kids,” he says, “and now these experts are coming in and telling them they’re doing everything wrong.”

De Beck, a teacher for 36 years before election to the school board, agrees. “I don’t believe there is one right way to teach. Teaching is an art, and Alvarado is ignoring teachers’ intuition and insight into their students.”

Further, Knapp says, the blueprint’s main focus on literacy and math mean students are no longer learning a broad-based curriculum. Because of that, he says, “Most teachers will tell you that three or four years down the road, our kids will hate school even more than they do now.”

Which brings it back to Alvarado’s passion, that kids — especially the disadvantaged ones — need help now, not in the weeks and months it takes to reach a consensus.

That a teachers’ union would doubt management reform comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with educational labor relations. But what makes San Diego’s situation unique is that in his previous New York post, Alvarado enjoyed the fervent support of the United Federation of Teachers-New York, which represents the 140,000 teachers in the New York City schools.

The late Albert Shanker led both the UFTNY and the American Federation of Teachers for more than 25 years. A militant unionist, Shanker in 1993 said about Alvarado’s work in New York:

“(Miracles happen) in places where people work constantly and over the long term to build on their advances and correct their mistakes. If you want to see a place where that’s happening, it’s District 2, where Anthony Alvarado is now superintendent.”

Alvarado also won the AFT’s QuEST Award (Quality Educational Standards in Testing) in 1999 in honor of his work to improve the quality of professional development for teachers. He was singled out for “extraordinary cooperation” with the teachers’ union.

Contrast this with the assessment of the SDEA’s Knapp:

“Tony has his own personal vision, and he believes he is absolutely, unequivocally right.”

Knapp ranks Alvarado as even less popular with teachers than Bersin, who was himself characterized as a “scofflaw” with “a personal agenda” by SDEA executive director Robin Whitlow in the June 27 issue of The Advocate, a teacher publication.

Alvarado, who calls himself a staunch unionist, looks a little rueful when considering the polar opposites of opinion the two teachers’ unions hold about him, and pauses before commenting.

“It’s true that I was considered a good guy on the east coast. Out here I’m more like Darth Vader.” But, he says, in New York the teachers’ union he worked with was the AFT. “And I think they are more sophisticated than its San Diego counterpart on certain issues in education.”

What’s important, according to Alvarado, is the future of public education and its labor organizations.

Because he supports teachers’ unions, he says, “I do have a concern that the data (on student performance) will continue to improve over time, and it has happened in spite of an oppositional union. Somebody’s going to ask the question, ‘is the union actually essential?’ I would argue that in a partnership with the union, we would have been able to do more powerful work. But not with the agenda that the (SDEA) leadership here sets up as the basis for reform.”

Alvarado disputes the charge that he has low regard for teachers. In fact, he says, “The quality of the teachers and the other professionals is a strength in San Diego. They are, generally speaking, better educated and they work very hard. In the east, one negative aspect is that some people have become clock-watchers. That’s not an issue here.”

On this point, Alvarado and Knapp find rare common ground. So seriously do San Diego teachers take their professional duties that Knapp says many are ready to strike over it. And, he adds, many teachers have postgraduate degrees and long years in the classroom, in contrast to Alvarado himself, who has only a few years of actual teaching time. It’s a point Alvarado does not dispute.

Whether the blueprint reforms have been helped or hindered by Alvarado’s passion, both Knapp and Alvarado agree that the district’s sea of change has had its share of pain and suffering. According to Knapp, flocks of San Diego’s teachers and principals are leaving, or wishing they could.

“I’ve written 15 or 20 letters of recommendation for principals this summer,” Knapp says. Moreover, “we’re now seeing some of the outlying school districts recruiting young teachers with three to five years’ experience offering them retirement service credit.”

More defections are inevitable, he says, as teachers chafe under the reform and exhausted principals burn out.

The numbers bear out Knapp’s attrition argument. In his study of Alvarado’s 11-year term at the helm of District 2, Elmore noted that about half the district’s teachers were replaced, another fact Alvarado doesn’t dispute. Locally, figures show non-retirement departures peaking in 1999-2000, the year before the adoption of the Bersin-Alvarado blueprint, and retirements steadily climbing. (See box, Page 38.)

Alvarado is unapologetic about the personnel losses. However, he asks, “‘Is the happiness of the adults involved in schools an end in itself?’ No, I think that’s the function of the individual, not the school system. If we make that an end, then we lose sight of what the kids need.”

Edward Lopez, a school board member since 1996, agrees that only radical change as proposed by Alvarado will address the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

“Past reforms have not gotten us anywhere closer to closing the achievement gap,” Lopez says. “When we hired the superintendent, we knew we would be doing something different. If we do more of what we have in the past, maybe polished or refined at the edges, would we get anywhere different? In my mind, unless we do something out of the box, we won’t.”

Lopez agrees with many interviewed for this profile that how the reforms have been implemented has left something to be desired. “It wasn’t perfect, but like we tell our kids, you gotta try. You may not succeed the first time, but you gotta try.”

What separates Alvarado from other educators, Lopez says, is that “a lot of people know what public education’s problems are, but can’t see their way to solutions. Tony can, and it’s professional development for teachers. He’s making a hard stand for kids, and that may not leave all the adults happy.”

But Alvarado’s focus and drive have reinvigorated some educators’ careers, among them his second-in-command Mary Hopper. She joined the school district in 1976 and was one of the original 15 handpicked by Bersin and Alvarado to launch the Institute. Hopper admits that her job is a lot different now — harder and more challenging — than under the district’s prior leadership.

Her eight- to 10-hour workdays have stretched to 12 to 14 hours. She’s lost the time to exercise regularly, and her family has to remind her to make time for them. And to keep pace with Alvarado’s passion, she says, “it helps to have that same sense of desire, that sense of being on a mission.”

Reform campaigns dot her 30-plus-year career in education, but none matches the focus and energy of this one.

Prior to the Bersin-Alvarado regime, she says, “reform has always meant more-is-better.” But schools had so many demands made on them and so many things going on, she adds, “that I had concluded that it might be too difficult for us. We had no clear focus at the top.”

Bersin’s and Alvarado’s arrivals changed all that, she says. “What Tony has is focus. The concepts we’re using in this reform aren’t new to me, but we have never had them as our sole purpose.”

School principals also have seen their jobs undergo radical change. Time for administration has been slashed and new stress placed on their duties as educators of both students and the faculty they supervise. Thirteen principals and two vice-principals were demoted in 1999 because, in Alvarado’s and Bersin’s judgment, they weren’t capable of supporting the intensive blueprint reforms. Most of those posts were reassigned to other educators within the district, but, if Knapp’s recommendation letters do their job, more departures are in the offing.

It is Elaine Fink’s job to find, recruit and train new principals and other leaders in the district. She pilots the Educational Leadership Development Academy, a consortium set up by the University of San Diego, UCSD, San Diego State, the County Office of Education, Point Loma Nazarene University and San Diego Unified School District to train administrators for urban districts. Housed at USD, its mission, she says, is to teach novice or aspiring administrators “how to run a school with instruction as its focus.”

Fink held a similar position in Manhattan’s District 2, and came to San Diego with Alvarado at Bersin’s request. She had worked with or for Alvarado on and off since 1973. Principals are key in the blueprint, she explains, because “without strong leadership, reform doesn’t happen. It’s all about how a principal leads. You can send all the teachers to the best possible training, and if the principal doesn’t focus on instructional leadership, it won’t work.”

Applications to become principal are down nationwide, she says, so identifying and recruiting future leadership is essential.

But there’s conflict here too — Alvarado and Fink share a personal relationship and, in fact, live together in Coronado. This situation has prompted one principal to remark bluntly, “If you want to go anywhere in this district, you have to go to (Alvarado’s) girlfriend’s principals’ academy. The district is funneling people into the program that pays her salary.”

Fink is aware that her and Alvarado’s relationship could make some people uncomfortable. She’s happy that the Leadership Academy is housed at USD and not at district headquarters. “I think that’s enough distance between us,” she says. But she points out that in her job, she has no power to evaluate district staff, including the people who report directly to Alvarado.

“My job is strictly to coach them and support them,” she says. “I don’t evaluate any principals or instructional leaders.”

Fink concedes that she and Alvarado talk shop in their off-hours, but usually only on the drive home. Once home, she says, they try to change the subject and occasionally have to say “enough!”

Alvarado says he relaxes by reading — the biography of W. E. B DuBois is a recent favorite — and movie-going. He used to be a rabid sports fan, especially of National League baseball, but his interest has tapered off in recent years. And while he did not mention it as one of his diversions, Fink says since being in San Diego, she and Alvarado have taken up ballroom dancing.

“It’s totally different because it’s just about us, not work,” she enthuses. She adds that, in preparation for a Christmas vacation in South America, they are learning Argentinian tango and samba.

Little of what Alvarado’s friends or foes say comes as any surprise to Andrew Lachman, executive director of the Connecticut Center for School Change. Lachman was Alvarado’s chief of staff in New York, and says that San Diego’s experience with school reform, Alvarado-style, is similar to what happened there.

“Yes, things were rough in the beginning. People thought he was trying to move too far, too fast. But the record shows Tony was right. He actually won those people over and made life better. He did achieve the student performance for which he is nationally recognized.”

That Mary Hopper finds Alvarado an inspiring boss comes as no surprise to Lachman. He was “crushed” to learn Alvarado was to leave New York. And but for Lachman’s own family ties, he says, “I’d be working with him right now in San Diego if he wanted me.”