As LAUSD continues to layoff some of the best teachers I know, I wonder how effective any of the multi-pronged union efforts has been. Strikes (legal, illegal, “wildcat”, hunger, sit-ins, you name it) get piddles of press here and there. While I’m not comfortable yet in fully speculating on the direction of UTLA, LAUSD, or the future of Manual Arts. I did want to share a quote that’s about a year and a half old:

“I’ve always been a teacher. That’s the highest of the hierarchy. That’s not the bottom it’s what it’s all about. We’ve lost sight of that.”

In case you’re wondering, that is indeed Superintendent Ray Cortines in an interview Travis Miller and I conducted when Cortines was working with the Mayor’s Partnership. Funny how the quote reads differently in light of the changes that have taken place.

I’ve linked to this interview a few other times on this blog, but thought I’d post the actual thing here to make it easier to reference. The focus of the interview was local autonomy. However, there’s plenty here that speaks to the dire situation for teachers and students today.  Full interview after the jump.

“I’ve Always Been a Teacher” – An interview with Ray Cortines
By Travis Miller and Antero Garcia
Whatever happened to the plan to kill off LAUSD’s central office? Why can’t every administration draw upon the local expertise of their teachers? Why can’t teachers be a part of the perpetual shopping sprees undertaken on our behalf? Shouldn’t we be consulted before they purchase the latest round of training, scripted curricula, or state-aligned textbooks? Everything LAUSD does in is “in the students best interest,” right? So if they are not talking to us, how do they know what the students need? As out of classroom spending soars and six-figure non-teaching positions proliferate, we thought it was time remind the veterans and inform the new teachers of how Roy Romer and Company double-crossed the students and taxpayers of Los Angeles. In our interview with Ramon Cortines we find one of America’s most experienced administrators (and teachers) considering these issues. Ray touches upon the troubled relationship between administrators and teachers, the intent behind Open Court, the promise of decentralization, and what made him a successful principal.

Update: It has been seven months since Andy and I sat down with Ramon Cortines in his City Hall office. Just this week it was announced that he will be returning to LAUSD as the Superintendent of Instruction.

Travis Miller: We are very interested in LAUSD’s shift from a central district into many mini-districts.

Ray Cortines: It was unanimously approved by the Board of Education, supported by the teachers’ union, supported by the administrators’ union, and Governor Romer got the job as superintendent based on saying he would implement it. However, Romer believed strongly in a very centralized system.

I came to the district in a very difficult time; the board was firing Dr. Zacharias and not handling it well. The Board asked me to stay on and I said I would stay on until June. We agreed that I would reorganize the district, cut the central office, move to decentralization, balance the budget, and create stability. We did that. And we did that in about nine months in the year 2000.

I visit schools all the time, that’s been my history. I show up unannounced, without an entourage. I don’t do it to “get” somebody; I want to see what’s happening. I was a teacher at every grade level; I know that teachers need support. Many times all you need is “good morning.” Many times it’s “how’s it going” or for a teacher to say, “Jeez, I had a rough day.” But also many times it is to get the kind of support or somebody that they can talk to: a peer.

There is a book – they hide it – that we wrote about decentralization. The idea was that I was concerned because of the size of the district and I don’t believe that size is usually a problem. I have run small districts and they’re just as complicated as this one is; size is just an excuse for not paying attention to teachers and parents and facilities and students. During my time as superintendent, I visited schools probably three times a week all over the city. What I saw was that if you were in the Valley or San Pedro, during peak traffic time, it took you an hour and half to two hours to get to the central office. We didn’t do very well responding by telephone either. The whole decentralization process was to put decision making near to where education happens: near the classroom and the school. You didn’t have to drive for two hours.

The book is very comprehensive; it looks at every faucet. It talks about the small central office being of service to the local school districts. It lays out the number of people in the district offices – it was a very thin document – because I thought that the principal and teachers at the school building should be engaged in making the decisions about their destiny.

I never saw the district offices as I see them now – the local district offices – as compliant agencies or gestapos standing on a campus checking who comes or who goes and all of that.

I was a damned good teacher but there were times when I needed help. I remember my first class, certainly needed help then. I had 44 kids in my first class all 6th graders. I didn’t know that was too many. I was too green. I thought that was what I was dealt so I needed to deal with it, but I had people. I had a principal and a county supervisor that visited me once a month. They didn’t visit to “get” me, but to find out how they could help and what I needed. So I always envisioned people being responsive. Even when I ran New York, I demanded and I checked if the area superintendents were in school buildings.

In my report it talks about how the staff of the local school districts should be in school buildings the majority of the week. You can’t make decisions, know what teachers are going through, know what children and young people are bringing to a school if you don’t observe it. I remember when I was assistant secretary I was very frustrated one day with the bureaucrats and I said, “You people need to learn how to pick up the paper off of the playground.”

I did an hour interview last night and someone asked me, “What are you?” and I said, “I’m a teacher.” I’ve always been a teacher. That’s the highest of the hierarchy. That’s not the bottom it’s what it’s all about. We’ve lost sight of that. Not just in L. A., it’s across the nation. I remember when I was cutting staff and moving people to schools and to local districts people were saying, “I worked for ten years to get here!” I said, “ I beg your pardon?” The school is where it’s happening.
In San Francisco, when I was superintendent, I taught twice a year – all day. Let me tell you, it was the hardest work I did in the year.

In New York I used to go and wander the halls and teachers were having problems. I would go into a class and say, “I’ll take it. You can get a cup of coffee.” I’ve taught everything. The state of California says I’m certified to teaching anything. Not qualified, but certified [laughs]. The teacher would come back and it would sometimes be worse than when the teacher left! Many times I had calmed the class down, but what I had done was model for principals and people in the central office that we are partners. That’s what it should be about. Many of our management and administrators are afraid.

I think you need to be deciding what the professional development should be. I think you may need guidance, but you know if the kids have cancer or if they just have a skinned knee. You know that if they have cancer you don’t just give them an aspirin. You need to have some expert help and not just give the hyperactive kid Ritalin.

I think we use the copout of the size of the district to not provide the services that teachers need. I put emphasis on math and reading. I’m very critical of the reading program of the district, even though I put it in.

Travis Miller: The reading program in general or the specific programs?

Ray Cortines: The specific program of Open Court. I put it in mainly because I had visited over 200 schools and I saw that, especially for poor kids, there was no focus on a reading program and it wasn’t prescriptive or diagnostic and they were being short changed. So, I ordered Open Court … except for 40 schools. I believed that information and data – if 40 schools could show me evidence that they were making progress then they should be left alone. I should listen to the teachers and the principal and the parents that they know what they are doing.

Travis Miller: What type of evidence? Just test scores?

Ray Cortines: No. I don’t believe in just test scores. Parent involvement is evidence. Student attendance is evidence. Behavior of students is evidence. All of those things are important. We live in a testing world; you’re never going to get rid of it. We may modify No Child Left Behind, but you’re not going to get rid of it. I lived with testing as a teacher. I didn’t ignore it, but it didn’t consume me.

I never saved my bulletin boards any one year. I threw them away. My reasoning for that was that I need to look at who the children are, what the world is doing, and make sure that my bulletin boards are adequate to their needs. In doing that, it forced me to be a learner, constantly. And so I never got board. I never got burnt out. Did I get tired? Hell yes.

I wanted the families to be in the schools. I believe that parents should be in schools. I don’t believe they can be disruptive. Share with them; let them share with you. You will understand their kids better. I have always been inclusive.

Regarding the whole issue of observation of watching children and watching other teachers, I so believe that you don’t have time; time in the school day where you can come to my class and see what I’m doing or time for me to go to your class.

I had two teachers my first year on either side of me. They were wonderful. I had enthusiasm for my new career, but they had experience. I also had a good principal that said, “Watch what they do. Look at them. Don’t do what they do, just watch. If it’s applicable, fine. If it’s not mix it up and make it yours.” I believe in that and it’s what I saw in decentralization. I saw the school as the center of learning and the local office as supportive of that. Some people were not happy with the design I put out because they said it was too lean – they couldn’t do it. I said, “’Yes you can … if the students and teachers are your priority, not all the other things.”

Travis Miller: Did they mean it was too lean in telling them exactly what to do?

Ray Cortines: No. They thought there weren’t enough people. What we have in the district now is you have an assistant to the assistant to the assistant. That’s just bullshit.
One of the things I put into local offices was arts people. I feel strongly about arts and the sciences for all levels of children. You’re not going to be a literate, well balanced individual if all we emphasize is reading and math, because that’s not what life’s about. Life is about thinking, solving problems, being able to make decisions.

I saw the local offices as management and administrative training. Whenever I went to schools I looked at teachers and how they managed the classroom. When people ask me how I got trained to be a superintendent, I say my first 6th grade class, managing 44 kids, making sure that the instruction was prescriptive and individualized for 44 kids. I didn’t do it well with some of them. I know that, but I did well with most of them, most of the time.

I constantly look for talent. I remember in San Francisco I thought that the administrative training program at San Francisco State was the pits. I started our own. I went once a month to meet with people. I did it in conjunction with San Francisco State, but I wanted them to have more of a practical understanding – not just theoretical – I wanted them to understand what happens at schools.

I had never been a high school principal until I took over a school in Pasadena at the end of a major racial riot. I was an assistant superintendent; I thought I knew everything. Bullshit. I didn’t know anything.

The school is the center. It’s not the center in this district. We don’t value what you do every day. We don’t value your opinions. There’s not a forum for you to share that.

Travis Miller: They purchase materials for us to use all the time without ever once asking. It’s very strange to have all of this stuff purchased on your behalf and it’s not in your size or color.

Ray Cortines: Yes. Somebody said to me, “You put in Open Court!” Yes. Benevolently, I did dictate it, but I told Romer that it should be modified after the first year. I would have made it more focused. It doesn’t serve English language learners well. Yes, we made gains at the elementary, but if you look at the lowest quartile, they have not made gains.

In New York I gave $10,000 to schools every year if they could raise their scores. However, you didn’t get the money unless you raise the upper quartile, the middle quartile, and the lowest quartile. It was never about three people carrying everyone. It was about learning for everybody.
I’ve been to look at the Green Dot schools and the Alliance schools to see what they do to help kids be successful. I think those schools do it better. I think that’s the way that Title I funding should be used. That’s the way No Child Left Behind money should be used.

I believe that there should be standards and that we have to adhere to the state standards, but I was a damned creative teacher and don’t tell me how to implement the standards. I’ll do it my way.
Many teachers – many of us – want to be encouraged to be entrepreneurs. I think that in doing that you avoid burn out. You avoid the boredom and the rigidity.

In regards to decentralization, part of it was that the union supported it because of the problems with the major district. I convinced them that decisions would be closer to schools, that teachers would be more engaged, and that it would also have the spin off value of break up. The break up didn’t happen; the other didn’t happen either.

Travis Miller: We’re friends with [Former UTLA President] Day and Charlotte Higuchi, and we spoke to Day before we came to meet you. He sent me a glowing email about you being the only teacher friendly superintendent he ever knew of.

Ray Cortines: I never knew that. I’ll tell you when I first became superintendent I asked to meet with the union and they said maybe I could have an appointment in three weeks. I said bullshit! [laughs] I showed up at their office the next day. They weren’t going to tell me to go to hell!

Travis Miller: Three weeks?

Ray Cortines: See, that’s the way the school district does it. The union is a bureaucracy too. They could be helpful in modeling the rhetoric we all use. We need to create an environment we can use. For example, I call everybody a colleague in this office. Am I the boss? Hell yes, ultimately. I’m not going to get anything done unless it happens through them. I was a principal at every level and I was a successful principal. I was successful because I listened to you. I didn’t always like what you told me; sometimes it was too truthful, but I learned. I would go back to the principal’s office and close the door – you can’t do that. I so respect that. You can’t escape. Yeah, you can stay home and many of you do which is part of the attendance issue because teachers are so frustrated that they find an excuse. And that’s not everybody or even the majority, but it’s because we don’t try to find out about you. We talk about kids and the problems they bring with them. So do we.

I envisioned a collegial kind of relationship in the decentralization of the district. Not that you don’t need a central office – you do. But you certainly don’t need Beaudry. Roy [Romer], instead of getting rid of anybody every time they weren’t doing their job, he just moved them down or up a floor. I don’t do that. For example, after the riot in Pasadena and I’d agreed to spend a year as principal, the teachers came to me and they wanted to choose the new principal. I said, “We’ll share it.” And they said no. They wanted to choose the principal. I caved and they chose the principal. I knew it was the wrong person and we would have had someone better if we’d chosen together. However, they had come through a very difficult time and they had helped solve the problem – not just me as the interim principal – we all solved it. Later on, they came to me, “Will you get rid of this principal!?” I said, “I didn’t hire him, you guys did. You get rid of him.” They burst out laughing. They asked where I was going to move the person. I said, “We’ve been going through an evaluation process. The person is not right. I’m not going to move him. The person will be terminated.”
Administrators get an arrogance about them and it’s hard to cut through that. They get caught up in the trappings. They don’t understand that you, as teachers, are at the top of the hierarchy. They’re supposed to be there to help you. If you were like me as an unorthodox teacher you did need to be reminded about rules and regulations every now and then, but it’s how they’re doing it.

Antero Garcia: Do you view school autonomy as an extension of the kind of decentralization you originally envisioned?
Ray Cortines: Yes. I don’t believe anybody’s completely autonomous, even in your classroom. We do have to follow a certain standard. I’ll take the standards, but don’t tell me how to implement them. I would get bored at teaching the same thing. I would say in one year to give me the high achievers and the next year to give me the low achievers or to give me the in between. I never wanted the same. I didn’t think teaching the gifted and talented kids meant that I had arrived, professionally. Probably the best education I was engaged in was with low and reluctant learners.

Travis Miller: By choice I teach 9th grade and the students that haven’t been picked off by the other teachers. No one has observed me to see if I’m a good teacher but I have a reputation because I go out and speak about what’s going on in my class. Every time I do, I’m told, “That’s because you do have the gifted students. Let’s be fair about this.” They assume I have the gifted students.

Ray Cortines: They don’t understand gifted and talented kids. Some of them are the worst students. They can be some of the most problematic troublemakers because we don’t excite them or motivate them. Regardless of the learning level of the children, they’re all good ones.
I set goals for every elementary school to identify gifted students. I also set goals of having these numbers go up each year. I wanted the principal to work with the teachers, especially for poor kids. See, that’s insidious racism and remember most of the principals were mid-career and most of them were white.

Travis Miller: If you were to come back in as superintendent, what would you see as your immediate priorities?

Ray Cortines: I think the educational staff needs to be listened to. My first year in New York I held 30 community meetings with interpreters. People said that New Yorkers weren’t interested in education; there were never less than 300 people in any one of those meetings. What I did was I didn’t start talking. For the first 40 minutes I just listened. And then we got back to them and I told them my focus.
If I were taking over a school, I would create forums or focus groups where I listened to you. It’s very difficult to be dumped on for an hour and a half, day after day after day, but it needs to happen. We’re demoralized as teachers, as administrators, as parents, as a district. Part of the reason when I was here that it was successful was I was a fierce defender of this system. Don’t tell me it was going to hell in basket. I might tell you that, because we’re colleagues, but the outsiders that aren’t there every day, they don’t know how we’re busting our butts. That’s what I would do. It’s about listening to people.
[The phone rings]

Travis Miller: We should probably let you get to work.

Ray Cortines: No. No, it’s okay. It’s been a quiet morning. Always as superintendent, principals called me, teachers called me. I –

Travis Miller: Teachers called you?

Ray Cortines: Oh yes.

Travis Miller: As superintendent?

Ray Cortines: Sure. I work for them. [Day] Haguchi can tell you that. The current union president, Duffy, told me, “I didn’t know you when you were superintendent but let me tell you what a teacher had to say about you, you took her call at 6:30 in the morning.” That’s what I’m saying.
I want school systems to be responsible to the clients. Students and teachers are the clients. I can’t improve academic achievement. You can. And a student can. It’s between a teacher and a student. We need to create the conditions that are optimal for you to improve academic achievement. I will never get off of academic achievement and that kids can learn and progress, but it is creating the conditions, it is allowing you to have a voice – whether it’s pink paper or white paper. It’s allowing you to have a voice that, even though this is the adopted text book, this supplemental reader is better for these students. It is allowing you to say, “Hey, I’ll use the textbook, but not all of the time. I’m going to use the newspaper in this class and magazines.” It is allowing you to look at the standards in a science class but encouraging kids to be creative and you almost blow up the place.

Antero Garcia: Those aren’t the conditions we’re seeing in our schools and the district isn’t making the effort to move toward those kinds of conditions.

Ray Cortines: They’re not, and that’s part of the reason that I’m working with the partnership schools to do that.

Travis Miller: We have a small learning community and we started it three years ago. It’s just amazing how we’ve got a number of like-minded teachers who want to work hard in the right direction and our small learning community mirrors what you’re talking about at a large district level. In my experience I’d never imagine the district working like that because – as you say – it uses the excuse that we’re too big, and we simply can’t look at this stuff.

Ray Cortines: I bend the rules. I was never illegal, but boy did I bend the rules. You have to. I just think that so many people forget what a child looks like and what a child needs.
A school is not a prison. A school is not a straightjacket. [pause] Are they going to start other small learning communities in your school?

Travis Miller: Our school went wall-to-wall: 4,500 students into nine small learning communities and a lot of great things happened. Because they weren’t all successful small learning communities in the first nine months, a lot of the administration said that clearly this wasn’t working and quickly began to move away from small learning communities

Ray Cortines: But what the administrators were doing before wasn’t working either. It takes nine months just to birth a baby, and then they grow forever. I also had administrators when I was a teacher that allowed me to stub my toe, to make mistakes, and to take risks. I believe in that. I would be the first one to be on your class and raising hell, but once you explain to me I would understand. I’m not as patient as I should be; I admit it. It’s clear you need more time.