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UESF News
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Meet Carlos Garcia
SFUSD's New Superintendent
The following is an expanded version of an interview with SFUSD's new Superintendent Carlos Garcia that originally appeared in the September 2007 edition of the SF Educator. It has been edited for clarity.
Tell us something about your background that has not been in the papers already and will help our members understand who you are.
People ought to understand that I am a teacher who happens to be a superintendent. I take a lot of pride in being a teacher, and consider myself a pretty good defender of teachers. I started out as a social studies high school teacher. I never set out to be an administrator.
I spend a lot of time visiting classrooms because I think that the most important thing that happens in education is in the classroom.
You were a classroom teacher, where and when did you start?
I started teaching in 1975. I was a bilingual classroom teacher at Nogales High School in La Puente California. I just loved teaching – it was a lot of fun. In those days, I taught just about everything from career exploration, to anthropology, to U.S. government, to world history, to U.S. history, to geography.
I grew up tough, in a tough neighborhood in Los Angeles. They put a lot of kids into my classroom that no one else would wanted, but those were the kind of kids that I really enjoyed working with because they reminded me a lot of everyone that I grew up with in the Barrio.
How is the SFUSD different now from when you were a principal at Horace Mann?
Well, there are some really great things and there are some things that concern me. In terms of student achievement as a whole, the district has really done a remarkable job. If you look at our data, test scores continue to go up. And I think that is something that teachers, administrators, and parents, everybody has been working on and it stands out as something that is commendable. On the other hand, I have a real concern about the achievement gap getting wider and wider and wider. We are serving the needs of some kids very well, but there are some kids that are not being served. This is something of urgent need.
Another thing. We are about in the same place as when I left in 1991 in terms of technology. We are very far behind in our infrastructure of technology. When I look at the places I’ve had the privilege to work, they are a lot more technologically advanced than san Francisco is, and that is somewhat of a surprise since we are not too far from Silicon Valley. We are a district that could go out and build some partnerships to get that technology. It looks just like when I left. That is an eye opener that I didn’t expect. I thought we would be further along.
We ought to be grateful that voters have passed some bonds to help build and renovate some of our facilities. That is very commendable. All in all it is a really good district that like any other district can get better. A big concern here is the finances. It is not like we have a lot of money to do a lot of things, so that complicates things even more.
What are your goals for the coming school year? How will these goals affect our teachers and paras in the classrooms and work sites?
San Francisco can do a lot of wonderful things if it can just focus more. What are the top priorities? I will be really successful, all of us will be successful, if we can come down to top five priorities. We can’t take a shotgun approach to try to do everything. We don’t have the money, the resources. Obviously, one of those priorities in speaking with the board has got to be closing the achievement gap. But our practices have to reflect our priorities; our budgets have to reflect our priorities. How are we going to get there if we dilute our resources by trying to do everything? We need to have those five priorities. As items come up, where do they fit into these top five priorities?
We are too poor to be cheap. We don’t have very many resources. Let’s get the most return for the investment of those resources. If we focus we will be able to do that. In return, what teachers get out of focusing - everyone wants to know where we are going.
I’m a realist. If student achievement goes up, the people who deserve the standing ovation is not the superintendent. The people who deserve the standing ovation are the teachers, the site people who are supporting them, the parents, the community, everybody else. My job is not to get credit, my job is to support people.
At Horace Mann, one of the things I was able to do was to support the teachers. To make them better teachers by getting things out of the way so they could do their jobs. Trying to come up with the resources so that they could be free enough to do what needed to be done. To focus on the most important thing – what is going on in the classroom.
If we do not have great teachers with good training and good materials and good support than how are we going to have successful schools.
Is there anything that you personally are prioritizing, other than the achievement gap?
The achievement gap is important to me. Technology is important to me. I’m going to set out a fairly aggressive agenda of things we need to work on. Are they going to happen overnight? No. It is going to take a lot of hard work to get there
I want to engage teachers, parents, in a simple way that says – the children in San Francisco are all our children, not just some of them, and we are going to take responsibility for our children. If we walk into a school or a classroom that we as teachers or administrators or parents wouldn’t want our kid in, then why should anyone else have their kid in there. A real simple standard – would I want my own child in here.
I’m a real champion for public education. I’m a real believer that without public education you cannot have a democracy. I’m going to fight for it, and the only way to fight for it is to get us all believing that this is our company, and everyone of us is a proud owner, a stockholder in this company and we are all going to do what we can to make it succeed.
Why Horace Mann was successful was simple – everybody took ownership of our school, it was our school. We all made sure that the students knew it was ours school, that they were at the best school. Pretty soon, everybody started to believe that we were the best, and if we don’t believe that we are the best, how are we going to get there?
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision limiting the use of race in school assignment, how will you lead San Francisco in narrowing the achievement gap, and desegregating?
One of the discussions we’re going to have with the Board and with the community is where do we go from here? I think that the best solution for desegregation, the ideal solution, is to have top notch schools everywhere. If we could create an environment where there are such great schools all over, in all areas, we will have what we want. Schools of choice, where people want to go because of great programs. I believe that if we build it, they will come.
The real solution is to create more schools where people will want their kids there. I’m a realist. Those things aren’t going to happen overnight. But I do think that we need to start looking at ourselves as to what we can do, without having a Supreme Court decision to motivate people to desegregate.
What will you do (or do differently) to involve teachers and paraprofessionals, and other stakeholders in addressing the problems in the district?
I think that you’re going to find that I am going to spend a lot of time in schools. I want to have one-on-ones with people when I visit schools. People are pretty honest. Face to face communication is very important – to walk in and have a conversation. I never tell people what schools I’m going to go to. It’s an important role for me to go out there and see what we are doing. To get people’s comments one on one. Sometimes people don’t feel comfortable in large audiences, telling you what they really think. Establishing some trust with people, being able to go around. It’s one thing to view you on TV in sound bytes, it’s a different story when people get a chance to communicate and talk with you. And that’s what I’m hoping to do. I think that will establish some mutual understanding of where we are headed.
What role do you see for UESF, as the educators union, in helping to set the course for the district?
I believe in a lot of collaboration. It is not us versus them, it is we. I will be the first to extend the olive branch. I don’t know what happened in the past. And quite frankly, we’re moving from here to the future. Whatever issues occurred, I can’t be held responsible for what happened in the past; I never hold people responsible for what happened in the past. I just simply say, today’s a new day, what kind of world do we want to create from this day on.
I’m saying to the union and its leadership – lets work together to create a better future. Does that mean I can give you everything you want, I can’t. If I could, I definitely I would. If it were up to me, Carlos Garcia, and I could do anything I wanted, I would say teachers ought to earn a $100,000 a year. It’s a tough job, it’s not getting any easier, and I think they merit that kind of respect. On the other hand, you know, it’s not raining money in here. But I am willing to work, collaboratively, towards setting up something and working towards it. I believe in collaborative negotiations. We do have mutual interests.
There are lots of obstacles in the classroom. One of them is teaching to the test, and a focus on tests rather than education. What will you do to make sure that teachers are supported in the classroom?
I think what we have to try to minimize as much as possible the things that interfere with instructional time. And I think we have to see, are we over testing, and if we are, then let’s do what the law requires and that’s it. If indeed it is taking away from instructional time, then how are kids going to be successful?
Student discipline is an issue, especially at the middle school level. What experience do you have in dealing with this issue, and what do you plan on doing about it here in SF?
I have a lot of experience, not only as a teacher, but as a principal in middle schools and other jobs. You know, discipline is something that everyone has to take ownership of. In other words, no one has the privilege in education to say it’s not my job to do discipline. Discipline is everybody’s job. Schools that are effective in diminishing discipline problems, it’s really simple what they do. Everybody takes responsibility for it. In other words, they don’t look the other way when it is convenient. Kids are experts at picking us all apart. And so you have to be realistic – you have to be very consistent with them and everybody has to be involved.
I remember when we first went to Horace Mann, we had this discussion, because we ran a collaborative school with shared decision-making, and people said we had a discipline problem.
We collectively agreed that we would set up some things that we would all do. Such as, if somebody was using improper language, we would stop them and not accept it. If we saw someone throwing trash, we all would take responsibility and say, wait a minute, this is our school, you can’t do that here, come and pick it up. When we switched periods, the adults stood outside. So after a while, we didn’t have to do that as much. But we set the tone of a culture.
It’s really easy to say have downtown, or somebody else come and resolve this issue. But it’s something that we have to work on. And it involves good training and getting people to have ownership of it, and doing something about it, and standing united as a front. It also involves engaging the community. You can train parents on how to do discipline in their homes, because unfortunately a lot of parents don’t know how to do it. You also involve them in solving some of our problems at the school.
In 2005, the National Center for Policy Analysis released a study of all 50 states, determining that San Francisco, when adjusted for the cost of living, had the second lowest pay in the nation. What steps are you taking to make sure that San Francisco educators are paid a living wage and San Francisco is a desirable place for the best educators to come and make a career?Having been here almost 3 weeks, I can genuinely say, I come in here and have inherited a budget. It is not something that I have a lot of flexibility on. The commitments that I can make are more long range than just around the corner. I’d be lying to anybody, and I don’t’ do that, to tell them that we are going to go out there and fix this right away. The only way were going to fix that is long range, and a lot of that is through the legislative process. Because the money we are going to get is controlled somewhere else.
In Nevada I had to go in, literally, and face the legislature about raises. Later, I had support of the teachers union and the classified unions because they couldn’t do it very well with the legislature, whereas I had to sit there facet-to-face and basically duke it out. I didn’t make a lot of friends. But we were able to achieve quite a bit, even though their salaries are also low.
I think we’re going to have to work more and smarter working through the legislative process, because the state controls most of the purse. Yeah, can we have some smaller raises that are incremental, yeah, but unfortunately those raises don’t keep up with inflation and your point of being second, I understand that, and that is a problem.
Do we look at housing for teachers, do we look at loans that can be forgiven for teachers, do we look at getting other partners if we can’t do it through the legislature? Absolutely. And I think that my job is to look at those options, and to try to engage the community in a meaningful dialogue, that this is our community, and if we want to compete and have world class schools, than I think we have to have better pay for our teachers.
Here in SF, there is talk out there in the educational community considering placing a measure on the ballot to help out with educator salaries. What will you do to support that?
If we are moving in that direction, then my job is real simple, than I am going to go out and campaign for it and get all the work done and do everything I can do to support it. If the Board and all of us have agreed that that is going to be something that we want to do, then we have to pull out all of the stops. Because I think that it is essential that we do something about those types of issues. And if that’s the agreement, and I’m still not sure what direction it will take, or how they are going to split the pot, but if we are going to go on that, then we are going to go out there and make sure that it passes.
