School Leadership in Challenging Times — Profile of Anaheim Supt. Michael Matsuda
“The most urgent social issue affecting poor people and people of color is economic access.“ — Bob Moses
Mike Matsuda loves to quote Bob Moses and does so frequently. As Superintendent of Anaheim Union High School District for the past eight years, he has led one of the more successful, big city school districts in the country.
Anaheim Union has about 30,000 7–12 grade students. In his tenure, Matsuda and his team have dramatically improved student graduation rates, college persistence rates, and increased the number of students on the prized California “A-G completion rates” that signify a student has met minimum requirements to be eligible to attend California state universities. (AUHSD Performance Data)
Anaheim Union does not serve the elite. 76% of students are eligible for free and reduced lunches and 20% are English Language Learners. 92% are students of color.
Matsuda and team swim against the current. They do not believe in the high stakes testing regimen that for the past two decades have been promoted by education leaders who almost exclusively focus on math and reading. Rather, Matsuda and team are laser focused on the whole child; developing a student’s voice, giving each of them a sense of purpose and wishing to cultivate in them 21st Century Skills, which Matsuda calls the 5 C’s; critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, communication, and compassion.
With his considerable energy and charisma, he builds partnerships with everyone in the community — from businesses to colleges — from government to local nonprofits. All Anaheim stakeholders are asked to support students in concrete ways through his Anaheim Pledge.
Anaheim is not an easy school system to lead. Like the country, it is rife with political divisions that can hurt teacher and student morale. Matsuda navigates this political “white water” nimbly. He may be as good of a politician as he is an educator. Twenty years he ago run for state senate and so is no novice at campaigning.
“Jobs are a social justice issue,” Matsuda, echoing Bob Moses, effectively has integrated the values of stakeholders on the left and right and built trust with business community.
Matsuda, listens to the concerns of parents and, once he explains his number one priority is for their kids to find a good paying, meaningful jobs, he has their support. The District’s slogan — “Unlimited You” — was created in direct response to parent feedback about their goals for their children.
Matsuda can’t please everyone and hasn’t. For example, after a contentious fight over the school mascots, Matsuda chose compromise solutions that left folks on the left and the right unhappy. With the mascot controversies, he challenges his students to research, discuss, and in an advisory capacity, vote on the issue. When he and the School Board make the final decision, the stakeholders may not like the outcome, but they know the most important voices — the students — were heard. (More on this story here)
The Superintendent, an American of Japanese descent, whose mother in 1941 was sent to an internment camp when she was a freshman at Anaheim High, sees gray areas in politics better than most. While serving as a school administrator, he persuaded then Supt. Jan Billings to award his mother a high school diploma, but his mother only would accept the diploma if her former principal, Paul Demaree, who courageously showed support for her and her family, was recognized as well. (watch Video of this story)
Though having experienced racism and discrimination, Matsuda’s patriotism and belief in American ideals remain strong, and he retains his conviction that the American experiment can succeed if we participate in our democracy, confront injustice, and build bridges across political divides.
No other school district in California has won as many civic education awards in the past five years as Anaheim Union, and no district has as many state-designated “Democracy Schools.” Matsuda places civic engagement and student voice and purpose at the core of teaching and learning, and belief in youth civic engagement won Matsuda the first ever California Champion of Democracy Award in 2018.
Perhaps Matsuda’s greatest accomplishment as Superintendent is something with the most bureaucratic of names — the Career Preparedness Systems Framework (CPSF Brief). The CPSF is the strategy that invites all the community stakeholders to the table to support his schools and points his teachers and students towards the common goal of preparing students for meaningful careers. Often schools are stuck with too many goals and too many siloes. Anaheim’s career preparedness and whole child focus is coherent and consistent. Every teacher and administrator know the District’s North Star.
What’s Supt. Matsuda ‘s secret leadership sauce? Having partnered with him for many years, I believe it’s his ability to balance passion with practicality. Though an idealist, he knows how to get things done and show real results — both in traditional and non traditional metrics.
I also have observed that it’s his spiritual core that gets him through tough times. The most excited I’ve seen him was after he returned from visiting with the Dalai Lama. It is no accident that Compassion is one of five C’s in Anaheim schools.
What can other school districts learn from Anaheim and Supt. Matsuda? His ability to make the educational process a unifying force for the community is perhaps most important.
This country needs to find ways to build bridges and come together. Our kids and schools used to be where that occurred. Perhaps, using Supt. Matsuda’s Anaheim model, we can get there again.
To see my interview with Supt. Michael Matsuda, click here —>