Article on superintendent’s drive to attract students with diverse, ‘innovative’ schools neglects to provide details on his penchant for working with charter operators
Piece also lets district official attack unions with no rebuttal
Texas AFT has published a lot on San Antonio Superintendent Pedro Martinez’s moves to get cozy with charter operators and welcome them into his district to take over neighborhood schools. Now I’m going to offer a bit of criticism for reporters not presenting that important part of the story in today’s piece: San Antonio ISD is innovating to integrate its schools. Is it leaving some behind in the process? And the subhead reads:
To stem the exodus of students to private and charter schools, San Antonio ISD is redesigning dozens of schools that now offer popular educational programs. Families and educators at those schools are thrilled, but people at other schools feel left out.
In this second installment of the Texas Tribune’s “Dis-Integration” series — delving into segregation issues in schools — we see an extensive look at Martinez’s plans for trying to diversify campuses while also trying to attract more students to the district, which according to the article, has lost 10,100 kids to charter schools.
To be fair to reporters Alexa Ura and Aliyya Swaby, the guts of this story really is about fast-paced investments in some schools trying to make them more competitive with private and charter schools, while a host of other schools are left without the same money or attention. Martinez’s plan is to use a block-by-block analysis of poverty and other demographics to try and diversify schools and put students with the lowest socioeconomic status on campuses with innovative programs and more money. Ideally they then will sit side by side with more affluent kids seeking innovative programs.
But the backdrop of the article is still about charter schools draining state money out of San Antonio ISD. And here’s where my beef comes in, with the quote from the chief architect hired to carry out Martinez’s plans.
Hunched over his laptop, Mohammed Choudhury, the district’s chief innovation officer, sat near the front of the reserved staff section and looked spent as the crowd at the May board meeting criticized how the district was implementing the plan he helped mastermind.
In an interview months later, Choudhury chalked up the anger to a small group of union-affiliated teachers clinging to the status quo and resisting the district’s attempts at “disrupting mediocrity.”
“You’re not doing anything if you’re not loved and hated while you’re trying to create change,” he said.
First, there’s a difference between not pleasing everyone and being justifiably “hated” for pursuing Martinez’s favorite word “disruption,” which along with unions “protecting the status quo” are shopworn buzzwords used by so-called “education reformers” seeking to privatize schools. Second, what’s lacking is a rebuttal from our union to dispel the spurious notion of union teachers settling for “mediocrity.” Additionally, our local union — the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel — has filed a lawsuit against the district for Martinez violating the law in his “partnership” with a charter operator. And Texas AFT has filed a lawsuit agains the Texas Education Agency over rules developed for SB 1882, the law Martinez used for the partnership. We do hear from David Garza, an active member of the San Antonio Alliance.
Looking out onto a standing-room-only crowd in the district’s boardroom near downtown, Martinez….sat quietly for almost an hour, listening to scores of outraged teachers who were upset about layoffs and anxious parents who worried about the district’s trajectory.
….David Garza, a teacher and parent at De Zavala Elementary School, spoke out against the district’s “lack of transparency,” which he said had only intensified in the last three years. Protesting the district’s decision to hand over control of a low-performing school to a New York-based nonprofit, Garza told the board he was alarmed by the district’s overall strategy.
“You had an opportunity to engage with all of SAISD with your plans for bringing charters into SAISD. You didn’t do so,” Garza said.
That “New-York based nonprofit” is really a charter operator. Also ignored in the article — which again, to be fair, isn’t entirely about the charter school debate — is the superintendent’s role in surreptitiously courting charter operators, serving as a key proponent for the Texas Education Agency’s attempt to infiltrate districts with charters, attending numerous gatherings devoted to charter schools and their role “partnering” with districts, and his dismissal of the rule of law in turning over an elementary school to a charter operator. (I’ve got scores more examples of his kissy-kissy relationship with the charter industry, but there’s only so many I can mention in this column without ending up with a book.)
The article still is a great examination at what many districts are attempting — diversifying schools and providing more options for education — while also pondering whether it leads to a new system of haves and have nots. As the piece shows, San Antonio ISD’s efforts haven’t been without at least one big “misstep.”
In advance of the fall 2016 opening of San Antonio ISD’s Advanced Learning Academy, which eschews traditional, structured instruction in favor of creative, self-paced projects, district officials received 1,000 applications for just 550 seats in what started as a kindergarten through 10th-grade campus.
Some families living in the surrounding neighborhood, which is primarily low-income and home to many immigrants, had applied to ALA but got stuck on the waitlist, despite living blocks away, according to state Rep. Diego Bernal.
Bernal, who lives in that neighborhood, realized that his constituents were left out and pointed out the discrepancy to district leaders, asking, “Are we sure that the way we’re doing this is working the way that it’s supposed to?”
Choudhury acknowledged the misstep. Before his arrival, the district did not reserve seats for its poorest families in its magnet and specialized schools, meaning parents who knew how to navigate the system were more successful, he said.
And as union member David Garza points out:
“If you’re allocating so many funds to these boutique schools and then you’ve got other schools that are not getting those funds, that doesn’t seem right to me,” Garza said from the second floor of the local teachers union’s offices months after the board meeting. “I really take issue with that because I mean, in the meantime, who’s suffering? It’s our kids.”
I’ll give the last word to the San Antonio Alliance president, Shelley Potter, who wasn’t interviewed for this story:
Mr. Choudhury couldn’t be more wrong when he says the anger is only from a small group of union-affiliated teachers. In a survey we did of district employees last spring — with about 1,000 respondents, both members and non-members — 77 percent disagreed with the statement, “I have confidence in the SAISD Superintendent, Pedro Martinez.” (Only 11% of respondents agreed.) Survey comments explaining the lack of confidence paint a picture of employees who feel that both they and the community are being left out of having a voice in decisions made by the superintendent. There was a strong sense that decisions are being made based on a business approach rather than a student-centered approach. As one respondent wrote, “I don’t believe he [superintendent] has the students’ interest as his priority. I base this on the fact that it seems he’s willing to develop schools to attract others from around the city but not for our own population.”
Texas AFT in the News:
Houston ISD projects initial $76M deficit for 2019, eyes potential cuts (Houston Federation of Teachers in the Houston Chronicle, December 3)
