San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Selecting top leader hard task for SAISD
The announced departure of San Antonio Independent School District Superintendent Pedro Martinez didn’t exactly come as a shock to his board members.
But it presented them with a tall order: finding a successor with the same sense of mission.
Some of the things they admire most about Martinez — after six years of his intense and sometimes controversial efforts to transform the district — will be hard to replace, they conceded in interviews last week.
For one thing, board members are losing a friend, said Patti Radle, a trustee for about a decade who was board president for most of Martinez’s tenure. But they also are losing a leader who understood the opportunities and challenges that come with the SAISD demographics, she said.
With more than 48,000 students in San Antonio’s urban core, the district is one of the largest in the region. It’s also among the poorest, with 80 percent of its residents Hispanic and with a median household income of about $36,000 a year, according to 20152019 data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Martinez was hired in 2015 to reverse a steady shrinking of the district’s enrollment, improve its anemic academic performance and rescue schools on the brink of
shutdown after years of failing to meet state accountability standards.
Born in Mexico, raised in Chicago and crediting that city’s public schools with pulling him out of poverty himself, Martinez knew this demographic well, spoke its language and saw potential where others saw only defeat, trustees have said.
At 51, he will soon become the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, an even larger national laboratory in the elusive search for ways to fix education amid U.S. urban poverty.
The board will discuss the appointment of an interim superintendent Monday and begin talking about what likely will be a national search for a permanent one. It might take until the spring at the earliest — the prime hiring season for this type of position — to attract better candidates.
But trustees already are thinking of the traits they want to see in candidates for the job. Whoever they pick will face ongoing problems — including, as with every school system in the United States, the need to repair the learning damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In SAISD’s case, trustees said, the pandemic also damaged something intangible: momentum.
“We were coming off the news of being one of the most transformational districts in the state of Texas as it relates to student academic performance before the pandemic,” said Ed Garza, one of the board’s longest-serving members. “So I think we felt the impact of the pandemic more so than other districts.”
In late 2019, months before the virus arrived, SAISD was still grappling with significant numbers of underperforming schools, but it had managed to go from a failing district in 2015 to earning a B, with an overall 83 score.
Enrollment had stabilized after 20 years of losses, even in the face of relentless charter competition. Middle-class parents who had abandoned SAISD schools now were putting their kids in its magnet programs — where the district had a lottery system to keep a balance with students from low-income households.
The progress and the innovation, Radle said, were made possible by Martinez’s vision, the team he put together to achieve it and the board’s support.
“The board has played a very important part, I think, in the legacy of Pedro, because we’ve had long and good conversations with him about what we saw as needs, either for the district or for our individual single-member districts that we represent, and Pedro listened,” Radle said.
Outside game
One practice that has lost unanimity of board support — and for years has fueled opposition to the superintendent by the SAISD teacher and employee union — was Martinez’s willingness to use outside partners to run schools.
The district now has 11 partnerships
with nonprofit groups to secure extra state funding under a 2017 law called Senate Bill 1882 that encourages such arrangements.
“I was afraid that we were moving too fast without really thinking of the implications of what it meant to hand hiring, firing and curriculum decision to outside entities,” said trustee Sarah Sorensen, who was elected this year with union support.
Garza believes those partnerships are at the core of why SAISD has seen success, and he hopes the future superintendent embraces them.
“We know that we cannot do this alone,” Garza said. “We have to create powerful partnerships. I see that as continuing and continuing to grow because of all the challenges (the pandemic brought).”
Working with outside partners is important but not necessarily a priority for the next superintendent, said Arthur Valdez, who has served on the board since 2013.
But Valdez said he admired Martinez’s ability to recruit another kind of outside partner: the business community, which “has really supported us.” He pointed to grants from companies such as Valero and H-E-B.
Whoever leads the district in the future needs those communication skills, he said.
Some of the SB 1882 partnerships — and an earlier contract with an out-of-state charter network — were intended to save schools from closure. State law shuts down schools that repeatedly underperform but allows extra time with such changes.
Starting in 2020, however, the pandemic shut down the state’s accountability system. Despite some reforms, the ratings are still largely based on test scores, and when the system starts again, the performance of many SAISD schools will be an open question.
“The narrative around transformation is based primarily around standardized testing. And we know as educators, that does not tell the whole story,” said Alejandra Lopez, the president of the union, the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel.
“Many of us who are in the front lines still see a lot of work to be done to ensure that our
schools are meeting the needs, not just of our students, but their parents, their families and our communities at large,” she said.
Lopez said the union has its own list of qualities it would like to see in a new superintendent, and she stressed the importance of a hiring process that includes everyone with a stake in the district’s future.
“Our union represents teachers and bus drivers, food service workers. What we are experiencing right now is a tremendous sense of stress and a very high workload,” she said.
Departure amid unknowns
The stress and the workload exploded during the pandemic. The academic damage is significant, but its exact contours are unknown. And in states such as Texas, safety precautions in schools have become politicized.
Martinez’s departure comes amid this uncertainty, which has been overshadowed by his recent high-profile maneuvering for classroom safety.
Trustees agree that the main focus of the interim superintendent and eventually Martinez’s permanent replacement should be to make up the learning loss and regain the district’s pre-pandemic momentum.
This will be hampered by a shortage of teachers, which is national in scope, some pointed out.
“We have to remember that our workers’ working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” Sorensen said.
And that, in turn, makes mental health another top priority, not just that of students, but teachers and staff, Garza said.
“We need to be able to offer support to our students after these bizarre virtual and other circumstances,” he said.
With no report card from the Texas Education Agency, educators have relied on classroom data and some testing in the spring — full participation was not required — to calculate what students need.
Because many of them live in multigenerational households, with relatives who might be at higher risk for COVID-19, Martinez directed one of the area’s most cautious and slow-paced returns to campus. Only about half the district’s enrollment finished
last school year in classrooms.
The majority of those who learned online didn’t do well, and Martinez pushed for their return in the fall. But the pandemic came roaring back as Gov. Greg Abbott banned mask requirements. SAISD became the first of several local districts to defy the governor’s order.
Martinez also decided to do without state funding for a select group of students with health risks, so their teachers could be asked to instruct both online and in the classroom — something Texas will no longer pay for.
He also became the only school leader in the area to require vaccinations for district employees, a move most of his board recently reaffirmed against a lawsuit by the state.
Whoever leads SAISD must be willing to operate under that kind of political and legal pressure, Radle said. High on her long list of traits for the next superintendent is boldness in making the right decision and sticking to it.
The district needs “someone who is extremely focused on the student,” Radle said. “Someone who listens to their teachers, who listens to their staff, who is not afraid to take advice from their staff. … And someone who is going to keep on course.”
Martinez is able to recognize talent and give it a seat at the table, several current and former trustees said. Part of his legacy is already apparent: a strong team of administrators who can continue the district’s work after his departure and who might attract good candidates to replace him.
“We are in an incredibly strong position,” Sorensen said. “I think we are in a position where we can be choosy. We can take the time to find the right person for our community. We have a strong board. We don’t always agree on everything, but we work together, and I think we respect where we are all coming from.”
Trustee Alicia Sebastian-Perry said it will be important to find a new leader who can balance the successful Martinez-era initiatives with the ability to innovate and make changes.
“Myself and my colleagues have had numerous conversations about what good leadership looks like and I think Martinez has shown us a whole lot of what that is,” Sebastian-Perry said. “It’s probably going to be not as hard for somebody to come in and kind of pick-up some of the charges that are already happening and have been beneficial to us, but then also come in with the high-level systems approach.”
Part of the attraction for job candidates will be the SAISD trustees themselves, “highly engaged and highly focused on working hand in hand with the superintendent,” board president Christina Martinez predicted.
“There are still unknowns with COVID,” Martinez said. “We want a superintendent that is doing whatever it takes to make sure that our schools stay open and our kids stay safe.