Shuttle Diplomacy

A year after his controversial appointment in March 1998, Alan Bersin, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, had scored impressive victories—and made bitter enemies. He took the reins of the second largest school district in California with the support of a narrow majority of the divided school board. A former Rhodes scholar and U.S. attorney, a.k.a. border czar, Bersin had no experience as an educator but plenty of chutzpah. He had spent the past five years enforcing the nation’s 2,000-mile southern border, hunting undocumented border-crossers and locking up drug traffickers. His appointment as superintendent drew praise from then–U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who called him “one of America’s finest U.S. attorneys,” and provoked protests from Latino activists, who blamed Bersin’s enforcement of Operation Gatekeeper for human rights violations and deaths of undocumented immigrants.

Deaf to praise or criticism, Bersin launched multiple initiatives that would become, arguably, the most comprehensive, combative and closely watched test of standards-based school reforms in America. Working 12-hour days, Bersin was seemingly everywhere. In his first year, he hired New York City’s legendary (and notorious) education designer, Anthony Alvarado, to create an Institute for Learning within San Diego schools; spearheaded a successful $1.5 billion school bond campaign (the largest in San Diego’s history); challenged a community literacy foundation, San Diego Reads, to contribute more than a million books to classrooms [editor’s note: Jonathan Freedman has received unrestricted research and writing grants from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation of New York and from San Diego Reads]; slashed 13 percent of the district’s bloated bureaucracy; reorganized the central office; demoted 15 principals; and swept away a Babel of 200 reading programs and replaced them with a comprehensive literacy initiative from kindergarten to high school.

For these accomplishments, The New York Times profiled Bersin as among a “New Breed of Professionals Changing the Face of Schools.” He and Alvarado were on the A-team of big-city school reformers from New York, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. Hopes were high that they could achieve what educators had failed to accomplish: a rebirth of America’s public schools.

The obstacle in Bersin and Alvarado’s path was Marc Knapp, representing 8,500 teachers. The doughty president of the San Diego Educators’ Association had watched the humiliating demotions of 15 principals and was not about to let teachers be pushed around. With a florid complexion, piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Knapp was a veteran fifth grade teacher who saw himself as the common educator facing up to elitist amateurs. Critics saw him as a bully who got his way by throwing temper tantrums. As San Diego’s power struggle gained national attention, Knapp believed his local union was fighting for the freedom and dignity of teachers everywhere—for the very soul of teaching.

The first major clash was over a seemingly innocuous issue: peer coaches. Alvarado wanted a cadre of specially chosen teachers to adopt his teaching strategies and to coach and evaluate their peers. He had used this strategy to great effect in New York, where his methods boosted literacy rates. He wanted to bring his system of “continuous improvement” to San Diego, and peer coaches were the first step of implementation.

Knapp protested: Singling out some teachers to supervise and judge others was a violation of the union contract. He accused Alvarado of wanting to turn these coaches into snitches. Ironically, Knapp had once encouraged Alvarado to apply for the superintendent’s job in San Diego, but Alvarado’s authoritative methods soon caused Knapp to regret this.

In another irony, Bersin wanted to negotiate with the union, while Alvarado wanted to act unilaterally. But Knapp already felt betrayed by Bersin. After leading the 1996 teachers’ strike, Knapp had pursued a policy of “shared decision making” with Bersin’s predecessor, Bertha Pendleton. Bottom line, all “stakeholders”—teachers, administrators, parents and community members—would govern each campus. But Bersin repudiated shared decision making as a prescription for paralysis.

The peer coach negotiations were carried out between Knapp and Bersin’s representative, Chuck Nathanson. Nathanson directs a UCSD-based think tank, San Diego Dialogue, and is skilled at conducting community dialogues on explosive issues.

Bersin and Knapp negotiated in a complex political environment. As union president, Knapp was ultimately responsible to his members. As superintendent, Bersin was accountable to the fiercely divided board of education, where he held a narrow 3-2 vote majority.

Each man had to plot moves on a chessboard. Bersin shielded Alvarado from political battles, enabling him to focus on reforms from a purely educational standpoint. Knapp resented Alvarado’s autonomy. “Alan gave Tony the keys to the candy shop,” Knapp later said.

No transcript was kept of the negotiations, which went on for weeks. But the dialogue might have gone something like this (with the district in bold and the union in italics):

We want to create a mentoring program.

Teachers have always voluntarily mentored each other.

This will be more rigorous and systematic. Everyone will be on the same page.

One size does not fit all teachers!

Professional standards require evaluation.

Coaches will intimidate and punish independent-minded teachers.

Coaches will help weak teachers become stronger and smarter.

According to whom? Teachers must have the right to select their coaches.

Tony’s Institute for Learning knows best.

New Yorkers shouldn’t tell San Diegans how to teach our kids.

The negotiation bogged down over who would choose coaches and where they would receive training. The two sides had different accounts: According to Knapp, every time they worked something out, Nathanson would take it back to district headquarters and Bersin or Alvarado would reject it. Alvarado resented Knapp’s interference. Designing a mentoring program was not a political act of horse-trading, Alvarado protested. It was the result of a rational method of pedagogy, whose stages were practice, observation, analysis, refinement and a constant process of improvement. Alvarado was not willing to create a wimpy mentoring system that pleased teachers at the expense of children.

While a dialogue appeared to be going on, both sides were actually engaged in separate monologues. Knapp was arguing for teachers to have freedom to teach behind closed doors without being snooped on. Alvarado was arguing for teaching to become a public practice with professional standards, such as is required of physicians.

Alvarado: Should surgeons “do their own thing” to remove a gallbladder?

Knapp: Students are not gallbladders.

And so on, back and forth.

Hearing the two sides bicker on public radio, Dr. Stephen Weber, president of San Diego State University, thought to himself, “Holy cow, SDSU should get involved.” SDSU is the flagship of the California State University system, and its education school has trained thousands of teachers

in San Diego, including Marc Knapp. More than any other institution, it has shaped San Diego’s teaching force. The university also has a stake in improving public schools to better prepare high-school graduates for college.

“We lag behind in almost every index,” Weber later reflected, citing the larger percentage of incoming freshmen who needed remedial math and writing. “The U.S. as a whole lags behind the industrialized democracies. We lag behind the laggards.”

Weber had been following school reforms closely and later encapsulated Bersin’s role: “Alan comes in. Alan nails it. Teachers join Prop MM [the $1.5 billion school bond issue]. It’s a community achievement. Then the program moves slowly into crisis. Bersin brings in military people—chain-of-command types. This is not how things work in academia.”

Soon after hearing the radio broadcast, Weber called Bersin and Knapp and offered his services as an intermediary, conducting “shuttle diplomacy” between both camps. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had once used shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. Certainly this would be easier than negotiating the Arab-Israeli conflict, Weber thought.

Knapp was more amenable than Bersin, Weber believed. But it was difficult for Bersin publicly to say no. Both agreed to the shuttle diplomacy approach. For the next three months, Weber went back and forth between sides. The level of dialogue was almost ridiculous:

Bersin: Marc, we’re not going to let you choose the coaches.

Knapp: No, Alan, we’re not going to let you choose the coaches!

In the absence of trust, Weber got both sides to work out criteria for peer coaches. “Like so many disputes, this was not a very profound disagreement,” he reflects. “It was political and positional. We sat down and I said, ‘What do we disagree on? This is not a Gordian knot.’”

The clock was ticking. Bersin wanted peer coaches in place for the 1999 summer school. Weber laid down the line: If agreement wasn’t reached by May, Weber would withdraw.

Weber’s involvement created insights that provide an independent perspective on the disagreement—a window into the conflict at a crucial juncture.

“Both sides needed a way out,” he later explained in an interview. “What was the problem? The good news was that San Diego had a bunch of civic-minded citizens who rightly felt the need to step in and work on the schools.” Weber calls this group—made up of business, civic, labor and community leaders—“the oligarchy.”

He amplifies: “As an oligarchy, they stepped forward to take the responsibility for the selection of the superintendent. Alan came in under the premise that the schools were broken. The oligarchy had established that premise. When the premise is that things are so broken they can’t mend themselves, you cannot trust premises and parties because all are tainted. The oligarchy’s premise was that the teachers are part of the problem. Not surprising that teachers immediately took offense. It spun out from that initial tension.

“One thing Alan deeply believed is that teachers must be highly trained professionals who accept responsibility,” Weber stresses. “These were words the oligarchy was happy to hear. From the teachers’ point of view, they [Bersin and Alvarado] were part of the problem. The teachers asked, ‘Why can’t you be professionals like us?’ The teachers feel they were handed a blueprint and not consulted. This undermines the professionalism of teachers.

“If you’re going to change something with that kind of inertia, Alan is right,” Weber says. “But it does not follow that you don’t consult professionals. If you really believe, as he does, that schools are broken, how could you hope to fix schools without the support and cooperation of teachers? When the orchestra conductor forgets it’s really about the orchestra, it causes deep alienation. It’s harder to get teachers to do things they need to get done.

“Another piece of the puzzle is Tony Alvarado,” says Weber. “What’s attractive to the oligarchy is that he’s a can-do guy. Alan doesn’t perceive himself as an educator. He looks around the country and gets the very best. Alvarado is well-respected, on the cutting edge of education reform.

“But here’s the difficulty: Tony comes in with a solution before the schools and the public were led to acknowledge the problem. You can’t solve a problem before it’s stated in the mind of teachers and by the general public.

“The district might have gotten along better with a tough-cop–soft-cop [approach]. Instead, there were two tough, bellicose cops.”

Weber says of Knapp’s role in the dispute: “The professional high point of Marc’s life was leading the strike. What does it mean to lead a union? I’m willing to go out on the street and fight for these people. His way of expressing service to colleagues is through confrontation. That’s why Marc is Marc.

“He had developed a good relationship with [former superintendent] Bertha Pendleton. They shared the same values and came up through the ranks. He didn’t have to educate her. Bertha was his friend and collaborator. After the strike, he could work with management. Then Alan came in. The door slammed in Marc’s face. He was thrown back to the thing he understands, which is confrontation. Marc has not made the distinction between defending teachers and resisting change.”

Weber offered SDSU to prepare peer coaches. Knapp liked the idea. But Alvarado was not convinced: If the College of Education had done such a good job preparing thousands of local teachers, why were San Diego kids failing?

Weber was skeptical that Alvarado’s upstart Institute of Learning could match the expertise of the university’s College of Education. It was not in the university’s interest to lose control of teacher education. Maintaining SDSU’s primacy was Weber’s agenda. Like every other party in the dispute, he had interests to defend.

Still, the university diplomat was very persuasive. Bersin and Knapp worked out an agreement to have peer coaches prepared at SDSU. This was a victory for political compromise, not purity.

Yet philosophical disagreements arose, sparking testosterone wars.

“Great teachers are born,” Knapp later said. “You can only make teachers good.” He added, “I’m a great teacher.” Indeed, he was 1991’s San Diego City & County Teacher of the Year, a title he displays on his business card.

Alvarado believed teaching was not an intuitive “gift” but a professional discipline: Ordinary teachers became highly effective if they were part of a system of continuous learning and improvement, such as had been created in New York. The chancellor estimated his leadership skills at least as highly as the union leader did his teaching skills.

Weber eventually succeeded in breaking the deadlock. Teachers were given certain guarantees about the evaluation process. In return, peer coaches would both mentor teachers and evaluate their performance, for the purpose of improving their skills.

Knapp signed the agreement and presumed that Bersin did as well. To celebrate, Knapp scheduled a San Diego Educators’ Association rally of 4,000 teachers in front of Bersin’s office. He invited Bersin to attend, so together they could announce they had an agreement. But at the last minute, a “minuscule detail” came up on Bersin’s side, according to Knapp.

Angered, Knapp withdrew the invitation. Nonetheless, Bersin and his chief of staff, Colonel Terry Smith, came down from their second-floor offices and talked with teachers. Their presence provoked angry protests.

Over a weekend, Weber and Nathanson came to Knapp’s office to hammer out the final details. On the “Day of the Teacher,” Knapp led a San Diego Educators’ Association meeting in Mission Valley. Across the freeway, Bersin was hosting a meeting of the Academic Achievement Council. Knapp wanted to announce the signing together. But Bersin announced the agreement on his own.

This perceived slight left Knapp resentful, even three years later. “Alan fanned the flames,” Knapp recalls bitterly. Then a smile creeps upon his lips. “I know how to fan the flames.”

Weber had brought the two sides together for a negotiated agreement that gave SDSU a role in teacher training. “Peer coach-staff developers,” as the new position was awkwardly named, began coaching in the 1999 summer session. They were greeted with conflicting feelings of resentment, hope and envy by their colleagues. Their expertise was limited, and it would be months and even years before the coaching system was effective.

Some union members have never accepted it and still believe it is a disaster. But Richard Elmore, a professor with Harvard’s graduate school of education and a scholar who has studied Alvarado’s methods, says professional peer coaching is the wave of the future.

Academically, Bersin had achieved a milestone in his long and difficult quest to make San Diego city schools the best urban district in the United States. Student achievement in reading and mathematics began to rise for children in elementary school, reversing years of decline. Lesser gains were made in middle schools, virtually none in high schools. Some scholars caution against interpretations of test scores until 10 years of data are collected. The racial achievement gap began to narrow. Some gains in student achievement can be attributed to peer coaching. Ultimately, no progress can be achieved without the hard work and dedication of teachers.

Politically, it was a different story. Instead of bringing the two sides together, the agreement between the superintendent and the union president increased suspicion. Neither Knapp nor Bersin was happy with the result.

“Is it better than we had before?” Alvarado asks, more than three years later. “We created a system that we’re working like hell to improve.”

Knapp comments that the position of peer coaches became a stepping stone to administration. “It attracted wanna-be principals, not necessarily great teachers.”

As Bersin and Alvarado drafted a comprehensive plan for reform in 2000, they were wary of engaging Knapp in further discussions, lest they get more deeply bogged down. This strengthened their resolve to carry out deeper reforms with or without the union’s consent or collaboration.

Knapp blamed Bersin for fanning the flames of distrust. But Knapp knew how to fan the flames of rebellion. With the benefit of hindsight, one could ask a key question that frames all that would happen over the next three years: Can school reform succeed against fierce opposition from a teachers’ union? n

Jonathan Freedman, a Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist, is writing a book about the battle for school reform.

Postscript

The events described in “Shuttle Diplomacy” occurred several years ago. Here is an update on the key players in that drama:
# Marc Knapp has returned to teaching in the district’s Balboa Park program.

# His role in local school reform reduced by Bersin this year, Anthony Alvarado is in the process of renegotiating his $930,000 compensation package. “The district is evaluating what type of role would be most effective [for Alvarado] at this stage in the Blueprint’s implementation,” says district spokesman Steven Baratte. Alvarado’s deputy, Mary Hopper, is assuming greater responsibilities for running the Institute for Learning.

# Alan Bersin beat back a union-financed challenge to his leadership in last November’s hotly contested election of two school board members. He says he intends to listen to teachers and parents to heal fractured relationships.

# The San Diego Unified School District now faces massive budget cuts that threaten the survival of the reforms, as well as other, more mainline programs.

—J.F.

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