Who's Got the Power?

In the end it was a draw. Last November, the four-year power struggle between administrators and teachers in the San Diego Unified School District ended with a victory and a defeat—for both sides. Backers of Superintendent Alan Bersin and his sweeping reforms seemingly won one seat on the school board, but lost another when incumbent John de Beck, a Bersin foe, handily glided to a fourth term.

The vote left Bersin with a tenuous 3-to-2 majority on the school board. As a result, the balance of power is essentially the same as it’s been for the past four years, leaving the San Diego Unified School District anything but unified.

In the November race, the San Diego Education Association dumped more than $500,000 into a campaign attacking Bersin, the district’s financial standing and the two candidates it perceived as pro-administration: Katherine Nakamura (who won) and Clyde Fuller (who didn’t). The local union’s efforts were aided by a $300,000 contribution from the California Teachers Association and $15,000 each from the Anaheim and Montebello unions.

Meanwhile, the San Diego County Republican Central Committee spent nearly $60,000 to help elect Fuller. Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad, a big backer of Bersin’s reforms, spent $65,000 on mailers to help elect Nakamura and Fuller. The latter, during his failed campaign, called the sitting school board “the biggest public embarrassment in the city of San Diego.”

The rift is not so much over Bersin’s Blueprint for Student Success—which mirrors similar educational reform movements around the country, with its focus on literacy and teacher training—as it is about the way these reforms are being handled.

“The teachers, and a lot of the community, felt we had been totally left out of important decisions when the Blueprint was instituted,” says longtime teacher Terry Pesta (21 years at Sherman Elementary), who last August became president of the San Diego Education Association. “What we have been saying from the beginning is that we want a seat at the table; we want to be involved. But it’s been totally top-down.”

Bersin doesn’t dispute this, but he defends keeping the Blueprint close to the vest.

“Because of the implacable hostility this reform met with, there was a sense that the district had to go it alone,” he says. “One would have to analyze past conduct and what was perceived by the district as hostility on the level of the Khrushchev ‘no’ that greeted every change. The sad history of urban school reform is that collaboration that purports to vest veto power with each side is a recipe for paralysis.”

Early resistance to Bersin’s reforms, observers say, may be due to the way he was hired to run the city schools in July 1998. He was an outsider who had headed the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Diego since November 1993; before that, he was a senior partner in a respected Los Angeles law firm.

“A lot of it goes back to the way he was hired,” says one veteran education observer. “The school board made a decision to keep it quite closed, and then delivered Alan to the public as their candidate. This fueled the perception that it was a behind-the-scenes deal the business community had brought through.”

Within a year of his hire, Bersin had tapped former New York City Schools educator Anthony Alvarado as his right-hand man and drafted his reform plan, which he called the Blueprint for Student Success. The pair got three board members to sign off on it—Sue Braun, Ed Lopez and Ron Ottinger—and later demoted or reassigned more than a dozen principals who were perceived as not wanting to play by the new rules. Bersin also eliminated some parent committees and replaced them with other programs, including outreach drives for families at poor-performing schools.

In 2000, the Bersin camp got key business leaders to pump nearly $1 million into a bitter campaign to defeat Francis O’Neill Zimmerman, who, along with longtime incumbent de Beck, opposed Bersin’s reforms. Zimmerman narrowly won, but the aftertaste soured teachers’ perception of Bersin even more.

“It was a smear campaign,” the observer says. “That validated a lot of people’s suspicions that something ugly was going on.”

After the november school board elections, Bersin took steps to reduce the role of the controversial chancellor of education in his reform efforts. Although this pushing aside of Alvarado is seen by some as extending at least an olive twig to his critics, Bersin defends his original tactics. “There certainly was overkill by the business community in 2000,” he says. “But it was equal in terms of intervention by the state teachers’ association [in the November 2002] race.”

Now that each side has thrown punches, Bersin says, he’s optimistic ruffled feathers will ultimately be smoothed. “When you look at previous changes [in other districts], there’s always been a period of four to five years of tumultuous readjustment,” he says. “I believe we’ve gone through that period and can look forward to a much more productive relationship.”

School board member John de Beck puts the onus on Bersin.

“Compromise on the board remains in the hands of the superintendent,” he says. “If he continues to put out take-it-or-leave-it proposals, then the chances for compromise are limited.”

Going forward, who’s got the power? Bersin still has a relatively secure 3-to-2 majority on the school board, so that certainly gives him the upper hand. He’s also got solid support from The San Diego Union-Tribune—although in the November 2002 election, its influence seemed to be waning. And he’s backed by lots of local business leaders who feel they have a vested interest in the education of San Diego’s young people, to bolster their future hiring pools.

According to campaign-spending records, the Lincoln Club, a Republican business group that rallied behind the pro-Bersin candidates, channeled donations to those candidates of $25,000 from Manpower, a temporary-employment agency; $8,000 from Sycuan’s Singing Hills Resort; $7,500 from the Associated General Contractors; $6,000 from Science Applications International Corporation; and $5,000 each from Manpower chief Mel Katz, Echo Pacific Construction, the Latino Builders Industry Association, Martinez-Cutri Corporation and Broadway Typewriter.

“I think the business community observed, for a number of years, that the school district was not able to move the student achievement agenda forward as the district became increasingly populated by children of color,” says another longtime observer of the local education scene. “And when you look at potential employees, increasingly, businesses are going to have to look at people of color. If those children aren’t succeeding in school, they’re not going to make good employees in anything other than low-paying jobs, and as we move into more high-tech and biotech, there’s a growing need for people with more than the bare-minimum education that a lot of our kids had been getting.

“The business community rallied behind the idea that swift, radical change was necessary to bring student achievement up—and that’s Alan’s agenda.”

Bersin also has won support from business leaders and organizations outside San Diego, including the foundation run by Bill Gates’ father, which has given Bersin millions of dollars in grants and other gifts. One of the truest believers in Bersin’s reforms is Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad and his Broad Foundation, pumping nearly $5 million into Bersin’s reforms and giving the San Diego educator top billing on the foundation’s “heroes” page.

“I can imagine no more important contribution to our nation’s future than a determined, long-term commitment to improving urban public schools,” Broad says. “We invested in the reform effort under way in San Diego because we believe their approach has a strong chance of success, and that elements of that reform can be transplanted to other large urban districts across the country to improve student achievement.”

Broad says his foundation is the “lead funder” of Bersin’s controversial Principal Training Academy—an ideological training camp for administrators—“because effective leadership from principals increases the positive impact other school reforms can have on student achievement.”

Melissa Bonney Ratcliff, the Broad Foundation’s director of communications, says this support is not limited to money. “We also help with communications,” she says, taking some credit for a laudatory Wall Street Journal editorial that called Bersin “Giuliani West” and concluded, “If Mr. Bersin can’t reform public elementary and high school education, it is probably unreformable.”

Bersin got more kind words from veteran NBC newscaster Tom Brokaw during an election-eve national news broadcast from San Diego, but the superintendent insists this one wasn’t a plant. “Brokaw told me he had become aware of the reforms here himself,” Bersin says.

This is not to imply the teachers’ union has no teeth. Terry Pesta notes the San Diego Education Association represents nearly 10,000 school district employees, including teachers and nurses, and when all those minds are together, there’s plenty of power.

“We are most powerful when we get our members involved, like in 2000, when they [the district] tried to defeat one of our endorsed candidates, Francis Zimmerman,” Pesta says. “All those big businessmen came in, but in the end we won. We couldn’t match their money, but we were able to defeat them with people power.”

Pesta concedes that with the November 2002 elections ending in a draw, the Bersin camp still has a majority on the school board. But he points with pride to the fact that state and national teachers’ unions came to the local association’s aid, and for the first time pumped real money into a pair of teacher-backed candidates, one of whom, de Beck, survived a well-financed challenge.

“In the last election, we had our biggest effort ever, not just with money but with people,” Pesta says. “Our members made almost 37,000 phone calls in the last month [before the election]. We had two precinct walks with more than 100 teachers each time; we had a postcard campaign in which teachers wrote to their friends; and we had little things the teachers did on their own, like go out to the Chargers game and pass out fliers. And look

at the election—we’re disappointed that both our candidates didn’t win, but John de Beck won in a landslide.”

For his part, de Beck is reluctant to give the Bersin camp any advantage in the current balance of power.

“The teachers’ power remains undiminished, despite their incomplete political victory,” he says. “Actually, they got their message out to every candidate. All of them, except me, moved from full support of the superintendent and the Blueprint to a very interesting middle ground.

“Every one of them agreed that more attention should have been paid to teachers, and that Bersin needed to pay more attention to process and to the involvement of parents and teachers. In the [Jeff] Lee–Kathy Nakamura race, neither one of them stated they would fire the superintendent, and both of them criticized the Blueprint, so the vote was decided on character issues.”

Nakamura has publicly stated she plans to be an independent voice, but it’s no secret she was heavily supported by the school district. Longtime business leader Malin Burnham, a Bersin supporter, spent $20,000 on radio commercials on her behalf, financial disclosure records show. Still, Pesta says, “I’m hopeful that Katherine is not going to be an automatic part of the rubber-stamp majority, like Sue Braun was. All through her campaign, she promised to be independent and bring the district back together.”

Nakamura herself will say only, “It’s still a mite early for me to be telling anyone about anything. I need some time to get my sea legs.”

One observer sums it up this way: “Right now, Alan Bersin has the power. He’s got three votes. During her campaign, Nakamura said something about the Blueprint needing to be looked at, but I think she will be the third [Bersin] vote most of the time. For the union to have claimed victory, they would have had to claim both candidates, and they didn’t.”

Down the road, however, the tensions must ease, because continued strife jeopardizes Bersin’s entire reform movement—and the superintendent himself.

“It could be four more years of the status quo, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” the observer says. “Either the union is going to have a major change in philosophy, or something else is going to have to give. In any event, I think there’s going to be a big change in the way they work. The 3-2 board is going to be gone, but I don’t think we’re going to see any lack of discussion, any lack of public debate, over Bersin and his policies.”

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