Category Archives: Q&A

Roots Firmly Planted in Saint Paul

Posted in District Administration Magazine, Feature stories, Profiles, Q&A by

Superintendent Valeria Silva, Saint Paul (Minn.) Public Schools

Having spent 25 years at Saint Paul (Minn.) Public Schools, Valeria Silva has seen more than just a few changes in her district. Since 1990, the number of English language learner students has more than tripled from 4,633 students to 15,772. In 1975—10 years before Silva arrived—the district had 100 students from Asia. Today there are 11,000. Silva has spent her entire career at SPPS, which now has 64 schools and 38,500 students, and became its superintendent in 2009. A native of Chile, she was a Broad Academy Fellow, graduating in 2009, and is an executive board member for the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents. She feels her knowledge as an insider has helped her cope with many of the challenges the district is facing. At a time when urban school leaders quickly burn out and move on, Silva assures us that she’s not going anywhere.

When did you come to the United States and specifically to Minnesota?

Silva: I’m from Chile and lived there until I was 24. I came to the United States for three months just to learn English, originally. Then I met my husband, I moved back to Chile, and then we came back to Minnesota. It’s been over 25 years since we’ve been back.

Twenty-five years is a long time to have worked in one district. When did you begin at Saint Paul Public Schools, and how has your role changed?

Silva: I began as a teacher in 1986, and then I became a coordinator of the Spanish immersion program and curriculum in 1989. By 1992, I had moved up to become an assistant principal. For a short time, between 1993-1995, I worked for the state department of education as a specialist for ELL standards and accommodations. When I went back to the district, I was the principal at Adams Spanish Immersion School, then director of ELL programs from 1998-2006, and most recently the chief academic officer until 2009.

Do you feel that working in one district for 25 years has made you a stronger, better leader?

Silva: I think it could help you or it could hurt you to be an internal person. Because of my longevity in the district, I had the chance to have different roles in different times of my life, and I’ve had the opportunity to understand what teachers feel. I was also familiar with the culture of the school system when I came in as superintendent. That can be a big learning curve for a superintendent. Sometimes it takes you over a year or two just to get there.

What has kept you as an educator in Minnesota, specifically in the Saint Paul community?

Silva: Saint Paul is a very culturally diverse community. It feels like a small town, but at the same time, it’s still a large city. The other piece is our education system. I believe Minnesota has an excellent education system. This has become my new culture, my new family. I’m one of those people who like to set roots.

Many superintendents, especially those in large urban districts such as SPPS, stay three or four years and then move elsewhere. But you’d prefer to stay rooted?

Silva: I would like to work at Saint Paul until I retire. I believe that it’s an exciting time to be a superintendent in an urban setting, and a challenging time. You need to stay in a post for a while to really see reform happen. I think that is one of the issues we have with urban leaders—that they don’t often stay in a place long enough because of politics or better offers. I think reform could really help education if we could just settle for a little bit longer.

What goals did you set for the district when you began as superintendent?

Silva: “Strong Schools, Strong Communities” is Saint Paul Public Schools’ strategic plan. It is based on proven models and grounded in data. It has three goals: achievement, alignment and sustainabili- ty. The focus on achievement is supported by predictable academic supports at every school and a streamlined school choice system with distinct magnet programs. We see our principals as instructional leaders, and we hold all staff accountable with data. We have frequent assessments, and we have already had over 1,000 observations of senior high teachers and over 1,500 observations of middle school teachers this year—all using a common rubric for classroom practice.

The alignment plan establishes six geographic areas that promote learning close to home, because our data shows that students do slightly better in their community schools than in magnet schools. This also means we will have an aligned curriculum across all schools, clear K12 pathways, and systemwide class size and enrollment targets. Goal number three, sustainability, will ensure the long-term success of our core functions, which are teaching and learning. SPPS will work with unions, the city and the county, and our funding partners to preserve programs, services and staffing.

How have you seen the district change since you began?

Silva: In the past 10 years alone, the number of SPPS students who live in homes where English is not the first language has risen from 34 percent to 45 percent. And many of our staff are still not making the connection that the kids we have today are very different from the kids we had 15 years ago. The other biggest changes are the students themselves. Our young people have never known a world without computers. That exposure to technology from the time they are born has challenged us as educators.

Choice is another hallmark of SPPS. In many ways, we have led the state nd the nation in offering quality options for families. Now, 25 years later, we are reinventing a school choice system that not only provides options like language immersion, science, engineering and the arts, but one that offers families a quality school close to home.

Your district has the largest percentage of ELL students in Minnesota. What brings so many refugees to the Saint Paul area?

Silva: ELL students represent 45 percent of the SPPS student population. In Minnesota, Saint Paul’s ELL population makes up about 25 percent of the state ELL population. There are a lot of churches in Minnesota and social services that the churches support and sponsor. Apart from the weather, it’s a friendly area for families. The communities are very open to accept and embrace diversity and work with families who come from different parts of the world.

Since 1998, the district has been practicing inclusion in the classroom for ELL students. How has this worked, and what are your goals for the future?

Silva: We are going to continue providing the same kind of immersion, but it’s more than immersion. It’s about the students knowing that from the minute they walk in the door, we have high expectations for all of them. In 1998, the district took a different approach to teaching ELLs. Rather than first learning English to pre- pare them to learn academic content, ELL students were placed in general education classrooms, where they learned language through content.

For example, take a math classroom where the students are learning about whole numbers. The general education teacher is working with one group of students that includes higher level ELL students who are able to use English to learn the new concepts. The other group, led by the ELL teacher, includes lower level ELL students who understand the concepts but have yet to master the English words for them. SPPS began to see significant improvement in ELL achievement about five years after implementation of the collaborative model began.

There has been a lively discussion in Saint Paul about centralizing many aspects of the district. Why do you believe centralization is needed?

Silva: We are finding that some kids are doing really well and some kids are not. SPPS has pockets of excellence, but only half of our students are proficient in reading and math. It’s very difficult to create equity across the board when every school has a different curriculum. Some schools have had more money, while others have had many changes in leadership. With more centralization of the resources, we can promise our parents and our customers what we truly can deliver. Also, economically and financially, we cannot afford to have seven different textbooks and companies working with us, or 17 different platforms for computers. We need to function as one school system, not a system of schools.

 

 

On Top of the Race, but Under the Radar

Posted in District Administration Magazine, Profiles, Q&A by
Joanne Weiss, director of the U.S. Department of Education Race to the Top initiative

As chief-of-staff to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and director of the Race to the Top fund, Joanne Weiss has seen the praise, criticism and speculation surrounding the Obama administration’s federal high-stakes competition. The remaining $3.4 billion in Race to the Top funds was allotted to 10 states in August, with winning proposals promising improvements in teacher performance, data management, and student achievement. Despite concerns that the competition was pressuring cash-strapped states to adopt new policies with a multimillion dollar carrot, Weiss stands by the program, saying that in her 20 years in the public, private and philanthropic sectors of education, she has seen success and knows what it looks like. DA Associate Editor Marion Herbert recently spoke with the influential woman behind the scenes of Race to the Top.

DA: How has the competition positively impacted those states that lost out on the money?

Weiss: The states that competed did a few things that are pretty extraordinary and will help them as they move toward trying to develop a comprehensive education reform agenda in their states, whether they won or lost the competition. The first thing is, just putting together the proposal for Race to the Top was really creating a blueprint for reform for their state. And in most states, there wasn’t a comprehensive education plan in place. Some districts had their own plans, although not all of them did. Race to the Top gave states the opportunity to work collaboratively across the business sector, the foundation-philanthropic sector, with the community, the nonprofits and all of the different parts of the school community that must work together to design plans that work. These plans are rooted in the comprehensive assets of those states and the needs of those states. I think that’s a huge win for states.

The second thing is that it really gave states the opportunity to look comprehensively at their laws and legal infrastructure and see whether they were really doing the most that they could for education reform and whether or not this infrastructure was really conducive to doing education reform the right way in the state. As a result, 32 states changed their laws in ways that I think will have lasting impact in those states.

DA: Some state leaders are compromising their education doctrines for reforms they don’t believe in because they need the grant money. At a time when states are struggling for public education funding, is a federal high-stakes competition the best way to demand change?

Weiss: I think that you can’t use other excuses like the economy to put off doing what’s right for kids. These kids have one shot at second grade. They’re not going to be there again, and if we say, “Sorry, we didn’t have time to pay attention to you until you were out of college,” then we have done a tremendous disservice to these kids. So I think it’s a false dichotomy. I absolutely think we have serious issues with the economy that we have to take care of and that there are ramifications on education budgets because of it. That doesn’t mean, though, that we get a pass on doing right by kids and trying to put in place the reforms that are going to help them. I think you can hold both things in your head at the same time and manage them, and that’s what we asked states to do. A tremendous amount of them did that beautifully.

DA: Since the release of the second round of Race to the Top winners, there has been some buzz as to why some states won and others did not. Can you share with us why for instance, Colorado and Louisiana did not win, given that they have been known leaders in areas such as teacher policy, data systems and charter schools?

Weiss: Yes, they have, and they’ve both done extraordinary work in education. The competition was, as I’ve said, a comprehensive look at education, and we had peer reviewers read through the applications in detail to review them, discuss them, participate in presentations with the states, ask clarifying questions, and get more information. In the end, all of the reviewers’ comments and scores— which is the way the states were judged in this competition—have been posted online, and people can look at them for themselves.

DA: But is it taken into account the level of sincerity of the proposals by the states, and would renowned educational leaders’ plans be more promising?

Weiss: One of the things the peer reviewers were looking at was the credibility of the reform plans and whether they felt that the state was actually going to be able to execute on the plans that they submitted. That’s one of the reasons we had the presentation component, so that the people who were actually going to lead the reforms in the states could come and meet and talk to the peer reviewers about what they were planning. So yes, there were a number of ways in the competition that the credibility of the plan was taken into account.

DA: Knowing the power of the teachers unions, is it fair to place such an emphasis of the RTTT application on reforming them?

Weiss: Certainly no reforms happen in education if they’re not happening all the way down at the classroom level where kids are really impacted by what happens. So the challenge of all of these reforms is really to make sure that we connect the dots all the way into the classrooms so that the improvements impact the kids. That means that teachers have to be at the core and hearts of all of these reform efforts. If they’re not at the table helping to design these reforms and figuring out what will work in their states for their kids, then I think the chances of success go way down. I absolutely think teachers are a key part of the whole reform community and designing the reform agendas.

DA: With states strapped for cash, there was a lot of pressure to win these grants—so much so that the education commissioner of New Jersey was fired after a clerical error caused the state to finish in 11th place. Do you think there was too much attention to the presentation of the grants versus the big picture?

Weiss: The presentation portion of this competition is actually is not the standard way that we do these competitions. It’s certainly something that has happened before in the department, but it’s not the usual way it’s done. Usually it’s done entirely off paper. We felt that in this case that it was really important for the reviewers to ask clarifying questions, get answers, and engage in conversations with people that are going to be running these programs to make sure that they have faith that they are going to execute on them. So no, I don’t think that there was too much emphasis placed on the presentation. In fact, I think in the end, that proved to be a pretty important part of the entire assessment of what was happening in those states.

The New Jersey case was unfortunate, but I think it was more than just a clerical error. There was just a lot of stuff going on in the state that led to this problem. It’s unfortunate that it played out the way it did.

DA: Arne Duncan has mentioned on his recent “Courage in the Classroom” tour that the administration plans to continue the Race to the Top competition. Can you confirm this?

Weiss: Well, we’ve actually asked Congress for it. We put in our budget request for the fiscal 2011 year another $1.35 billion to continue the Race to the Top competition, and the budget is still pending in Congress.

DA: And will states that have already won be eligible for more funds?

Weiss: We haven’t put together the plan for what that competition will look like if it is authorized by Congress, but I think it’s fair to say that the states that have won have a four-year grant program ahead of them and will be executing on the current grant for the next four years and therefore probably won’t be the ones we target the next grant competition at.

DA: There are now 11 states and the District of Columbia receiving federal aid through this grant competition. Are there consequences if they fail to deliver major promises made in their applications, and are there timelines in place?

Weiss: As part of the grant proposals that each state submitted to us, they have timelines, milestones and performance measures, and we will be holding them accountable on delivering those. There are absolutely consequences if they don’t deliver. We will be working very closely with states to help them succeed and to hold them accountable for what they promised to deliver. If they don’t, we can do everything from delaying funds to actually withholding funds if they are not acting on the plans they put forth in their proposals.

District Administration magazine, July 2010