Tilting at Windmills: School Reform, San Diego, and America's Race to Renew Public Education

Harvard Education Press, 2013, $29.95; 296 pages. By Richard Colvin Reading this account of Alan Bersin's successful, by the test scores, but highly contentious time as school superintendent in San Diego, 1998-2005, I could not help but think back to an account of another successful superintendency, that of Pat Forgione in the Austin, Texas, public schools, related in Larry Cuban's book As Good As it Gets (see "Lessons from a Reformer," book reviews, Fall 2010). The challenges were similar: substantial gaps between black and Latino and white and Asian schoolchildren, school systems in disarray, and school boards looking for strong leadership. The remedies that the new leaders proposed and implemented were also similar: bringing in the best consultants, introducing new curricula, removing and replacing the principals of poorly performing schools, adding math and reading coaches, requiring summer staff training, bringing in charter school organizers to manage the worst-performing schools. Yet San Diego became notorious for the fierce resistance of its teachers union, abetted by school board members, to any and all efforts at change, whereas there is hardly any reference to the role of the unions in Cuban's account of Austin. Cuban, writing in 2010 of Forgione's success there, notes, "his performance matched that of big-city superintendents ... such as Carl Cohn of Long Beach, California, Beverly Hall in Atlanta, and Tom Payzant in Boston." Bersin is striking for his absence from this list: Carl Cohn, who succeeded him in San Diego, did not last two years, apparently driven out by the atmosphere of incessant and poisonous conflict that prevailed even after Bersin left. Bersin was one of that group of reforming superintendents who were being brought in at the time from outside the world of education to manage big-city systems, the most prominent being Joel Klein in New York City. School boards and mayors thought these leaders could do what those professionalized in the world of education could not. Bersin, Colvin tells us, the son of "Russian immigrants" (better described as Eastern European Jews) in Brooklyn, had "benefited from a rigorous public school education" (though there is no mention of his attending one of New York City's examination high schools); gone on to Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar, in the same class as Bill Clinton), and Yale Law School; and enjoyed a successful legal career culminating in service as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California. Clearly, only his desire for further challenging and serious public service could have led him to consider the superintendency of the troubled San Diego public schools, the eighth-largest school district in the United States. Two members of the five-member school board, strong supporters of the teachers union, were doubtful about him, though Bersin was a Democrat and should have been considered sympathetic to unions. Bersin jumped into the job with remarkable vigor. Months before taking office, he engaged in an extended effort to educate himself on the problems and prospects of urban-school district management. He "brought in a consultant to map out the various district offices and what they did.... To counter the instinctive wariness [that accompanied his appointment] Bersin did all he could to assure everyone that student achievement, good teaching and equity were his primary concern.... [He] formed a transition committee that included the head of the teachers union, the nonteaching employee unions ... administrators ... and representatives of parent and ethnic communities." The main interest of the transition committee seemed to be to voice complaints, and it met only once. He interviewed 20 of the district's top leaders, received many solicited and unsolicited messages, reflecting what he called "a deep sadness, a disturbing fatalism at the root." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] He flew to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to consult with faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and learned of Tony Alvarado, the former New York City schools chancellor and head of District 4 on the East Side of Manhattan, where he had had remarkable success in raising achievement in a district dominated by minority students. …