Wildflowers: A School Superintendent's Challenge to America

By Jonathan P Raymond and Peter H. Reynolds

Wildflowers is both one man's journey into the joys and sorrows of leading a large urban school district in the 21st century, and a gripping, highly informative guide to transforming America's public schools. Every child, Jonathan Raymond believes, is as exceptional and unique as a wildflower, able to ad

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildflower Press
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732141629

Jonathan P Raymond

On one his first days on the job in 2009, Jonathan Raymond recalls a parent imploring him to "please take risks for kids." He had just come on board as Superintendent of Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD), one of the top 1% of largest school districts in the country and one of the most impoverished and ethnically diverse. During his 4.5-year tenure, those were words he vowed to live by. An outsider to education by trade (formerly a labor law attorney and non-profit leader) but a passionate advocate for equity and system-wide change, Raymond implemented bold initiatives to transform the school district around a vision that focused on supporting the whole child. Highlights included transforming some of the district's poorest performing schools in the neediest neighborhoods to some of the highest performing, raising graduation rates, expanding early education, summer learning programs, dual-language programs, college and career pathways, and introducing salad bars and healthier meals, and social and emotional learning to the curriculum. His journey in Sacramento was about changing the culture in the neediest schools and throughout the school district to one of excellence and demonstrating, in a time of great financial stress, that we can do something dramatic and bold when kids' futures are at stake. Raymond now serves as President of the Stuart Foundation, a California-based private foundation focused on systemic and sustained change in public education, under the guiding principle of an education system that values the Whole Child by strengthening the relationships between students, educators, families, and communities.

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Introduction

From August 2009 through December 2013, I had the honor of serving as superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD), the eleventh-largest school district in the state of California. This book describes my four-and-a-half-year experience leading a public school system where nearly three-quarters of the families served have incomes below the federal poverty threshold, in a district whose residents speak more than forty different languages.

My purpose in writing this book, put simply, is to inspire change. By telling the story of my Sacramento journey—what I learned, where I succeeded and where I failed, the structural problems I encountered, and the innovative solutions my team applied—I aim to issue a challenge to every American concerned with public education to rethink their views and actions.

Whether you are a parent, educator, school administrator or school board member, a funder or an education advocate, this book represents a challenge to relinquish dogma and ideology and reframe the endless debate over public education through the perspective that matters most: that of our children. Only when we begin to align around this critical viewpoint can we hope to end the debate and finally advance the field.

Could this ever really happen? I know it can. Because it’s what happened to me. After arriving in Sacramento full of aspirations shaped by my training and preparation, I came face-to face-with the realities of the lives of my 47,000 students and found myself seeking new and different solutions to the daily problems confronting our stressed and underfunded district.

I can proudly tell you many of these solutions had a lasting effect. As reported by EdSource, California’s foremost resource for information about its schools, I departed Sacramento with a credible list of accomplishments at least partly attributable to [my] leadership,¹ including greatly expanded summer programs, new college and career programs tied to businesses and the community, home-school visits and new parent-teacher partnerships, along with a new focus on social and emotional aspects of learning.²

The district-wide graduation rate, which was 68 percent when I arrived, rose each year of my tenure, hitting the 85 percent mark the year of my departure. Described as a hard-charging leader³ by The Sacramento Bee, I undeniably ruffled some feathers. But it’s not a boast to say the numbers speak for themselves, and I’m especially proud that graduation rates rose in particular for our most challenged students, including those tracked as socioeconomically disadvantaged, special ed, and English learners, who alone constituted one-quarter of the student body.

Of course, no account of confronting a challenge is useful if failure is left unexamined. As someone who studies and aspires to leadership, I believe in telling the truth to myself and my community. Perhaps Sacramento’s greatest lesson—and one I could only fully grasp in hindsight—is that taking on problems one at a time will inevitably cause different problems to erupt when the issues you’re trying to solve lay nested in a massive bureaucratic system. Sacramento made me a believer in structural change because in an intricate, multilayered system like a school district, every small decision triggers a cascade of unintended consequences and controversies.

No doubt my most controversial project was what we termed the Superintendent’s Priority Schools, in which our lowest-performing campuses were literally transformed from the inside out. Despite the conflicts they created, the Priority Schools stand as a microcosm of what can be accomplished when risks are taken for kids and when grown-ups act like grown-ups by working collaboratively and creatively on behalf of the children and families they serve.

You may notice that I frequently refer to families, and not just children, when I speak about the people who are served by public schools. That’s intentional! In the chapters that follow, as you accompany me on my journey as superintendent, you will learn how valuable and necessary it is for public schools to treat education as a service to the entire community and not just its youth. It is imperative that we seek out and engage all stakeholders and contributors who help improve good schools and turn struggling schools around. You will discover, as I did, that the key to effectively educating children is to focus on the Whole Child—head, heart, and hands—as well as on the family and community.

The Whole Child approach you will read about is not some new age trend—it’s a deeply established, road-tested, outcome-focused approach that influences every aspect of our children’s educational experience. In fact, as you’ll learn in chapter two, our country’s public school system was founded on Whole Child values from the start. There is widespread lack of understanding about what Whole Child education is, and perhaps it helps to ask the question differently: How do schools, classrooms, and communities support the Whole Child? Our education system must reflect what parents and families inherently know about what it takes for their kids to be whole—happy, healthy, connected, and learning.

Once you’ve read how Sacramento’s students, families, teachers, and communities benefitted and grew thanks to Whole Child thinking, I hope you will agree that our country’s prospects will improve if every community adopted a Whole Child focus. Indeed, had our current leaders benefited from this approach in their own educations, America would be further along in the quest for excellent education and less arrested by ideological clashes and chronic